1. Yeah...the nurse's office? We know you're faking it.
2. Silent in-class reading assignments benefit us as much as you.
3. No, I don't have a stapler or cough drops.
4. We resent hall duty, bus duty*, and detention duty, but we inexplicably enjoy chaperoning your prom.
5. On that note-- lunch duty every Friday is our own personal version of hell.
6. We blame you for our little Twilight problem.
7. Whether we enjoy running into you outside of school depends on the location: Trader Joe's, Starbucks, the movie theater--fine. The dressing room at Victoria Secret's while you are with your grandmother and we are trying on a slip, the Wynn when it is waaaaaaaay past your curfew and we are on a date (hello, does not ANYBODY card these people?), the Cliff Notes aisle at Barnes and Nobles (self-explanatory)--not so much.
8. We actually do read your research papers--all fifteen pages of run on sentences that make us want to stab our eyes out with our red pens and curse that fateful day we changed our major from International Law to English for nothing more than the love of language which you are so very adept at destroying without even trying while we could be working on that little illegal immigration problem with a better chance of achieving results than teaching you how to spell. And. Every. Single. Painful. Fragment.
9. We will not accept your friend requests on FB under your flimsy guise of "friendship." Nice try, you little Perez Hilton wannabes.
10. Would be cheaters, we kid you not: Turnitin.com is truly a wonder to behold.
11. No, we don't think you will ever actually have to diagram the Star Spangled Banner in the real world, but trust us-- your ability to do so may one day unexpectedly come in handy, if say you bet your little punk brother $50 that you can do it and he can't.
12. We find our lesson on gerunds as boring as you do.
13. Regardless of what Joan and Frank (aka your parents, as in "mom" and "dad") say, we are not equals. Their house, their rules. Our house, our rules.
14. Yes, that Starbucks coffee cup is directly linked to the temporal lobes in our brains. Without it, we would not be able to talk to you at 7 freaking 15 in the morning.
15. And no! I still don't have a stapler or cough drops!
*mentioning bus duty is just me being quaint as I'm pretty sure high school students don't ride the bus anymore.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
15 things you always wanted to know about your high school English teacher...
1. When you're not around, we split our infinitives and end our sentences in prepositions.
2. As far as your little high school romances go, we secretly wonder what you could possibly see in her. And what she could possibly see in you.
3. We check out your new shoes and whether you wore the same shirt on Tuesday.
4. Yeah...lie vs. lay? We have no idea.
5. We hate your papers more than you do.
6. We love snow days more than you do.
7. We abhor Beowulf. We just pretend to like it.*
8. We are somewhat bitter that more than likely within four years your tax bracket will surpass ours despite the fact that you don't even know what surpass means.
9. We watch 90210, too.
10. Those long cardigans we wear are strategic in nature.
11. On some days we can't stand you more than you could ever imagine.
12. On some days we love you more than we could ever imagine.
13. We dream in red pen.
14. That old saying about how teachers do it for the easy money is intrinsically flawed because 1. It's not easy and 2. There is no money.
15. That old saying about how someday you'll thank us? Yeah, that one's true.
*Whatever! Beowulf by Anonymous pretty much says it all. The rookie who wrote it wouldn't even admit to it. AND, it is the first story EVER written in English, so really I ask you: how good could it be?
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
strippers...they're just like us
People who don't live in Las Vegas have a lot of misconceptions about people who do live in Las Vegas.
"I would die if I tried to live in Las Vegas," was the most common response by people when I told them I lived there. And they literally meant "die," since most trips to Vegas--at least for the 35 and under set--are nothing if not--let's face it--very close calls. A small sample of friends' and acquaintances' close calls include blurry-at-best nights that inevitably terminate in the emergency room, jail,* or the water fountain at Caesar's. For one poor soul I know, it included all three.
But the truth is that life off the Strip is as ordinary as life off any main drag in any town--almost. There are dry cleaners, post offices, and Dairy Queens. There are Targets, school crossings, and bike lanes. There are churches, parks, and girls-next-door, though--and here is where Vegas distinguishes itself from places like Piedmont, North Dakota--there is a 89% chance that the girl next door is a stripper. Or the sister of a stripper. Or the roommate of a stripper. Or the boyfriend of another stripper, which, of course, is another topic altogether.
The one defining characteristic, I noticed, in life off the Strip is the disproportionate number of strippers per capita. LA has waiters who aren't really waiters; New York has Ford Models; Gary Indiana has deliquents and well, Vegas has strippers. They are everywhere: buying groceries, dropping off dry cleaning, and showing up barefaced at Starbucks in their Juicy yoga pants. Even in plainclothes, you can't really miss these women. They are always wearing anklets, and if their Amazonian proportions don't tip you off, then the rolls of hundred dollar bills they pull out of their Fendi and Ferragamo bags when buying a latte will.
And I'll never forget meeting my first real live stripper. It felt momentous, not unlike the day I met President Clinton on the Capitol Steps or Santa Clause at the Eastwood Mall. I had thrown a birthday party for a friend at a cigar lounge and not one but two real live strippers had been on the list of invitees. My friend had worked in the service industry in Vegas for three years at that point, he was plugged into the stripper circuit by default. All service industry people in Vegas whether they keep their clothes on or take them off, mind you, know one another, and Kevin Bacon has nothing on their interconnectedness.
When the two women introduced themselves at my friend's party, I was admittedly fascinated. As the women told me about themselves, I leaned in for the Faustian plot--after all, haven't all strippers made a deal with the devil? I had assumed that Vegas strippers fall into one of two categories: magna-cum-laudes paying their way through med school or high school dropouts on the lam.
But as it turned out, Chrissie and Fiona were surprisingly...ordinary. Their stories, like the stories of most women I know, fall on a continuum that starts with heartbreak and ends with happily ever after. Both women seemed ambivalent about their jobs. They were supporting themselves, as well as their young daughters. Both of them were taking classes at a nearby community college and biding their time until they could find "better," though less lucrative, jobs. These women, nor their stories, were nearly as heroic or pathetic as I at first had imagined them to be.
Except for the fact that Chrissie and Fiona were veritable fountains of information when it came to where to find the best go go boots in town and how to repair a snagged pair of fishnet stockings with lip gloss and a mascara wand, they really weren't that different than me.
They were just normal girls doing the best the could--like the rest of us--with the hand they were dealt.
*I have to say here that anyone who does actually end up in jail deserves some kind of special mention because getting thrown into jail in Sin City is actually A LOT more difficult than getting thrown out of jail. In fact, Las Vegans know that the subplot regarding police enforcement in The Hangover is the only part of the film that is not a documentary.
"I would die if I tried to live in Las Vegas," was the most common response by people when I told them I lived there. And they literally meant "die," since most trips to Vegas--at least for the 35 and under set--are nothing if not--let's face it--very close calls. A small sample of friends' and acquaintances' close calls include blurry-at-best nights that inevitably terminate in the emergency room, jail,* or the water fountain at Caesar's. For one poor soul I know, it included all three.
But the truth is that life off the Strip is as ordinary as life off any main drag in any town--almost. There are dry cleaners, post offices, and Dairy Queens. There are Targets, school crossings, and bike lanes. There are churches, parks, and girls-next-door, though--and here is where Vegas distinguishes itself from places like Piedmont, North Dakota--there is a 89% chance that the girl next door is a stripper. Or the sister of a stripper. Or the roommate of a stripper. Or the boyfriend of another stripper, which, of course, is another topic altogether.
The one defining characteristic, I noticed, in life off the Strip is the disproportionate number of strippers per capita. LA has waiters who aren't really waiters; New York has Ford Models; Gary Indiana has deliquents and well, Vegas has strippers. They are everywhere: buying groceries, dropping off dry cleaning, and showing up barefaced at Starbucks in their Juicy yoga pants. Even in plainclothes, you can't really miss these women. They are always wearing anklets, and if their Amazonian proportions don't tip you off, then the rolls of hundred dollar bills they pull out of their Fendi and Ferragamo bags when buying a latte will.
And I'll never forget meeting my first real live stripper. It felt momentous, not unlike the day I met President Clinton on the Capitol Steps or Santa Clause at the Eastwood Mall. I had thrown a birthday party for a friend at a cigar lounge and not one but two real live strippers had been on the list of invitees. My friend had worked in the service industry in Vegas for three years at that point, he was plugged into the stripper circuit by default. All service industry people in Vegas whether they keep their clothes on or take them off, mind you, know one another, and Kevin Bacon has nothing on their interconnectedness.
When the two women introduced themselves at my friend's party, I was admittedly fascinated. As the women told me about themselves, I leaned in for the Faustian plot--after all, haven't all strippers made a deal with the devil? I had assumed that Vegas strippers fall into one of two categories: magna-cum-laudes paying their way through med school or high school dropouts on the lam.
But as it turned out, Chrissie and Fiona were surprisingly...ordinary. Their stories, like the stories of most women I know, fall on a continuum that starts with heartbreak and ends with happily ever after. Both women seemed ambivalent about their jobs. They were supporting themselves, as well as their young daughters. Both of them were taking classes at a nearby community college and biding their time until they could find "better," though less lucrative, jobs. These women, nor their stories, were nearly as heroic or pathetic as I at first had imagined them to be.
Except for the fact that Chrissie and Fiona were veritable fountains of information when it came to where to find the best go go boots in town and how to repair a snagged pair of fishnet stockings with lip gloss and a mascara wand, they really weren't that different than me.
They were just normal girls doing the best the could--like the rest of us--with the hand they were dealt.
*I have to say here that anyone who does actually end up in jail deserves some kind of special mention because getting thrown into jail in Sin City is actually A LOT more difficult than getting thrown out of jail. In fact, Las Vegans know that the subplot regarding police enforcement in The Hangover is the only part of the film that is not a documentary.
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