Lucy Who's Cardboard TARDIS

I work in a faraway land called Brooklyn, in a building that I have to assume is made out of cardboard. I say this because the walls are so thin that I can hear everything. Like long discussions on the merits/shortcomings of various coworkers. I also swear I can hear the occasional euphemistic "struggle" from the bathroom on the far side of the building.

While waiting to be fingerprinted I have a desk job…minus the desk. With no fixed office home, I spend the day surfing between whichever computer happens to be free for a moment. During the two hours or so in which I was at “Lucy” ‘s desk, a coworker walked in, saw me sitting at Lucy’s desk, and said, “Lucy?”

Before I continue, let me stress that Lucy and this woman are long-term employees, and know each other. But she said “Lucy?” the way you’d say it if you bumped into Lucy after she had gotten a peculiar haircut, as in, “Is that really you, Lucy? What the actual eff have you done with your hair?” (Except the second part of that is kept to yourself.) Only this time, Lucy not only got a weird haircut, but also morphed from a confident black woman into a neurotic white jackass.

The “Lucy” was one of genuine confusion. The rational response to seeing me at Lucy’s desk would be to say, “Oh, is Lucy not in today?” Not, as happened here, to stare at me as though I could be a new form of Lucy. A regeneration if you will, like the Doctor. Yes, I am the 9^th Lucy. The 10^th Lucy will be portrayed by David Tennant when the 9^th Lucy is forced to regenerate after sacrificing herself to save the receptionist from a tragic filing cabinet accident, in which the safety mechanism malfunctioned and two drawers were able to be opened at the same time, causing a tear in the very fabric of space.

Such was the conviction of her “Lucy?” that I began to wonder if maybe I really was Lucy, and I nearly said, “Yes.” Instead we had a long silence in which we stared at each other from across the room, me in a throne-like chair with wheels behind someone else’s fine wood desk and her in the doorway holding a stack of files, to the music of the ticking clock and the buzzing fluorescent lights. And I really mean staring. Intense, unbreaking eye-contact, both of us fully aware of it and not sure how to proceed.

I’m not sure how things ended. Perhaps the other lady committed hara-kiri when I finally broke eye-contact. And so I was left alone again, updating children’s medical charts and entering in the dates on which they received their polio vaccinations.

In a misguided attempt to stay sane, when I enter this information I pretend that I am personally responsible for the eradication of polio in the western world. In my head legions of men with swords follow behind me into battle to a stirring trumpet score by John Williams while I charge forward, waving a crusader cross banner and yelling, “NO ONE IS GONNA DIE FROM POLIOOOOOOOOO!” …as I silently stare at the screen and move nothing but two fingers on my right hand to punch in the numbers for hours on end, like a gamer minus the Mountain Dew.

I suppose that’s the depressing thing about saving the world. It seems like no matter how badly you want to save the world, the world always wants you to do data entry. You yell at the world, “Let me love you!” and the world responds, “Um, ok, that’s nice.” Awkward pause. “Fold this towel, I guess?”

The Obligation of Art

Today I went to the vanilla soft-serve temple of pretentiousness that is the Guggenheim. And look, I’m not about to say that the art in there is objectively shit, only that there are far too many people in there who, on a profound level understood by God alone, desperately do not want to be there.

The first clue was the group of girls who had huddled around a bunch of lines on paper. They stood there, staring at a print, and nodding to each other as if to say, “Indeed, this painting of random brown lines in no way resembles the other twenty paintings of brown lines in this room. Or indeed any of the other paintings of brown lines in the next two rooms.” In awe of their art appreciation I stared at them for a little longer, only to find that when each one thought the others couldn’t see her, she’d surreptitiously look at the other two with a pained and uncomfortable look that clearly said, “Am I the only one who doesn’t get it?”

Somehow this group of three girls ended up in an art museum that not a single one of them wanted to be in or understood—and this is common for art museums. This is how most people end up in art museums: “Hey, we should check out the Guggenheim!” suggests one friend, remembering as soon as the words come out that she actually hates art. She had seen a poster for it somewhere, felt pressured into becoming more “cultured,” and now…shit…now she’s fervently praying that one of the friends will say, “No thanks, I find the mold growing in my shower far more interesting to look at.” But no, God has no mercy. So the other friends smile and say, “Hey! What a great idea,” while grimacing on the inside and remembering the endless three hours spent in the Met the last time one of their friends forgot that the entire human race secretly hates art.

And this is how you end up at the Louvre, jockeying for a position among a crowd of hundreds of people who similarly secretly could not give a shit about the Mona Lisa. This is how art museums make their money. Because no one has the balls to admit that they find art museums spectacularly boring. And this is how we end up with crowded museums filled with people cocking their heads to the side, the last resort of the desperate. “Maybe if I turn my—nope, still looks like shit.”

The best were the people on dates. I saw a cheerful lady dragging around a man, shuffling with a brave but stricken look on his face that reminded me of my subway reading, “The Imitation of Christ,” in which we are encouraged to bear suffering and not seek to escape the situation. But best of all was the couple who were clearly only remaining in the Guggenheim to justify the price they paid for their tickets. “Uh, should we look at this one now?” said the man, half-heartedly pointing at yet another framed piece of paper with some lines on it. “Um. Yeah. I guess,” said the lady, as they wearily dragged their feet through the confused/bored/in denial crowd and tossed a forlorn glance over their shoulders towards the exit.

Usually at art museums I just pretend to read the little blurbs next to the pieces, but today I was feeling adventurous. I found that when I read them I could easily imagine a man with a fake English accent, in ceremonial tweed, squat-talking and waving his hands around while squinting his eyes to convey to you the exact levels of his pretentiousness, lest you underestimate them. This art “engenders emotion,” or “fosters an expression of necessity through color,” and everything is “explored.” Every piece of art “defines” or “redefines” some abstract noun that you hadn’t ever learned in 17 years of private education, and everything is a study, such as “a study of lines,” making me imagine an artist wearing safety goggles and sweating over test tubes for hours on end only to exclaim, “EUREKA! I HAVE MADE LINE!”

Staring at what was, to me, a sheet of gold on a black background, but what was actually a “journey,” I read the following sentence: “The luminosity of gold and the seeping shadows of obsidian evoke parallel visions of eternity.” And I just stood there and thought to myself,

Does it though?

Sometimes I wonder if these art-blurb writers are actually part of a humiliating conspiracy. Some of the more enthusiastic people in the gallery provided further evidence. See, there was this man in a black turtleneck, a tweed jacket, khakis tucked into his boots, goatee, and glasses.

He would walk up to a painting and then, as if overwhelmed by the painting’s majesty, would whip his glasses off in astonishment, and then continue to stare at the painting in amazement. As someone who is extremely nearsighted, I don’t understand the logic behind this, but that’s okay. No, what made this remarkable is that after doing this he would let out a “YES” that was almost Marian in the depth it conveyed, and then would put his glasses back on, proceed to the next painting…and then do the same “LOOK AT HOW MOVED I AM!” glasses removal for each painting. I liked to imagine him to be the sort of person who at home would be eating a bowl of cereal in front of the TV, channel surfing, and dropping the bowl in amazement with what each new channel had to offer.

 In spite of  his constant cycle of being deeply moved, he somehow managed to compose himself. For a while I saw him standing near the exit, with one hand holding his tweed jacket over his shoulder and the other hand on his hip, standing like a jackass superhero in khakis. “Fear not, I bring you gratuitous corrective eyewear!”

I’ll be honest with you: I have been floored by one piece of art in my life. So maybe I’m just an emotionless bitch, but I’ve decided that you do not get to let every single piece of art exert glasses-removing levels of emotional power over you. Surrendering that way to every painting makes you the emotional equivalent of the French, and that’s not okay.

Being the contrary person that I am, part of me wants to stand in front of the elevator, contemplate it with crossed arms, and when it opens scream “YES!” and throw myself to the ground. “YES,” I’ll continue while writhing on the ground, completely moved and overwhelmed by the art of opening elevator doors, “CLEARLY THE ARTIST EXPLORES THE NOTION OF THE NECESSITY OF DISLOCATION—THROUGH COLOR!” And everyone in the gallery, here by obligation, would look at me and think, “Well, shit, I really don’t get art.”

CAN WE GO?!

I’m on the District Line somewhere between Embankment and Upminster, my legs straining to prevent my enormous suitcase from falling on anyone and my brain straining to figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my life. It’s officially my anniversary of job seeking, and I’m riding this train with a fresh sting of rejection. And even more than rejection, fresh affirmation that I’m probably not supposed to be doing the one thing I’m qualified to do: teach. I mean, I am supposed to teach, but I don’t think I’m meant to be a teacher.

I’m sitting there with a growing sense of panic, the kind where you think “IS IT HOT IN HERE?” and suddenly your clothing all feels tight and you just want to vomit everything, but there’d be nothing to vomit anyway because you’re too upset to eat. The kind of panic where, even after the train has emptied as you’re now far from the city center, you feel like there isn’t enough air in the train and you’re going to suffocate. Oh God everything is so shit, I’m so shit, oh God oh God oh God I can’t take it anymore I just want to cut my own head off, make it stop, I just want to scream—

And then suddenly someone screams. But it’s not me. We’d been stopped somewhere near wherever West Ham plays, but we’d been stopped for an obscenely long time. Train stopped, doors opened, waiting for no apparent reason. People were starting to get a bit impatient, when this woman’s voice from a different train car called out, “CAN WE GO?!”

After the first time she said it there was a long pause. Me and the person sitting across from me exchanged bug eyes, almost wondering if we had imagined it. But sure enough, she broke through the quiet again, this disembodied voice shrieking, “CAN WE GO?!” But we still didn’t go. We still sat there with the doors opened. So the voice asked again, this time louder: “CAN WE GO?!” And then with even more desperation: “CAN WE GO?!” Then again and again, louder and louder: “CAN WE GO?! CAN WE GO?! CAN WE GO?! CAN WE GO?!” Towards the end it sounded like she was about to start crying, not with sadness, but with frustration of the futility of her efforts to get the train moving. “CAN WE GO?! CAN WE GO?! CAN WE GO?!”

For a while I sat there with a vague smile on my face. I grew up thinking that English people were all quiet, polite and passive, and here was further evidence to prove my thesis formed last year that actually English people are some of the most in-your-face and/or obscene people I’ve ever met (I say that with love and admiration). I was amused, to say the least. But then I thought harder about this woman yelling at the train.

“CAN WE GO?!”

I think it pretty succinctly sums up how I feel right now. You know, some unemployed people don’t really have a clear sense of where they want to go, and even some of them just want to sit on the couch and laze around all day, never growing up. I’m not one of those people. I’m pretty enthusiastic about getting my life started (provided that I can still have the occasional “Fat Elvis” couch-sitting marathon). I have a very clear idea of what I would like my life to look like. Sure, I’m willing to compromise—my imaginary Beagle doesn’t HAVE to be named Simon Peter—but I think I have some very clear “career” goals that I’ve been trying to pursue. I want to go, I want to get this started. Let’s GO! Why aren't we going? CAN WE GO?!

Unfortunately, no door that I’ve tried opening has been unlocked. Actually, I feel a bit like how I felt a couple weeks ago when a friend lent me the key to her flat with instructions on how to find her flat and I, being jetlagged (okay, even without jetlag I’m this much of a bozo), spent about 25 minutes trying desperately to get into a perfect stranger’s flat. Eventually I did figure out that my friend’s flat was around the corner, and I was able to laugh about it. But to go back to my life in general, I feel like I have a key that does not fit into ANY door. Because, my God, have I tried a lot of doors.

So anyway, back to the train. This woman is screaming “CAN WE GO?!” and that’s pretty much what I mentally scream at my life every day. Eventually the train did go, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this woman had screamed at it to do so. Part of me wonders if I should stop mentally screaming at my life because, like the train, my life isn’t going to take orders like that. But a larger part of me thinks that it must feel amazing to just let dignity go to shit and scream at the train for a bit.

The Brunch, Church, and My Social Anxiety

Some days I get really bored of meditating upon new things to which my body odor can be likened (today’s simile: a stale fortune cookie) and going for long sobbing sessions drives. Because these things are, of course, how one occupies one’s time (in addition to a never-ending stream of pointless job applications) when one is unemployed.

In an effort to get me out of the house and, more importantly, out of the dirty pajamas I call my mope rags, my mother suggested signing up for a class. Her reasoning is that any normal person would make friends. And she’s right, but unfortunately I’m not a normal person. I would say that I’ve forgotten how to make friends and socialize, but that would imply that I knew how at one point.

See, I’ve signed up for this theology class a local church. Before our lecture and discussion, we are expected to have dinner with each other in the parish hall, a dinner which, if you know anything about me, is complete agony. I honestly cannot remember how I have ever managed to make friends, and indeed sitting through these weekly dinners that are like a Greatest Hits album of my gaffes has made me seriously wonder whether the people I think are my friends are, in fact, imaginary.

I wish I knew how to show these people how desperately I’d love for them to tell me about their day, using a method that does not involve asking accidentally personal questions about their work in a voice several octaves higher than my actual speaking voice. I try to fill our many awkward silences with a friendly smile to show how open I am, but instead I smile the near-hysterical forced smile of someone who has just farted in polite company and is hoping to God that no one heard it. When conversation has been paired away from me, I drink obscene amounts of water simply so I have something to do with my hands. Other times I give up and pick a spot on the wall, stare at it with a forced serene expression on my face, and wonder why this is supposed to be better than sitting at home in my underpants and crying.

The worst is when one of the priests comes to the table, because they use a Scream movie entrance rather than a Jaws approach. That is to say, none of them wear clerical gear, so you don’t notice them slowly but surely making their way towards your table, which would allow you to prepare for their arrival.  Instead you casually look to your left, jump about five feet in the air, let slip an expletive, and say hello to the priest that was definitely not sitting next to you just a second ago. But why would you need warning for a priest anyway?

Well, only a minute before you were treading water in a sea of people with actual social skills, and then all of the sudden without warning the priest, who as a priest is naturally the only other person in the room whose social ineptitude can even begin to compare to yours, comes up and starts talking to you. There is at least some hope of normalcy when I talk with the other people, but now suddenly the conversation becomes the verbal equivalent of two fat people trying to come through a doorway at the same time.

If dinner isn’t alienating enough, the post-lecture discussion does a great job of making me feel more foreign than I’ve ever felt in my life. I’m not entirely sure which country I think I’m from, but I think we can safely assume no one has heard of it. It’s not just my social awkwardness, it’s also the content: they talk about heaven as social justice and replace God with a vague “higher power,” apparently everyone’s been canonized, and we listen to the Gospel according to Maya Angelou. It’s all so foreign to me that I would have an easier time if they instead talked about Malian butt hygiene.

I could have given up socially, but I’m stubborn. Pioneer spirit, American can-do attitude and all that. I like to think of myself as a one-woman Titanic band, if the Titanic band had sobbed hysterically while nonetheless sticking to their guns by going down with the ship. And so what does the one-woman Titanic band do?

She signs up to serve at the parish brunch. I figured I would have a purpose, and I could make small talk but would also not be weird for being quiet. And, best of all, I’d have something to do with my hands. THIS would be my social in, I declared.

When I walked in to serve brunch and discovered my role for the morning, I am convinced that Satan and Hitler were sitting on a couch somewhere in Hell, having a fantastic laugh about it. Hitler actually laughed so hard that he snorted, got really embarrassed, and had to tell Satan to stop making fun of him. See, I had been placed in the position of “kitchen runner.” That is, I had to stand awkwardly (well, the awkwardly part was optional, but I like to go big in all my roles) to the side and watch other people serve other people. Should any buffet server run out of food—which, I must stress, did not happen—I was to go to the kitchen to bring more out. But mostly I was to just stand awkwardly to the side.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re uncomfortable and have nothing to do with your hands you suddenly turn into an octopus? It’s like all of you is just a blob of hands, knocking into things, touching your face, shaking violently. It seemed like every time I tried to casually ignore one of my hands it would suddenly become five hands, and if any of those new hands were ignored they would then turn into even more hands. Hands everywhere, but what do I do with them?

This pretty much sums it up.

I tried standing by the silverware station with my hands in my apron pockets, but there were two problems. The apron pockets were in a quasi-vulgar place, and also a parishioner thanked me for my work. Having done literally nothing to enable the fine buffet spread besides putting on an apron, this was more than I could bear. I figured I could reject the gratitude and explain that everyone else had done the work, but it seemed like I would waste too much of her time in explaining that this was not false modesty but simple accuracy. After all, she just wanted to say a quick thanks before shuffling away to eat her breakfast—she wasn’t asking for insight into my social anxiety. So instead I died a little inside and said, “You’re welcome. Enjoy!”

I figured I could just do this to anyone who said thank you, but my hopes were dashed against the rocks when I met the eyes of the 8 year old standing between me and her mom, who  (lucky bitch) was assigned to serve the scrambled eggs. I swear this 8 year old girl in a sunflower-patterned sundress could see into my soul as her eyes seemed to sentence me to Hell with a, “YOU DID NOT DESERVE THAT THANK YOU!” For all I know she didn’t even hear the thank you exchange and was just appalled by how ugly I am, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

Absolutely terrified of what this 8 year old girl with flowers in her hair would do to me, I swapped my creepy lurking by the silverware table for falsely purposeful surveying. I floated around the parish hall, pretending to do mental calculations of how much orange juice we had left (enough), patrolling around like a soldier visually verifying that every table had a pitcher of water (they did), and, perhaps most stupidly, putting on an official census worker-like air to ask the buffet servers if they needed anything (they didn’t).

Still though, I wasn’t as bad as the Brunch Nazi. She was in charge of ensuring the smooth running of the parish brunch, and she clearly thought the day was the culmination of her life’s work and existence. Indeed, she was called by God to manage THIS particular brunch, which I guess to her turns every scone we are short of into one concrete slab in the sidewalk to Hell. Someone served an old lady about 30 seconds before Parish Brunch Go Time, and Brunch Nazi reacted as though someone intentionally shat in her jacuzzi.

She also used the word “need” more often than I use the word “just.” Just about every sentence took the form of “I need you to do X” or “We need to do Y” or “You need Z.” And you could tell that she really meant the NEED, you could hear the urgent desperation in her voice every time she opened her mouth. The “need” seemed to suggest a WE WILL DIE IF THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. I found this amusing because, actually, we don’t need to do any of this. We could actually just say screw it to all of this and go back to bed. But instead we got “I NEED Hallie to serve this much potatoes. I NEED you to go to the kitchen to ask them about this. We NEED , We NEED, We NEED, You NEED, I NEED.”

Lady, you know what I need?  I NEED you to calm the eff down. You’re like my dog  when the mailman comes, and you know what we give to my dog? Prozac. You should look into it. Because you know what happens when the parish brunch is running a little short on scrambled eggs?

Everyone dies.

Oh wait, no, that’s what happens when there’s a nuclear holocaust. Sorry, I meant to say that some people don’t get scrambled eggs. And if having to suffer through scones, potatoes, ham, and unlimited coffee and juice without scrambled eggs at the parish brunch is enough to make someone abandon Christianity and join some kind of pagan cult, then so be it. They’re probably better off there than here anyway.

My Acceptance Speech

Announcer: AND THE AWARD FOR MOST UNEMPLOYED PERSON GOES TO....[*pauses while opening the envelope. flashes a cheeky smile to the audience*] awww, you don't really want to know, do you? Haha, oh all right then...SAM BERRY!

 

 

[*immense applause as Sam gets up from her seat, awkwardly and unintentionally shoves her butt in people's faces as she scoots towards the aisle, and accepts her award on the stage*]

 

 

Sam: Wow...oh my goodness...[*applause starts to gradually die down*]...wow...[*inspecting award*] this is just...wow...thank you, thank you [*applause finally dies down completely*] thank you.
 

This is such an unexpected honor. I never thought I'd be up here, winning this prestigious award when I was up against so many amazingly unemployed people on welfare.
 

You know, growing up on the mean streets of Cheviot Hills, a hood where a slim majority of people can only DREAM of upgrading their BAs to doctorates, I never thought it would be possible to win such an amazing award. [*running left hand through hair in stunned amazement*] This is like something out of a dream. Um...wow...I'm speechless, but I'm gonna keep talking. [*the crowd chuckles*]

 

 

I mean, as I watched kids graduate Brentwood and go off to college and grad school and become successful lawyers and doctors and what have you, I always felt that the world of sitting in one's underpants all day and sobbing sometimes quietly and sometimes violently while questioning the worth of one's existence was something that only happened in fairy tales, something that couldn't happen to me, Sam Berry, just some poor nobody in upper-middle class suburbia. But you know what, America?

 

 

[*raising award triumphantly in the air*]
 

DREAMS. DO. COME. TRUE.

 

 

Of course, there are so many people to thank. Obviously the schools, the private families, and the countless faith communities both here and in many foreign countries, for not employing me. But you know, I couldn't have done this without the behind-the-scenes help that I received from hundreds of more qualified individuals who, with Christ-like attitudes of self-sacrifice, willingly succumbed to employment in my stead. I could not have achieved this without you guys.

 

 

Most importantly, I want to address any children who might be watching this, yes you children whose eyes are big and Bambi-like with the hope of unemployment. I'll tell you now what I would have told any young person, had I actually come in contact with one since last June, and that is this: my success here tonight was not without effort. Only if you work really hard and stay in school will you, too, one day be able to baffle and annoy the living shit out of your Oxford tutor by being the one student in his program who is still unemployed. You need faith in yourself and in God, children. That faith will give you the strength you need to wake up in the morning, apply for a job you're either ridiculously under or over qualified for because it's the only one out there, and then spend the rest of the day crying into some cake. Faith will give you the courage you need to carry on in self-pity in spite of the nay-sayers who call themselves "friends" who try to weigh you down with things like "hope," or the promise of a job one day, or their prayers. Faith will give you the determination you need to cry like a little bitch every day. You need to believe in yourself. Yes, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou,

 

 

"Ain't nothin' gonna break my stride
Nobody's gonna slow me down, oh-no."

 

Faith really is the most important thing, children. And adults. I would like to take this opportunity to thank God, who has blessed me with the totally off-putting complete lack of social skills without which I could never have bombed so many interviews. You see, not so many people are lucky enough to be born with the gift of having no idea how long or short appropriate eye contact is, giving me a shifty, serial rapist-like quality when under pressure. Only a loving and personal God would inspire me to take the successful gamble of actually shimmying at a headteacher during an interview. By God's grace alone do I misunderstand interview questions, awkwardly interact with other candidates, and laugh when no one else is laughing. Yes, it takes a lot of work to be stuck in this state of permanent adolescence, but with God all things are possible.

 

[*orchestra starts to play*]

 

 

Oh dang it, I've turned into one of those people that the orchestra has to play off the stage. Sorry I've spoken for too long! Um...oh crap oh crap...there are still so many people to thank...um....thanks to Carol, Susan, Charlie, Jeff...um....Hank, Laurie, Jeff...shit, I already said Jeff...um....OH MY GOD I NEARLY FORGOT KEVIN! Um...oh the band's getting louder, they really want me off. Ok okay, um, thank you America. [*points at sky*] Unemployed to the glory of God!

 

 

[*exits*]

A cubicle dweller reflects on the concept of pregnant women

You know what I don't get? Pregnant women. I'm staring at one right now and I have no idea how she's so calm, doing work on the computer. If I were her, I'd spend all nine months screaming, "OH MY GOD THERE IS ACTUALLY ANOTHER F***ING PERSON IN MY STOMACH LIKE RIGHT NOW. HOW THE F*** IS EVERYONE OK WITH THIS?" But not her. She just sits there, occasionally clicking the mouse and humming along to the quiet strains of a muted Stevie Wonder belting something out on the office radio.

And this is not even taking into account the countless horrifying aspects of the actual process of childbirth. No, ignoring the pain, the wishing your husband dead, and the potential to crap yourself in front of strangers, I--and I say this as someone who is pro-life and completely pro-babies--find the concept of pregnant women to be completely and utterly terrifying.

I feel like it's not cool to admit this, particularly as a woman (and a woman who loves babies for that matter), but I find the concept of pregnant women about as frightening as the concept of a twin in the womb dying and being absorbed by the other twin, like I saw in that House episode. Or maybe it was a nightmare. I can't remember anymore, all I know is that it was bad, because you know it's two people, but you only see one. Pregnant women are like the conjoined twins who got their own TV show on TLC, except much more concealed and therefore much more sinister. No, even worse, it's like a pregnant woman has her own horcrux that she carries around with her in her stomach. SHE CANNOT BE KILLED.

And because the fact that a pregnant woman is actually two people in one is hidden beneath clothing and skin, then there's the problem of fat people and/or people who wear empire-cut dresses or blouses. Are you pregnant and therefore to be feared, or do you, like me, simply have a fondness of Hostess snack cakes? This is why obesity is an issue--not because we're all going to die of fat, but because I don't know who is a terrifying clandestine two-person she-beast and who just likes McFlurries. Clearly the only solution is to either make all pregnant people wear signs announcing their pregnancy or we fat people need to start wearing signs that say, "DON'T WORRY: JUST FAT."

This might seem extreme, but you'll know I'm right once you, too, spend a few hours in an office where the only person you can see from your cubicle is a pregnant woman. In the meantime, I'll just be keeping an eye on her. COME NO CLOSER, TWO-HEADED SHE-BEAST!

You're welcome, world.

Further proof that Americans are terrified of old things.

Some people like to use their tourism to live their failed dreams. You know, where there are tourist photo opportunities where you can stand with a drum kit at a replica of the Cavern Club to pretend as though you were a Beatle and not the boring insurance salesman that you actually are. Other people have slightly grander dreams, such as the dream to live like interwar British aristocracy, which brings me to today’s post.

Basically right now, in my stay in some ridiculously large room in a manor-house-turned-hotel, I’m living out the dream to live like a 1930s BAMF. I fully recognize that I am privileged to be staying in such a nice place and to have a room to myself. The only problem is that I have never had the dream to live like a 1930s BAMF, as I’ve been stuck watching far too much Poirot this year. If there is one thing I’ve learned this year about ANYTHING, it’s that everyone with that much money at that time was constantly murdering or getting murdered. And, quite frankly, I am just too damn lazy for that right now.

Lazy, but also terrified. Terrified to the point where I just peed with the door open so that I could still hear the comforting sounds of the BBC warding off evil spirits in the bedroom. Like a character from a Jane Austen novel*, the door seemed concerned about a potential breach of the boundaries of propriety in my leaving the door open, so it kept trying to close itself. I solved this problem by propping open the door with a tin that was filled with dusty shortbread biscuits that smelled like someone else’s grandma—was this a recent gift from the hotel or an actual relic of the manor house?

*Yeah, I know Jane Austen waaaay predates Poirot. But that’s the thing with this place. WHAT YEAR AM I? I am in a confused time warp. I found myself checking the closets for Zombie Mr. Darcys and also checking the wardrobe for a portal to Hell Narnia. I checked under the bed to see if I could find the body of the great-grandmother who decorated this room, someone else’s fussy, WASPy matriarch with a penchant for smalls prints of Victorian girls picking unsettling blue flowers.

My mother is similarly creeped out by her own hotel room, and (ignoring the fact that I’m not only a grown woman, but also a grown woman who involuntarily kicks the living b’jeezuz out of anything else in her bed while sleeping) has offered to let me sleep in there as well. I turned down the offer as their room has a canopy bed, and I feel like if I were a ghost with a  taste for blood I’d be more likely to haunt a room with a canopy bed. She’s tried to comfort me by encouraging me to think of our stay in this terrifying manor house [that smells of every unpleasant memory of reading Charlotte Bronte (and also of dusty biscuits)] as though it were a camping trip.

Truth be told, I’d rather be camping. At least in the woods there are no faded, long-ago trendy Japanese prints of flora and fauna. At least in the woods there are no fussy cloth Kleenex holders. At least in the woods there are no terrifying portraits of long-dead rich girls who used to live in this very building and who might be looking up at you from Hell and resenting the fact that you are sleeping in HER bedroom and also have indoor plumbing now.

How many people have died in this room? Why is the ceiling so high? Why the hell are there so many goddamn chairs in this room?

This place is nice, and I am massively spoiled, but oh my God I just want to be in a Motel 6 right now.

This one time I almost died in St Pancras

Okay, so the title might be a bit of an exaggeration. Let's back up a bit.

I took refuge in St Pancras.

Okay, again, a bit of an exaggeration. Basically I'd been walking around London for far too long, saw a church, and thought, "Ah, there's a place for a good sit." Because, and I think this is something people of all creeds can agree on, churches are great places for sitting. And, as an added bonus, sometimes they even have toilets.

Maybe that's why American tourists seem to always flock to churches in Europe. No, it's not our religiosity or our interest in European ecclesiastical history or even a penchant for fine architecture--it's just that we are a people used to having far more public toilets around. People frequently ask me, because apparently I'm the only American they've ever seen, what my biggest source of culture shock is. Can I finally admit it? Quite honestly I'm shocked by the lack of toilets. I'm not talking about in touristy areas, I'm talking about "real people" areas.

Anyway, you shouldn't have let me get onto the topic of toilets, because actually there's something else I really wanted to talk about.

So... I wandered into St Pancras. It had the feel of a hotel lobby, complete with some unseen person whose piano tinkerings gave me flashbacks to a childhood spent sitting in hotel lobbies around the world, waiting for that travel agent who went on family vacations with us (I seem to remember my brothers addressing her as "Mom") to come back from her tour of the luxury suites.

And then I saw the pews.

Box pews!!!!

The last time I saw pews like this I was a small child on a family vacation to New England. I remember standing in a church somewhere in Boston and seeing these boxes that families would sit in, and being in absolute awe. The height of the box, the size of the door, and the fact that a family would be shut into a box, all reminded me of a roller coaster car. At age nine, just as I was doing now at age 24, I imagined WASPs dressed in their Sunday best, throwing their hands in the air and screaming with fear and excitement as their pew went around a loop and into a corkscrew.

Well, 24 year old me couldn't help herself from living nine year old me's fantasy. I looked both ways (only a man on a piano and a woman praying in the corner) before dashing across the aisle to a particular pew that seemed to be waiting for me. Like a giddy idiot I slid into the pew and closed the door with a satisfying CLICK.

For a while I didn't even realize that I had violated some rule that probably got deleted from an early draft of the Chronicles of Narnia, something about not shutting pew doors shut unless you are absolutely certain how to open them back up. Instead I sat there imagining that I was on the roller coaster at the pier back home. Does that one even have doors? Who the hell cares. All I know is that I sat in this pew, trying to lean from side to side pretending to be on a roller coaster as quietly as possible so as not to disturb people in the church doing actual church things. I figured throwing my hands up and screaming, "WOOOOO!" would probably be frowned upon, so I made do with swaying slowly enough that the creaks of the wooden pew were hardly audible.

After a while I decided it was time for me to grow up and head out to the British Library, so I gathered my things together, pushed the pew door open, exited, and walked along the road.

Oh wait, no. That's not what happened.

Instead, I pushed on the pew door and absolutely nothing happened. I paused for about five seconds, hoping that in that time the pew door would sort itself out, and then I pushed again. Nothing. Again. Nope, still locked. Again? Nope. Nope. Nope. A horrifying realization then dawned on me, namely that I had no idea how to open the stall I had locked myself into. Basically my roller coaster fantasy had come to full fruition, and now I would have to wait for the ride operator to come release me. Except churches don't have ride operators.

At this point I let out a sigh and thought to myself, "Well, this is where I die." Because, let's face it, starving to death locked in a church pew is the preferable option to asking a priest/pastoral assistant/verger/parishioner/passing bishop to release me, an idiot who was pretending to be on a roller coaster in a church. I mean, there are worse ways to go. Just trying to look on the bright side here.

I briefly considered vaulting over the wall and hoping the man on the piano and the praying woman didn't see. Would I get arrested? Then again, is vaulting over a pew wall even an arrestable offence? Can the Church arrest people? Oh man, this is what happens when you let Jews into churches...we accidentally lock ourselves in.

Then I thought about hulking out of the pew. I've [accidentally] hulked out of a t-shirt before. Once. Could I do it with wood, too? Well, it was certainly worth a shot. I tried to think of things that pissed me off, and thoughts of the RE GCSE exam flooded my mind. I AM SO ANGRY ABOUT TEACHING TO THE EXAM...........................BUT WHY AM I NOT TURNING GREEN AND ENORMOUS???

Aw crap. Looks like I don't have the ability to hulk out of things at will. A disappointing discovery...

For a brief moment I looked down at my left hand, resting next to me on the bench. Just beyond the chewed nails and the faded notes to myself I caught sight of a little button. Now I was ready to cross over to the other side. I pushed the button and I was liberated!

I left St Pancras a changed woman. A woman who now realizes that even the hideous stack chairs at St Paul's Cathedral that look like something from a high school multi-purpose room, even these have hidden beauty and benefits. Specifically that they will not try to hold you hostage.

I've reached some new lows.

Let’s get one thing straight, since so many people pity me when they hear I’m a lone tourist. I love it. Until I find a traveling companion who is just as vile as me, I prefer walking around foreign cities by myself because it’s the only time I can walk around publicly belching like a cheap prostitute without consequences. And people who burden me with oppressive hospitality rob me of this joy.

You know what I mean by oppressive hospitality—the most I want from you for breakfast is a finger pointing me to the nearest McDonald’s still serving breakfast. I appreciate your effort, but your three-course breakfast that you watch me exhaustedly cram into my mouth like a chore under your eager, almost evangelical eyes is about as welcome to me as an extended tutorial with my professor who wants to talk about nothing but the golden age of British bus travel.

This is how I ended up spending 5 ½ hours alone with a 40 year old on an internship. See, I was in Geneva for a job interview. My host (and potential boss) had offered to find someone to show me around Geneva on my free day, and not wanting to seem like the anti-social bitch that I actually am, I pretended that this was a fantastic idea—thinking it’d be a brief lunch and visit to a church or museum or whatever it is you’re supposed to see in Geneva. Instead, in an act that gets the award for Most Misguided Act of Hospitality of the Year (Runner Up: Not allowing me to withdraw cash from the cash machine), my host arranged for me to spend the entire day with a complete stranger, and a weird one at that. A man whose first stop on our tour was an English language bookstore, so that he could spend an hour looking for a French dictionary for himself.

And I didn’t even get the job.

When I first met him there was a glimmer of hope when I detected his Midwestern accent. This hope dissipated, about as quickly as a fart caught in the early stages by lowered car windows on a freeway, when I realized his accent didn’t have the same, almost Swedish, sing-songy quality of most Midwesterners, perhaps the chattiest folk in America. Instead it was the gruff, monotone mumble of a defective Midwesterner, like one with a flipper for an arm. He reminded me of the impressions of Louie Andersen saying “Chicken, donuts, cheesecake…” that my brother and I used to do.

I’d like to think I did a pretty good job of keeping the conversation going for three hours, even with the occasional awkward silence, particularly when I gave correct navigational instructions that he ignored in favor of just wandering around like a retarded puppy, followed by a sullen me who occasionally offered a weary, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure we need to turn right.” Followed by a passive aggressive, “…like I said.” But, as I said, we had three hours of the wonkiest conversation even I’ve ever experienced. The last 2 ½ hours were covered by my occasional murmurs of “Mm…this is a nice neighborhood. Is it known for anything?” And his brief, otherworldly “Yeah.”s.

But no matter. At least I got a hug out of it at the end, and you know how much I like hugs. This being a sweltering, sunny Geneva day, filled with loads of walking, it’s safe to say the hug was a bit wet. So, again, it’s not like I got nothing out of the day.

To be fair, the day wasn’t entirely horrible. I did quite like the Museum of the Reformation, and in particular its depiction of Luther burning in Hell. Also fantastic was seeing two teenagers clearly on a date, passionately making out in front of a portrait of a reformer. I’d like to think it was the boy’s idea to go to this museum on the date. “I’ll take her to the Museum of the Reformation—bitches LOVE ecclesiastical reform!”

But most spectacularly eye-opening was the exhibit where you could actually smell fragrances mentioned in the Bible. As I learned, all Biblical perfumes smell surprisingly of shit mixed with harsh chemical disinfectant. It makes me wonder how bad the ancient Middle East must have smelled if THIS was considered a luxurious improvement. I mean, I lived in the Middle East for a while, and I can tell you I’d rather be next to a sweaty Sephardi man on a bus than a bottle of nard. They tell me that nard is what that famous woman in the New Testament anointed DJ JC with, though perhaps given that nard smells of asparagus-flavored piss this woman should be considered infamous. I can clearly imagine her rubbing this vile, inexplicably expensive trash on Jesus’ feet and the world’s dear savior screaming, “For the love of God, Mary (they were all called Mary back then, weren’t they), get that off my feet!”

I also quite liked the cornball attempt to bring it all to life. I was told at the beginning by some overly enthusiastic Swiss girl that there would be a room with a dining room set up and OH MY GOODNESS if I’d only press 300 on my audio guide then I could “listen in” on John Calvin’s dinner conversations with other reformers. Needing to kill time as my tour guide, in spite of this being his fifth trip to the museum, had decided that every tiny label in the museum needed full, Talmud-length exegesis, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to let 300 be the soundtrack of my sit. I suppose they had tried to make it sound as realistic as possible by adding the sound of beverages being poured, but it had the effect of making the first minute of the recording sound as though I were eavesdropping on John Calvin having a particularly stubborn morning pee in an echoey bathroom. Ah well, points for trying, Museum of the Reformation.

Before we rounded off our day with a silent, hollow walk back to my “hotel,” we visited something called the Maison Tavel, which (as far as I can tell) is a museum. To what in particular, I’m still unsure even after spending an hour in there. Armor? Pub signs? Wallpaper? Dead stuffed pigeons? Who the fuck knows…

There was this one tiny room in Maison Tavel that was especially memorable. It was this tiny sitting room, sort of in a tower. I walked in and—I know I’ve talked about farts, belches, etc. already too many times in this post and that I’ve exceeded the quota, but just bear with me—and I caught a whiff of several hundred years’ worth of accumulated farts that have soaked into the wallpaper and gone stale. I have trouble conveying to you in words the strength of this smell, and the closest I can get is saying that it was actually like something out of a fairy tale.

Just over 48 hours in Geneva, and that’s probably what I’ll remember years from now when I look back on my weekend in Geneva. Foul smells.

Oh right. And having to start off my job interview by leading the chaplain in what was probably the most appalling bit of freestyle prayer he’s ever heard. But that’s a post for another day.

.

Some things, like hair, are more important than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

If you're in my curriculum group you probably think this blog post is going to be about how I got into an argument with our guest lecturer today over the disgusting ease with which he switched between sets of terms (Israel and the Palestinian Territories, vs The Occupiers and Palestine) depending on whether he was speaking to Palestinians or Israelis.

But no. I have an even greater injustice to speak out against.

So this guest speaker enters the room. I take a quick look at him--besides the tie that's slightly too loud for England he looks pretty normal. Typical man in a suit from an organization. However, as soon as he was invited to begin his talk, things quickly went downhill. With an ounce of hysteria in his voice, the first words out of his mouth were a desperate insistence that the windows be opened. As he threw off his jacket, tore off his tie, and rolled up his sleeves, I was starting to worry that he was having some kind of an extreme male menopausal hot flash that would result in us having a naked and crazed guest lecturer standing in front of us.

I froze in panic as some classmates hurried to the windows to allow cool air in. I know it must seem as though I'm making a bigger deal out of this man's uncomfortable warmth than perhaps I should, but I know that if I were in the same situation (a guest in unfamiliar territory who feels uncomfortably warm) I would just grin and bear the heat. I don't care if I'm dressed in more layers than a Victorian woman and the classroom's heat is so intense that the friction of pencils on paper causes small brush fires to break out--I don't give a shit. If I'm a guest speaker somewhere I'm STILL not going to perform the professional equivalent of a burlesque show by removing even a blazer.

My God, I thought. My God, this man must be crazy. The tie is off. And beneath his polite requests there is a palpable sense of urgency that seems to scream, "I AM SO WARM! I AM SO WARM! WE HAVE TO OPEN THE WINDOWS IMMEDIATELY!!!!"

With the opening of windows and speedy professional nudity this man's thirst for coolness was immediately quenched. For a second I was ready to forget the fact that this man was OH MY GOD SO WARM!, but then he turned his back to the class.

I saw it, and for a split second I continued my usual daydreaming. Today's reverie involved Robin Hood asking me to give up the whole teaching thing in favor of simply being a badass. This then morphed into imagining Robin Hood, St Stephen, and Ronald McDonald having a picnic together. They were just about to--WAIT. WAIT. Hold the phone. Stop the presses. Get into your nuclear bunker. What in the name of Hank F. Effington is attached to the back of that guy's head?

From the front he looked totally normal. Okay, maybe his mustache was slightly too big and slightly too ginger for his gray beard, but otherwise he looked average. Slight receding hairline, gray hair, glasses...nothing too weird here. I found myself employing my Jedi powers to get him to turn again so I could catch sight of it. Come on...come on...

BINGO!

I took a moment to just stare at it in all of its rattail glory. I've really never seen anything like it. It looked like if he grew it out for another couple of months he could tuck it into his belt loop and use it as an alternative to suspenders. It was so long, a nearly never-ending braid, and my God was it tiny. At its widest it was about the width of my pinky, but it quickly withered away into a tiny braid that would make a fine toupee for a fetus. Such a tiny braid, how could he do it himself? Does his wife braid it every morning as she silently dies inside? Can such a man even attract a wife?

I briefly got a hold of myself and turned away from the hypnotic hairdo, but unfortunately I made eye contact with one of my classmates. And we just knew. We just knew. This man has a goddamn RATTAIL.

Well fuck, I thought to myself. I came here today to learn, but there goes any hope of me not having at least three inappropriate and uncontrollable giggles today. All of them hair-related. As it happened, I did manage to control my giggles (though I did have a couple of spontaneous fits of shaking). I did, however, find myself unable to stop myself from imagining what it would be like to pull on it. Not just a slight tug. I mean a serious yank that throws the man around the room like a rag doll tied to a ceiling fan. I wanted to grab hold of that rattail and drag the man around the room. I wanted to use that rattail to turn that man into a human hammer like Miss Trunchbull does. How much force would I need to apply to floor him simply by tugging on his hair? I wondered to myself. Could it be used like a leash? When he gives horsey rides to his children (assuming he has any I think we can safely assume they all--even the girls--have rattails), do they use it as a whip?

But enough about this man's hair. There's one more thing that must be addressed:

The Snort.

Look, I know what it's like to laugh. Sometimes you get a little carried away and you might snort a little bit. But provided you commit ritual suicide immediately afterwards, this snort is completely forgivable. This man, however, apparently thought he'd forgo the laughter that accompanies this embarrassing and unholy noise and simply have a snort in a vacuum.

What am I talking about?

Here's a normal snort laughter:
[*Punchline of a joke*]
Hahahahahhaha--SNORK--HaOMGthatwassoembarrassinghahahah

Here's this guy's laughter:
[*Punchline of a joke*]
SNORK!


I'm sorry, but simply making a snort noise is not an acceptable alternative to laughter. I can forgive his gross political views, his hot flashes, and even his rattail. But I feel that snort laughing without actually laughing is a character flaw that should be grounds for immediate termination. And I don't mean firing him.

Giraffe cranes with a taste for blood.

I wish people had “for hire” lights, just like taxis. I don’t mean “for hire” like we’re all prostitutes, I mean “for hire” in the “I’m ready and willing to interact with other homo sapiens at this moment” sense. It’d be perfect for those days when I want people to fuck off—I’d just turn off the light and only tourists and others ignorant of taxi protocol would continue to try to hail a conversation. Because sometimes you (and by you I mean me) have days where you don’t want to be rude to people and you can’t just tell them the truth: that right now the thought of interacting with another person makes you desperately want to vomit. And because humans don’t have “for hire” lights, the only option left is to hide. And think about giraffes.

That’s really what I did today. Apologies to people trying to track me down, but I need to think about giraffes much more than I need to interact with other people right now.

Before I talk about giraffes, I think I need to talk about cranes for a bit first. See, I’ve been thinking about cranes and claws for a while. Mostly because a few nights ago I had a dream that the school I was working at suddenly materialized in a claw machine that I was controlling. So then I dreamed that I could pick up students and teachers who pissed me off, hoist them up into the air, and then drop them into what Dream Sam recognized as nuclear waste, but which Awake Sam recognizes was actually horse shit.

Another thing that has got me thinking about cranes a lot is the fact that every day on the drive home we catch a glimpse of the city. There’s this one moment in particular where we get off the freeway and you see this glorious bit of green, and the city’s famous buildings sort of poke through the newer buildings and the green and…and…I can’t really describe it. But I love it.

But then there are construction cranes. Oh my God, there are cranes. Cranes everywhere. But not that much construction… For a while I had convinced myself that the cranes were actually an invading alien race, quietly biding its time until it had bred enough new cranes to form a crane army for a hostile takeover. Now, of course, I see that’s ridiculous. See, these cranes peer their heads over the houses and famous spires of the city like giraffes sticking their heads over the railings of the zoo’s giraffe enclosure to say “Herro!” to tourists.

Yes, dear reader. I am convinced that cranes are actually mechanical giraffes bred in the locked, underground laboratories of this city by creepy graduate students from the Ukraine to kill the people of this town.

Igor: “We’ve done it! We have successfully created the world’s first mechanical giraffe!”

Evgeny: “MUAHAHA!”

Igor: “And now we shall let these creatures loose on the city to wreak havoc, these giraffe cranes with a taste for blood! MUAHA—“

Evgeny: “And Cheerios.”

Igor: “Sorry?”

Evgeny: “They are giraffe cranes with a taste for blood…and Cheerios. I fed them Cheerios, too. They seemed to quite like them…”

Igor: “[*heavy sigh*]”


And so they’ve planted these mechanical giraffes everywhere in the city. I sat and stared for an hour at one in particular today, and I’m convinced he is a mechanical giraffe who wants to avenge the brutal turning into scrap metal of his father, the great giraffe crane king, Okonkwo. I imagine him going on a vengeful rampage through the city. “Nooooo!” people would scream as he picked them up and lifted them over the city before dropping them to be impaled on one of the city’s dreaming spires. Well, the few Israelis he’d find would say, “No no no no no” in a rapid fire, but everyone else would definitely go for the one “Nooooo!”

And so Chinua Achebe, this vengeful giraffe crane, lies dormant as the students and hordes of open-mouthed Japanese tourists pass by him, not knowing what level of monster lies in wait on the corner, just by that pub and that library.

But I know.

My cover letter

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am pleased to apply for the post of Teacher of RE at your school, as advertised on the TES website.

At this point you are probably wondering what that blinding light is. You know, that mesmerizing but slightly painful light that seems to be suddenly shining in your life out of nowhere, just as soon as you opened this letter? Well, to answer your question, that light is the sun shining out of my ass.

Now now, stick with me here. You are dealing with the biggest BAMF this side of the River Avon. I don’t even know which side of the Avon we’re on at this point, since I haven’t the slightest clue where the fuck the River Avon is, but regardless of the Avon’s geographical location I can pretty much guarantee that I am the greatest teacher you will ever see.

What do I mean? I mean my kids know the Bible so well that they can fart the 10 Commandments in morse code in their sleep. My kids understand the concept of the Trinity so well that they literally made their Math teacher’s head explode. My kids understand arguments for the existence of God so well that Richard Dawkins actually weeps with fear and dives into the nearest trashcan like something out of Scooby Doo when he bumps into my kids on the streets of Oxford.

Bitches worried about how I deal with SEN kids? I am such a goddamn champ that I actually cured my students of their SEN issues. None of this standing around trying to make provisions for these kids like a little bitch would. I cured blindness, much like Jesus. Except I did one better than JC and cured dyslexia as well.

Safeguarding? You’re worried that I’m not gonna keep your kids safe? I will personally bite the head off of any bastard who tries to lay so much as a perverted GLANCE at my kids. And then I will use his head in some kind of a fucked up voodoo ritual—that’s how seriously I take safeguarding. One time a kid had some weird bruises on his arms so I used my laser vision to incinerate his parents into an irrelevant pile of dust that blew away in a slight breeze--at Parents Evening. And then I had one of them free biscuits and ate it like it ain’t no thang.

Bitch please, you think I can’t differentiate for pupils of differing ability levels? Bitch, it be like 27 different goddamn lessons when I teach.

In conclusion, if you don’t employ a fucking BALLER like me, I will have you sectioned. And no, I don’t mean taken in for mental health observations. I mean literally chopped up into sections.

Sincerely,
Sam

Tell us more about the lineage

Friday morning I spent about an hour and 45 minutes staring at some dude's hairline. And when I say some dude I actually mean a Buddhist monk. And when I say Buddhist monk, I mean some guy who dressed in red robes and worked at a Buddhist center. To be honest I have no idea what he introduced himself as because, as I shall explain, I did not understand a single word that came out of this man's mouth.

There were definitely a solid few minutes where I was shaking with suppressed laughter when, sitting Indian style with my ass propped on a meditation cushion, I realized that I was stuck in a never-ending lecture with a man who was less intelligible than my newborn niece. I wasn't laughing at him, mind you--no way, having been the unintelligible foreigner in Israel, I'd never laugh at someone else's accent. Rather, I was laughing at myself, because at the time I thought I was the only person who didn't understand this man.

I looked around me as this lovely gentleman spoke to us, and all I saw were all of my classmates nodding attentively, as though this man had just provided some life-changing insight into the nature of the world. An insight which was completely lost on me. Needless to say, I began to zone out and wonder about things. For as much as I tried to understand this man he seemed to get even harder to understand. And after witnessing our tutor continually ask questions about lineage and history that invited hour-long responses, not a second of which I could understand, I began to wonder if I had had a stroke.

At one point the monk may have asked me a question. Yes, me personally. Actually though I'm not entirely sure it was a question, and I'm not entirely sure it was addressed to me. It was sort of the aural equivalent of someone with a lazy eye addressing you. There was definitely a moment where I considered pointing at myself and mouthing the words, "Sorry, me?" and quickly glancing behind me and slightly to the left.

All I know though is that I'm grateful we didn't do any silent meditation. When I saw the hippie white guy lead us into this room with mats and cushions I got a little afraid. I'm not afraid of finding Enlightenment, but I am afraid of the weird noises my stomach makes. Public silent meditation and I don't get along because my stomach is a bit of a diva. Well, he's not really a diva--maybe he's just one of those people that is afraid of awkward silences. "HEY GUYS!" my stomach likes to scream in silent moments. And even though most of these dear classmates have seen me fall over furniture, molest trees, fall in front of an ambulance, and eat disgusting amounts of kebab, I don't want them to misunderstand my stomach noises and think I'm the sort of person who goes to other people's shrines just to fart in them.

This did, however, lead to a private silent mediation during the monk's lecture. I began to ponder meaningful questions about the relationship between farts and Buddhism. Namely, "If you're about to reach Enlightenment in a shrine and somebody farts, do you get sent back a bit?" And "If you intentionally fart in a shrine to distract someone from reaching Enlightenment, will you get reborn as something really nasty?"

I can't believe they let me teach RE...

Double double toil and please just let me die now...

Oh man, I've been bitten by the theater bug. I offered to help with props/building/whatever with the local Passion Play, and a shortage of willing players has meant that I've since been upgraded to the status of actor, with an actual honest-to-goodness line. I flatter myself by thinking that the person who allowed me to take on this role thinks I can draw upon inner acting strength I didn't know I had to add meat to this one line, when in reality (as learned from this past Sunday's rehearsal) when I act--on a good day--I just sound like a quietly constipated version of my normal, dull self.

To be fair, I am enjoying myself and I'm happy to be part of it. But honestly it also brings back horrific memories of my time as a theater major at college. All I wanted to do was play with lights and use the occasional power tool, but my college thought that in order to be a good lighting designer I needed to know how to act.

All I remember about that class is that every day was humiliating agony. I still cringe at the thought of having to perform that witches thing from the beginning of Macbeth in front of everybody. I remember during rehearsals for it my partners would nag me to put more effort into it. Get into character, they'd tell me. Double double toil and trouble... And I'd just silently pray that either I or everyone else or both would die before the performance date, because the thought of enthusiastically crouching around an imaginary cauldron and speaking in verse seemed somehow even worse than simply shitting my pants both visibly and audibly while onstage.

It got to the point where 18 year old me considered drastic solutions. Whenever I had to perform in front of my class I would fantasize that while I was reciting my poem/monologue/whatever I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume. "Surely that'd embarrass you even more, Sam," you're probably saying. But the fact is that imagining I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume made the rest of the class seem ridiculous. Here I am, wearing an invisible inflatable penis costume in front of the entire class--and these dumbasses don't even realize it! I'm giving a serious monologue in my dull voice of indigestion and I'm NOT EVEN ACKNOWLEDGING THE FACT THAT I'M DRESSED AS A HUGE INFLATABLE PENIS! And you're taking me seriously! Who's the idiot now, guys? Oh, that's right, YOU!

Well, a girl can dream...

I eventually gave up on the whole theater major thing. It wasn't just the horrific acting classes, but also the crap jobs I had to do backstage. My personal favorite was "Lint Mistress," where my job was literally picking lint off the leading man.

As part of the costume crew I had to follow around the costume designer, a grad student who had such a strong Great Lakes accent that I thought her jaw was going to pop off at any minute from the vowel strain. On one memorable occasion I was called in to help her with the leading man's pants (TROUSERS!), so I followed her into a small dressing room where the three of us could be alone together. She decided that the leading man's pants needed to be expanded, so without any kind of warning she just tore this guy's pants open. So the guy was just standing there with a huge, gaping hole in the region of Ass, looking completely appalled. The costume designer had to hurry out of the room to get more pins, leaving me alone with this guy I don't know but who I regularly pick lint off of, now with him in underpants and pathetic tatters that were once pants. I remember trying to turn around to preserve some semblance of this guy's modesty, only to find that a mirror was behind me. So instead I just sort of stared off to the side while the leading man and I both grew increasingly red in the face as we both tried to pretend like he was not wearing shredded pants right now. He was a senior and I was a freshman, so he tried to break up the awkwardness of the situation by asking me how I was settling in. "Not very well at the moment," I wanted to tell him.

After about five eternities the costume designer finally returned to fix the pants, but by that point I was pretty convinced that theater was no longer for me. I needed order in this chaotic world. I needed to know that pants would not suddenly be ripped apart at any given moment without any kind of a warning.

The whole realization that theater was not the major for me made me think of Roland the Farter, or more importantly Le Petomane.

Le Petomane was a guy who farted professionally in the Victorian era, a guy who is sometimes referred to as a "fartiste." Apparently he used to do farting impressions of the San Francisco Earthquake, and he'd do animal sounds. This flatulist retired during World War I because he thought the world was too inhumane. Just as I only wanted to play with lights, he just wanted to fart. That's all he wanted.

And that, my friends, is beautiful.


(Speaking of theater, if you'd like to read a short scene about St Thomas a Becket that I wrote when I was 16, please click here)

Yet another subject I suck at teaching

(from yesterday)

In addition to being the worst geography teacher ever, I found out today that I’m the worst food tech teacher (home ec teacher for Americans) in the history of English education. Not because I don’t know any proper information about food (well, I don’t), but because I am a firm believer in bowl-licking. Should I ever become a mother, I will probably be one of the few in the history of the modern world that would not shriek, “BUT YOU’LL GET SALMONELLA!” when I catch my children eating more brownie mix than they’ve poured into a baking dish. No, I’ll say, “Eat up!”

And all 28 of my theoretical children will die of salmonella.

So today in food tech we were working with cake icing—salmonella was not an issue here as icing is just sugar and butter. However, as a teaching assistant for today’s six lessons I was expected to figuratively slap the hands of the little devils who stuck their hands into their bowls of icing for a cheeky little taste. And THIS has proven to be my most challenging task as a teacher. Because I can’t blame them for it. I mean, fuck me, if I weren’t 23 and a trainee teacher I’d be fighting those kids tooth and nail for a share of their icing. God bless ‘em, lick away, the time when that will no longer be socially acceptable is fast approaching for people their age. Lick away, children.

On a related note, I hated that the proper teachers made one class leave their cupcakes for later because the kids had gym immediately afterwards and would get sick. That’s the whole fucking point. If you eat yourself sick after the age of 18 you’re a pig, but under 18 and you’re just a kid. Let kids be kids, I say.

But back to my main point: licking the bowl. It’s hard to tell the kids off for something I don’t think is all that wrong (yeah, I know it’s not hygienic in general, but in this instance it was a private bowl of icing, not for public consumption). To me it’d be like telling the kids off for liking Doctor Who or wanting to learn Hebrew. Some of the poor dears didn’t want to be naughty and asked me, “Can I lick the bowl?” And I had a burning desire to yell, “FUCK YEAH!” and triumphantly pump my fist in the air.

Realizing that if I acknowledged their question I would have to tell them no and kill a part of my soul, I chose to tactfully ignore the question. After their question I would let my eyes suddenly glaze over and act as though, “Oh wow, something absolutely fascinating just happened out the window and I’m going to walk away from you now to go check it out.” And then I secretly hoped that they would take the opportunity to go ahead, embrace their joyful youth, and shove a hearty thumbful of pink frosting into their mouths while none of the teachers were looking.

The problem is that towards the end of every lesson the kids got wise, and those mischievous surreptitious dips into their bowls of frosting gradually turned into blatant icing feasts. Which, let me clarify, I do not give one solitary shit about. The other teachers, however, kept glaring at me whenever a child would snarf some icing and I said nothing to the child in question.

Finally this one kid was quite overtly piping frosting directly into his mouth. I thought this was the greatest thing I’d seen all day, as this kid was clearly the happiest kid on the planet, with his head tipped all the way back and the piping bag in the air guiding a steady supply of blue heaven into his mouth. He just looked absolutely thrilled, with that look of joy on his face that you rarely see in children at school. Part of me wanted to give him a nod of solidarity, as if to say, “I’m with you in spirit, buddy. If you fuckers weren’t in this room with me I’d definitely give that a go.” But responsibility kicked in.

Not wanting to be too much of a hypocrite, I chose to say something friendly, something like, “You know, that icing would taste much better if you put it on the cupcake you’re decorating first.”

And this boy briefly put his bag of diabetes down and let the mirth disappear from his face. Suddenly he became very serious as he told me, “No, it wouldn’t, Miss.” He wasn’t trying to be cheeky, he was just speaking the truth.

All I could do was look at him, smile, and say, “You’re right.”

The Hokey Pokey Army

Again, too tired to actually write something new. There is a post in progress about how ridiculously unqualified I am to teach geography, but until then I hope you enjoy an EPICALLY LONG post from the past, written in 2009 while I was living in Israel and still in the process of dealing with the Israeli army:


Probably the worst thing about the army enlistment process (okay, army drafting process…) is the fact that at any given moment you have no idea what’s going on. I feel like most of the process involves being buffeted helplessly from station to station, from interview to interview, from test to test…it’s a bit like being Aeneas, except at the end of the process you don’t get to establish the foundations of Ancient Rome. You just get some boring two-year job.

What can you expect? You can expect, on several occasions, to get calls from random army human resources divisions (they’ll introduce themselves immediately after you say, “hello,” and they’ll speak so quickly that you have no idea what their name is or what division they work for). They’ll then quickly tell you that you have to be at X spot on Y date—they’ll say this information so quickly that it’s more like vomiting than speaking. You’ll ask specifically what it’s for, and you’ll get the same vague, generic answer: “It’s connected to your army placement.”

Well what the hell does that mean? The pee test I did in the army enlistment center was connected to my army placement, as was the mile I had to run at the combat gibush (*basically a combat audition), as were the computer tests I took at the jobnik test day. So how the hell am I supposed to prepare for this latest labor? Should I assume it’ll be a three-for-one test, and prepare to pee, run and test my brains all in the same day?

Today was one such mystery task “connected to my army placement.” All I knew was that I had to be in a specific building in a specific city at a specific time. And I was told, “God help you if you are late!”

So I got there about ten minutes before my scheduled appointment time. I rang a bell on a door, and after a few minutes a non-descript man answered the door. Really, the best way I can describe this guy is to say that there wasn’t anything about him worth describing. Bland features, bland voice….whatever. He ushered me into the waiting room and then told me that he would be with me in 30 minutes. So much for “God help you if you are late!”

And so I was left completely alone in this waiting room. Kind of freaked out and still not entirely sure what I was going to have to do at this latest army task, I cautiously made my way to one of 13 enormous chairs. I sat, completely alone in this absolutely gargantuan waiting room, filled with empty chairs, and started looking around. The walls were absolutely white—not just white, but a harsh white that, when combined with the harsh fluorescent lighting from the ceiling, made me feel like my eyes were about to shrivel up and die. “I’m melting! What a world, what a world….” It gave the room a sort of sterile, hospital-like feeling, minus the unsanitary fact that on each of the unoccupied chairs there were hairs and footprints and flakes of dead skin. This proof of the existence of other people in my shoes was both comforting and disgusting at the same time.

I settled down in my seat and tried to wait patiently. In complete silence. I swear, the color white makes a sound. So I’m sitting there, the walls are droning on in the background, saying, “WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE.” And the air conditioning is humming, and the loudest thing in the room, drowning out the white walls and the AC, is my breathing. Deafening. It sounded like the breathing you hear in trailers for horror films. Like, “BREATHE…..Is the monster gone? BREATHE…..BREATHE…..Aaaaaaaa!!!!!!!” If that makes any sense.(If you’re still reading my blog that sort of thing MUST make sense to you.)

After about 10 minutes of complete boredom I got the idea that maybe sitting in this oppressively white, abandoned and bare room was in itself the test. I tried to slyly look for hidden camera, but after about five minutes of looking I realized that I’m probably not interesting enough to the army to be subjected to weird tests like this. So I made a mental note to not pick my nose, just in case, but stopped looking for hidden cameras.

I might just have to mention something really gross right now….when I get nervous, I pee. A lot. So obviously while waiting in this room it dawned on me that I needed to pee before going into my latest army task. Normally I’d ask permission to use a private office’s private bathroom, but in this case there was no one to ask. I was completely alone in this large waiting room. The exit door was locked, as was the door to what I figured was the main office. I turned a corner, passing through an extremely bare kitchen (just a sink and four small jars of coffee/cocoa powder—no spoons or even cups!), and came into a tiny toilet closet. I did my business, then flushed….and

WOOOOOOOSH

A deafening roar comes out of the toilet. Like, not a flush, but a noise that lets you know that you have done something irreversibly horrible to the toilet. The toilet growls, like it’s angry for revenge or something. I spend the next 10 minutes standing next to the screaming toilet, with my finger to my lips as I whisper, “Shhhhhh!” like it’s an upset baby instead of a toilet noisily demanding justice. I keep quietly repeating to myself, “All I did was pee! Shhhhh! Shhhh!”

Finally, over the angry growl of the toilet I heard the guy in charge start to come out of his office, so I rushed out to the waiting area to act as if I had been there the entire time. He doesn’t seem to notice the sonic boom coming out of the toilet…

Once inside the office (almost as bare as the waiting room—just a plain desk, two chairs, a telephone, a wilting plant, a pen, and a binder) , he asks me about some of my details. What is my name? What is my ID number? What is my phone number? I answer all these questions in my goofy Hebrew, and then he explains to me what this day is. It’s basically just another interview where he’s going to ask me about myself, and he’s going to ask about jobs in the army, and if there’s something I want to ask for I can do it now. And so the interview starts:

“Tell me about yourself.”

How the hell am I supposed to answer that? What does he want to know about me? Does he want facts about me? Like a biography or something? Does he want to know my philosophical beliefs? How detailed am I supposed to be?

Instead of answering, I just sort of cough and fidget uncomfortably, saying, “Ummmmm,” quite a bit, hoping that this will encourage him to follow up with a more specific question. But I get nothing. So then I said something like, “Look, I’m fine with telling you about anything, but I just don’t know what specifically you want to know.” This made the interviewer reflect for a moment, and then he issued a new demand:

“Okay. Tell me about school.”

Again I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and wondered what I was supposed to tell him. Did he want to know about my grades? What subjects I liked? My social life? My extracurricular activities? The various times I jumped out of windows or ran away from teachers?

But as I tried to form the right kind of answer in my head, I looked up at the interviewer. Big mistake.

This guy brought eye contact to a new level. This was not normal eye contact; this was a staring contest that the guy didn’t seem to realize I had already forfeited. I thought to myself that this must be what it’s like for Cyclops from X-Men to look at you without his protective glasses, that same intense burning sensation. I thought maybe he was trying to achieve some kind of telepathy with me, and I wanted to tell him, “Sir, no matter how hard you stare, you’re still not going to be able to read my mind.”

Anyway, somehow I got past the fact that apparently the interviewer didn’t need to blink like most humans do, and I found it a little bit easier to open up to his questions.

It did get really confusing though because I mentioned that I like to write stories about people I encounter. When he asked me to explain how I saw myself, how I would write about myself in one of these stories, and I said that I’m not all that exciting, I’m just an observer. He asked what I meant, and I said that I personally am quite boring, but my life just happens to intersect with the lives of interesting people, and I like to write about them. He asked for an example, and I brought up the Hokey Pokey Man.

The Hokey Pokey Man is a man that became sort of a legend of my childhood. I was a little girl, standing outside the White House with a school group, waiting to go inside for a tour. It was freezing, we had been waiting for what seemed like five years, and we were all miserable, when suddenly and completely out of the blue, we hear a loud voice singing the Hokey Pokey. We all looked around for the source of this sound, and down the street we found him. The Hokey Pokey Man. A man who dressed 100% like the respectable businessman or lawyer or whatever that he was, but who also wore enormous, bright yellow DJ headphones. I could say he was running down the street, but I think the word “prancing” would be more fitting. So this man pranced down the street in his sharp business suit, belting the Hokey Pokey at the top of his lungs, and flinging his arms into the air in time with the music. As all eyes waiting in line at the White House turned towards the Hokey Pokey Man, he seemed to be completely oblivious….still skipping and twirling down the street in his immaculately kept business suit and singing and dancing to the Hokey Pokey. And off he danced into the distance, like some kind of flamboyantly gay cowboy riding off into the rhinestone sunset.

The interviewer asked me how this story shows how I am, and I explained my telling him this story in itself is telling him about myself. While my classmates may only vaguely remember the Hokey Pokey Man, I’m the only one who is going to keep telling the story, who’s going to write about it, and who is going to spend great chunks of time for the rest of her life wondering what ever became of him, wondering if he’s still dancing the Hokey Pokey down the street in DC or if he’s made to a different state or different song by now.

This one time, this dude totally fell asleep in intro to hinduism

At some point we’re going to need a serious post about the fact that a member of staff just casually dropped an anti-Semitic remark like it ain’t no thang. I am, however, feeling a little ill (I wish I could claim that the shock of the remark on my Jew-soul gave me this cold, but unfortunately I’ve been sick for a couple days now), so instead I give you an edited version of a previous bit of writing I did.

I thought about it yesterday when I fell asleep during a lecture. In a normal lecture with the about 180 members of my program this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but this particular lecture was with 18 students only. When I woke up I thought maybe I’d gotten away with it, but when I made eye-contact with the lecturer she gave me a pretty undeniable glare.

With that I give you: THIS ONE TIME THIS DUDE TOTALLY FELL ASLEEP IN INTRO TO HINDUISM



Today during lecture--given by an Italian guy that I like to think of as Professor Mario Brothers--I noticed that my neighbor had fallen asleep on the shoulder of his other neighbor. She seemed slightly annoyed by it, but they were acquaintances so she wasn't too upset by it. I laughed, thankful for myself and amused at someone else's misfortune. I also liked that we were in the second row, the Splash Zone if you will, since you're so close to the professor that if he spits when he talks you will get wet. It's like the first few rows at Sea World or a Gallagher performance. Anyway, if you ask me (and you are asking me because this is my blog), to fall asleep within any professor's Splash Zone takes chutzpa to a new level. Instead of discretely dozing off in the back few rows of a huge lecture hall where the professor's weak eyes won't notice your closed ones, you choose to position yourself close enough to the professor that his lapel microphone can pick up your snoring.

Anyway, after a lengthy mental digression, my thoughts returned to the subject of the lecture. Well, actually my thoughts returned to their normal subject during that class--noting which words the professor has trouble pronouncing. But then something horrible happened. I sensed my neighbor shift in his seat. And then, horror of horrors, I noticed his head sleepily traveling from his other neighbor's shoulder towards me.

For any stranger reading this blog, you have to understand that I don't like being touched. It's not about germaphobia....I don't know if I have OCD or if I'm just weird, all I know is that I don't like being hugged, I don't even like handshakes, and I just generally do not like people who get too close to me. I usually make a genuine effort to forget about this problem when I'm around friends and family, but even with my own brother I would get very upset when he would fall asleep on my shoulder during car trips. So you can imagine how horrifying it was to see a stranger's head approaching and looking to do that very thing.

In fact, here's the theme from Jaws to provide a soundtrack for what I'll write next:


And so his head slowly advanced towards my shoulder. No no no, I prayed silently, please dear God....Buddha....Jesus....Krishna....whoever. Please for the love of all that is holy do not let him reach my shoulder. But my prayers fell on deaf ears. I had to come up with an escape and quickly, because I only had seconds left before his head made contact with my shoulder. Realizing that I was sitting in an aisle seat, I figured I could just lean out of my seat towards the aisle. Surely his head would stop its journey eventually, and I could just sort of huddle in my corner. And so I leaned out....and his head kept coming. So I leaned out more.....and his head kept coming. Eventually it got to the point where I was leaning so far out over my armrest that I resembled a damp towel on a clothesline....or like a fat, dead fish just kind of flopped out, with my fat bulging over the sides of the armrest. This was as far as I could go without flipping over my armrest. And trust me, I considered it. I wasn't sure if the armrest could hold my fat, but I just held on and prayed that the advancing head would stop.

But it didn't. The head finally landed on my shoulder. Actually at this point, because of my sort of weird crouched/reclined posture it landed on my hip/arm. But whatever, all that matters was that a stranger was now sleeping on me. There were a few minutes where I silently thought about what to do, if I had to wake him up or if I would just have to suffer through class, when suddenly and completely involuntarily my body, as if deciding to take matters into its own hands, just had a spasm. It was the sort of spasm that wasn't dramatic enough for the people around me to notice, but it was strong enough to wake up Sleeping Beauty, who suddenly bolted upright, snorted and said something like, "Huh? What?"

And then about two seconds later he had conked out once more. Thankfully he didn't use my shoulder as a pillow again, but I kept a wary eye on him for the rest of class just in case. It became apparent, however, that this guy was incapable of sleeping without a shoulder-pillow, because for the rest of class he would sort of doze off....his head would sort of drift backwards...and then BOOM! His whole body would seize--like literally the whole body would seize, and his arms and head would flail around--and he'd sit upright, completely startled and awake. And then within a few seconds the process would repeat itself. I spent a few minutes watching his cycle of falling asleep, then suddenly completely spazzing out, trying to stay awake, and falling asleep again, and I imagined he was probably thinking to himself, ZzzzZzzZzzzz *SNORT!* HUH??? Where am I? Oh shit, was I sleeping in class? Okay, I can't fall asleep again, I gotta stay awake....but....but maybe it'll help me concentrate if I just sorta tilt my head back and....zzZzzZzzzzZZZzzzz."

While this cycle took a few minutes for each revolution during the beginning of class, by the end of class it was happening every couple of seconds. Honestly, I even entertained the thought that he was having a seizure. But once I realized that he was indeed still just falling asleep and waking up repeatedly, I started laughing. In the middle of lecture. Which was about burning widows on pyres in Hinduism.

I looked around me and realized that no one in this 100 person lecture even noticed the guy who was having what looked like seizures every couple of seconds. If you ask me, not noticing stuff like that is a waste of coming to lecture.

/