Hone my story telling skills by using this space to share anecdotes about my life.

So, yet again, I have been left to wonder what kind of bad Karma vibes I am sending out into the world. Coming on the heels of my hospital misadventure, I had yet another emergency this week. The one coming less than a week after the other was a bit much.

Monday, I went to a late afternoon movie downtown and met Christopher there. He’s the friend who took me to the hospital last week. As the movie let out at about 7:00, we went back to the garage. He got off the elevator on his floor and I continued up to mine. I got my keys out as the door opened. Out of nowhere, my right hand went dead, like it does sometimes and I dropped my keys down the elevator shaft. I panicked and ran down to where my friend was parked, but he was gone. I ran down the rest of the stairs to the police station, but it was closed for Martin Luther King day. I walked around looking for help for a while until I rememberred the gov’t building next to the garage. The security guards called the elevator company, but they refused to come out, even though it was explained I had no car keys, no apartment keys, I couldn’t get ahold of anyone to come get me, and I had neurological problems.

They still said no because it was not an emergency in their view and it was a holiday. They were rude as can be to me over the phone. For a moment, they agreed to come if I paid them $400, but then took that offer off the table. The security guards gave me until 9:30 to find a ride and suggested that if I didn’t find someone that I go stay at the homeless shelter for the night. I was terrified and have never felt so alone in my life.

Finally, Christopher called me back and told me he was coming to get me but that he had no place for me to sleep. Eventually, he got me something to eat and checked into a hotel at around 10:00. He even insisted on paying for it and it being a really nice one b/c he thought it would be more comfortable for me. As bad as the experience was, I am lucky to have him as my firend and did get a night in a nice hotel out of it. I don’t know what I would have done without him, by the time he got there, I was shaking so hard I couldn’t stop, completely in a large panic attack and my legs were close to collapsing. My right leg was in such bad shape that it is just now getting back to normal pain level today. Meanwhile three security guards sat at their desk watching basketball and trying to get me to leave.

Tuesday morning, he came and got me early so we could be there when they told me to. After a bit more hassle, they finally got them out for me. It took them less than 3 minutes from the time they stopped the elevator to the time I had them in my hands. I will be getting a $200 bill for that. I also was supposed to have to pay $50 to get my car out of the garage for parking overnight, but the lady at the gate felt sorry for me and let me go.

That’s the basics of it. I’m not sure I conveyed just how horrible it was, but that will do for now. After it was over, I thoguht about how much it upset me and why and two things came to mind. While I have long been aware of my health problems, this left me feeling like a gimp or cripple in a way that I have not before. Also, it bothers me that the elevator company was able to be as shitty as they were to me because there really isn’t anything I can do about it. They have the right to decide whether or not to send a technician and it’s not like I can get people to boycot their product or that it matters if I do. They have no reason to give a shit if I ride their elevators or not. Like with my medical stuff, they have me cornered. I may be wrong and just looking at it the wrong way, but I believe I am powerless here.

But I’m feeling the need to post again. . .silly girl that I am.

So I’ll post the poem I’ve written. . .and just share a moment of my life. . .

THEY BROKE THE MOLD

she can walk among the . . .merely. . .trailing tips and train through soot and sand. . .sullying sweetness just for the glory of texture in the cream. . .

and it won’t mean a thing ten days hence. . .

eventually, she’ll return. . .pondering her precious smudges. . .brushing them onto pages to press into the fossils of her future. . .

may not make sense. . .to anyone who’s reading, or still looks for Lola. . .but there it is.

Kisses to all of you

give me time, and i’ll tell this. meanwhile, i’m off to walk..ask nicely and i’ll tell it!

This is also a re-post that I am dedicating to my newest 43T playmate, Kitty. I hope she enjoys her bedtime story. :)

As I’ve mentioned before, in addition to being an English major in college, I was also Pre-Med specializing in chemistry. I have a whole host of great stories from chemistry lab that I could share, but for this entry, I’m going with one of my two “finest hours.” One of the perks of being an English major and a Chemsistry minor was I always had stuff to read during those long steps in lab when you had to cook stuff for an hour or two or just wait around for some other reason. Well, one week, I saw that one step in our lab involved a 3 hour wait, so along with all of my chemsitry books, I also brought my Collected Works of Shakespeare (Riverside edition of course) with me to chem lab. Our assigned play for that week was King Lear, which is my second favorite Shakespeare play and my favorite of the tragedies. (My favorite Shakespeare play is The Merchant of Venice.) As I started cooking my reagents, I excitedly began reading all about Cordelia, Edmund, and of course, the fool.

Unfortunately, I was so into reading the play that I accidentally skipped a step, and I did not realize what was happening in my beaker, as a result. The end result was I made Mustard Gas, which for those of you who don’t know, is not only poisonous but was used by the Germans during World War I. That’s right: I made a chemical weapon. I discovered my faux pas when my Professor asked me how much of a certain reagent I had used and I suddenly realized that the answer was none. He then yelled at me and told me what I had done. I was taken by surprise. I mean a minute before I was lost in the storm with Lear, now I was an aspiring weapons manufacturer, and all I could say in response was “I didn’t mean to.”

We had to evacuate the entire building and call in the hazardous materials squad all because of me and my stupidity. I guess I should add that this was the second time that semester that they had to be called in and the building evacuated because of something I had done. One of the rescue workers even recognized me. Also, due to my enraptured reading state, I had also breathed in a fairly considerable amount. Not enough to be life threatening, but I did burn all of my taste buds off. It’s Ok. I recovered just fine in about three weeks or so. All I could think about after I realized that everyone was OK and I wasn’t going to get kicked out of Advanced Organic Chemistry was “Damn, I left my book in there. I hope I get to finish reading the play tonight.”

This is a re-post, but I am dedicating it special to Tink because I think that the editor in her will appreciate a celebration of anal retentiveness of this magantude. Plus, it’s really funny and I want to make her laugh.

Let’s see if Unc can resist making jokes about my use of the word anality.

Because I went to a small college, whether or not you went Greek had a tremendous impact on your social life. Neither my roommate, nor myself decided to pledge a fraternity. Fraternities where I went to school required heavy drinking as part of the pledge process, and neither one of us drank at all. I can’t speak for him, but I decided if they didn’t want me, then I had no use for them. As a result, we both made a ton of jokes at the expense of the frats. Then, we had an even better idea.

We decided to start our own fraternity! What’s more, we decided to limit membership to the two of us. We even took to calling our dorm room “The Frat House,” despite the fact that it was occupied by a Biology major and an English major who studied way too much. We began by organizing our own version of Hell week, which included things like studying for our Chemistry test for 6 hours, a YooHoo chug, and going to class wearing sweaters that picked up everything but women. Things were going well, but we were missing something.

We needed a name. We tried organzing Greek letters to spell something. We wanted NERD, but couldn’t figure out what to use for the N, despite both of us looking it up. We thought about becoming Delta Omicron Rho Kappa, but then a light went on. You’ll groan about that idiom in about a paragraph or two.

One morning, my roommate was getting dressed to go to his 8:00 class. I didn’t have class until 10:20, so he didn’t want to wake me up. However, he needed light, so he cracked the door and used the light from the hall. However, the guy across the hall kept getting up and shutting out the light. My roommate would then turn it back on. They kept battling back and forth between on and off until finally my roommate left him a note that said “Just leave the damn thing on.”

Later that day, he and I came back from eating lunch and the Ozzy Osbourne quote I had left on our whiteboard that morning had been erased and replaced with the following: “You guys are a pair of tight assed light dorks!” We had been named. A couple of hours later, a sign hung proudly on our door and the brothers of Tau Alpha Lambda Delta had been born!

Our next step was to establish a motto for ourselves. Our school’s motto was “Having light, we pass it on to others.” So, we decided to riff off of that and go with “Having light, we leave it on for others.” We then made our sign even better so that in addition to our letters, we had our motto and a makeshift crest with a lightbulb in the middle of it hanging proudly on our door.

We were serious about it as a frat, too. We held meetings, did organized nerdy things, and even petiotioned the student sentate for money so we could hold a pizza party for all new members.(request declined) Over the next two and a half years, our fraternity featured no toga parties, no drinking binges, and sadly no panty raids, but we did have a lot of studying, a lot of Star Wars nights, a lot of bad jokes (including a running gag about lime sauce), and a lot of hours spent playing trivia. Most of all, we had a lot of fun. Tau Alpha Lamda Delta shut down after we graduated, but for two and a half years, it stood for Anality, Dorkiness, and a well lit hallway.

As promised, this story is for Tink. It’s not so much about me as one of my students from when I taught high school, so I’m going to write her another one this week that is about me.

I have tons of great plagiarism stories, but the best one of all of them happened when I taught high school. I can’t imagine what it would take to top this.

When I taught high school, I loved teaching the 12th graders, and I really liked my one class of 11th graders. Teaching 10th graders, however, was awful. My dear friend Caiti being excepted from this rule, 10th graders are proof that Satan’s spawn walks among us. I had two sections of 10th graders when I taught. My last period class that became notorious and will be the subject of several future stories and my 8th period class that had some good students in it and one very large pain in the ass, also known as the star of this little tale. This kid was obnoxious as could be, rarely tried, and had parents, including a father who was a professor, who could not conceieve of their precious little angel doing anything wrong. Perhaps if they spent a day as his English teacher, they would have felt differently, but whatever.

One of the things I was supposed to spend a month teaching the 10th graders was how to write reviews. I don’t know why, but I was. I thought it was a stupid thing to teach, but at least it came with some pre-planned classes built in. Anyway, when we got to movie reviews, I showed the class Return of the Jedi and then assigned them to write a two page movie review. This assignment was supposed to be practice for the book review that was due 10 days after that.

I got the movie reviews and Mama and Papa’s little bundle of joy had plagiarized his. He had downloaded it from the Internet. He had changed a couple of things, such as changing unsatisfactory to crappy, but he had still plagiarized one of the easiest assignments I have ever given. I turned him in to the Dean who told me that I had to give him an 80 on it, but that if it happened again, the school would get tough. I told the Dean that I didn’t think that something that used the word crappy deserved a B, even if it was original, but the Assistnant Principal intervened, and since I was in her office for punishment more than any student, I elected not to fight that battle and save my pissiness for other issues. Side note: I may be the only teacher in history to actually be called to the office over the loudspeaker during morning announcements to be punished. That happened three times. I’m kind of proud of that. End Side note.

Anyway, the kid turned his book review in, a review of Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones. Right away, I knew the review was plagiarized because it was titled “The Wishbones by Gary Klimt.” That’s right, folks! He got the author of the book wrong and wrote down the author of the review he plagiarized instead. So, I looked for where he got it from and found the source text. This time he had plagiarized the New York Times. I turned him into the Dean, expecting that a serious punishment awaited him. The Dean even requested that I be present at the meeting this time.

The kid came in and we presented him with the evidence. The kid took one look at the evidence and without batting an eye proved he had balls that even make Unc’s look small. He looked the Dean and I square in the eyes and said, “Wait a minute! This guy cheated off of me!” I was speechless.

The Dean asked him to wait and outside and asked me what we were going to do about this new possibility. I asked what he was talking about and he looked at me and said. “Well, we have to explore the possibility that this other guy cheated off of B. In fact, I say we give him the benefit of the doubt.” Now, I was really speechless.

I somehow managed to explain that my student was getting a C in his 10th grade English course and that this other guy wrote for the Times. I pointed out that he could probably bang out his column without B’s assistance. The Dean agreed with me and decided that B had to be punished and punished severely with a 70. A 70!! Two plagiarzed essays in 10 days and he was getting a 70. I protested and was told that his parents simply donated too much money to the school.

This time, I did fight back and gave him a 0. When his parents called to protest me giving him a 0, even threatening me with my job, I didn’t yield. I simply told them that if I had my way, he would have failed the course. It took mutliple phone calls and a meeting with Administration, but I won. Then, two weeks later I signed my acceptance letter to go teach at UK, after I got in trouble for what I decided was going to be the last time. Not for one second have I missed teaching at that school.

This is a re-post from a comment I left a couple of nights ago for Caiti. Hope all of you like it.

When I started dating my high school girlfriend, I didn’t meet her Dad until several months into the relationship. He was always at work when I went to get her. Her parents were very protective of her as far as things like sex went. Her Mom, for instance, didn’t even approve of us holding hands, and she told me that both of her parents were always looking her over carefully when she came home from our dates, searching for evidence we had been fooling around. However, when she came home from one of our dates with one earring on her ear and the other one still in the cushions of my couch, we thought that they were easing up. Just for the record, we never had sex, but we sure did make out A LOT!

Our tale begins on a cold January night, as we came out from watching some romantic movie that she had wanted to see. Her windshield had a lot of frost on it, and we had no scraper, so we turned on the defroster and waited. While we were waiting, we decided to partake in our, ahem, favorite activity. I don’t think any of you need a play by play, but at the end of the date, I had a giant purple hickey on my chest and she had a small (I mean small) one on her neck, so small in fact that we didn’t notice it. We may not have noticed it, but her father did. He summoned me, and the two of us were about to meet for the first time.

He started off by telling me that he didn’t appreciate his daughter coming home with a hickey and some more stuff that sounded like “blah blah blah” crossed with the teacher from the Charlie Brown cartoons to me. I guess he saw that I wasn’t taking him seriously because all of a sudden he shouted, “Hey! I’m talking to you!!” He then pointed at my girl’s neck and shouted, “Look what you did to her you son of a bitch!” That did it. I lost it. He was suggesting I had her hurt her, when I would never hurt her. I loved her, cherished her, and protected her. Plus, he was completely blowing things out of proportion. A small dab of make up would have covered it up completely. I had to say something and say something I did. I had balls, but my brains temporarily left me.

“Hey!” I shouted, “Look what I did to her? Look what she did to me!” at which point I took off my jersey I was wearing and showed him my king sized bright purple hickey that had come courtesy of his baby girl’s lips. He did not respond well to me showing him that his daughter was gifted with her mouth. A bunch of general chaos ensued, I was thrown out of the house, and my girl and I were broken up within a month. I deserved it. Not only had I disrespected him in his own house, but more importantly, I had sold her out completely and disrespected her. I had been a very bad boy…but looking back on it now, it was funny.

Often times, we must challenge ourselves to see who we really are. After not being in the ocean for a few years, I decided to do so in the Gulf of Mexico during my Spring Break Habitat trip.

Jeremy and I were capitalizing the shore of a beach after building houses that day. We tried skim boarding with a boogie board and walked on our hands close to the water so that our falls would be cushioned. This was not enough. We needed a new obstacle to peak our interests.

My neck turned from a pole on the outskirts of the swimming region to Jeremy and back to the pole again. He knew what was on my mind. With his eyes approval, I verbalized my thoughts and he accepted. We were going to the limits of the imaginary boundary set forth by men for their safety.

He starts out strong and proves himself a much better swimmer than I imagined. Neither one of us were regular swimmers, so this feat was starting to take a toll on our breathing. As we approach the pole we begin to slow our pace because we are tired. He announces that we should head back. To conserve energy, I float on my back and pedal towards shore. Jeremy decides to swim in a little bit ahead of me.

Staring up into the expansive, blue-raspberry jello with splotchy whip topping sky, my efforts seemed to be in vain. This brought my focus back on my body. I ask myself, “Am I thrusting forward?” The answer was yes, but another force was detected pulling me in the opposite direction. Suddenly, the concept of current flooded my brain. Soon after, a slight panic ensued. I was not comfortable with the ocean tugging at me.

“Maybe the pole will point out my progress,” I think. Looking at the pole, I realize that it is entirely to close for the length of time I have been travelling back to shore. My patience fades and I pedal with all the will that I have. Then I start becoming satisfied with the small distance gains that I see between the pole and me. These gains gave me the hope to finish my journey back to the stable land.

“You can touch now,” Jeremy’s voice cries from the beach.

“Not quite, yet,” I gargled in return as my feet searched for sand. Five more feet of swimming and relief set in as seashells swirled around my toes.

On the shore, I collapsed and kissed the water packed sand. My strive for a demanding trial was finally satisfied.

When I picked myself up and dusted myself off after the divorce a bunch of years ago, repairing the tears in my life was at the top of my wish list.

Apartment living with two little kids was not fun. My neighbors complained when I brought my kids to the pool. My neighbors drank a lot at the pool and didn’t think about whether they were making an unwholesome atmosphere for little girls, as they acted in the way drunk people do, swearing a lot loudly and groping each other rudely. Not that I am a priss, but it was not a good scene.

So I moved down the street into a condo, which I bought when real estate was soaring $5000 a week in Southern California.

What goes up must come down, as they say, so after I had borrowed enough money on the place to owe more for it than I had originally paid, the Northridge Quake happened. My little condo had rips in the walls. And the insurance didn’t quite pay for it.

My little sister came over and spent a week with me fixing it up. We patched and painted, and put it all back together again. But the values of the condos there went down and down.

I thought about walking away from it, but after I got busy with my calculator and the tax code, I figured I could take a $750 a month loss and still come out OK. So I moved out and rented the place out.

Years went by, and I got a telephone call from a nice man who told me he wanted to sell my condo. He told me I could make some money, and I did some research and studied the tax code and decided I would have to find another house to buy with the money I’d make and I’d have to rent out the house, or I would have to turn over the money I made on the sale to the IRS.

So my sweetie and I traveled up and down the coast, looking for a nice little place to buy, and wouldn’t you know, there was nothing I could afford with the money I expected to get.

On a lark, I went online, and checked out Hawaii. Maui? I could get a little shack on the sand. Tempting! Oahu? Any number of Waikiki condos. Kauai? A nice condo near a beach, all done up in 1959 surfer retro style. The Big Island? Pages and pages of houses and condos. Views. We went over, and we picked one.

And that’s why we have a house in Hawaii.

The moral of the story – always use those lemons to make something you enjoy. It doesn’t have to be lemonade. My mom used to make lemon meringue pie.

Third grade offered the opportunity to take a cassette-based language course. (The school made the quantum leap from reel tapes – Oh, yes, this was the 70s.) My parents insisted on Spanish because it would be more useful in southern Arizona. I wanted to take something more exotic like Latin or French. At eight years old, I was torn between rebelling against my parents’ wishes – hoping they’d capitulate – or remaining an overachiever.

The first year of rote memorization and recitation was painful, but my report cards notes evolved from “Jim is doing acceptable, but [has a negative attitude problem]” to ending with “Jim is doing well in the [name of curriculum], but hates the cassettes.” Recommendation: continue with the program.

Summer came, and I was glad to be out of that part of school. While camping, my folks ran into the Gonzalez’s, a family we met in a previous year’s camping. Hector and I shared the same birthday, so we played most of the day. My dad mentioned to his dad that I’d been taking Spanish. Perhaps to encourage me further, it was suggested I try speaking to Hector’s dad. Perhaps it was performance anxiety, but the only thing I could recall was the phrase drilled into me in the last lesson we had before break: “El burro sabe mas que tu.”

After some silence, and my chagrin at realizing I had unintentionally insulted Hector’s dad, his dad complimented me on my accent.

I have no idea why anyone would have thought that would be a good thing to included in a curriculum.