It was hot this week. Miserably hot. The thermometer in my car read 103, but I believe that it melted in the intense frigging heat of being left in an uncovered parking lot for many hours. It definitely feels hotter than 103.

Even the camels I pass on the way home from work have given up. They were just sitting in their shaded field, heads on the ground, and humps on fire. The steam was incredible. But they didn't care. They could always go inside if they wanted to.

Their enui disgusts me. These camels live in a nice air conditioned estate built just for them, with large bay windows along the east wall so they can watch the sun rise over the lake from their barcaloungers; and murals that cover the south wall depicting early 20th Century labor struggles. They don't do much all day but eat grass and bore the egrets that come to bathe in their pond.

Thanks, Tripp and Rachael for coming to visit me and the family. And for drinking Tito's vodka with me in the kiddie pool while we squirted water at each other's breasts with the baby's bathtub toys. And for making me listen to Dizzee Rascal. And also for going with us to T&A sports bar and the T&A breakfast buffet, even if it did suck. And getting drunk at the baseball game. Oh, and the Indian food at the Krishna temple… even though it gave me the craps.

I heard the dumbest thing on the radio today. A woman was worrying about what to buy her fella for Valentine’s Day. Now, let’s go beyond the obvious disappointment that the same culture that turned the Baby Jesus’ birth into an annual economic event has also hyper-commoditized the very emotion of love (“Only counts if you give her diamonds! On sale now!”). No, no. It’s simpler than that.

Now, I know men are often satirized as being simple minded or thinking only with certain portions of anatomy. But in truth, is this worse than associating the value of love with jewelry? I think not. The reality of the situation is this: a woman need not ever buy her man a gift. Ever. What we want doesn’t cost a dime.

It's a rock block of Bach
That he learned in the school
Called the school of hard knocks!"

16-lute-suite-in-e-minor-bwv-996_-sarabande.mp3

(Played by the late/great Andrés Segovia)

what if for the first 25 years of your life you were blind. lets say you were born blind, grew up that way, were accustomed to not being able to see anything but complete darkness and maybe some blurry shades of light here and there. lets also say that you got married. and your relationship with your significant other was built on personality alone. what sensual, erotic things would you experience with your lover? your knowledge of that person would be on touch, taste, smell, hearing alone. you would never had ever seen them. you would have felt their face, but you would never know color their eyes or hair was.
now, lets say that one day you go into surgery and have new eyes put in. now you can see for the first time. you are for the first time in your life being given a new sense with which to judge how you feel about different aspects of your life. do you think that your perspective on that person might change after seeing them for the first time? or would that be completely shallow and superficial. most people would probably say yes, of course, that would be shallow and superficial. but what if, you see the person for the first time ever that you've spent the last 20 years with, and they are so god awful ugly that you cannot stand to look at them one minute longer? what would you do?

An important word of caution to any fathers-to-be out there:

Newborns may not immediately recognize the difference between mother and father. That is … the functional difference.

Yeah. I think you see where I'm going here.

I'm kicked back on the couch, my new daughter sleeping soundly on my chest. She stirs slightly, then raises her now-alert eyes to mine. We share one of those wonderful moments of connection between parent and child as she raises her little head ever so slightly of my chest…then…

…she quickly drops—-no, dives—-her head back to my chest. It is at this moment I experience an odd sensation which my male brain had trouble fathoming. Then: Did she just … latch on?!? It would be at about that very moment my tiny daughter began to suckle with abandon.

"Suckle" of course is the wrong word. Think "shark attack."

Of course, you can't just break that sort of vacuum seal. Something might implode. Like my chest cavity. She proceeded to get angry at my lack of lactation. And as my family does not raise quitters, she starts to suck … more … vigorously.

Thankfully, the nice lady with the real boob juice rescued me before she drew blood or sucked out an internal organ.

Lesson for the day: They might appear cute and helpless. Be warned. Fear babies.

talk about a case of the mondays. i feel like i've completely hit the wall. i wish that having a great weekend didn't make the start of the work week so much shittier. my saving grace in trying to haul myself out of bed this morning was the fact that it's a short week, otherwise i still feel like i'd be under the covers trying to convince myself to get up.

i feel like i have these issues i am struggling to not let bug me, and i don't want to be around anyone else 'cause my disposition is so unpleasant. i don't want to teach today and i don't want to make small talk with my colleagues. i just don't want to be bothered!

one of the first things to cap my mood today was repetition of the persistent rumor that my school will be closed in january. the newest incarnation of this topic shifts from affecting everyone to, staff-wise, affecting only some. a recent decision (by whom? who knows.) was made that at the end of the first semester all the kids who don't stand a chance of graduating in june are getting the boot out of school so that all that's left when the school ends in june is a happy little line of graduates. if this decision sticks, we will be getting rid of a fuckload of kids, and excessing of staff is a definite possibility. and i, dear friends, am at the bottom-most bottom of the totem pole here, so i'm pretty sure that would mean a big buh-bye for me. i really can't handle the notion of being displaced when i am finally getting used to my new school.

not that my new school doesn't drive my nucking futs on an almost continual basis. don't get me wrong. i love the kids – without them i wouldn't be able to hack it here; my frustration and incredulity about how such a den of inefficiency could possibly survive would have me out the door. frustrations from today alone are a laundry list. the fact that my school has no dictionaries. that we have one classroom set of copies of huck finn, which disappear at the rate of a couple a day. i can get excerpts of the novel copied for the kids to bring home, but that means interaction with the copy man downstairs, who is a greasy, incompetent nerd on a power trip. my classroom has not one but two heat vents that are blasting dry, hot air. to keep my students (and myself) from passing out, i can crack the windows, which creates a charming breeding ground for sickness as drafts of freezing air creep through the sweatbox. i was asked this morning to run this afternoon's professional development session by my direct supervisor. never mind the fact that PDs are her job to run and that i conducted last week's session at her last-minute request and no other teacher has been asked to do a PD once. normally i wouldn't let myself get streamrolled like this but i feel very much as though i can't say no due to afore-mentioned totem pole status. and i think my boss knows this and is exploiting it.

friday i was told, first thing in the morning, that a TV news crew would be coming into my class 5th period to shoot footage. what the —-. their piece was on our valedictorian, though how they can ascertain this honor ? the way through the school year i do not know. the kid sin my class were given consent forms that had to be signed my parents and notarized, and, surprise, surprise, none of them returned them the next day. well, our highly-competent guidance department shit-fitted and came up with the following solution. students of legal age could sign their own release and content forms, and so my classroom was filled with two dozen 18 year olds who weren't even my students. i was then instructed to pretend they were my normal 5th period class and carry on with class as usual. the camera crew had not shown up when the period began, but i was instructed to start the lesson anyway. in the end i spent 43 minutes teaching a group of primarily strange-to-me high school seniors about chapter 10 of a book they had never read. the tv people turned up just before the end of the period, shot three minutes of footage, and left.

i can not look at the cover of today's newspapers because i simply can not stomach looking at the picture of president bush's stupid doy face
when he couldn't open the doors to leave his press conference yesterday. i am reminded of the far side cartoon (with the little gifted kid pushing the door marked pull)…although, obviously, not gifted…

i am PMSy and cranky and feel like i just want to go home and cry. not like a sad cry, but a frustration cry, directed at everything and nothing at all.

i'm having a posting binge. i don't know why it is that i won't post for days but then all of a sudden all i wanna do is write.

i am down to ? a paxil a day. i can't remember if i wrote about it already that with my doc's guidance i am weaning myself off my antidepressant. it's weird because i felt like the switch from ? a pill to ? pill was noticeable to me, whereas the whole pill to half pill switch was not. i think it's been about 2 ? weeks now on the lower dosage and every time i feel a little down i start wondering if it's due to this. but that doesn't really make sense. i have to self-remind that feeling a little down is not depression. that depression was crying myself to sleep every night and freaking out about life-after-death nothingness to the point where i felt like i couldn't breathe. how strange that is what my literally everyday life used to be like. and that i thought it was normal!

gabeFest was a success. it's a relief to finally be able to post about it without worrying that i'd ruin the surprise. though now ultimately i am not sure exactly what the surprise was. it was nice to see all the DC kids and really nice to have them up here in nyc, which was more comfortable to me somehow. when i go to parties in VA i feel so odd-man-out sometimes. this might be the first time nyc has seemed like home turf to me.

but the party was good and gabriel was happy and i didn't drink toooo much of tyghe's crazy potent rum, but enough. i wore my black boob shirt (thanks forever, jules!) and early on the evening acquired a roll of money that i shoved between the girls. it was funny to me the rest of the evening to see people i didn't know do a little double take when they caught an eyefull of my bank roll. and to see people i do know get 'distracted.' ha.

i wish i was this good at scrabble.

the new kanye west video (the song with the lanky maroon 5 fellow) is all animated in what looks like simple pencil drawings and is very cool.

sometimes i really enjoy people who are unabashedly shallow. or vain.