Happy Pay the Rent Day!

I’m so excited to fork up 17 fifty dollar bills today because my landlord keeps his money in his mattress [1].

I’ve decided that I’m not fond of managerial duties. My job entails quite a lot of it, moreso than normal teaching in a classroom. I mean, you could technically apply “management” as a necessary aptitude of classroom teaching, but it turns more into “garnering control” than anything. I’m learning that “management” here means a) being able to stick to a deadline b) being able to talk to people who are older than you and tell them they screwed up, and how to fix it in a non-condescending manner, c) paper pushing organizational skill. But what, you might ask, is the underlying theme of it all? It’s all sweet talk.  ALL of it.  It’s like foreplay with strangers you find out you’re not attracted to, all day, every day, to get anyone to do something for me. Sometimes it’s incredibly excruciating.

In other news… ZOMGH1N1!

That’s right…it’s the lightening fast car of your over-media hyped fears, combined with your apathy to taking the lords name in vain over a fickle thing. And I fucking made it up! It’s mine internet, MINE!

[1] I am pretty sure this is what he does with it…or they stuff it into their pajamas at night to keep them warm,  like they did in 1932 (he was 5).

Goals and life and whatnot

I was subscribed to the tomes of Steven Covey for a few days on course the other week, to make me an effective person. Apparently being able to provide shelter, food and clothing don’t actually make you this, so I was subject to gross hypocritical analogies, and singing kumbayah for about three long long days.

The end result is that while I felt like more of a hideous calibre of human being for all my lack of proactivity on the intangibles of my life (tongue in cheek), I walked away tripping out over how badly I and others actually communicate to one another, as well as with a small amount of tips to help manage my priorities better. What priorities could I possibly have? Good fucking question…the answer is ‘very few.’

While other people are wigging out over their roles of parent, professional, mentor, volunteer, and other such noble things…I am still finding I have enough time for all things I count as important, but little incentive to use it accordingly.

I made a little time-table for all my ‘big rocks’ — painting, writing, caretaker (animals…it’s the nearest thing I could equate to parenting, and lamely, it does take up a lot of my time–I’ve been spending upwards of two hours everyday outside with the cats– enough time eaten by them sniffing poop and chasing string there, to be considered a priority), sister (what the fuck do I even do for this? I don’t know), Aunt (ok, so the goal here should be that she actually remembers who I am when I visit), Daughter (whatevs man, buy you coffee?), teacher (got it), friend (start being more of one and less of an insular anti-social douche).

So far, other than the sibling/aunt stuff, this has been going relatively well, and while I’d originally planned to map every day out by the minute so I would be so busy I would forget I know no-one in my town and am completely alone outside of work, but somehow, things are still going along at a steady clip, and I’m still getting it all done. I’m finding that actually being cognizant of them, more than anything, is helping.

I’m thinking about maybe volunteering in the community. Part of me is “yay, shake up the monotony” but the other part of me is like, “in the town that’s considering a purely christian stream of public education, k-12…don’t get too fucking comfortable.”

Bento and I went to the Telus World of Science yesterday, and looked at the “Building Bricks” Lego sculpture display. I was pretty impressed by the physicality of it– not the size perse, but the absolutely perfect awareness of balance and proportion he created. Bento sort of burst the bubble a little bit by mentioning the guy probably had some killer 3-d imaging tool, but all the same, it was quite awesome. It made me wish that I hadn’t always played Lego’s so begrudgingly when I was little (with my brother). He always had great ideas of what to build, and wanted to have shoot-em-ups, but I always ended up making long lines of yellow ducks that he would run over with his cars.

The rest of the day was spent meeting lots of strange people and being generally confused and scared by the weirdness of “fending for myself” social interaction. I was a little overwhelmed, I think, having basically not spoken to anyone outside of work, for a whole week.  This, coupled with being with “The Mouth” for a year, has made me realize I should brush up on mingling skills.

One of my goals is to blog twice a week.

C’est froid, chalice!

Things have calmed down around the home front as I’ve become more settled into B-town. I have been hard core focused on work, and my social life has improved drastically (which may sound surprising, but it has).

I turned 26 on Saturday and drove up to my parent’s place for the weekend, where I spent most of my time eating cake and making sushi and conversation, or playing with my friend’s wiggly little spawn.

Weird thing about spawn…I’m so very aware of how ready I am to have kids, and 95% of me cannot wait to have kids. The other 5% is uber selfish however, which is enough to dissuade me from hunting down some baby juice and getting the job done. This 5% is comprised of career worries, personal relationship worries, physical worries (stretchmarks, weight gain), and of course, wild card issues.

Despite this, if I did get pregnant tomorrow by some freak inseminative event (there does seem to be “something in the water” here), I do still know I’d be ok. Weirdly enough, it would be better to get pregnant by accident than deliberately, in my mind, because then all that would be left to do is deal with it. Screw that conscious embracing of the miracle that is squeezing a 10 lb creature out of a coffee cup sized opening.

I’ve long realized I’m not the kind of person who needs to agonize over decisions. I’m the “make the mistakes first” poster girl, which sounds awful, but I’ve generally got a good sense of preparedness and flexibility for any of those mistakes that may occur.

The boys and their respective men/women are coming over on Friday I think. This should be good times. I’ve still got loads of birthday cake.

This entry totally is live journal. I’m, like, so impressed by my own skills of verbatim….  Something more intelligent will come later.

Not a racist!

I have one particularly obstinent student (surprising actually, how now I view “badly behaved” students on a huge sliding scale of severity that I barely ever see, much less have to consider) who drives me nuts. I give him a chance, he comes halfway. I give him another chance, he gets halfway, nearly almost done. He’s had several “chances”, based on my giving him the benefit of the doubt because I’ve only ever talked to the kid over the phone.

Today I get an oral presentation.

“It’s me, interviewed by the President of the United States,” he laughs.

Enter your boring job interview questions here, with wind noises (evidently he is standing in the wind on the side of a busy highway or something) for about two or three minutes.

“Thank you Mr. Barack for your time. Oh yeah, I hope  you, like,  get assassinated!”

This was followed by awful stoner shrieks of laughter. I swear to god, if being a racist is a new adolescent fad,  I will start …something contreversial…you better believe me, I tell you whut. Goddamnit. Nothing like ending the day on a highly annoying note. What’s worse, is his facilitator tries to apologise for him, begging me not to give him a zero for a high-mark assignment. Why not wipe his  18 year old ass  too?

Starting Over, Unrepentant Sinner!

In short, push did come to shove, did come to being too drunk to stand, did come to nearly having the police called for noise complaints, did come to a much lower self-esteem than initially started with accompanied by scarily absolute feelings regarding mortality, and things ended.

The following weeks have brought me to B-town, a mere 25 minute drive from W-town, but the differences are dramatic, let me tell you what, though granted,  some of these are psychologically conjured out of blissfully altered state of mind. I live in a creepy old duplex half that makes weird noises and is perpetually drafty, with the two cats and the two snakes.  All the taps drip, and a poltergeist runs around knocking shit over (like the felines) and creeping me out.  It also likes to drink out of the cat’s water dish for some reason. I am the proud new owner of a Co-op share (number 26331), I have bird feeders, and live in a town with 22 churches (more on that later). I DO stuff.

I honestly couldn’t be any happier than I am right now, unless Unicorns existed and we could domesticate them into seeing-eye animals. It’s only been two weeks, and I feel like my chest can expand completely. I can sleep entirely through the night without moving once, even with the variables in cat-sprawl that map the quilt at bed time.

My job still rocks. My co-workers have twisted senses of humour, and my expendable income, despite my heavy-ish rent price, has doubled, now that I’m not spending it on shit I don’t care about.

And Tempest? I got to keep all my books.