home | archives

LuLu's Land of the Fey

All the news that bores the pants off anyone who cares.

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Bitching and moaning

I have been told on more than one occasion lately that people don't check my blog regularly because I'm so infrequent in my posting.

Irregular.

Longwinded when I do post.

It has been implied (although never actually said) that I merely blog as a "hobby," as opposed to the "serious" blogs of others.

Whatever.

I've thought about this for quite some time now, and now that I'm over being bugged by it, I have finally come to some conclusions about why I blog the way I blog. I in no way imply that my way of blogging is better or worse than anyone else's way; I am simply rationalizing my behavior, which all good therapists will tell you is a "no-no" and so of course I'm more than eager to do so.

First, though, allow me to give you a peek into my high school diary, a document in which I wrote fairly regularly (and which I unearthed the other day--more to come on this topic later at a later date):

January 14, 1992
"I hate Dawn! What a bitch! I can't belive she said what she said--doesn't she know how deeply she has hurt my feelings? BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

January 16, 1992
"I talked to Dawn yesterday and we have decided to be friends again. She was rilly, rilly [sic] sorry about what she said and promised that she never meant to hurt my feelings. What a great friend! I can't believe that I thought she was trying to steal my boyfriend away from me--she'd never do that 'cuz we're B/F/4/E!"

.....And so on......

Which brings me to my point: when I write every day, my prose tends to get really, really, rilly fucking boring. I mean, I bore myself. And if I'm bored with me, I can only imagine how bored you are. And besides, at this rate, since I'm on the discipline committee this year, I can just imagine how it would end up:

Monday, Sep. 29, 2003
"We had to deal with Rhonda* for tardies again. God, this kid is such a bitch! I rilly, rilly hate her, and it's even worse that she's in my class, as well as having to discipline her. This sux!"

Tuesday, Sep. 30, 2003
"Rhonda approached me in the hall today and said she was sorry. I think she really means it this time. She's such a good kid, underneath it all."

You get the picture. Kind of along the lines of Samuel Pepys, this guy who was alive in the 1660s. He kept these very meticulous journals of his day-to-day life that are very useful to historians because they show what the upper-middle class was like during the Enlightenment. He was at the coronation of King Charles II, helped to try to stifle (unsuccessfully) the great fire of 1666, and many other things. However, he wrote down everything he did every day and, quite frankly, reading his journal is pretty dry. You have to really search for the interesting things because they are buried so far down in the day-to-day muck.

Thing is, I would rather be doing the things that make me happy than writing about them. I'm not so good at the daily documentation of my life; I specialize more in pointing out humorous observations and ironies. I was a journalism major when I first entered college, and I love to write. However, I changed majors; one of the reasons was that I got tired of having to crank out inane musings on a regular basis, regardless of whether I actually cared about what I was writing or not. If I'm going to write, I have to have a feel for my topic; I can't just be filling space in the ether.

So, in the interest of getting everyone up to speed on what's going on in the cobweb filled mind of Amy, I figured I'd do a short list of things that have happened to me, things I've thought about a great deal and things I'm concerned with. A nod to Samuel Pepys, if you will. Henceforth, I will be writing when I damn well please, or when the thought occurs to me. Check back daily, weekly, monthly or never. Whatever.

Let's get this party started.

1) I teach for a living (as has been previously mentioned). The first day of school this year was pretty hard for us because one of our Seniors was killed in a car accident going home from vollyball practice. I hate this kind of waste. The girl who died was one of the students who actually worked in her classes, was involved in nearly everything at school. As Ray Bradbury says, she left her thumbprint on that school and is still missed by her friends.

An interesting side note to this girl's story is that the graffiti in the bathroom is now 90% memorials from her friends and 10% trash talking, as opposed to last year when every stall was covered with "Tiffany is a slut!", "You are a cunt!", "I hate this town!" etc. Part of me says that they are still vandalizing the stalls after the janitors repainted them this summer, but the other part of me says to just shut up about it and let them have their sense of peace.

2) My art club is thinking of having a haunted house for Halloween. I'm not sure if I feel like doing this or not. In a community as small as the one in which I teach, I have to wonder how many people are going to drag their lazy asses up to the school to get scared. I really hate putting out the effort to do something and having the community as a whole be apathetic about it. We'll see.

3) Books I'm reading: Odd Girl Out, by Rachel Simmons. Really very interesting; about girl bullying and how girls are trained by society to not just duke it out when they get mad like boys, which leads to some pretty passive-agressive behavior. (And yes, I'm pretty aware that this post is pretty passive-agressive, and so I have noted and appreciated the irony.) A must read if you are around teenage girls and can't figure out what the hell their problems are.

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffry Chaucer. Classic. Sometimes I get a bug up my butt to read something that I either had to read in high school or that I taught when I was living in hell on earth and teaching English. This would be one of those cases. Besides, Chaucer was pretty kinky--had a pretty funny way of looking at some things.

Organizing From the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern. I'm obsessed with getting the house into order. This book is awesome at helping you figure out how to organize just about anything, be it your bathroom, your sewing room or your purse. She teaches you to organize based on how you actually think, not how you should think. I totally covet a label maker now, though. Sigh.

4) Still not pregnant, but not for want of trying. This month we offically opened up the Let's Get Pregnant Olympics. I have to say, after years and years of having sex and trying desperatly not to get pregnant, this is the weirdest fucking feeling I've ever had. Kind of reminds me of Highlights for Children: it's Fun With a Purpose! We won't know for a few more weeks whether we have been fruitful or not this month, but either way, it's good practice. :)

5) I'm pretty psyched because in November I'm going to a Texas Art Educators Association conference in Dallas where I'll get to meet other art teachers and go to a bunch of cool workshops. Best of all (and really the main reason I'm going) is that I'll get to see the Guerilla Girls, this group of women artists who dress in gorilla costumes and go around talking about how sexist and racist most museums and galleries are, and often times, the whole art community as well. I have wanted to see them forever, and I can't wait to meet them. I'm going to be such a dork, getting the autographs of a couple of women in gorilla masks--kind of like when I got Goofy to sign something for me at Disneyworld.

6) Apprently, my grandmother is going crazy. Got a panicked call from my mom yesterday, saying that she and dad were heading down to see my grandmother and try to figure out what to do. Called mom back today to see how it went and found out grandma is living with my parents. I'm sure that's got to be some kind of fun.

That's all I can think of right now, and more importantly, it's 1:35 in the a.m. Got to get to sleep. Heading to Houston tomorrow with Robert, Will and Liz to see Radiohead and then going on to Trashfest in New Braunsfels. It's going to be a fun, if a bit exhausting, weekend.

Yay!

*Names, of course, have been changed in the interest of keeping my job.

.: posted by amy 1:35 AM