Thursday randomness.

Point foremost in my mind: Gilmore Girls should never have been made. I realize that this is a point of contention between myself and nearly every female I know, but really, it's hideous. I blame the writers and the people who came up with the thing in general. I realize that in my previous post I claimed to be an idealist, but the relationship between the mother and daughter in this show is far too ideal. I have a great relationship with my mom, but the fictionalized pair make us look like... I don't know, I can't even think of a comparison negative enough.

Meanwhile, my birthday was Tuesday, and as a consequence of this I have acquired LAMBIE SLIPPERS!!!!!!! They are fluffy and adorable.

Today my seminar English class ate at Greenville's latest greatest downtown restaurant: Handi Indian Cuisine. I got entirely addicted to Indian food while I was in England last year, and Handi is the closest approximation to authentic British Indian food I have so far found in America. The food and the service are both appallingly good, and now I have to save up to eat there once a week. Sorry Furman University; no more parking ticket fines going to you!

Meanwhile, if anyone has any favorite very short stories appropriate for reading aloud to ninth-graders, let me know. I'm lesson planning and you'd be amazed how difficult it is to find intelligent literary short stories whose plot does not entirely depend on sex and/or alcohol. I suspect this is due to the fact that most good authors depend on sex and/or alcohol to write. That's probably one of the qualifications for canonization.

I'm going out with friends tonight to celebrate my birthday; we're going to Molina's, a pretty classy (by Laurens standards) Mexican restaurant in TR. Should be exciting.

Pessimism sucks!

No really. I'm so sick of everyone naysaying everything. And this statement is kind of a big deal coming from me, as I would have previously classified myself as an eternal pessimist.

Idealism has fallen prey to a vicious cynicism (some would call it realism) in modern America. No one believes in marriage. Teachers hate their students. And we're all so jaded that we won't even vote because we say you just can't trust politicians. Or maybe we're just lazy.

Believe it or not, it's easier to just not believe. After all, if you don't hope for anything, you won't be disappointed, right? The unspoken side of that philosophy is that you'll never be happy either. In education, we talk a lot about "self-fulfilling prophecy," which, when applied to the classroom, basically says that your students will do what you really expect them to do. Studies have shown that when a teacher believes a student will succeed, he does, but another student of the same ability level fails just because the teacher believes she will. It's an unfortunate situation.

It's even more unfortunate though when you live your whole life expecting to fail. How will you ever succeed? It is our perspective that changes everything.

So now I choose to believe. In my students. In love. In my candidate of choice. In my future. And most importantly, I believe in my friends and my God and myself.

Laundry and assorted nonsense

I have been forced to do laundry today, as I am on my very last pair of underwear, granny panties included. So currently I'm sitting around waiting for that magic moment when I may go transfer my laundry from the two washing machines to the two dryers. I believe I may have to extricate someone else's laundry from the dryers, seeing as how, 20 minutes ago when I put my own laundry in the wash, the dryers still had 87 minutes to go (here at Furman you can set the dryers to run for whatever amount of time you wish, in 15 minute increments). I assume said person is attempting to avoid cooking tonight by having extra crispy tshirts for dinner.

I myself will be dining at the creatively named Business Etiquette Dinner being put on by the formidable Office of Career Services. The OCS is formidable mostly because their incessant emails make me beat my head against the wall multiple times a day. These are very friendly emails attempting to make me go out, get a real job and/or grad school acceptance letter, and make my way in the world. But, SURPRISE! I already KNOW what I'm doing with my life. In fact, I have not only my career planned, but my Master's and Ph.D. programs as well! Therefore, Sandra Clark, Head Honcho of OCS Emails, you may now cease and desist with clogging my inbox with 18 emails a day. Perhaps you could consider compiling all those lovely events and other news into one weekly email, so that I would not get carpel tunnel from hitting the "Delete" key.

My laundry has approximately 2 minutes left in the washer. I am debating whether I should fold the Dryer Fiend's clothes for him/her, or whether it would even matter since I'm not sure that one's t-shirt must be folded to taste like Extra Crispy Tide. Yummy.

Oops, my bad

So I realize I promised more blogs back in, oh I don't know, September-ish, but the reality is that life is choking me with a braided rope made of lesson plans, pointless projects, and senior seminar English papers. (Well, the truth is that there is only one major seminar paper, but to make it fit in the series it had to be plural.)

I have no time and therefore no life. It is an unfortunate situation. And parts of it are unpleasant as well.

I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the public school system in all its forms, including the way future teachers have to jump through 18 flaming hula hoops to become certified--and we get to pay money for that sort of fun! For example, I will soon have to have an FBI background check and official fingerprinting, which does NOT fit into my schedule at all (I will have to skip my EES lab to go to it), and I will be paying a total of $85 for this, $10 of which goes directly to Furman, as though I haven't handed them enough money over the past 3.5 years. And in a few more months, I will be taking the Praxis battery of standardized tests, which will run me about $350 or so, and to pass these tests, I have have to have satisfactory knowledge of only EVERY MAJOR WORK IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (plus a few originally in other languages). Of course, that wouldn't be so bad if I had time to study for said exams, but I'll be doing my Winter Term Practicum (read: student teaching) around the same time, so I'm pretty much screwed all around. Right now I'm just counting down til Spring Break, after which point I may be able to breathe again.

In somewhat more pleasant news, I am hoping to buy a house next year. Of course, there is the logistic problem of my not getting a paycheck until September (thanks again SC Dept. of Education), which means I can't get a mortgage until September, but I remain optimistic. It is an older home that has real fixer-upper potential, and I'm surprisingly excited about working on it. I think this is partially because if I didn't actually have to work on it, I'm not sure I would, and then I would essentially be living in someone else's house, which I think might be a bit creepy.

One final note: only one more week til my 21st birthday, huzzah!

After a 2.5 month hiatus...

The Token Redhead returns post-summer, as she now has reason to procrastinate via blog again.

So the two kittens I mentioned in my June post turned into 4 kittens after we determined that the mother wasn't producing milk, which subsequently turned into lots of time spent with bottles and poop and lots of money spent on formula and vets. Good times! They are now 11 weeks old, weaned, litter trained, and named--Ariel, Sebastian, Scuttle, and Flounder! Flounder is nicknamed Flounder the Pounder due to the fact that I felt it unfortunate that she should be named after a fish, but it seemed preferable to Ursula, and of course I had to keep the theme going.

In other news, summer was mostly working and raising the children, and it recently concluded with a 4 week stint with 9th graders at Berea High, where i will be doing my "co-teaching," as Furman insists on calling it. It has been entertaining, but even with all the frustration the experience entailed (as I've bent many an ear about), I still know that teaching is what I'm meant to do, so that is a good feeling.

That's all my tired and stressed brain can come up with at the moment. Shoutouts to my multiple friends studying abroad in the British Isles--I'm shamrock green with envy.

Stray Cat Maternity Ward

Well, only about a month after 3 kittens showed up and started eating at our house, courtesy of their stray mother who doesn't seem to like us humans much yet continues to eat our expensive cat food as though she were entitled to it, another litter arrived via yet another stray who won't let us touch her but eats at our house. There were 4 of these, 3 born in the Igloo pet house under our deck, and the runt born on the other side of the deck and for unknown reasons left there until my father found him and returned him to his mother.

Long story short, I have become a mother. The newest litter's mother is herself only about 6 months old and seems completely bewildered as to how this happened and why those large male cats were chasing her around in the first place. She abandoned two of the kittens, leaving them in the Igloo and moving the other two maybe 20 feet away. My mother and I watched for a while, and when it became clear that she was determined to no longer take care of them, I kidnapped them and have now become their full-time mom. Believe it or not, I am bottle-feeding them kitten formula every 3 hours, even in the middle of the night, soothing their upset stomachs, and letting them poop and pee on me without getting mad. Who would've known motherhood can change you so much?

It's one boy and one girl, both now 4 days old, and I haven't named them yet, as I haven't come up with anything I really like. Right now Flower and Thumper are my best choices, but I figure I have until they're at least a week old to think of something. And even though I don't really enjoy waking myself up to heat a bottle, it's really not as bad as I would have anticipated.

Forget the plums...

This is just to say
I didn't read the book
I was supposed to.

Forgive me,
I had no time left,
And sleep seemed more important.

Sanity Status Update

2 presentations and 1.5 papers down, 4.5 papers to go!

I had a group presentation yesterday on the Chinese American Experience for my novels class (we're reading The Joy Luck Club). Unfortunately this was perhaps the most politically incorrect group our professor could have possibly put together, and many of our group meetings consisted of Matt expressing his frustration with the cashier at the Rice Bowl not understanding his need for 20 pairs of chopsticks and Carolyn doing a pseudo-Asian dance to the theme song of Amy Tan's cartoon TV show about her "Chinese Siamese Cat." I could feel us losing point by the minute.

I also had a presentation this morning on the differences between English and French syntax. A thrilling topic I assure you, but at least one that I knew enough about to not have to spend entire days in the library. According to Roommate Laura I spent the whole presentation trying to push my rather short hair behind my ears. This is my standard in-front-of-people-anxiety habit, as evidenced by the multitudes of VHS tapes of me in plays--the donkey at the stable tugging on her hair, Alice in Wonderland flipping her hair behind her ears, Auntie Em attempting to pull the errant strands from her bun behind her ears. I thought I had conquered this issue, but apparently not.

Meanwhile, I have in fact managed to stay somewhat ahead of the game in this end of term madness. I wasn't up 'til 2 am this morning finishing my presentation, and those 1.5 papers I've completed aren't even due until Monday! (Nevermind that there are another 2.5 due that day too.) And I have a fairly solid idea of what I'm going to write about for the 2 papers due Wednesday. In fact, I think I'm so ahead of the game that now would be a delightful time to take a nap to congratulate myself. I mean, that's what all my friends who are already out of school are probably doing right now.

Summer Reading List

This is the list of books I am forcing LaurenFrances to read this summer. You should too.

Much Ado About Nothing : Shakespeare
The Sun Also Rises : Hemingway
The Color Purple : Walker
The Awakening : Chopin
My Sister's Keeper : Picoult
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets : Crane
The Handmaid's Tale : Atwood
How the Irish Saved Civilization : Cahill

That should do you for now. List of books I plan to read this summer will be posted once I have figured out what they are.

Kristen the Evil Technological Genius

I have just downloaded a ringtone of Sara Evans "Born to Fly" for my cell phone. This is my first ever purchased ringtone. Shh, don't tell my parents, to whom the bill will go. And parents, if you read this, ignore that last sentence and I owe you $3.