The materially real elements of the past week got the same job done and should be therefore be stored in the same lost basement as Maggie Gyllenhall's razor blade collection - achingly painful, not entirely real (she was "acting" after all), but at least they keep the teenage girl in both of us in the realm of the feeling. I'll go backwards because it's simpler to remember things this was and it has the added bonus of destroying any semblance of suspense, something for which all writers strive.
Friday - Fun times. Drove the rental car into school to meet a student at 7:30 who has been MAD struggling with a History paper. When I first met her, I got the impression of a racecar in the red, the MFing Guns of the Navarone, a mushroom cloud-laying mofo, mofo. She seemed like she was about to simultaneously blow and implode, so I hid my razorblade collection accordingly. But Friday morning, ella fue calm and collected, a shining example of someone benefiting from something I would, were I a real estate selling midget twin, call "Maximize Your Humanoid Potential Via the Magic of Calm, Rational Evaluation and/or, er, Synergy." Or, a little something Marcellus Wallace may have summed up as "Chill Them N$%^&^%s Out 2006." Anyways, if this whole teaching gig fails (which, by most accounts of relatives / relatives-to-be, it already has), I can always become a ledge-talker-offer. Seriously, yeah, I'm actually pretty happy with the way things have worked out, she has gone from near incident-to-be-documented-in-an-agenda-serving-Michael-Moore-documentary to just another kid who's going to graduate from high school. On second thought, maybe the notoriety and fame would have been worth it... but so yeah, we put the finishing touches on her paper, she turned it in, and is in all hopeful likelihood high school degree and therefore college / rest of her life bound.
Then I helped with some fetal pig dissection. I cannot answer questions like "where is the inguinal ligament" with a simple "there it is;" I find myself compelled to get my education on. Hey, you don't spend 100K on a tutoring training program for nothing. This, natch, leads to a truckload of fun moments where I am talking to 16 year old girls about why docs ask boys to turn and cough. The over-under on the date of my termination for "Explicit scientific language" is November 12, 2006. Place your bets, ladies and gents.
Fairly normal rest of the day, class, education, SAT tutoring, confirmation of right-brained kids' inability to grasp the concept of natural logs. Good times. After school, threw the frisbee with Corrine, her hubby Jarod and Spencer, eventually joined by a slew of other students. Impromptu Ultimate game exploded, and despite the grapefruit of fluid that has taken residence in my right knee, I had a great time. As an added bonus, I taught the kids how to do hilarious spikes, and so a new generation of poor sportsmanship is well on its way. Screw it, it's funny. A torrential downpour (what else carries the adjective "torrential?" I mean, besides illegal downloading?) brought our fun to a screeching halt, so I drove home soaking wet to my empty house. FUn evening despite that - read, watched some of Indecision 2004, and basically put off apartment cleaning until Saturday.
Thursday morning started at 5 - I decimated the house in a failed attempt at finding a happy combo of a bicycle lock and its key. No such luck. I even tried using a bic pen on the lock I did find, but I didn't have the correct model. Of lock, not pen. I mean, really, you think I needed the bic 2006 and I only had a '98 lying around? So after hurriedly getting ready (dressing, walking pups, etc.), I decided to just bike to Ben's house and get a ride with him to the train station. But the bike was clunking with gear changes, so I walked instead, 2 miles up Rte. 122 to Ben-Ali Manor. Got a blister, hoo-ah. Ben took me to the train station; I rode to Natick; Walked to School. More Fetal Pigs. Paper help.Good class. Win took me to Avis Rent-a-Car, where I stood in line with some cocky mofo surgeons. They were awesome dudes and well aware of their status as awesome dudes; treated the counter clerk accordingly. Ugh. I had reserved a sub-sub-compact POS, and they didn't have one, so I got to drive a Pontiac G6 for Thursday-Saturday for the SSCPOS rate. Home, dogs, back on highway to Cambridge for an Ultimate game...
Roid successfully pulled a G'N'R in the early nineties tour act, meaning we went on stage 3 hours late if at all. Unfortunately, the game ended after an hour and a half, so we got our collective ass handed to us, 15-9 or so. The game was a joke on several levels - Magazine Beach right on the Charles (windy), played between two tee-ball games (20 yards wide, 50 yards long field), did I mention the majority of Roid (everyone other than of Ben, Cork, Kelvin, Lisa and me) did not show up. J-ette was getting beat by a newbie; that was the kind of hustle that was going down. It was horribly frustrating; I felt like I was right back in the classroom with people who could not be talked into working hard. On top of that, the idiocy of Youth (the other team was BU-laden) resulted in some terrible calls AND a guy pulling the classic pansy move of jumping into the lane to stop my cut. Won't get into it; I am vowing not to talk on the field any more. We'll see how long that lasts. As an added bonus, I spent 2 hours in the car getting to this game, and had an hour ride back. Sub-excellent.
Wednesday morning I drove Ben's new car to work, which gave me a little bit of that nice Captain Kirk feeling, what with the *ridiculous* GPS system on board. More (or less, since this thing is chronologically backwards?) fetal pig dissection - I shouldn't gloss over this, as I had a pretty great time helping kids slice and dice. More tutelage, lots of faculty lounge antics - really, on the social front, I had a great week, even engaging in some banter with various counter clerks and delivery men. I think this was the day where a certain ballet-dancing student gave me sassback in class so I laid into her (verbally, natch), ultimately putting the fear of a polygamy approving god into her. She stopped the sassback instantly, so as dumb as I feel chewing out someone half my weight, it got the job done. We're covering logs and exponents this week, and it's a hopeless endeavor. The whole round peg, round hole concept is not flying. Sigh. Faculty meeting, in which Win and I were essentially insulted and left unappreciated. I'm not mad, just disappointed.
Went to the library after work, and en route got the call - the jeep is dead, long live the jeep. The engine was bone dry (despite my having changed the oil 2 months ago) and the engine locked up; your classic hilarious sitch where the new engine trumps the blue book value of the car. Actually, just FTR, the Kelley Blue Book is $1015, and I think they probably tacked on that extra $16 to keep me from crying. Anyhoo, hence the car renting, walking and etc. Don't know what I'm going to do about this, but in the near future, I'll just drive the Beckmobile. I'm thinking something small and relatively fuel efficient; an Accord or Corolla would probably do the trick. But wait, doesn't Ben have a... crap, he just sold his Corolla. That's why I was driving his new car; I headed out to Waltham to pick him up after work as he had left the house with his Corolla and was coming home with a cool $6900 cashier's check. We went out to Pepperoni Express and S&S with the alley wolf, and lumbered home to a thrilling night of rental phone calls. Ugh-ness. This was also the night that a grey-haired sapsucker won a recording contract, the kind of thing that would have been banal in the 1950's but today draws 35 million viewers. Given the chance, I wouldn't even want to be the voice of my generation.
Tuesday? Drove Ben's Corolla in its pre-sold state; that's for sure. Went over the exam in class; read kids riot act about the test corrections assignment. More tutoring. Great guitar lesson; worked on learning notes on the fretboard and faster scale techniques. Hmmmm... okay, now we're getting back too far, as my memory's getting hazy. The next (previous days', I mean) section probably deserves its own entry, anyways. It's upcoming. Not to be confused with, "Up and Coming."
So yeah, a weird week. Dead cars. Multiple outings with up-the-street neighbors (though I think those came mainly Sunday-Monday), but I don't feel like recounting that portion just yet). Backtalking spoiled-brat students. Psychotic parents (an entire subgenre that I pre-edited out). Psychotic teachers. Pop-culture dregs. Episodes of House where scrotums explode. An A+ in the chaotic universe game. As an added bonus, if you google a certain pop music singing contest show and something that said show might make you inclined to do (smash my face against a wall, drink hemlock, tear my pulsating eyeballs from their swollen sockets, etc.), you don't get sympathy, you get things like "OMG, if Jill Smith doesn't win, I am so going to smash my face against a wall, drink hemlock, and tear my pulsating eyeballs from their swollen sockets." Come to think of it, they probably wouldn't say "drink hemlock." Regardless, consider this humble blog a solid vote AGAINST Jill Smith.
Because if you don't vote, how can you complain?
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