Daily Batman: Hidden underneath

I think hidden underneath a lot of teachers are very sexy women.

(Andie MacDowell).

I know I have been a total slug about posting lately and the last time I did that was because I nearly croaked, but fear not. This time it’s nothing so dire, and is good news instead. I’ve been scrambling to get my shit together to make this whole substitute-teaching my Scamps thing in to a full-time gig, and I felt that I had to put all my fire under that. I was busy being well-dressed and using my gracious telephone voice while applying to a credential program, throwing my hat in the ring for an open position at the private school where I teach, and sending out queries for letters of recommendation — my least favorite thing to do on the planet. I don’t just burn my bridges: I dynamite them in my wake and launch the ashes in a coffee can in to space and I sow the land around where the bridge used to be with with salt and then I seek out the bridge-builder and I rough him up and cut out his tongue in front of his family. You cannot imagine how horrible I am at looking back, seriously.

And I’m even worse at admitting I need a favor. I’d rather drink bleach then ask for help. I’m working on all this, honestly.

But now it’s basically all in other people’s hands so I’m back.

It was recently pointed out to me during my absence that even though I like plenty of comics and link them to literature and artistic tropes all the time in conversation, I don’t focus much on anything except the Bat on this journal. That’s true. It’s lazy and misrepresents the entirety of my interests. I’ll work on remedying that more often. I’ll try and throw something up today as an example.

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: “Your Friend, Holly Golightly”

And I said, “What about Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”

I don’t know how the weather is faring in your town but in my neck of the woods, I’m hot. Once I’ve finished cooking up preliminary materials for an orientation I’m putting on for the Scamps this week, I’m sliding down to C-town to swim with Paolo, Miss D, Gorgeous George and Corinnette — and to wish Corinnette all the best as she goes away for college. Catch you on the flip!

Daily Batman: Come to lady

Again, awesome art by Bengal.

For doing pretty much nothing with it, it’s been a surprisingly busy day. I feel accomplished. Did a lot of swimming and started that Stieg Larsson book I mentioned last week. Just wound down tutoring my Scamp (somehow we spent way longer than I had planned talking about the Alamo, but I suppose that should have been expected because she is a nut for the old west and I ♥ Davy Crockett) and now I’m off to scare up dinner. Catch you on the flip.

Daily Batman: Why? … Why?

In Batman’s nightmares, he is not well-liked and he doesn’t understand why.

I had troubling, thickly plotted nightmares last night but too much was going on immediately after I woke that I didn’t have time to make a note of them. The last dreams like that I can remember happened while I was subbing for the Scamps, and I told them about it the next day:

I dreamt that my daughter was being held in this large industrial building and I was using the stairs to get to a certain floor before the elevator, and a dude started pursuing me and I turned around and first wrestled him, then kicked him down a short flight of stairs, then ran briefly down after him for, you know, “suresies” and threw him over the edge and heard him come down all wet and broken on a landing several flights below. I totally did not even lean over the rails to check on him after that because I was only focused on getting the kidlet and getting out.

Scamps in bio class action, but I chose a blurry picture for privacy.

The kids were shocked and exhilarated by this vivid story of unmerciful ass-kicking and I said it was all on their heads because they’d asked me anxiously the day before during Social Studies what would happen if the President’s daughters were ever to be kidnapped. I’d reassured them and theorized that not only would the Secret Service prevent such a godforsaken thing from ever happening, but that my guess was Michelle and Barack Obama, besides being loving parents, are pretty hardcore and good at taking things in their own hands, and that I definitely would not want to be in the shoes of an attempted kidnapper of their girls were he to be caught.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have told a classroom of ten-year-olds that I dreamt I straight up dropped a motherfucker, but, on the other hand, it could be part of why I had practically zero discipline problems in that class.

June is bustin’ out all over — time to jump along with it

Today has gone about as I expected, but with weirdly more zen-like contentment and even restrained happiness.

The principal as much as said at the interview that she would have to go with the more experienced teacher to fill the position at the school where I’ve been working as an aide and substitute, no matter how she felt personally about me, due to parent demand for fully credentialed teachers, as I had anticipated. I assured her I understood that with the parents, it is always a delicate balance and I appreciated that she was in an awkward position. We agreed it was a shame that I can’t in good conscience take out a loan and pursue my credential until I have a job to finance that academic endeavor, and the promise of one in my own field is worth holding out for, but I can’t secure a position like that without proof I am at least beginning an effort to be in a credential program, which puts me in this awful Catch-22.

Brigitte Bardot photographed by Phillipe Halsman, 1951.

But overall it was a really positive, loving, and upbeat interview, and it accomplished my chief goal, which was to demonstrate the sincerity of my committment to the little community she has created at her school. She was really nice and spoke glowingly of things she hoped we would be able to do in the near future. She said frankly that she wanted me on her staff and that once this position was filled according to tradition and political appeasement, there would not be pretty much any competition for whatever new openings may arise next year. It was a good talk.

via Square America.

So. Happy thoughts. Great things happening in my life with these tutoring jobs for the Scamps and kidlet finishing up kindergarten tomorrow, plus my Katohs graduates high school tonight, and all in all I’ve got a million things to be thankful about and a new season in which to celebrate them. And I have decided — no more hiding and tossing in my sleep. No more anxiety and self-doubt constantly wracking me. No more tearing at my fingernails and spitting them out while my mind hashes through all the ways things can go wrong and obsesses over my bank account.

Audrey Hepburn photographed by Philippe Halsman, 1955.

Time to start leaping a little. Let’s do it!

At last I shall return to the work I love.

via comicallyvintage on the tumblr

New job starting today: tutoring one of the Scamps on the reg for the Summer. According to her absolute battleaxe of a mother — who if you ask me is the sole author of all her daughter’s insecurities in academics and anywhere else as, if my conversations with this mother have been any indicator, the poor girl is never able to get a word in edgewise and the mother decides every detail of her life down to making her write it on a calendar, and I empathize with her 1000% — other Scamps’ parents’ calls will be coming in soon. Also, in mid-August, I agreed to put on a 2-day workshop for them to help them prepare for sixth grade vis a vis setting up notebooks, discussing notes and organizational skills, and hopefully developing some strong test-taking strategies.

Fast Times via moviecritic, Australia ed.

Though they will still be at the same K-8 school as they have always been, beginning in the sixth grade they will switch classes for different subjects. Not only will their homeroom guy, my old buddy from That Day, J–V–, be their first male advisor, but he will also teach them math. And the science teacher is a man, too.

I wish. Neither J–V– nor Mr. N. looks a thing like Dr. Jones. Maybe Mr. N., a little. But only a little.

So, for a class that is predominantly girls, most of whom have declared openly how unprepared they feel they are for middle school math after their fifth grade experience, there is the concern that they will follow statistical patterns and slip behind in those subjects through a combination of lack of confidence in their own skills, societal conditioning, and intimidation about talking to a male instructor.

The lovely and talented Mrs. Edna Krabappel.

The Scamps are mainly marvelous geniuses and neither they nor their folks need to worry at all about their academic prospects in my estimation, but if those anxious parochial school parents want to pay me to hang out with their kid and prepare them for pre-algebra or read Harriet the Spy with them all Summer, I am totally for it!

via legaljuice.

Tomorrow I have an interview for a position teaching in the third grade at this same school, it is actually the position my dear Sarah-fina recently abdicated in favor of staying home full-time with my favorite Baby Ginger, and though I don’t hold out much hope that I’ll get it because I know one of the other candidates is far more qualified than I am and has spent the last seven months as the temporary instructor filling in for S-f at that grade level, my application and interview are at least I hope a demonstration to the administrators that I am passionate about pursuing education for my life’s work and that I am committed specifically to the kids at this school. So wish me luck with all my edu-ma-cating and I will catch you on the flip!

Mean Girls Monday: “Sex ed” edition

It feels weird to put “Monday” up because I’m actually cobbling this together late Sunday night after finishing cleanup from a family barbecue, and will be gone tomorrow (today) to my aunt’s for a jazz festival and another barbecue.

Anyway, I took these screencaps a bit ago and wanted to use them to illustrate one of many Awkward Moments that fills up E’s wonderful life.

I was on my first day of a long-term sub job in the fifth grade at the private Catholic school where I’ve been working. I love those kiddos now and I call them the Scamps. More on that when I have more time cause it’s spun out in to a buttload of unexpected summer work. Anyway, I was glancing over the frankly shoddy lesson plans that’d been left for me and wondering why the teacher had noted on the agenda for Science in the afternoon, “Boys will go to room 8 with Mr. V—, girls will stay with you. Video is cued up.”

“Video? What—” I had not even finished thinking it when I realized, oh, man. It was That Day. I think you remember That Day, you know, the day when you split in to gender groups and learn about Each Other’s Bodies. First it is all menstruation and growing leg hair, and then you switch tapes and learn about the boys’ testes and why their voices are changing, and the kids are ten and this is mainly the first they’ve heard of all this, so absolute hell is on the verge of breaking loose with every nuance of the voice-over and tick in the animated shot of the vas deferens.

I only remembered that day from the girl’s side of it. A flickery screening of some kind of Reader’s Digest, “I am Mary’s Fallopian Tubes,” type-film, a stumbling conversation about how periods don’t hurt and it’s really no big deal, the assurance that boys are changing too, nobody breathes a word this first time through that all this body stuff is in preparation for SEX, like it is totally absent from the conversation, and at the end everyone gets a single pad. THAT DAY.

I was in charge of That Day!

It was a session every bit as nerve-wracking and filled with giggles and shaky, mumbly questions as you might imagine and at the end I felt like I’d been hit by a truck and I wasn’t really sure if any of the things I’d said in my answers to their questions had laid their nervous minds to rest, but at least I knew I tried, even on pretty much zero preparation.

Keep it under your hat but I actually love my job. (“I am Joe’s Soaring Job Satisfaction.”)