TAREIBF

I don't feel like expending the energy to put together a nice, cohesive blog post, so once again: Thoughts About Recent Events In Bullet Form (TAREIBF)!

• müs is looking at plane tickets to come out here! That would seriously make my year. Someone to show around, someone to agree with me on how cute/frickin' annoying the kids are, someone to derisively tell me how barren my apartment is...brilliant. You better make it out here, müs; my expectations are now set far too high. If you don't come, I will break your kneecaps.
• Teacher work days = fantastic. I got all my report cards done today, without having to kill myself over the weekend. Now it's time to brace myself for conferences on Wednesday and Thursday...12-hour days! Woo!
• St. Patrick's Day for me turned out to be a series of poor choices. Not terribly awful, just rather disappointing. It involved: (a) hanging out with my TA and some of her friends from a local university... (b)...at a frat house. The Sigma Chi house. (Disclaimer: I had not agreed to this in advance.) It was ridiculous; frat boys are amazingly stupid and I am far too old to be doing stuff like this. Anyway, on with the list: (c) going to two very, very crowded bars with (d) drunk people wearing all kinds of tacky green 'Irish' stuff. And (e) cheap, gross beer because Guinness was $7 a pint, and (f) some of said beer getting spilled on my coat. And last, (g) an hour walk home in 15-degree weather because there were no cabs to be had. So yeah, it rather sucked. I stayed in the rest of the weekend.
• You know that feeling when you're kind of getting sick but you do everything possible to stop it? I'm kind of at that phase. (perhaps due to the hour walk in 15-degree weather...) For the last three days, I've been downing tea like a Brit. However, thanks to this teacher work day and not having to stay up ungodly late doing report cards, I might be able to shake it off. Let's hope!
• I recently bought the newest GBS CD as well as this CD from Nickel Creek. Both excellent, if you like my taste in music, but I don't think any of you does. Except maybe müs, for whom I'll be making a copy of the GBS CD anyway. I've been listening to the GBS CD pretty much non-stop since I got it on Saturday, except for in school today, where I had to turn it off because I was singing along and not getting any work done. Just to share: Track #4 from that one is just about the funniest song I have ever heard. I had to listen to it twice just to make sure I heard it right the first time...a bit raunchy but so amusing. (Why yes, I do have the maturity level of a teenage boy.)
• I will be cat- and house-sitting from tomorrow until next Tuesday, so no updates from me. And then I'll be cat-/house-sitting again over spring break. (however, they have wireless internet, so I'll probably update) It's my new little cottage industry.

Happy vernal equinox! Wouldn't 'vernal equinox' be a great name for a band?

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Slainte!

The two most beautiful words in the English language:

snow day!

Waking up to a phone call at 6am: Confusing

Calling other people at 6.15am: A bit embarrassing

Going back to sleep and not getting up until 10am: Priceless

Excellent timing on the snow day, too; I was definitely not looking forward to going in to work this week. Now I can get stuff done, like registering for the Praxis (woo! $200 down the drain!) and reading something for fun!

Self-esteem booster of the week (a.k.a., selfish bragging): I actually got a number of compliments this weekend. Granted, two were from 5-year olds ('I've never seen eyes like yours!' - I'm assuming that's a compliment) and most were from intoxicated guys at a dance club, but still. I'll take them where I can get them.

50 Things About Me

...because I couldn't come up with 100. Maybe I'll post another 50 at some point; until then, welcome to my dark and twisted psyche.

50 Things About Me

1. I am ridiculous.
2. I have been known to howl with my dog.
3. Every night before I go to bed, I make my lunch for the next day.
4. Small children think I am a riot.
5. I once took the Myers-Briggs personality test at the career center at college. The woman who went over the results with me said she had never seen anyone more solidly introverted.
6. I get really crabby when I’m hungry.
7. #6 can happen very suddenly. I’ll be fine, and then literally ten minutes later, I’ll be ready to snap at someone for no reason. (sorry, Jamie!)
8. I am very fond of Canada.
9. I don’t dry any of my pants in the dryer, for fear they will shrink and be too short. This probably stems from a childhood of almost never having pants (or sleeves, for that matter) that were quite long enough.
10. I generally only buy pants from this store, because then they will actually fit.
11. I am a very bad liar.
12. Natalie Portman and I share the exact same date of birth.
13. I was voted ‘Most Intelligent’ in my high school class.
14. I get very competitive at trivia games. Sometimes, scarily so.
15. I would give one of my appendages for a dishwasher.
16. I can be very stubborn.
17. The surest way to get me to do something is to tell me that I’m not capable of doing it.
18. In middle school, I was the skinniest and most geeky, awkward, braces- and glasses-wearing, frizzy-haired, picked-on kid you can imagine.
19. Only now, at age 24, am I coming to terms with how I look.
20. I put an extreme amount of pressure on myself to do everything well.
21. I have this irrational fear of driving. I think it’s because I’m a bad driver and I hate not doing things right (see # 20).
22. Name a movie that is a standard of the 80’s, and I probably will not have seen it.
23. I tend to be thrifty. Okay, maybe just cheap.
24. I despise Vivaldi.
25. For the life of me, I cannot keep papers/documents organized.
26. I spent about 10 days in England last year. For about 3 months after that, and without realizing it, I was still talking with a British inflection.
27. I constantly have purple rings under my eyes.
28. I have a weakness for musicians.
29. I have only ever been really drunk once or twice. Both times, I could walk a straight line and carry on a reasonable conversation.
30. I have never met the majority of my relatives, and I don’t know most of their names.
31. I am the procrastination queen.
32. I don’t own a pair of plain white socks.
33. Once I get about halfway through a book, I’ll sometimes flip to the end and read parts of the last chapters. Then I go back and continue reading from where I left off.
34. I love Cryptoquip puzzles: the ones where letters are represented by other letters and you have to figure out the quote.
35. I harbor a secret ambition to get an MA in Linguistics from Cambridge.
36. I also think that working for the NSA would be an excellent job.
37. I know embarrassingly little about popular music.
38. I could eat chocolate chip cookies every day for the rest of my life.
39. I haven’t been on a real vacation (in which you travel someplace else in order to relax, not a traveling, see-everything-you-can-see-in-this-city trip) since I was a junior in high school.
40. If I had the option, I would wear a fleece and jeans every day.
41. I have a tendency to read emails and not answer them, until they either all pile up and I have to spend forever writing people back, or I forget about them.
42. I am incapable of doing anything only half-way.
43. I think dark chocolate is far superior to milk chocolate.
44. I own far too many shoes.
45. I think my eyes are my best feature (apart from the dark circles).
46. I was born over 2 months early. They weren’t sure I was going to make it.
47. I love to cook, but I end up eating pasta all the time because I’m too tired to make something halfway decent.
48. Annoyingly, and for no obvious reason, I get extremely nervous talking to guys.
49. In Germany, I became addicted to coffee. Since then, my tolerance for caffeine has only improved.
50. I appear much more put-together than I really am.

Why learn a foreign language?

Because!

Randomness

As it is Monday evening, and it's my only relatively free night of the week, I thought I'd update quickly to say that I'm still alive. Nothing exciting is going on; school consumes my life and report cards are coming up. (Again! Didn't we just have them?) Outside the job, a few (mildly) noteworthy events and/or comments:

• I went out on Saturday night with my TA, her host mom (art teacher at school) and host mom's friend. A band that the host mom knew was playing at some club, and it was a good time! But rather weird, since there were two of us in our mid-20s and host mom and friend who were 50 and just under 50. Can anyone picture their moms bar-hopping at 2am? For that matter, can you picture yourself bar-hopping in 30 years, while your kids are sleeping at home?
• Sunday, March 12th: My long-awaited return to the Irish dancing stage! There is some big Day Of Irish Dance celebrating St. Pat's Day, and I'll be doing 3 dances with my new school. The costume is quite excellent (though $50 to rent for one day!); I'll have to post a picture of it if I remember to take one.
• One of these days, I'll also get around to posting a 100 Things About Me on this blog. Though I'm afraid I won't be able to think of 100 mildly interesting or amusing aspects of my personality.
• I have to stop going to the grocery store when I'm hungry. Seriously, I've bought so many cookies in the past two weeks, it's rather sad. However, buying sushi for dinner was an excellent idea.
• Clearly, I need a roommate or something if I'm telling you all about my grocery-buying habits.

Time to go finish the laundry!

Improved! Now with more sleep!

Apparently all of my problems are caused by lack of sleep. After having a rather horrific week and a half, I came home from school early(-ish) yesterday and took a nearly 2-hour nap. Then I proceeded to make dinner, watch Monty Python, and go to bed at a decent hour. I'm feeling much better now. (not 100% better, but not in a weeping-and-gnashing-of-teeth mood)

For example: It's Thursday. One would hope that I would be hanging out with certain other people tonight, a certain person in particular. However, it looks like that's not going to happen. So that's kind of a downer, but there will be no dramatics, just mild disappointment.

And now, to amuse myself and the Internet at large: the Four Things Meme, stolen from Heather and Jess and pretty much every single blog that exists.

Four jobs I’ve had:
(1) Lifeguard
(2) Summer camp counselor
(3) Wal-Mart cashier - still scarred for life by this one
(4) Kindergarten teacher

Four movies I can watch over and over:
(1) Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(2)Ferris Bueller's Day Off
(3) Mostly Martha
(4) Center Stage - somewhat predictable and cheesy, but entertaining!

Four Places I’ve Lived:
(1) [suburb of] Buffalo, NY
(2) Springfield, OH
(3) Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Germany
(4) Kaiserslautern, Germany

Four TV shows I love:
(1) The Office - the only show that I absolutely have to watch every week...so hilarious!
(2) Scrubs
(3) Whose Line Is It Anyway? - too bad it's not on the air anymore
(4) CSI: - unfortunately, it loses out to 'The Office' so I haven't seen it lately

Four places I’ve vacationed:
(1) Ocean City, MD
(2) Vienna, Austria
(3) Italy - Rome and Venice
(4) Ireland - Dublin, Cork, Galway, Derry (N. Ireland)

Four of my favorite dishes:
(1) Steak (medium-rare) and baked potato
(2) Chicken marsala
(3) Chicken pot pie
(4) Salmon - especially this dish that my mom has made with really thin pieces of salmon in a butter and cream sauce, with capers... müs, know what I'm talking about? I'm drooling now.

Four sites I visit daily:
(1) (No more) Adventures in Deutschland - *cough*stalker*cough*
(2) Dooce
(3) Google
(4) Yahoo! Mail

Four places I would rather be right now:
(1) With friends
(2) On a beach - with sand, not one of those rocky beaches
(3) Sprawled on the grass under a tree (with leaves on it), reading a book
(4) Anywhere in Ireland

There you have it, Internet. Not at all witty or entertaining, but further proof of my unoriginality. Whoo!

Today has been brought to you by...

...these three words: day from hell. I'm not even going to get into it, it'll make me too depressed. In summary: (1) I have zero control over my class and (2) The kids are learning absolutely nothing.

Jamie, I might have overestimated when I said that I can handle another year of kindergarten.

Bright spot of the day: My grandparents sent me a Christmas present: a huge fleece blanket! So when I'm wallowing in self-pity because I suck at teaching and am lonely, at least I'll be warm.

*yanks self out of self-pitying pit*

Time to go do some schoolwork. Surprise, surprise.

You know you're old and/or a big dork when...

...you turn down a Fasching party in favor of a night at home, a movie and an early bedtime.

B stands for Big Loser.

Reality check

There are moments in which I think my job is great: kids are learning and being nice to each other, everyone's listening, and their progress is amazing. (Case in point: One of the kids helping the new student ask a question in German.)

And then there are weeks when I want to quit, lock myself in my apartment and live off of chocolate alone. Weeks like this one. Though it only has four days, verily, it bites the big one. Chalk it up to the parents who blame everything on that lousy kindergarten teacher instead of their kid not paying a damn bit of attention in class, the people who want us to now prove we are not just meeting standards but exceeding them, the people who've been asking why some kids can't read (they're freaking 5 YEARS OLD, it's KINDERGARTEN for god's sake), and some other totally unrealistic expectations which I am expected to meet. And I was just starting to not think about school every waking minute.

Also, bizarre dreams this past week. What is going on in my life?

Forget it. Bring on the chocolate.

Thank you, George and Abe

...for giving us this long weekend. Without the two of you, February would be a long, cold month. Oh yeah, and thanks also for helping win the Revolutionary War and signing the Emancipation Proclamation.

In honor of President's (or Presidents'?) Day: Name Your Favorite President! Come on, you know you have one. I'll go first: Woodrow Wilson. Brilliant man, had the idea for the UN before anyone else did, got the country through WWI, and alliterative name. Rock on, Woody.

And happy birthday, Hetta! You now have the same age as the title of a television show! Have a great day and eat lots of cake. (by the way, that dinner invitation didn't work out...because I should have called 15 minutes earlier!)

Not a whole lot more to say, except that it's back to school tomorrow. Without another break until March...right before parent-teacher conferences. So I am going to continue slacking off today for as long as humanly possible until I really have to write some lesson plans. Join me in becoming one with the slack.

In which I sound like a squealy 14-year-old girl

*Warning*: This entry to be filled with ridiculousness, since I am currently on a four-day weekend, have had enough sleep, and haven't done a thing all day. Therefore, I'm in a great mood. (bipolar, what?)

I've been listening to this radio station all day, and it's like a constant nostalgia trip. Half the time, it's songs like REM's 'It's The End Of The World' and Blues Traveler's 'Run-Around' which remind me of high school yearbook (i.e., skipping class, racing wheely chairs, vandalizing furniture, fighting over Bruce the couch) and then it's 'Everyday' by Dave Matthews bringing back memories of college. Makes me feel old. I wonder if any songs will make me nostalgic for my first year of teaching. Doubtful; although it has its moments, it's not the most pleasant experience in the world.

So I went out last night with two co-workers and a friend of one of them... it might turn into a Thursday night routine, since we were out last Thursday as well, and we're going ice skating next week. They are a riot, seriously. It is fabulous to be able to (1) talk to people over the age of 6, and (2) be sarcastic and somewhat witty. Of course, that's before I have a few drinks, because then I start talking too much and say stupid things. (at least I realize it and shut up) BUT...

**edited because I've clearly jinxed it already, so really, what's the point**

So...yeah. No concrete evidence, clearly, but I enjoy replaying moments in my head and blowing things entirely out of proportion. Because this is what I do. Suffice it to say I'm looking forward to next Thursday.

What I have realized while house- and dogsitting

• Having an entire house to yourself can be kind of creepy.
• TiVo is fantastic!
• ...as are dishwashers!
• Small dogs are cute when they crawl up onto your bed.
• However, not so cute when they get you up at 6.30 AM on a Sunday.
• Not having your closet to choose your clothes from is a bit irritating. (sounds snotty and materialistic, but try it sometime...it's true)
• Cafe lattes are fabulous.
• It's hard to make dinner when you don't know what food you have or where everything is.
• When you read the newspaper, you actually learn what is going on. (i.e., Mark O'Connor and Leahy are both here this week! Too bad I don't know anyone who'd be interested in going...)

Right, lesson plans.

Warning: Don't read this entry unless you want to listen to me complain.

A lot.

So it's 9.20, the dishes are finally done, my apartment smells like a combination of fish and drying laundry, and I'm apparently a bit sleep-deprived, since I'm feeling rather snappish. (snappish, adj.: ready to snap at small, trivial things) And this blog is going to be full of griping, so WATCH OUT.

First off, if I hear that freaking 'A Hundred Years to Live' song or whatever the hell it's titled ONE MORE TIME, I will seriously flip out. That's not a threat, it will happen.

**remainder of post edited because I like my job and would like to keep it**

Happy St. Bridget's Day!

Ha ha...and happy 21st birthday, Müs!! God, that makes me feel old. Now my age has absolutely no advantages over yours. Damn.

And I got the fellowship; I'm going back to Wittenberg this summer! Time to pull some strings and see if I can live with someone I know...think they'll let me live with an American (i.e., Jess)? That is, if she'll have me? Was that request smooth or what?

In response to the State of the Union address

O Canada, how I miss thee and thy television stations. And Tim's. (double-double?)

Reasons why I would not make it on 'The Bachelor'

• I don't get catty. Bitchy, sure, but not catty.
• I think it's obnoxious to have people prying into my motivations every single step of the way.
• I can't toss my hair.
• It would require far too much effort, appearance-wise.
• You cannot get to know me in 15 minutes or less.
• I can't walk in high heels.
• I don't get all squealy.
• I can't play dumb. I can be rather dense, but that's not nearly as attractive, apparently.
• I can't be two-faced. If I'm lying, you can tell pretty quickly.
• The whole premise turns me off. Twenty-five women fighting for one guy? Seriously.

I'm just watching for the scenery from Paris, the French Riviera, etc. ;)

Oh snap!

Inspiration for today's post: 'Oh snap!' actually heard on TV. Moose, you've started a trend; better find a new catch phrase.

Today was the best day ever. Only seven kids this morning, and three adults in the room! And nine in the afternoon, again with three adults! It was amazing, everyone had some one-on-one time, and it was just so calm. Yay for watching kids at work and learning.

Incidentally, we've started on a Karneval theme, so if anyone has any brilliant ideas on learning center-type actvities that have to do with Karneval and/or Mardi Gras and/or Germany, send them along.

Here is a glowing article written about the school, a.k.a. 'free advertising'.

Randomly, I'm having a semi-career crisis. (or would that be a career semi-crisis?) Is it a bad thing that I have no 5-year goals I can verbalize, besides getting a master's? I've gotten asked this question twice in the past three days, and I'm getting the feeling that I'm not doing the right thing, that I could/should be doing grander things than this. What those grander things might be, I have no idea. I seem to be having a hard enough time getting through each week, let alone thinking about what I should be doing five years from now. And I'm still getting pressure from my parents: 'Okay, so you're going to stay another year, that's fine. It'll help you decide what you want to do next.' Two points come to mind: (1) ...Like what?? (2) ...Because those two years in Germany were so helpful in deciding what I wanted to do with my life.

Never mind. I'll just work on surviving Karneval, I suppose.

Admit it, you knew there was something wrong with me all this time

Personality Disorder Test Results Paranoid 46% Schizoid 74% Schizotypal 42% Antisocial 30% Borderline 42% Histrionic 18% Narcissistic 22% Avoidant 30% Dependent 30% Obsessive-Compulsive 62%

Take Free Personality Disorder Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Question of the day:

Why am I socially inept? More specifically, why can't I work up the nerve to say what I want to say? Lots of head-smacking going on this evening...

Also, I finished up my application to the summer program in Wittenberg! We'll see if they'll accept me, but it looks promising; they've already extended the deadline for me. =) Clear the guest room, Jess, I might be coming over!

Lastly, this is the best hot chocolate mix EVER. So good. I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to the powdered stuff.

Must...stop...procrastinating...