Sunday, September 27, 2009

Tidbits

I don't have any really unified thoughts that would make a good long post so this will be a bulleted one.

  • These last few weeks have been fairly uneventful as far as subbing goes. I've subbed for the same teacher several times so his kids are used to me and I know their names. Nothing really exciting there.
  • Tuesday night, there was a job at the high school that is closest to my house so I signed up for it as soon as I saw it. I must not have looked too closely because I went there Wednesday morning thinking it was just a job for that day. When I got there, there was a note on the desk thanking me for subbing for the next three days! I called home and had my husband check and, yes, it was for three days. Ooops. I am still tired from that.
  • Speaking of my husband, we are stuck in the discussion about whether to try for another baby. I finally decided that I'd like to, but he thinks that another baby would "ruin his life." So if I were to get pregnant, he would hate me. It's a circular fight and one that I hope we resolve soon.
  • Quincy went on his first trip out of town with my husband but without me this weekend. He went to Oak Ridge, TN to visit his grandmother and great-grandparents. I think he had a good time. When he was ready to come home on Saturday afternoon, he went out and got in the car without saying bye. He must have thought that it was time to go.
  • While he was in Oak Ridge, he got up very early, like 6 a.m. early. This morning, he woke up around 6:45. I am hoping this doesn't happen again tomorrow.
  • I am currently obsessed with The Gourds. I have listened to their version of "Gin and Juice" at least three times today. It's a bluegrass version done with some mandolin. I love it!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

In Memoriam

I've been reading Tennyson and various other poets thinking about the recent death of my old friend Kris Bristow and the death two years ago of Craig Duvelius. Kris died from a sudden illness and Craig from an accidental overdose. I was reading Howl earlier and was struck by the first few lines of one of my favorite poems of all time.

Excerpt from Howl by Allen Ginsberg:

For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
......
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in
the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating
all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns,
wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of
teahead
joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and
tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan
rantings and kind king light of mind,
......
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar
to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills of Empire
State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories
and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails
and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and
nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the
pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of
ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

_______________________________________________________________________________

As you know, the poem itself is very long. Certain lines just strike me today.
Like these:

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a
vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to
Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded &
loned
in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, &
now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each
other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul
illuminated its hair for a second,

________________________________________________________________________________
Obviously, the Denver lines are about Neal Cassady. He's one of my favorites also.


Friday, September 04, 2009

This Week's Adventure

I substitute taught two and a half days this week, which is so far my record this year. Sometimes there aren't any jobs. Sometimes I have lots of stuff to do and can't get to any schools. There are ALWAYS tons of jobs on the days when I have a million things to do. Why is that?

Monday was an awesome sub day. I had Sophomores in an English class at a school that is only about 20 minutes from here. The kids were pretty good and the teacher had two inclusion classes so I had help some of the day. The only thing that I didn't like was that it was one of those days where the teacher had left me a movie to start each class on. That means that all five classes watched the first 50 or so minutes of the same movie all day long. I rented the movie tonight so I can see something beyond the first half.

On Tuesday, I subbed at the school I used to teach at. I always expect that to be a negative experience, but it hasn't been so far. People I wasn't even friends with when I taught there are nice to me. It's kind of weird. Anyway, this was a Sophomore English class, too and she also had two inclusion classes. The difference was that she only had three English classes and the other two were Yearbook. The Yearbook classes are pretty much self-sufficient so that was fun.

On Wednesday, I subbed at the middle school directly behind our house. I had to be there at 7:05 a.m. because the teacher had bus duty. It was a five minute commute maybe. I loved that! I subbed for a Chorus/Music class. I only had two classes really and, while they were harder to deal with than the high school students, it was still a good day. These were 8th grade classes mostly and they just did not want to get quiet. The half class that I had were 7th graders and they were great kids. I usually like 7th grade better than 8th so it didn't surprise me any.

That was my week minus the dental experience. I hope next week is just as good!

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

The Dangers of Google Dentistry

I went to the dentist a couple of weeks ago and, while he was poking around in my mouth, he found a cavity in the side of a tooth that wasn't even showing up on x-ray. It was under a filling. "Lovely," I thought.

I got home and I started thinking about how if it didn't show on the x-ray, then there was no way to know how big it was without just going ahead and filling it, right? I didn't really think anymore about it at that point.

Fast-forward to last Friday when my tooth began to hurt off and on. I asked my dad, who has had four root canals, what it feels like if you need one. He said that it would hurt a lot. It was kind of a dull ache and it seemed to only hurt at the end of my day. I took some Tylenol and thought that would take care of it. I had an appointment to get it filled on September 8 after all.

Well, it hurt all weekend. It hurt all Monday while I subbed for a Sophomore English class. It hurt Tuesday when I subbed for another Sophomore English class. I called the dentist's office Tuesday afternoon and asked if they could squeeze me in, soon. Then, I went home and googled "root canal" and "root canal symptoms." What I saw scared me because I had some of the symptoms.

I went into the dentist's today well informed and scared to death. He gave me two shots of novocaine and started drilling. He drilled off and on for over twenty minutes. I thought that drilling the old filling off would take a while and I was right. After those twenty-plus minutes of starting and stopping, he pronounced it a run-of-the-mill cavity and not even that big of a filling.

I should maybe not google these things. I scared myself a lot. At least, I didn't look at the pictures though!