I'm blogging it out. Because deep inside my throat. S'why my snow night sucks.

Got sent home with strep today for the second time in two months. I have officially used up 7.5 of my 8 sick days, which were designated back in August for quiet luxurious mornings in which I call in "sick" and spend the rest of the day watching 90210 reruns on the couch, but have now been depleted in my part-time job of actually being really freaking sick all the time. I'm thinking about calling up my ENT and giving myself a tonsillectomy for a Christmas present but considering my luck this year I will come back to school after break, bleed out and faceplant on my blue carpet next to the djembe because they couldn't find a substitute to relieve me fast enough.

In any case, here are some not very inspired haikus about being sick, during The Great Ice Storm of Ought-Six, and not having any food I can suck down through a straw.

They're not funny, but neither is my mood.


I will die alone
My eyes, eaten by housecats
'Cause they got no food.

Tonsils--red, turgid
Are dripping with infection
Twin pillars of death

Got sent home today
Officially a leper
Just one sick day left

I think it's funny
How easily one can snore
When one's tonsils touch

If I die tonight
Don't let Rene see the Cuervo
that's in the pantry

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

writer's block

SYLLABICATION: writ·er's block
PRONUNCIATION: rtrz
NOUN: A usually temporary psychological inability to begin or continue work on a piece of writing.

In silence grows the immortal mind..

My visit to the otolar otorhin ENT resulted in a situation that could be a lot better, but could be a lot worse. If I were giving myself a grade in healthy throatage, it'd be a D+ that can be raised with extra credit and correcting my test in the future. I gave myself a D+ only because the 8th grade me--the one who would've sprinted the bathroom and cried through fourth, fifth, and sixth period because a D means I will die, frigid and alone in my parents' house because no self-respecting boy would EVER date a girl with a D on her middle school report card and I might as well stop going to school now and just get a job at Sonic so I can at least work my way up to assistant manager by the time I'm thirty--well, that girl still lives inside my head so I just couldn't bear not to give her a passing grade.

Anyway, the doctor made me sing Sinatra with him for five minutes, frowned, shot some foul-tasting anesthesia down my nose and throat, and then stuck a long rubber tube down the same path before the Lidocaine actually kicked in. The pain was TOTALLY AWESOME, especially when he had to jab to turn corners through my "extremely crowded craniofacial anatomy", and especially awesome when the Lidocaine did finally kick in right in the middle of my Crunchwrap Supreme on the drive home and I nearly died right there on I-435, choking on a piece of tortilla my benumbed throat refused to swallow.

He's determined that my vocal cords have blisters on them, and that I'm prone to getting them, and if I don't do something soon I'll develop either inoperable callouses or cancerous growths or both (exciting!) so I've been put on a 7-10 day vocal rest and subsequent vocal therapy after that which my insurance may or may not decline. I do so love spinning the Roulette wheel of health care to determine whether I'll have to choose to pay my doctor bills or eat food with nutrients in them instead. I had to call the principal of my school and explain everything, and so now I'm either going to be given the week off with short-term disability, or I'll run through my sick days, or Human Resources is going to make me a custodian's aide at another school so they can pay me for my time.

So anyway, weekend plans having been canceled because I'm not allowed to utter polite social phrases anymore, I am here. Alone with cats and expanded basic cable and two-thirds of a jug of orange juice. Message me if you want to watch a movie or play charades, yo.

Zweie Ausgaben

1) Today I completed the first leg of the 2-Day Awkward Fest that is parent-teacher conferences. Our administration decided to schedule two 12-hour work days for us this week and gave us Friday off as compensation. I have very little to say about this other than it sucks to have to remember to sit like a lady in a skirt from 7:30 in the morning to 8:00 in the evening, especially when you accidentally tuck the back of the skirt into your tights after coming out of the bathroom and you stroll down the hall unaware of your right ass cheek's semi-exposure to the entire fourth grade wing until your students come in and the one girl who's more mature than all the others because she babysits and got her period early pulls you into a corner and shields you while you pluck the offending garment from your underpinnings and pray that the superintendent who gave you a thumbs-up in the hallway five minutes ago had sustained some sort of damage to his peripheral vision from a football injury or in a foreign war that prevented him from viewing your gluteus in all its half-shrouded glory. Also, one of the parents farted while I was talking about how her son had a lot of potential and I started stuttering because I was trying not to acknowledge that she had farted even though it was sort of a melodic fart because she shifted in her chair to hide it which made it sound exactly like the first two notes of "Here Comes the Bride" and the fact that she had farted a perfect Perfect 4th and I couldn't say anything about it made me die a little inside and I realized right there in that room that I will never, ever be mature enough to raise children. I should probably just be sterilized for the sake of humanity.

2) I have to go see an otorhinolarynologist on Friday morning. I like to write otorhinolarynologist instead of ENT because I like think it makes you respect me, or at least the possible disease I have. My medical issues are GRANDER than yours because my doctor has twenty letters in his title. That's some impressive shit, brah.

Basically, our instructional coach at my school is very worried that I might be developing callouses on my vocal cords because of all the muscle tension I have from sixteen years of horn playing and three years of kid wrangling and two years of living with the man who would eventually cause me to completely lose my shit. And I' m pretty scared myself, because if my voice doesn't heal I will permanently sound like a castmember of Laguna Beach and I'll also never be able to do my job successfully again.

I'd really like to get my voice back, because while sounding like Kirstie Alley all day long totally heightens my sex appeal with the Cheers demographic, I can only imagine how much more unattractive it makes me to my own peer group. At least next Halloween I'll be able to really make my students cry when I tell them bloody finger ghost stories.

Ch-ch-changes...

I apologize for the lapse in posts this week. A few of you left threatening emails that both flattered me for your interest in reading my drivel and also sort of disturbed me that you'd resort to violence to be able to read more. I guess if I ever need "a guy to do a thing" for me, I'll know who to call.

I've been sort of distracted this week by my new piece of technology, the LG C2000 camera phone. I like to make my brother refer to it as such because otherwise it's a pretty unremarkable phone, but calling it the LG C2000 makes it sound like I could cure cancer with it, or at least something like psoriasis. Cingular and I were in a fight for most of the summer but this month I passed them a note and a couple hundred dollars during social studies and now we're BFFs again and so they allowed me a new cell phone upgrade. I picked the free one, and I'm pretty pleased with what I got. It has speakerphone, which excites me immensely, and it also takes decent pictures like the one below. I felt very Thomas Hart Benton-esque, capturing the grimness of the rural heartland while pulling into the Casey's on the way home from work.



Anyway, my other source of distraction has been a kind of inventory of my life, professionally and personally and otherwise, and where I'd like to proceed from here. I think I gave an erroneous impression with my last post about depression, and so now I'm sort of cringing thinking about the people who are unnecessarily worried about me. I'm really not on the verge of offing myself, I swear. The post on depression was a reflective one and it's something I can write about only because I've pretty much made my peace with it and moved on. No need to hide the razor blades and the complimentary snack bowls of uppers while I'm at your house; I'm just fine. Also, I'm really not that lame of a pumpkin carver...I was just in a hurry.

The life inventory mostly has to do with where I'd like to be this time next year, and the dawning realization is that I'd really like to be back in school. I feel horribly guilty about this because I have a great job. The people I work with are wonderful, they pretty much let me do whatever, and so far nothing I've done is wrong. I'm in an incredible situation, and so the fact that the only way I could describe teaching when a friend asked me about it was "It's...easy" disheartened me immensely. Because that's pretty much what I think about my job; it's really really easy and also I get to wear jeans on Friday. I have extremely strong opinions on the education crisis in America (if there really is one), but I don't think that teaching 7 year olds how to sing "Shoo Fly" is really doing much to fix it. And truthfully, I feel really irresponsible in any job where I'm not completely head over heels in love with what I'm doing, or at least handsomely compensated and rewarded each December with junkets to Barbados.

So basically, I would really like to be back in school. I miss being a scholar, and researching and doing ridiculous statistics that I never quite understand no matter how many times I plug in the numbers. I miss the intensity of academia, because even in the Chucky Cheese gameroom that is the field of education, the people there are scientists. They may study jam-faced little nippers and whether blue or red crayons make them learn better, but in the field of post-secondary education research, that's SERIOUS BUSINESS and they attack those subjects with the zeal of a surgeon performing brain surgery. Also, (and this is horribly embarrassing to admit), I really can't handle waking up at 6:00 anymore and walking into a bright building with perky women wearing Charlie Brown shirts who say "Good morning!" like there is even a remote possibility that it actually COULD be a good morning before my first round of Folgers has adequately stimulated my nervous system. No one at college would dare wear Charlie Brown shirts, and for that I would be immensely grateful.

I need a challenge. I need to pull an all-nighter trying to finish a term paper. I need to sit for hours and hours in graduate seminars doodling on my dayplanner and wondering what the professor's talking about. I need to have conversations with people my own age who aren't "passionate about kindergarten" and married with twin girls named Peyton and Bailey and who have opinions on Very Important Things and maybe also not so important things that would still not involve who's bringing which enchilada casserole to the birthday luncheon and how much we should spend on our Secret Santa presents this year and if I have to attend one more meeting where I talk about my feelings or pass around a compliment jar or laugh knowingly about menopause or chocolate or anything at all that is representative of the female gender I will GO MOTHER EFFING INSANE.

Ahem.

So, I need a change. And suggestions. Preferably in career for next year, but if you happen to know of a killer yoga studio with competitive rates I'd totally be into that too.