walking out of stride

I have been buying a lot of shoes again lately.  I think this is a strange development, only in the last year, that I have caught some kind of Ivana Trump type  of obsession with shoes.  Most of my life I have been a sneakers kind of girl.  This shoe thing is ridiculous.  (I have also noticed that I am becoming dumber.  Just a few days ago I blogged something about having "weaved" rather than "woven" a magic spell.  My IQ is dropping fast.)

Nothing about this makes sense, but my thought progression went from finishing my Master's degree, which seemed like a big accomplishment, to trying to think of what else I wanted to achieve in my life - and not something that required any brain power because my brain was tired.  This led me to think about learning how to walk in high heels.  I've never been able to do that convincingly, until recently.

Today I slipped out on my lunch break to buy these shoes.

I wonder what's wrong with me.  Why am I focusing on something so brainless and uncharacteristically girly?  .... It could have been worse, and it sometimes has been. It's not so bad being left with an insatiable desire to fill my closet full of pretty shoes.  

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calling me back to my sin

Jesse still talks about Mother Love Bone.  It's funny, isn't it, how we have a musical moment on an infinite loop that represents us?  I laugh at my mum for loving Pat Boone forever and forever, but of course it's no less ridiculous that I still hum, with complete seriousness, "Nearly Lost You" by the Screaming Trees -- and picture myself in plaid, and still feel I could have married Eddy Vedder if I'd been more proactive.  There are these forever places, like Seattle garage band land, or wherever else they may exist, where time was supposed to stop but it didn't.

And so although I'm 21 and I wear Doc Martens army boots with dresses, I'm also supposed to be responsible enough to parent a child.  And although I drink draft beer on tap, 5$ a pitcher, I somehow am supposed to pay a mortgage and understand interest rates.  I remember Mother Love Bone too, Jesse, and I remember Hunger Strike like I wrote it myself, every chord, every nuance, from the mouths of decadence.


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'Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Arrythmia

I saw my doctor again today for a follow up on my last (strange) appointment.  As I was beginning to suspect, there is nothing wrong with my thyroid.  Having read all the symptoms of hypo/hyperthyroid conditions, I was pretty sure that wasn't it.  It's sort of like the body just knows.

This is good news, of course, as no one wants to have a thyroid condition, but it would have been nice to have an answer to whyI have such a racy heart.  The ECG wasn't particularly informative -- just proved that my heart was indeed very fast.  My doctor wrote "tachycardia at rest" and "arrythmia" on my referral form.  That means my heart is not only fast, but also beating irregularly.

So now what?  I have an appointment to see a cardiologist next month.  I get to do some tests for which, apparently, I am to show up with running shoes.  (Fun.)  And I get to wear a Holter monitor for 24 hours so it can record my heart rate and rhythms throughout the day.

I suspect it will all boil down to working with Crazy Sue.  I wonder if there is a prescription I can take that will make her disappear.



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Meanwhile, the play is underway.  Two more nights, tonight and tomorrow.  And then I will consider myself to be on strike as far as extracurricular activities go.  I'll join what is lovingly referred to as the Three O'Clock Track Team.  And I plan to be a star.


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"Nobody hated paying taxes more than the rich" (Murakami, IQ84)

On Thursday morning a nearly-ninety year old man who survived three years in Auschwitz came to my school to speak to the students about racism.  Because he was to present from the stage where I teach my theatre classes, I helped set up for his presentation.  Crazy Sue stopped me for a few minutes to yell at me for letting the nearly-ninety year old man borrow her chair as opposed to having him perch on a hard plastic student chair.  At times I feel as though Crazy Sue has trouble seeing the Big Picture.

The presentation was riveting.  The man was articulate and very, very sharp.  He had a sense of humour and compassion for the young people who were struggling to understand the horror he was describing.  He asked us not to blame young Germans for the crimes of their ancestors; he asked us to assess each person based only upon his/her own individual behaviour.  He was modern and simultaneously wise.  I quite adored him and had trouble saying goodbye when it was over.  We stood and talked for a long time after the presentation was finished.  He told me he wasn't too old to notice that I was a beauty, which I thought was lovely because most of the time these days I feel I am the one who is too old to be a beauty.

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Rehearsals are finished for the play and the show begins in earnest next week.  It will be a week of fourteen hour days.  I am currently in defiance of the union order to cease all extracurricular activities, and open to being fined for non-compliance.  I am doubtful that this will really happen -- but it is a possibility -- and I cannot decide who is the bigger traitor in the whole debate.

The government has stripped our contract down to nothing; there are no longer any rules about class size and composition, no seniority rights for experienced teachers, and nothing to mandate the length of the working day or the length of the school year.

The union has taken away our freedom to choose what we do with our own personal free time, bargained a ridiculous starting position that made us look like idiots in the public eye, and wasted our dues on politicking instead of on supporting the members in getting a fair contract.  Daily we are insulted and attacked in the media, painted as greedy, selfish, lazy opportunists.

It has been an emotionally exhausting school year, and a physically exhausting few weeks of rehearsals.  I have reached a point where if I stop moving for any length of time, I fall asleep.  And so it is necessary to keep moving for just a little bit longer.  Soon summer will be here and I can wrap myself up in a warm cocoon made of public tax dollars and sleep and sleep and sleep.


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To say I miss you is not only overly simplistic, it is also untrue; it only appears that way on the surface. I do not really miss you, and in point of fact, I'm not entirely sure that I like you. It would seem more truthful to say I miss who I was with you, but that is also overly simplified, cliché, and not particularly true. I do not miss who I was with you. With you I was insecure, anxious, and overeager. In the end I do not really know exactly what it is that I miss, or if I miss anything at all. Maybe it's just that I notice the empty space and wish there was something to put in it. Better that I learn to live with empty spaces and not always feel the need to fill them up with clutter.




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To live up to my label as public enemy numero uno, suckling at the public teat, worthless lazy vile (i.e. teacher) etcetera, I skipped teachers' conference today and went, instead, to the endodonist to find out why my tooth is thumping. He x-rayed and poked and pressed, thocked, and touched me with dry ice. All of this was exceedingly unpleasant, but no clear answer was found as to why the tooth makes thumpy feelings. So in the end, he did nothing other than invite me to call him again if things worsen. It's nice to have things to look forward to, isn't it.




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