mental acuity ramblings.

I am up late. Again. The other night I was up until 4:30 am. I have no idea what is wrong with me, other than maybe I know I don't HAVE to get up early in the morning. Or if I do HAVE to get up early in the morning, whatever it is I'm doing will not require great amounts of intense mental acuity. This, I have come to believe, is the one and only reason I chose teaching as a profession: 8 weeks each year not requiring any strenuous mental acuity. That, and I just dig kids and how their brains work. And I wanted to make a difference. And I like cutting and pasting stuff a lot. And I get to play Design Superstar, Classroom Edition.Sometimes up to 10 times a year if a bunch of hooligans land in my room.

There is no point to this blog entry; really, it's just that I'm up late and having random thoughts and I thought maybe typing them down for (potentially) all the world to see would help that somehow. And so if you're reading this, I promise (1) to keep it relatively short (I tend to head off on long, rambling tangents when in random mode), and (2) try not to ramble. One or the other, but probably not both.
 
1. Teacher bloggers. God bless them and their creative brains. I'm convinced it would not have taken me 10 years to get a clue about teaching had I had access to this stuff back in 1995 when I started. I really feel for just-now-graduating teacher candidates: on the one hand, they're jumping into an ocean of a plethora of resources; resources I, as a 1st year teacher, didn't even know I could dream about...on the other hand: Race to the Top and Michelle Rhee. Man, I hate that for them. Sucks.

Anyway, I have pinned and swiped borrowed so many ideas for 2nd grade/beginning of the school year since the last week of May, my head is spinning. At last count, in my "teacherly" board on pinterest, I'm up to 520+ pins. I have other school idea boards there--Reading, Writing, Math, Literacy, Classroom Set Up/Organization, Beginning of Year, End of Year, Children's Literature, Technology. Possibly well over 1,000 ideas at this point. That's called "internet crack addiction," in case you were wondering.  Which is why, when I started thinking of starting a teaching blog I said to myself (very forcibly and out loud), "NO. NOOOO!!!! Are you on crack??? Also, all the ideas you have are pilfered from others. Nobody wants pilfered." Also, once the school year is under way, I sort of tend to wander away from this blog (and my other one--a "get fit" blog I abandoned waaaay back in March, along with the "get fit" idea) and get lost in the desert of stress and life and work, never to resurface until the next time I can have insomnia and not worry about mental acuity.

So I started a class website instead. I have a problem (this was pointed out to me by a handful of sweet and deeply concerned coworkers, and I was ordered to go on bed rest the rest of the summer. Which I am doing. Except for the cute welcome letter I'm currently working on). Really, it's just a love of internet clip art. (I'm not SAYING I may have bought $20 worth of clip art from a fairly well-known internet clip art site called scrappindoodles.com, but I'm NOT saying I didn't.) (Nobody tell C. He thinks my excessive computer time is me looking up fun beach trip stuff.)

2. Melissa. Man, she's wearing me out. On the one hand, I love her. I love that she's 3 1/2. I love that she's drawing people now: ridiculous big balloon heads with 2 legs and 2 arms coming out of them and crazy stuff inside she calls "The Face Parts." I love that we can have actual conversations. Conversations that always revolve around how supercalifragilisticexpealidociously awesome she is, while all the other kids get stuck in the class Thinking Spot for various infractions all day long.

Also, during bath time, we've invented a new game. I call it: At MY Birthday Party. It goes like this:

Melissa: At MY Birthday Party, there's going to be a big, big cake and balloons and princesses.

Me: Well, at MY Birthday Party, I'll have 100 balloons, a 200 foot tall cake, 500 princesses, teddy bears, Dora and Diego and Boots will give me 1,000 monkey kisses.

Melissa: Well, at MY Birthday Party, I'll have princesses, a cake, Grammy and Grandpa Harry and teddy bears, and Boots and princesses and cake and Dora and Diego and Boots kisses!

Me: But at MY Birthday Party, all the Yo Gabba Gabba gang will be there, with clowns and hats and a million people and princesses will sing me Happy Birthday and I'll get a cazillion dollars.

Melissa: At MY Birthday Party, I'll get a a a ca hillion clowns and people and hats and dollars!

And then I'll say something about how Daddy will be giving me kisses at MY birthday party, and we have to end the game because tears are shed. Daddy is HER Daddy and not allowed to kiss me. Go get your OWN Daddy, Mommy!!!!!!! (I'm not SAYING Sigmund Freud was correct about his Oedipus Complex theories, but I'm not NOT saying he was incorrect.....I guess what I'm saying is Sigmund Freud would be watching this process with a fairly smug look on his chauvinistic, cigar smoking face.)

3. Oh, wait! I never finished #2. I love all of that about Melissa. Except for the psychotic aspect of life with a 3 1/2 year old. Nothing can ever be experienced half-way. It's either extremely full of joy and excitement, or deep deep dark well of depression and fury-rage. Like living with a tiny, super cute manic depressive. Or with me, about mid-January through March.

4. I met my sweet friend Jackie for lunch today and we saw The Hunger Games. I've read the 1st book but not the other two. This movie reminded me: Man, those Hunger Games people were messed UP. And just thinking about the Kardashians, Jersey Shore, and the Bachelor/Bachelorette (I promise I don't spend a lot of time thinking about these people; only when I talk/write about The Hunger Games), I can see that being America in about another century or two.

5. Speaking of Hunger Games: Obama says children of illegal immigrants can stay. While this makes me, someone who loves children deeply and instinctively strives to protect them no matter their immigration status, insanely respectful of his bravery in these dark and angry times and really really  happy to see someone in government do something human for once (because God knows Obama's Race to the Top plan does NOT), many other people's panties are in a wad about this. They're mad about jobs. I'm not sure what jobs they want that the illegal immigrants are doing; they're certainly not any kind of job *I* want to do. And also, most of these wadded up panties belong to people who wouldn't vote for Obama should he somehow conclusively prove he's Jesus Christ arisen, so it wouldn't even matter if Obama were Jesus Christ and he magically made everything super perfect and awesome. He's clearly a Marxist Socialist Fake American Muslim from Kenya and those are BAD.

I'm just surprised everybody's upset about immigration and healthcare and socialism and Obama's suspect immigrant status. Obama's done so much worse than all that combined in his presidential term...I submit Arne Duncan and Race to the Top as Worse Presidential Ideas EVER. And yes, that includes Watergate. Five years ago I was saying that about Bush's No Child Left Behind, never imagining a Marxist Socialist Kenyan Fake American Leftist president would make it worse. (I'm still voting Obama in 2012, though; don't get excited conservative friends. My Communist choices are extremely limited in the 21st century, and Romney strikes me as a snake oil salesman...whereas, Obama strikes me as just the snake oil.) (Do you see what I just did with that? No, I do not either.) Anywho...

I'm not sure how I feel about illegal immigrants. I do know they aren't all from Mexico, though, and I hope those of you reading this do too. So I wish people would  just stop using the term "illegal immigrants" and replace it with what they really mean: "Mexicans and possibly Central Americans but since I can't tell the difference we'll just call them all Mexicans." Because that's who they really mean. I suppose they know if they say it that way, though, they'll look a tad racist-y. Ignorance and hatred are so much more palatable when you use general, inclusive terminology.


On the OTHER hand...it really chaps my buns when I run across people who admit to living in the USA for longer than 10 years and they refuse to learn English, or claim they can't (insert reason here). Come on, for real? I know it's a hard, crazy language with no logical rules at all. I'm so glad it's not a language I needed to learn as a 2nd language. But seriously. In 10 years you've lived here, you've never ever figured out how to say "Where's the bathroom?" or "I can't speak English well."?

Okay. That last part I just wrote was probably a tad on the ignorant side. I'm sure there's a very sound, logical reason someone would move to another country with a primary language other than their own and never even feel the slightest bit interested in learning how to count to ten or know how to say "Help! Police!" But I feel perfectly justified in allowing it for now since I DID take the time to learn Spanish, for no good reason other than once upon a time I wanted to move to Puerto Rico to marry a member of MENUDO.

So that's the end of political rant/rambling.

5. Wait, no! I'm also really chapped at people who get on the internet to write hate-filled, ignorant things about immigrants and Obama. At least spell properly, for God's sake, the whole world can see you. We're already the fattest people on the planet. At least let us be the Best Spellers.

Okay. So it's almost 1 am and this concludes my ramblings. I feel better to get that immigrant/Obama stuff on my chest. My panties are completely unwadded now, and I'm sorry if anything I just wrote got yours in a wad. Start a blog! It's incredibly liberating.

Also, I'm slightly sad Melissa isn't awake to play the At MY Birthday Party game, though I'm relieved she's not demanding to play games or watch inappropriate Nikki Minaj videos on youtube. I may go pin 10,000 more things to one of my pinterest boards. It requires zero mental acuity to pin stuff that amuses or bewitches you at 1 in the morning. If you don't have a pinterest account yet or you do and haven't pinned anything so far (how is that even humanly possible?!? it's like someone has placed a large slice of delectable cake in front of you and you don't even take a sniff! egads, non-pinning, freakishly normal friends!), may I suggest it as a good stress reliever? It's like one of those squeezy balls, except you just scroll scroll scroll and occasionally CLICK. So awesome.