I Am Not Yet Dead

In case you were wondering. Nope. Still here. Just haven't really had anything interesting to blog about lately. I've been going through this phase where I have been frustrated with uhh....everything in the world and when that happens I kind of shut myself off. I don't want to talk to people about the state of the world, I don't want to update on what's going on in my life when it's just frustrating stuff, and I don't want to make small talk. So, that meant no blogging. But hey, you can't be frustrated all the time so here I am, making an update.

On the happy note, I didn't get "shitcanned" (Jason's phrase) last week when they laid 136 people off in my office. Jason didn't either. That was pretty exciting, since we'd have been screwed if we had been let go, but we weren't. Unfortunately Jason's boss, who he really liked, was let go and now he's been assigned under a new boss and it's looking like he's going to start hating his job pretty quickly because he's going from being useful to being the department's event coordinator and secretary for his new boss. That makes me kind of sad, since the last time he hated his job (what, Discovery Channel store?) life was pretty difficult. He always came home angry or unhappy and we fought a lot for no real reason. So, I'm not looking forward to him not liking this job because we could be going back down that road. He only has to stick it out until December though, so hopefully it won't all become too much for him. As for me, I'm still under the same boss, still doing the same job and might even have the opportunity to stay on for a few hours a week after I start student teaching so that I can get some work done that the team won't be able to do if they're not able to fill my position. That would be nice, because then I could come in on the weekends or in the evenings and just do a few hours of work and still make some cash. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that to work out.

Uhh.....Spring break this week, which is a stupid name because it feels nothing like spring outside, but we have a break and that's pretty nice. Too bad it's only a week, and too bad I still have to go to work during break. Could be worse though.

Watched the Oscars, loved Hugh Jackman. That was good. Trying not to be frustrated with certain people in my life, which I may very well be failing miserably at, but I'm still trying. We'll see how that goes. Gotta make it until at least next April without making Jason want to kill me, so I'm trying to be sunshine and happiness. That's harder than it sounds. Never thought I'd spend the first 4 years of my marriage living with another person who neither of us want to live with. *sigh* But hey, if we make it through this, we can make it through anything. Other people have been pissing me off too, but it's easier to ignore them. I've been ignoring people a lot, because it's easier than telling them I'm frustrated and feeling like they don't really care. Why waste the time right? Right. Besides, I've been accused of being "high pressure" in the past and wouldn't want someone else to think that.

Wow.....this was kind of all over the place. But it's here. And so am I. Hopefully I'll think of something funny in the next few days and post it.

Time for Another Good Idea, Bad Idea

Good Idea:Going with your super awesome drama kids to their theater festival in Bay City which has been named "Love Fest" because any school can attend and it's for departments to be able to display their love of theater through performance of various one act plays. Jason and I had never gone with the kids to this event, mostly because we usually have Saturday classes, but this semester we had no Saturday classes so we decided to chaperone. It was fabulous to see the kids having fun the entire time they were there. They get to mingle with other schools and they have a lot of fun.....some of them have too much fun and have to be detached at the tonsils from whatever girl or boy from another school has attracted their attention, but over all there are not usually any major problems. The kids were pretty well behaved and they performed really well despite some technical problems, so I was pretty happy with the weekend.



Bad Idea:

Accidentally locking your most cuddly and chubby cat in your bedroom the morning that you leave for the weekend trip to Bay City. I'm not entirely sure how he got into the room. We usually close the door behind us whenever we enter or exit the bedroom, but for a 20 lb. ball of lard, he's pretty wiley. He managed to slip into the room without us noticing and I guess he must have gone straight under the bed, because we never saw him. Now, there is no litter box in my bedroom, and he wasn't discovered as being trapped until Jason's mom heard him meowing sometime on Saturday. We left at 7:40 a.m. on Friday, so that's a long time to go without a potty. So, what did my ever-resourceful kitty do? He made himself a potty.....on my bed. Yeah. We came home and didn't know he'd been locked in the room until Jason's mom mentioned it around 10, but at that time we hadn't noticed anything in the bedroom so we thought he had been able to hold it. Guess not. Jason crawled into bed around 11:00 and was like "It smells like cat pee!" because chubbs had apparently made quite a puddle in our mattress that had dried over the course of the weekend. That was....fun. Except that it was no fun at all. So, at 11:10 at night, I'm soaking my mattress in Nature's Miracle (this stuff is a lifesaver) and trying to figure out how we're going to sleep on the soaked mattress, washing the comforter and sheets and trying to evacuate the smell from my room. And here's the thing, it's not like this is the first time a pet has peed in my bed. No, it's happened 3 times!!! First time was Sam sitting on our bed and peeing the night before we went on vacation....WHILE WE WERE IN IT! He has separation anxiety problems. He's an idiot. Second time was Jason's sister's cat, Pig, running into our room while we were getting ready for work one morning, sitting on the bed and just peeing. No, I have no idea why. So, what I want to know is, what is it about my bed that makes it so appealing to pee in?

Those pets are lucky I love them, or I'd kill them.

Narrowing the Gap

So I had to read this article for class and do a Genre reflection on it, and a blog is a Genre so I'm doing it here.  Regular readers, you may want to skip this one as it has nothing to do with wondering who was the first to eat a pineapple, or weird things I think about when I can't sleep at night.  Or read it, if you're interested in education type stuff.

So I'm reading this article called "Narrowing the Gap between Readers and Books", which was...surprisingly short.  No, really, for an educational article, really short.  Anyway, the article talks about how getting students to read, and to want to read, narrows the achievement gap because it helps them perform well in other areas of their education.  Fair enough, I'm on board with that.  Then it goes on to talk about how multi-cultural literature actually helps students, particularly middle-school aged students who are on the verge of losing interest in reading, to maintain their focus and their desire to read.  Now, I can get on board with that too, to an extent.  Part of me wonders if it's the fact that the literature is multi-cultural that is getting students to want to read it, or if it's just because it's different from everything else school has been cramming into their heads for seven or eight years.  I guess I question whether this literature is grabbing kids from other cultures who have not been able to identify with any literature until they discovered books written by people from their culture, or if this is more wide spread and even the non-minority kids are jumping on board with African American lit and saying "Yeah, this is freakin' sweet".  I can see the merit of teaching literature from other cultures, but at some point I have to stop and look at things and say "You know....I'm still going to have to cover the standard literary canon because the school says so", and I wonder if that means I'm going to lose students by having them pay attention to that.  But, then I think that if I can get kids interested in reading literature from various cultures for fun, isn't that still narrowing the gap in a way?  I mean, the article talks about how reading just because you want to is as effective as any other form of reading, even if the kid is just reading comic books or graphic novels.  And to that point, does that make Manga multi-cultural?  No...really, I'm curious.  Do kids see Manga as a multi-cultural piece of of literature, and is that possibly why it's so popular?  Kids eat that stuff up like it's candy.  

I didn't like that the article mentioned lots of cultures, but it seemed to be slanted toward African American literature.  There's nothing wrong with that, but having come out of a high school and (almost) out of a college recently, there's a HUGE push to understand and appreciate African American literature in the classroom.  I think it's great, because it's been neglected for so long, but I think the heavy focus on it makes us forget that there are Asian, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern students in our classrooms, and while they can appreciate African American literature, they can't relate to it.  The study of African American lit was a great move toward inclusion when classrooms were basically either "black kids" or "white kids".  It covered all of your bases, but now our classrooms are so much more diverse and in some places they have become little microcosms of the globe, so we have to be careful to avoid excluding those kids too.  And then, of course, there is a part of me that says "Ok...but if we try to please everyone, does it end in us pleasing no one?" because inevitably some group is going to get left out, and that's just going to cause problems.  

I don't know, those were just the things I was thinking about when I read the article.  It was interesting and gave me some food for thought.

Future entries will resume talking about crazy things.  Perhaps next time I will blog about why you should NOT accidentally lock your cat in your room when you go out of town for 3 days, or why I feel weird when people don't get my obscure references in conversation.  But, that's for another day.

Becky: Live and on the Interwebs

So I did a discussion panel with Christopher Moore a couple of weeks ago, as I mentioned in a previous entry. Well now it's streaming live for all to see. Check it out here. There is very little of my actual face in the video, which is kind of fine 'cause I look like ick, but there's lots of my back, and lots of my friend British Jeff. You'll be able to figure out which one he is, since he's the British one. I thought there was only one video but they broke it down into chapters so you can click the menu on the right of the video window and see the other segments. I think they cut out some pretty funny stuff, but over all it's a nifty video. And it was fun to make!

Ye Olde "HOLY CRAP"!

Working in the book industry, you tend to get a lot of exposure to different authors you might not otherwise pick up and read. When I worked at Waldenbooks, I got to check books out on a library style system so that employees could gain more product knowledge without actually having to spend all of their money on all of the books they were reading. It was pretty genius, especially for someone like me who was really only familiar with the authors I really liked and was reluctant to spend cash on books I wasn't sure I'd enjoy. So, since I was in charge of our fiction section, I spent day after day after day shelving books with interesting titles or by authors I hadn't heard of before. One day I was shelving books and I came across a title that immediately sparked my interest. It was called Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. I did a quick read of the synopsis on the back of the book and thought it sounded funny. I picked up a copy and took it into the break room with me when I went on my lunch break and read the prologue. I laughed like crazy and decided I had to read this book. So, I did. I read that one and the other two we had in stock by this guy and thought "This is some seriously funny stuff". So, when I finished the book I saw that he puts his e-mail in the "about the author" section of his books and I decided to send him an e-mail saying that I worked for a bookstore and I really enjoyed his books. This sounds creepy, but I should also add in that I e-mail restaurants whenever they give good service, stores when I have received good service from them, so basically whenever anyone goes above and beyond my expectations and I have an opportunity to thank them, I send along a little thank-you note. Anyway, I experienced the unexpected when he actually e-mailed me back and started a conversation. I did not expect that. So, I spent some time on his fan message boards, where there were not a ton of fans at the time, and when he was doing a signing at a Borders in Ann Arbor I asked if he'd mind stopping by my Walden store. So he did. Seriously, coolest guy ever right?

Fast forward to a few years later when I'm working in the corporate offices for Borders and get an e-mail from a co-worker saying Chris is going to be in the office one afternoon. Although having a written dialogue with him for years, I am still a bit reluctant for face to face contact with people I admire and think are totally awesome, so I walk past the room where he's signing books for buyers and inventory analysts and I hear "Fine Becky, just pretend I'm not here. I hate you now" as I walk past the room. So...I go in and we have a chat, which kind of bewildered the buyers in the room because we had pre-existing rapport, and then I got my book signed, left and went to the public signing with some other local people from the message boards that night. We had a good time, and that was that.

Fast forward again to two days ago when I check my Facebook and get a message from my friend British Jeff (I mention that he's British because I know several Jeff's and want to specify which one I'm talking about) saying to check the message boards because I'm needed. What? Right. So, I check the boards and see that Chris is doing a Live at 01 Borders book club taping here in Michigan on the 30th and there's a call out to me, Jeff and Steve (lives in the area as well) specifically to come do this book club discussion, so I'm like "Cool, I'm in!" because it sounds like fun. Well then I check my private messages on Myspace and Chris had sent me a request to attend this and I'm like "Wow, cool, I was specifically requested. I'm all flattered and stuff!" so now I'm going to go to Store 01 on the 30th and chat about his new book (see picture above) with some friends of mine and with Chris and have it taped to stream on the Borders.com website. How freaking cool is that?!

Guilty Pleasures

I can't really lie folks, whenever there's nothing on television worth watching, my TV is always set to HGTV. It's sad, but very very true. Plus, since there hasn't been anything new on TV since before Thanksgiving, that means I've been watching a LOT of HGTV. This wouldn't be a problem, except that it makes me want to do all kinds of crazy interior design junk. I've done renovations and painting etc. in the house we live in now, but I don't really want to do anything else to it because we'll NEVER see any return on it since we're not buying this house and also because there's not really a whole lot you can do to this place to make it not suck. In general, the house is crappy and has the worst layout ever so it's always going to be sucky. So, this of course makes me sit around wanting my own house like...A LOT. Although, there are a lot other reasons I want my own house at the moment, but HGTV isn't helping. I want to go in and like...paint stuff or arrange furniture and actually have some space to have more than 3 or 4 friends over at one time. But, since I don't have that, watching HGTV makes me want to go to other people's houses and paint their stuff for them, which probably wouldn't go over so well since not everyone has my taste. But jeez....it makes me want to make people's ugly stuff pretty.

Damn you HGTV.

80's Television

So I was sitting around last night when I couldn't sleep because my brain wouldn't shut off (this happens a lot) and I experienced the usual mind wandering that happens when my brain refuses to be quiet and go to sleep. So, while I was lying in bed, I started thinking about telelvision in the 1980's and how weird some of it was. For example, who was in a room pitching Doogie Howser, M.D.? I imagine the pitch going something like this:

"Ok we want to make a show for families, but it's geared mostly toward pre-teen and teen audiences. It's a show about a 14 year old kid, but he's a genius. Not only is he a genius, he's a doctor! That's right, he's a child prodigy who survived childhood lukemia and decided to become a doctor so he graduated from med school when he was 14 and now he works as a doctor in the same hospital as his dad. The brains and responsibility of this kid will be offset by his idiot best friend who will also serve as the comic relief of the show. What do you think?"

Exec: Nah, not interested.

"Did I mention that at the end of each episode he makes a profound and moral statement in a computer journal that will promote values and good morality?"

Exec: SOLD!

I think that might be how a lot of 80's tv shows were pitched. They probably had weird and basically crappy setups and the premise was usually not fantastic, but the minute you threw in "positive moral message" television studios ate it up like it was a snack cake. I think this is particularly true for shows that were aimed at younger audiences. That's probably how we ended up with Doogie. And what the hell kind of a name is Doogie anyway? I'd have changed that crap.

Thank goodness Neil Patrick Harris has been able to move on from his roots in bad 80's television. And admit he's gay. And do another tv show. And do Broadway. And be Dr. Horrible.