I guess I didn't mean it!

I posted my wedding dress for sale on Craig's List about a week ago, fully expecting to never hear from anyone.

Now someone wants to come try it on.

What should I do?!

anywhere but here

Nothing's more depressing than driving home from a job interview that you bombed (one of 4 so far), while the SUN SETS AT 4:30, knowing you have a 10-inch stack of papers to grade and no plans yet for tomorrow's class, only to have Hawaiian music come on the radio, followed by a mariachi band from Albuquerque.

Well, to me anyway.

My sit-down

I'm taking a break from cramming for today's job interview, and again, I feel like Sarah Palin. Memorizin' catch phrases, stringin' words together into subject-free sentences, feelin' like a fraud and wonderin' what the heck to wear. Let's hope fifth time's the charm with this Interview Dress I bought in August and have been trying to keep seasonal by adding tights and a cardigan.

At my last interview, the woman ahead of me was wearing a nearly identical outfit. I wonder if she was hired instead.

This job is full-time, so I could actually accept it if offered. I was actually offered the last one (eventually, after probably being the third choice), but had to turn it down because they hours were way more than half-time, while being paid as such.

In other news, Goodwill and other thrift stores in Bellevue are awesome. Here's a sampling of what I've found in recent months:

* Laundry by Shelly Segal jacket
* Theory pants (though I couldn't buy them, because they were from back when a 0 was really a 0.)
* BCBG sweater
* Banana Republic shirt
* Ann Taylor pants

I'm not a slave to brands, but it's nice to know that my $7 blazer probably cost its original owner at least a hundred bucks. I'm all for labels when they're cheaper than new stuff at Old Navy!

Off to get costumed up and practice reading off the teleprompter!

Unlike my cynical husband, who came home on election day with a new button that says "If voting could change the system it would be against the law" over a picture of a fat ass sitting on what's either a ballot box or a toilet, I am among the breathless Americans who choked up when they saw Oprah and Jesse Jackson crying in the Grant Park crowd. In fact, I tear up a little when I think of it now, or of the way I felt when I was driving in my hand-me-down 1996 Corolla, battling a sinus infection and with a box full of papers to grade, and heard Neal Conan announce that NPR had called the race: absolutely amazed, exhilarated, and de-familiarized with my surroundings. It felt like an out-of-body experience, to think that more than enough of my countrymen had finally wised up. 

In that spirit of renewed idealism, tempered with caution for the backlash that the RNC is surely hatching, I'm sharing this essay by Pico Iyer. I doubt if Obama had an Obake-busters tshirt, the true badge of a Gen-Xer from Hawaii, but I still feel he embodies some of the Hawaii ethos.

As I flipped from Extra! to Inside Edition to Entertainment Tonight, trying in vain to find ONE gossip show that doesn't embarrass itself with attempts at serious election "news," I couldn't help but wonder: How many of the Hollywood for Obama folks are actually going to vote? I mean, are there polling places in Santa Monica with spa-like facilities and buttery leather chairs for people to wait in? Are there private voting booths that have been swept for hidden cameras and equipped with sparkling water? Is there a special parking area where Mercedes (Mercedeses?) and special edition Priuses are guaranteed to be safe from the dings and indignity of sharing space with our '96 Corollas? Is there any end to my class resentment lately?

Nyuk, nyuk.

But I really do wonder. Of course, there's always absentee voting, but I have even more trouble picturing Justin Timberlake or Angelina Jolie opening and sending mail. John Cusack--sure. I guess we'll know for sure when US Weekly does its November 4 spread on Celebs: They're Just Like You and Me!

9 to 5 -- well, actually, 8:15 to 12:25

I've been torn between wanting to write all about my job, and worrying that a past, current, or future employer--or worse, a parent--will somehow read it and end up hating, firing, or suing me, respectively. I would never share personal information about a student. It's mostly the blatant admissions of moral and professional turpitude that I'm afraid of exposing.

But that's what makes this new job something worth writing about: the surprising lack of turpitude it inspires. For example, just now, when I decided to use the word "turpitude," I actually looked it up in the dictionary to make sure it was appropriate. It wasn't quite the word I was looking for; I thought it meant "laziness." I'll leave it in in case you didn't know that.

Anyway, when preparing lessons for the classes I'm teaching, I find myself able, and even inspired, to keep working until the job is done. I am committed to making sure we cover all of the course objectives, and to making sure that every student is meeting them as we go along. No more putting off grading for weeks on end until papers are so piled up that I decide not to count the assignments. I've actually started grading papers the day they're turned in and returning them promptly the next day. Amazingly, the students read my comments and ask how they can get better grades! No more throwing in a lesson that has nothing to do with the previous topic of study because I'm too tired to write a new one or want to watch Lost. Maybe this will all change in January (when Lost is back on), but for now, I haven't been watching TV at all except for the debates.

Part of this may be pure fear: if I lose this job, our only hope will be getting picked up by a political campaign as a sob story illustrating the failure of the American economic system to reward higher education. (Don't you get something for appearing in campaign commercials, like maybe no-questions-asked food stamps?) Also, our program is the only accredited degree in the country for this population, and accreditation depends on meeting objectives, maintaining college standards, and the like. To be the one who brings down a desperately needed flagship educational program would be a career lowlight, for sure.

But it's mostly due to an amazing fact--amazing because it is so obvious, yet so ignored by the practitioners and administrators of public education. I care because my students care. In teaching, you hear a lot about the reverse of that maxim: Students only care when we care. (And showing Stand and Deliver will make them care, ese.)The assumption is always that if only a teacher cares enough, he or she can make the students buy in...and topple institutionalized racism through calculus.

But so much depends on the students. I will never be as charismatically inspirational as Edward James Olmos, or Meryl Streep, or Michelle Pfeiffer, or even the crackhead played by Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson. (Though Ryan Gosling sure inspires me, if you know what I'm sayin. Heh, heh.) Heck, the best I can hope for is the bumbling Steve Coogan in the brilliant Hamlet 2, and even that's a stretch. Probably 5 percent of all teachers have that innate gift of inspiring with their personalities, rather than with fleeting coolness, fear, intimidation (by discipline or grading on a curve), bribery, or painstaking, exhaustive preparation. And when your classes gleefully trounce your preparedness day in and day out, with their drunkenness or their smirks or their attempts to start fistfights or fires in your classroom, it's easy to decide not to prepare anything at all.

But when your students appear to be listening to every word you say, make eye contact, ask for help, email you when they miss class to ask for the homework, and seem so earnestly committed to overcoming their limitations, it's pretty hard to spend four hours watching Sarah Palin-mocking videos instead of modifying tests, writing those Jeopardy questions that all students seem to love, emailing extra instructions to a kid who didn't get it, or memorizing notes for tomorrow.

No, any more than 2 hours of Palin videos would be turpitudinous.

simple carbohydrates

I had a lovely birthday yesterday; thanks for the calls and Facebook messages! I should probably be posting this there, but ever since I started feeling obligated to become friends with the Mean Girls who hated me in high school, the boys who ignored me, and people not so far removed from my students, I've started trying to keep the personal info to a minimum. So I'm not linking to Missy Mussy from my profile. What a budding conspiracy theorist I am.

Anyway, here were the highlights:

• Started the day with half a leftover doughnut from Ben's Sunday sojourn to Winchell's.
• Taught Nutrition class. This would only become more ironic as the day went on.
• Got my Washington driver's license. Gift #1: I waited less than 20 minutes, compared to the 2 hours we spent when Ben got his, and the lady was nice to me! Sadly, the mean lady I'd noted last time took my picture. After the first one, she grunted, shook her head, and signaled me wordlessly for a second try.
  
• Had lunch at the German deli next to the DMV: marinated vegetables, a salami-and-buttercheese sandwich on that European wholemeal bread that you never find anywhere else, and the cutest tiny waxed paper bag of potato chips. I felt like Frances with her mini shaker of salt.
  
• Picked Theo up from school to take him to gym class. He was so excited to see me, if I do say so myself, probably owing to the fact that I am willing to humiliate myself by pretending to be Roo from Winnie the Pooh every time we play.
• Played.
• Had a birthday dinner of pizza & Chardonnay (my two favorite food groups, cheesey carbs & white wine), followed by......
• DECORATE YOUR OWN CUPCAKES!!!!!!! Theo was so excited about the stuff they had chosen at the store--candy corn, pastel mints, and sugary birthday letters, it was hard to not be awash in childhood delight. He carefully arranged as many mallowcreme pumpkins and mints as would fit on each cupcake, then ate one bite and proclaimed himself done eating, proving my sister's philosophy that if you don't limit candy and sweets, kids will naturally stop themselves when they're full. Levi happily smashed his face into a cupcake and got frosting up his nose. Gift #2: A friendly reminder from the heartstrings to the old baby machinery: Let's get crackin'! I can't wait to start my brood and name the first one Prig, or maybe Squirt, out of admiration for our potential new first ever female Prez! [Aside: Ben and I made a pact that if Marge McMoosemunch becomes Actual President, we will consider moving abroad.]
• The night was capped off with Gifts # 3 and 4: a box of powdered sugar donuts (guess who picked that out?) and a UW sweatshirt from Ben, "to keep my Mussy warm." We had already shopped for wine glasses over the weekend, having given away the wine glasses he gave me two birthdays ago before the move.
  

Awww. I am very warm indeed.

And today is the last day I eat nothing but leftover pizza, donuts, and cupcakes. Tomorrow I'll try to weave in another food group, especially since we're starting food diaries in Nutrition class, and I just couldn't live with the hypocrisy.

not the timeliest, but hilarious nevertheless

I've never embedded a video before, but this one is so funny, I'm willing to risk the embarrassment of utter failure.

lemmings

Ben and I just stopped by our friendly neighborhood bank, WaMu, where we opened a joint checking account, our third account there in the past month. While there, we overheard a total of at least $50,000 being withdrawn as people closed their accounts and prematurely cashed out CDs. The assistant manager (bitterly) joked about the giant pen she'd been using to sign checks all day. When one lady was asked why she was closing the account, she said, "Because I heard you guys might go bankrupt?"

Well, if we all panic like you and pull our money out then yeah, it'll definitely go bankrupt. Thanks for making it more likely, you broad-shouldered, '80s tank dress-wearing ninny.

Another woman, wearing torn shorts, a "Life is Good" t-shirt and slippers, first asked about how much she needed to open a checking account. Finally, I thought, someone who seems less with-it than us! Then, after carefully examining the brochure for free checking, she got to the teller, where we overheard her say, "I'd like to withdraw $10,000 from my account."

Whaaaa?

Then again, maybe I'm just jealous that these people had thousands of dollars to withdraw. In all honesty, if my checking account did vanish at this point, it would represent a setback of about two day's pay.

Time to have Ben melt out my fillings and hit the pawn shop!

tossed salads and scrambled eggs

I think a list approach will be the least intimidating and painful (for me, anyway) way to jump back into the world of documenting every miss and muss. So, here's a sampling of what's happened since my last post. This is more for my benefit than anything else, since I often find myself wondering, "I wonder what I was doing at this time four years ago?" I hope to soon be back to making brilliant observations about cereal box redesigns and those quirky Americans I keep finding myself surrounded by.

Hawaii, June 10-August 2:

• Didn't work a lick for two months
• Had a tumor removed from my thumb, couldn't use right hand for the month of July.
• Watched Ben sink (or soar, depending on your perspective) into the depths/heights of total obsession with Wii Mario Cart.
• Basked in awe of my grandmother as I wrapped our precious belongings in the hundreds of sheets of newsprint that she saved from my aunt and uncle's move and seemingly ironed into perfectly folded squares. Turned acquisition of bubble wrap, peanuts, and boxes into a full-time job.
• Got rid of a whole bunch of crap, from 10-year-old credit card statements to all those zebra print and sequined tops I've been hoarding since college just in case I ever got invited to several prostitute-themed costume parties.
• Decided to keep Sock 'Em Boppers.
• Lived with Mom and Dad for two weeks: became so addicted to Clean House, What Not to Wear, How Do I Look? and Project Runway that I rarely left the house.
• Took my last Body Pump and Body Combat classes. Cried a little inside. Abs, triceps, and other muscles not used in everyday life began their slow decline into middle-aged lady flappiness.
  

Bellevue, August 2-11:

• Risked ending my marriage with new addiction: Craig's List furniture sales. Purchased kind of cute, but mildly dysfunctional, mid-century modern dining set and credenza. Learned the meaning of "credenza."
• Played for hours: dinosaurs, roaring, bouncing, bounce-waiting, chase and chase-tag, catch and throw-catch. Realized I could spend hours watching Levi eat blueberries (and so could he spend hours eating them), started contemplating career in early childhood education.
• Went to Portland for a weekend of dinosaur exhibit-visiting, Jasmine and Carolyn-visiting, and massive pastrami eating. Ben got his new favorite t-shirt: "Body by Pastrami" from Kenny & Zuke's Deli.
• Interviewed for a great job as liaison between Seattle Community College and local high school. Got my hopes up.

Seattle, August 11-present:

• Didn't get the job. Spent the next week avoiding all activities related to job-seeking. Realized I'd been counting on getting the job, and began to panic over lack of job and mounting bills.
• Moved into our new apartment across from Gasworks Park, which overlooks some part of Lake Union. I still haven't figured out where exactly we are in relation to Puget Sound, and where that is in relation to the ocean. When I look out the window at night, I imagine that the glittering water just beyond the Seattle skyline is it, but am probably wrong.
• Bought lots of junk for our apartment to replace all the junk that we gave away before moving (mops, hangers, bathroom rugs, trash cans, olive oil....why can't all this stuff just come with your new apartment? Except for the olive oil. But think of how much is wasted whenever anyone moves, unless they've carefully calibrated how much olive oil and how many ziploc bags they'll need, and used up every bit before moving.)
• Bought the furniture of a couple leaving UW for a new job: shelves, dressers, TV, lamps....I should have made an offer on their plastic disposables and olive oil. While enjoying the two channels we get, came across an episode of Frasier. Appropriately, it was about a lady who had left her successful matchmaking career in another state to move to Seattle, and now found herself so desperate for new clients that she was carrying around a big binder full of what turned out to be empty pages. Now, if I can only convince Ben to let me troll the downtown bars for local washed-up celebrities, maybe I can find one to give me $10,000 like Frasier did!

Last two days:

• Applied for at least 20 jobs: preschool teacher, substitute teacher, after school teacher, barista/bread seller, Intervention Specialist (classroom interventions, not the kind I love to watch on A&E), Sales Associates galore, and many, many more.
• Scheduled 3 more interviews. Hope to cancel two of them once better offers come along.
• Tomorrow, am off to Bellingham for a one-night trip to visit Erick and Jenn, wedding guests extraordinaire and willing writers of prescriptions!
  

That's all for now. I'm going to go bemoan the impending fall of civilization, heralded by the news of Palin's daughter and the sinking feeling that this will only boost her popularity. It's only a matter of time before we learn the whole baby think is carefully orchestrated to appeal to those who like their national news aligned to the Spears family trajectory, and that McCain is adopting a baby apiece from Cambodia, Malawi, and Ukraine. And having twins.

Dan in Real Life deserved every one of the two and a half stars it received (on average). Unlike most of the movies I get from Netflix and watch while Ben is away, I was able to watch the entire thing without my usual breaks: twice for snacks, three times for internet breaks, and once for good. I watched it to the end! But can't tell you how it ended. I think ambiguously.

Keeping it short and sweet. Because if I launch into the topic that's constantly on my mind, renting our next apartment, I very well could go on for hours.

Not to gloat or anything, but....

School's! Out! For! Summer!

School's! Out! For Students! (tomorrow) *

School's! Out! For! Teachers! (the next day)

School's! Out! For! Ever! (I sure hope not, but you never know.) **

* And all I have to is bake some Costco pizzas and assure all my kids that they'll pass for the year.

** Because I don't have a job yet, so this really could be the end of my teaching career.

I'm celebrating by baking 3 pans of brownies (again for the studes), eating some delicious red chile that Ben made from chile pods hand carried over by our NM friends, and then watching Dan in Real Life while searching for apartments on Craig's List, my favorite new pasttime. (Just the Craig's List part, not the DIRL part.) Ben's working tonight so I can do whatever I want, even watch mediocre romantic comedies! I love life!

graduation day

On Saturday, Ben and I attended the high school graduation. We got there at 6 a.m., and the kids started arriving at 6:30, having been told to be there by 7. It was the first time any of my students have been early since I've known them. I was in charge of the "VIP tent," where such dignitaries as Board of Education members, our county councilwoman, and the drug court judge who will soon be sentencing some of the graduates were feted with banana bread and fried rice. I dragged Ben along as my muscle, forcing him to endure a seven-hour day of carting coolers to and fro, chasing teachers down in an attempt to give them their leis, and being embarrassed by me during the ceremony as I shielded his bald spot with my program.

The keynote speaker, a delightful woman who was the perky head cheerleader when I was a freshman and is now a teacher and radio deejay, gave a funny and lively speech full of classic pidgin phrases, mildly insulting shout-outs to the principal ("When I heard he was the principal, I thought, did they do a background check on this guy?"), and jokes that would be racist were we not in Hawaii ("You Filipinos out there know what I mean.....[silence]......ho, where all da Filipinos? Had plenny when I was in skoo."). This particular joke had to do with describing the location of one's "na'au," some kind of Hawaiian center of power, which is located in the gut, which is, coincidentally, Filipinos' favorite pig part to eat! HA!

Several times throughout the speech, she paused to "break it down," cuing Jawaiian music and dancing around the stage (at one point imitating the principal's Elaine Benis-like dance style), which caused the seniors to cheer and leap from the bleachers to skank in their shiny green robes. Amazingly, they sat down and resumed listening to her when the music stopped.

On the last "breakdown," she delivered her final, inspiring words over the even more inspiring lyrics, "Pakalolo, hula girls, and getting laid....."

Word.

butt to the bug

Lucrecia asked of a recent post: "What the eff are butt-bugs?"

I've decided I may as well settle this in a larger forum than the comments, which only one person (me) may read, so that my entire readership (Lucrecia and maybe Dennis) may learn. Sorry, self-deprecating quips about this blog being an exercise in navel-gazing just never seem to get old.

Butt-bugs are like my students. They started out being the bane of my existence here in Kona, but have oddly endeared themselves to me, perhaps because I've realized just how benign they are in comparison to the other evils out there, like giant flying cockroaches, Blackwater, centipedes, and corporate lawyers like those portrayed in Michael Clayton.

I believe the common name for the butt-bug is "earwig;" however, when we first encountered them shortly after moving here, in utter terror due to their shiny black carapaces and forked scorpion-like tails (or are those their heads?), we first ran screaming, then quickly named them butt-bugs because, well....hmm. I guess because they have weird butts? Also, it was around the time I saw a bratty toddler on Supernanny call her mother "Butt pie," which caused us to start calling each other that, which caused "butt" to enter into our vocabulary to a remarkable degree that has only increased.

At certain times of year, B.B.s are everywhere: dead ones on the floor and in the windowsill, live ones milling around wherever they please. One morning I found one stuck in the water gauge of the coffee maker. We never used it again. The funniest BB experience was when one hitched a ride to school with me on the outside of my car. Our evening conversations began to prominently feature our respective discoveries of butt-bugs during the day--in the lid of my Ziploc container at lunch, or worse. "They've hit the bedroom."

Ben and I have both had nightmares about them. I've lived a real-life nightmare when I suddenly realized I was surrounded on all sides by them in the shower.

But they endear themselves to me by never biting, and by running away cutely when I chase them (but not so fast that I can't catch them), not being able to fly, and looking sort of like tiny toys. All much like my students.

So that, Dear Lucrecia/Reader, is what butt bugs mean to me. I don't wish I could take them with me to Seattle, but nor do I wish to destroy them completely. Because who knows what we could have to deal with in their place? Much like...you know.

i'm going to miss this

• Going to seminars for work that are held either a) at the Sheraton Keauhou, affording the precise view upon which I meditated on my wedding day; or b) at the Sheraton Waikiki, where on my breaks I can thaw from frigid air-conditioning by watching Japanese tourists sunbathe floors below, learn to surf, or plan their Western weddings. All of which I did today during the state meeting of English teachers.

• Buffet luncheons at said teacher functions that are so resplendent in their offerings of protein and sugars (fish, chicken, fried tofu and beef, plus five desserts!) that we Ts spend the rest of the day proudly comparing how much we ate. Actual overheard snippets: "Ho, look at the dessert plates! Most hotels only give you the small-kine saucers so you only can take one. Can fit all of 'em on those." (English teachers like to exercise their local roots at all-teacher functions.) And, "I can't believe I'm hungry again [on the ride to the airport]. I ate choke of that fried tofu and watercress salad. And the chicken long rice, oh and the scalloped potatoes. Must be because I only had one half-slice of the tiramisu. Oh, and little bit of the guava cake. Oh. And I guess some creme brulee. But I never eat breakfast.....just the doughnut when we got here, and a muffin and bagel with four cream cheeses. Ugh, I could not possibly fit another morsel of food into my mouth."

Good GOD, but my dialogue skills are pathetic. I realize now that I have been projecting by including a dialogue component in my class's final writing project. When I suck at it. This is projecting, see. At least, based on my sub-high school-level training in the discipline. Of psychology, not dialogue.

Whatever, that was a composite of quotes I carefully squirreled away in my mind, along with an attempted catalog of social offenses committed against me on the plane by this classic A-hole couple that I sat next to. They stole my window seat and never said a word, clearly hoping--okay, knowing--that I wouldn't challenge them because of my nice mousely demeanor.

I also squirreled up some exhibits of classic teacher behavior that makes you certain they qualify for sainthood. Who else would have to check out an ancient laptop to bring to a conference on media literacy? Or jokingly note that their eating habits are so screwed up by living according to a bell, they nearly faint when denied their 10:00 snack or 12:00 lunch, and have to grab the sides of the metal detector to avoid crumpling to the floor? And only one of those examples is me! Don't worry, I didn't almost crumple. I risked great shame to my family by taking three trips to the buffet, and eating a gross carrot muffin, to prevent that from happening.

I'm sure teachers in Washington, should I be so lucky as to get hired as one, suffer comparable injustices, complainable offenses, yadda yadda. But I doubt whether I will ever feel such solidarity as with the teachers of my homeland, if for no other reason than I now can say I've given up my lunch breaks to make candy leis and been swayed in the awarding of a scholarship by whether or not someone regularly signed up to bring "Main Dish" to potlucks. And that I watched a woman eat a commercially produced Spam musubi during a conference presentation at 9:50, and I would have traded a year of tenure to trade places.


* sharing a ride with a colleague I've only met once, but who is totally warm, sharing of her personal life, cheerleading of mine, and effuses of my shoes (gray and black Crocs sandals with a silver button) without the usual retro-irony, "Oh da cuuute!"

* Living in a place where Spam Musubi is commercially produced, candy leis are a valid part of school culture and a currency of the National Honor Society, and Crocs are acceptable professional footwear.

whoops a daisy!

I guess I forgot to update this to report that we've decided to move to Seattle. Missy Mussy Develops S.A.D. may be an upcoming headline.

In other news, we got a Wii. I love it because I am a decent bowler according to its standards. Ben has already bought a new game, The Godfather, and is hard at work trying to beat it with the help of internet tips.

The final countdown is on: 13 more days of school. I have a ton of papers to grade, and have to figure out how to goad my students into finishing the final project that I foolishly decided to undertake in these last weeks. As a senior class adviser, I also have to work on an awards night, 2 full days of graduation rehearsal, and graduation itself. The main task involved is keeping students from getting wasted.

What I really want to be doing is scouring Real Simple back issues for tips on how to pack our stuff, and planning how Ben and I are going to play house in our new tiny apartment! I'm actually looking forward to having a smaller space to keep clean. And no butt-bugs in Seattle!

I can't get rid of those black lines for the life of me. However, this recent brush with the bitterness of humanity (a.k.a. loss of electricity for 2 hours) has helped me realize what is truly important.

back to the good old days

I write this by candlelight, not a flicker of electric glow in sight as the village of Kealakekua has been unexplainably plunged into darkness. It’s been a long time since a blackout that wasn’t caused by torrential rains or a devastating earthquake.

Could this be a harbinger of a new normality to come, as we run out of fossil fuels? Days ending with sunset; TV culture dead before the idiots of The Hills realize they’re no longer being taped; people forced to depend on each other, to commune in ways not seen since the pre-modern era? To spend the evenings (provided one’s store of homemade candles is plentiful enough) whittling tree stumps into crude toys for a child’s birthday, or ruining one’s eyes darning Bounty towels for re-use? Ooh, or crafting peanut and walnut shells into little dolls? I used to love doing that!

Thank god my computer battery is charged.

Gall durn. I just tried to download a plaintive-yet-uplifting Irish ballad to accompany my piety, but realized our wireless router is asleep in the blackout.

There sure are a lot of cars driving around. I bet people (young people) went out for drives because they couldn’t bear the lack of stimuli, and at least could listen to the radio or charge their i-pods in the car.

Whoa! I’ve been on for 15 minutes and my battery is already down by half. This does not bode well for my future as a Hawaii Outpost of the Pioneer Days blogger.

Now, let us pray that I someday am able to retrieve this, as I must turn off the computer to preserve precious battery life.

On to a week’s backlog of candlelit crosswords. Pray the stubs of wedding candles that I so presciently hoarded are not the cause of my early (but how romantic!) demise.

away from her

Last night while Ben was working his job as an A/V geek, I watched Away from Her, a heart-breaking movie about a sixty-ish woman's initial descent into Alzheimer's. It was really good, but I imagine it would be very hard to watch for anyone who's actually cared for someone with the big A. It was directed by Sarah Polley, who the dorkier among us know and love from her starring role in the sadly short-lived Ramona series on PBS.

My initial reactions were typical: Call parents. Spend more time with grandmother. Do two crosswords a day to keep mind sharp. Stop eating so much canned food, stop using anti-perspirant.

But what's lingered with me the most is Julie Christie's awesome wardrobe. She continues, of course, to be a stone fox 30 years after McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and even in the nursing home where she ended up, was a gorgeous, intellectual type. What does it say that I covet her ivory herringbone coat with a shawl-like collar that buttoned intricately at the neck? Or that I want to practice wearing my hair in the loose, careless way she pinned up her silvery-blond curls?

I want to dress like a sixty-five-year-old woman. Albeit, one in designer clothes carefully chosen by a costume designer, but the impulse is still worrisome.

greens

I'm basking in my own virtue after tonight's Sunday dinner:

• Vichyssoise, a pureed soup of leek, potato, peas and sorrel, which I had never heard of until Wednesday when I picked up our weekly produce subscription and it became my new favorite edible leaf. It's slightly sour and has the texture of a mint leaf.
• Stir-fried chicken with spicy beet greens and spinach, topped with green onions and peanuts, over brown rice.

I've also whipped up some chocolate soy pudding for Ben and portioned it into four dessert cups. Next I'm going to pay my bills, dutifully filing the statements in reverse chronological order, fill my weekly pill case with vitamins, and then iron my clothes for the week.

In case it's not painfully obvious, I have some job applications (which all include essays!) that should have been submitted a couple of months ago. Just as soon as I take care of all these essentials, they'll be the very next on my list.

Seattle probability for today: 87 %, not factoring in Friday's announcement that Seattle Public Schools is effecting a hiring freeze. 96 % when factoring in the report that Theo "ran into Mommy with the [child-size] tractor."

for those of you who are keeping score,

80 percent sure we'll move to Seattle. Or, as I like to think of it, Theo and Levi's playground that I, their favorite auntie, will turn into the magical backdrop of all their most beloved memories.

two a-holes in a 'stang

Just got back from our honeymoon. When we arrived on Kauai, the rental agent upsold us to a Mustang convertible. My excuse is that he was over 60, which elicited my pity (anyone these days who is my parents' age and working elicits pity, as I wish for my parents to be doted on while lounging in clouds of non-gravity), and it was only a few bucks more per day!

The car, which we couldn't have known would be cherry-red, prompted us to embrace our newfound mantle with gusto and fully inhabit the obnoxious couple personae played by Kristin Wiig and Jason Sudeikis. We cracked gum, we wore our sunglasses when we didn't really need to, we went to the hotel pool bar in the afternoon when there were children nearby.

We ordered things like tuna melts and fries when there was a shrimp stand across the street and perfectly good mangoes on trees nearby, I guess. (Dude, I hate shellfish, and fruit is a waste of stomach space, much like hard candy.)


We felt an unnameable malaise until the fourth night when we moved from the Hilton to our vacation rental and were reunited with the mother's milk of Fark and The Superficial:



We became the most animated when we found scenes that conformed to our images from television ads, like this one from a Bank of Hawaii commercial where teenage girls jump off the Hanalei pier and proclaim, "This is our Hawaii":



But we also provided one of the only stores of booze at the BYOB wedding, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes up for any touristy a-holeness we may have perpetrated upon the island. Our handiwork:

This would've been all water bottles without us, Babe.

cirque du muss

Dazzled by his recent acquaintance with the vast retail vistas of the Internet (in this case, free shipping both ways), Ben recently ordered nine pairs of shoes from Zappos.

I'll leave that there for a few lines to sink in with any of you who knew Ben five years ago.

When the order arrived, we both ran down the driveway, ironically barefoot, to pick it up from our mail carrier's Subaru. As we turned back toward the house, Ben held up the box and exclaimed, "My clown shoes!"


It tickled me so, I had to take a pic, and that takes a lot.

Ben would probably want me to mention that he only intended to keep one pair and the giant order was for trying-on purposes. Of course, none of them fit his Hobbit feet and he had to send them all back.

Ben was accepted to the library science programs at UH-Manoa and the University of Washington. What should we do?

too far?

Today I told one class they sounded like a horde of Beavises and Buttheads. Then added an impression (hunh, hunh, hunh, durrhhhhh) for emphasis. Apparently, B&B is being rerun on some cable channel, so they actually knew what I was talking about.

After another class rushed out the doors to see a potential fight in progress, ignoring me until I slammed the doors and threatened that anyone caught outside would get turned in for truancy, I told them I'd hate to see how they would act in the midst of a terrorist attack (as if that were entirely possible, even imminent, on our ridiculously rural campus). I punctuated this with a slack-jawed, buck-toothed impression:

Duhrrr. Wonder wut's goin' on out thay're? C'mon, yall! [explosive sound effect]

It's funny how even in Hawaii, a Southern accent universally connotes dumbness. Of course, had I used a pidgin impression, it might not have gone over so well.

Miss Muss, the Slack-jawed Yokel (!)

I have a whole backlog of Ben stories and Houseguest Tales that I have not been posting because--well, life with Ben and the Boys has just been so fun and all-consuming. Oh, there's also the crushing laziness.

Here's one I had the foresight to jot down on the back of a sheet from our daily New Yorker cartoon calendar. (I typed Jew Yorker by mistake--hee!) One of the unexpected joys of married life is getting gifts that I used to mock when I worked at the bookstore, but now can't imagine life without. I save all the torn-off sheets and use them for grocery lists, then have a moment of amusement at the store when I pull it out of my pocket and reread the cartoon, no matter how lame.

Without further ado, a Ben-Missy Mussy dialogue.

Ben (whining): We're out of ketchup.

MM: Here, open this.

B: BOO, Hunt's!

MM: It was on sale.

B (in mincing, sing-song voice): Oh, fine! Next time wool panties are on sale, I'll be sure to get you some wool pa-han-ties.

My husb is a Heinz man, apparently. Who knew he was susceptible to brand loyalty?

Another piece of ephemera brought a twinge of sadness to my otherwise blissful weekend ritual of cleaning the kitchen counter. As Ben puts it, we're Empty Nesters (not fans of the Richard Mulligan show, which was awesome, but actual sufferers of the middle-aged-parent syndrome).

It's a sheet of notebook paper helpfully labeled "heuristic experiment," then containing the following:

DONALD

+ GERALD
________

ROBERT

Hints:

1) D = 5

2) Every letter stands for a number 0-9

3) Each letter is a number different from the number given another letter.

Houseguest # 1 (of 3), Lu, posed this early in his visit when we were talking about some epistemological question or other. Why was I having a conversation in which epistemological questions were even possible? Lu is what my mom likes to call "A Renaissance Man." She uses that to describe people who are both intimidatingly intelligent and good with their hands, whether in carpentry, engineering, climbing coconut trees, or cooking--you know, all the things Lu can do better than me. Basically, when around Lu, I talk out of my ass and madly hope that he won't see through my author-name-dropping and quoting of "this article I read--well, really this really interesting headline--in the New York Times" to my comparatively Neanderthal intelligence. Although, come to think of it, he would probably have an argument for how the Neanderthals were comparative geniuses for their mastery of survival tactics that modern man completely lacks. Anybutt.

This equation, which Houseguest #2 of 3 figured out within 24 hours, is apparently a way for psychologists to examine how a person reasons. Whether you get the answer is not as important as how you arrive at it. Suffice it to say that before I just stared at it with my mouth agape, I first tried to use my logic and algebraic skills; which were stunted in 9th grade by a Filipino teacher whose indecipherable accent I protested by accepting an F rather than submit to her extra credit scheme of making dozens of origami polygons; then quickly reverted to mad, random guessing, going through many days of New Yorker cartoons and erasing more than I have erased in my adult life.

That reminds me of how my "hobby" in 3rd and 4th grade was making "eraser shreds," by diligently rubbing $1 Sanrio erasers across clean paper in a quest for uniform eraser turds which we would separate by hue and organize into the compartments of our plastic pencil boxes. Monica, Jonadine and I would sometimes stay in at recess to meet our self-imposed quota. I shall have to analyze this curious social practice soon. Please continue to read despite the possibility that I may actually do so.

eating mac & cheese oh yes i'm eating mac & cheese i think i like it!

I backed out of a camping trip with Ben and the Boys (more on them later), and while I've enjoyed watching "Real Simple" and "Everyday Food" (two PBS shows to which I have an inexplicable and nerdy devotion) without Ben's derisive snorts at the segments on organizing your gift wrap, I'm mulling a plan to show up for the second night at the cabin.

But that probably won't happen because I don't have a reliable car. Plus, it's good to have a night alone once in a while that gives me a taste of what I'd be doing if I were single. So what am I doing?

Poring over my husband's profile on Facebook.

Funny how it gives me the same giddy, nervous feeling I once had when we started our courtship over Friendster, as I pondered the tone of my next message - flirty or informational, revealing of the fact that I had memorized his profile or full of calculated ignorance?

Or maybe I'm just thrilled by the fact that I'm eating Stouffer's macaroni and cheese and not a steaming bowl of lentils for the first time in two weeks, and am about to watch last week's episode of LOST, this time without human interruption.

If I ever write a novel, I am going to have to weave in the weird things certain kinds of people say here in Hawaii. They're not pidgin--it's something more subtle than that. Maybe local-ese?

Example:

Instead of saying "You may turn in the same paper for this class and another, so it will count twice," a professor who speaks thusly said, "This paper can double count."

Or yesterday, my principal was describing a new program for managing student data. One glitch, he told us, is that you can't merge the data from another program--so you have to "double enter" it.

I've never heard this use of double anywhere else but here. I can trace it as far back as playing Chinese jump rope, when depending on who was the boss of the game, you may or may not be allowed to "double jump."

Another, more grating, quirk is the prissy Japanese schoolmarmish one of over-enunciating T's. A certain school administrator does this when s/he (see how I'm leaving it totally anonymous?) is obviously wishing to flex his/her authoritative muscle. S/he'll be like, "We must base our instruction on day-TAH," or "We must all be on time to tomorrow's meet-TING." To achieve this super-effective (if you're trying to alienate your inferiors) speech pat-TERN, simply pull the corners of your mouth as close to your ears as you can, keep your teeth close together, and pronounce the word slowly, as if trying to teach a child to say a new word, or as if dislodging a pesky sesame seed from between your front teeth.


Who am I kidding--novel? Time to get back to my work of describing the "best shave ice in Kona!" and "best bar for music" in 250 words apiece, without coming across as the bitter, judgmental misanthrope that I am.