yet what prodigious mowing we did make
Saturday 28 July 2007 | I like a cookie
Finally, I overdid it. Finally. After days of boxes and boards and sticks and sawing and raking and putting down contact paper and shoving things in closets. It took yesterday morning’s second lawn assault, one week after the first, but I did eventually manage to wear myself out completely. (Though I am pleased to note that the back garden is now tamed into submission, and when the Brujo returns on Monday he’ll be able to maintain it with that jaunty rattling nonstop mowing glide-stride which is ever so much more fun than what I did yesterday, mostly the old push-pull push-pull struggle-heave-yank through clumps and clots of recalcitrant Bermuda.) The cat woke me around six (she knows it’s her hour to go outside and watch me do yard work and glare at the feral cats, who must think she’s hilarious—”look how fat it is! it’s been shaved! and it has a green rhinestone collar!”) and I dressed with one eye open and betook yawning myself to the back lawn, where lo, I didst Mowe. Probably one reason Virginia Woolf never lived in the suburbs. Though she and Leonard could also no doubt afford to hire gardeners, and did.
Afterward I felt like an eighty-year-old. It took me three hours (though I stopped for two water breaks, and one longer break for locust tree trimming and bean removal). Now the grass is all evenly two inches high but for a very small mound in back where a colony of hostile ants live. I staggered in around nine, took a shower, breakfasted on nectarines and pecans, then took two Tylenol (at ten in the morning! decadent) because I suddenly had my period. Then fell into bed and have been little elsewhere since. I keep thinking of things I want to do, standing up to do them and then somehow flopping back down, addled. I did last night finish up some edging, which took about an hour, until the vorpal blade ran out of battery and so did I. Mango licuado made with unsweetened kefir for dinner (the involuntary detox continues) 
and more bed. This morning: laundry sorting and a big attempt actually to go to the laundromat, which resulted only in my getting all the laundry and detergent into the car, then falling back into bed with The Wings of the Dove, the Zen faery’s brilliant gift of a Baja book, the Brujo’s copy of Answer to Job, because it was the first thing out of the box in which I rummaged last night—and one of these ridiculously fancy late-empire yogurts by Rachel’s, that come in woowoo flavors like plum honey lavender and vanilla chai. So far I have managed to do nothing useful today besides wash out the cat’s water bowl (she’s sulky and bored: Why aren’t you doing yard work, Mommy?!) and call my parents. And rearrange the dirty clothes.
[Did you realize Jumex has sugar?! (The beverage that is, not oral selegiline.) Flopped on the carpet I finally read the label (”and/or high fructose corn syrup”—they don’t even KNOW what’s in there) and no wonder I’ve been liking it so much. Cane sugar 1, Unnarrator 0. No more Jumex “fruit nectar” for me; back to 50¢ fizzy water.]
I find the physical toil to be deeply satisfying, though I talk and grumble to myself the entire time I am doing it—and though I never dreamed one relatively small woman could sweat quite so much, soaking an entire t-shirt with salt water. (By the end of the three hours yesterday, I’d given up on wiping my face and simply allowed the rivulets to drip freely and indelicately off the tip of my nose.) I think I would prefer, in fact, to have a year-long yard work fellowship, instead of teaching. But this is not an option at this time.
Speaking of teaching, the Brujo has landed an interview with the alternative private school right around the corner. The bad news: they only have an opening to teach math to middle schoolers, a demographic he particularly does not enjoy (”they’re so squirrelly at that age!”) Even worse, he was sent an appalling list of questions he must answer in writing prior to the interview. They include queries such as: “How do you feel about working as part of a team? Where do you see yourself five years from now? Describe one of your recent goals. How would you plan daily lessons?” To which the Brujo, who has over twenty years of teaching and administrative experience, utters an eye-roll I can hear from 550 miles away, and dryly suggests answering them all with: Golly, I dunno. For my part, when I think about his potential (private) ripostes to such inanities, I can only quote Mlle Bovary: BWAHAHAHAHAHA! “Why are you interested in our school”?….well OBVIOUSLY, because it’s right across the street from the Vietnamese noodle shop, duuuhhhhh!
Even without answering their dumb questions, he is an imminently hot property and will inevitably be offered a job there or elsewhere; and should he wind up teaching in such a milieu I am duty-bound to attend every function just to beat back the MILFs (and DILFs) (as well as of course TILFs) with rolled-up scrolls of my deathless verse.
Speaking of which, silly idea for a book of white-trash working-poor poems: Made in China. Hanjin!
The B., as it happens, is not the only one being subjected to academic bureaucracy of the kind that makes you want to gnaw off your own forearm. Yours truly just received an email informing her that she is now a part of TAD. TAD! TAD stands for Teaching Associate Development. How do they think of these things? she said admiringly.
Now you might labor under the delusion that being enrolled in a graduate program could be considered adequate professional development. Or, maybe the three-week teacher training course would suffice….or the semester-long one-credit course preparation class. But no. This year we have TAD, and thank God for it! How did teaching associates ever function before? (As the Brujo divines, “They got some crappy student evals, and a bunch of kids flunked, so someone managed to get a grant and now you have to do more work for the same amount of money. It’s the kind of thing that makes administrators wet themselves.”) (Actually he said something else but we’re trying to keep it clean here.)
But really, how bad can TAD be, you ask? Allow us to demonstrate. We have to complete five “pre-orientation online modules” on stuff like FERPA, sexual harassment and diversity; these take, we are told, between twenty and thirty minutes each to finish (oh that’s what they think). Then there’s a half-day “face-to-face orientation” which seems to be mainly HR paperwork and probably some PowerPoint hurled at us. Last and worst, during the course of the semester we must “choose from among six professional developmental activities,” which actually only exist as six “online modules,” which actually means we don’t actually get a choice:
• Learning Styles
• Classroom Community
• Large Classes
• Cooperative Learning
• Active Learning
• Classroom Assessment Techniques
Each “module” comes with a multiple-choice pre- and post-test which are identical, and a PowerPoint thingy to look at in between. In other words all you really have to do is take the pre-test, which tells you what you got wrong, and then get the answers right on the post-test. You could conceivably never look at the presentation at all, except that then you have to fill out a “Developmental Experience Assignment Form”: “What three things will you take away with you from this learning experience?” What three things! What a compelling assessment tool! What economy, what precision, what pinpoint accuracy! What total unmitigated bullshit. We really are at a state school now.
After cruising a couple of the “modules,” needless to say the answers which spring to mind are—unorthodox. For starters, I suspect I will have to comment on the irony of being taught about cooperative and active learning via the unidirectional methodology of an especially dull involuntary online lecture which completely ignores our individual learning styles and quells any fledgling sense of community. Then, too, I may find assorted things to say about not being allowed to choose or plan or invent our own professional development activities. I may feel additionally compelled to note that no TA in her/his right mind will do any of the optional “activities” embedded in the PowerPoint (”take five minutes to freewrite about your own learning style!”). In conclusion, I’m sure there will be a pithy sentence or two on the subject of having all this sprung on me after I accepted the fellowship, which is in fact a violation of the graduate student union’s Bill of Rights. But since when did anyone ever pay attention to the Bill of Rights?
Look for me at the teacher training, as handouts fly and presentations flicker and phrases like “project-based learning” and “democratic classroom” are flung about and used incorrectly with great and misguided seriousness. I’ll be the one slouched in the back row with collar turned up and hair in a ducktail, scowling and etching graffiti on my desktop.
Speaking of being a bad girl…many nightmares last night about Herself coming to the door and me trying to hide the pristine untouched book ms from her—typed on round paper, for some reason, the kind developmentally disabled children receive in primary school. Then still more nightmares about being her anja and trying to pack her up to go to Asia on ridiculously short notice, scrabbling for warm clothes and medicines and shoes and suitcases and saying to her with exasperation, “I wish I’d known about this earlier, I could have started on it sooner!” Interesting, the way some of us don’t do things until literally the eleventh hour. Or five minutes past twelve, as the case may be (and it is).
Before I slither back to bed I must mention a great blessing: a housewarming package of yummies from Zingermans from Kimba! What generosity—
The Brujo and I will not have to eat spaghetti right away; we can feast on whole-wheat gigli and organic tomato sauce. Of course I am most excited about the OHMYGODOHMYGOD pomegranate molasses!!! And the very special cheese will make a mean quesadilla. I put the artisan breads in the freezer after double-bagging them in the provided plastic bags as instructed, so they’d still be around when the B. returns. On Monday. Have I mentioned that would be on Monday? I did? Because the suburbs are just no fun without him.
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