"you've got a baby...in a bar..."

once again, i'm blogging because heidi yelled at me for being the worst blogger ever. a moniker i sadly accept. apparently, i respond really well to people being angry at me--it's pretty motivating. this isn't shocking considering how i used to collapse into a sobbing mess whenever my mom would speak to me in any slightly angry tone when i was little. this, of course, in contrast to my brother michael who was amazingly stubborn and would continue doing something after yelling, spanking, time-out, and threats of bodily dismemberment. but i digress...

a few weeks ago, alison (my roommate) and i went to our local pub to get some dinner. previously, it had been our favorite pub because they sold our favorite drink, Magner's cider. well, they stopped selling it, because we were the only people who bought it, and two drinks every three weeks, wasn't lucrative, oddly enough. another reason we liked it was because our favorite bartender, ed, worked there. at least we thought the "work" was a past tense verb. it's also a place to get irish food, which we both love. when we got there, to our surprise, ed was working! we thought he'd quit, because we hadn't seen him in months and there he was! anyway, as we sat down at the bar to have dinner and talk to ed, i happened to look over and realized i saw a very small person at the end of the bar.

by "small person" i don't mean "little person." i mean "infant." of course i pointed it out to alison so we could mock that person's lack of responsibility and the fact that they were about as qualified to rear children as britney spears. i quoted sweet home alabama by telling alison that someone had a "baby...in a bar..."

a couple seconds later, the person holding the baby turned around and we realized it was someone we knew. a fellow teacher, to be exact. a fellow teacher who'd used to work at our school. welcome to las vegas, ladies and gentlemen.

i had never worked with her, because she moved to a different school before i came there, but i had met her when i helped to chaperone a field trip for the debate team, as she's the debate coach at another area high school. she saw us and started walking over to us, which meant alison and i had to curb all the sarcastic and critical comments that were vigorously fighting their way out of our mouths. we weren't able to look at each other very closely while we talked to her.

i also met her husband. and i thought "he looks like the kind of guy who's baby would be in a bar." he was wearing a bright yellow pull-over windbreaker. the kind you buy at the gap in a little nylon bag. the kind you wear when it rains. have i mentioned i live in the desert? yeah. classy.

after we talked to her and then mocked her (after her departure), we started talking to ed, who was incredibly cruel to me (along with alison) for he duration of our visit. at one point, he gave me a sample of some kind of beer, which i didn't care for. i told him i thought it tasted bland. he proceeded to pour me a pint of water and told me that "if i thought that beer was mild, i might like this new 'lake mead brew.'" alison laughed, because she's a sadist.


Today was my first day back at school. i was NOT excited to get up at 5am or put on dress clothes or go to school. and i'm not going to lie: my students are not smart this year. I found out a couple weeks ago that one of the junior english teachers told his students to take modern lit (the senior english class that i teach) because it was really easy. it's not. so, now i have a bunch of classes full of angry, lazy boys who are pissed that my class isn't easy. and, the thermostat in my room is broken, so it's really hot in there and by the end of the day my classroom is really hot and smells like stinky boys. ugh.

let's see... here's why i'm so bad about blogging: nothing exciting happens in my life. people think that my life is exciting and sexy because i live in las vegas, but it's not. think about your high school english teacher. you think his/her life was sexy? no, of course you don't, because teachers don't have sexy lives. well, some do, but they don't stay teachers for very long... but my life is as boring as any other english teacher. i go to work, try to get kids excited about appositives, colons, the scarlet letter, and brave new world, fail miserably, go home, watch friends reruns, eat dinner, grade some papers and go to bed. i do it again the next day. sometimes, funny things happen. the first year they were really funny, but the kids say the same things each year, and they're less funny each time. so it goes.

that being said, one of my favorite quotes from the year so far: "you know, a one night stand lasts one night, but syphilis lasts a lifetime." it was funny, but i found out from my friend jen that syphilis is curable with penicillin. however, genital warts does last a lifetime.

i've had a headache for about three days. stupid stress headaches. stupid lack of caffeine.

i think that might be all she wrote. my students don't enjoy learning how to do research. guess what i get to teach tomorrow? guess how many papers i've graded tonight? guess who might be going to bed at 8:30?

i'll try to do this more often. heidi, adriane, keep yelling at me. mom, you can try, but i think i'm immune to your yelling. i heard it too much in jr. high (don't get me wrong, i totally deserved it.)