Getting My Poop in a Pile, So to Speak

I have spent the better portion of today in the bowels of Bracken Library, sorting out syllabi and preparing for the first week of my newest endeavor. I am really excited about my children’s literature classes, and I hope my students will love the class as much as I have loved putting it together. My hopes are that we will all benefit from our journey together and that we will all come out on the other side with a greater appreciation of literature and of each other. It seems like the class is going to be quite a bit of work for both my students and myself, and the key will be not to get behind.

The new scheduling device on my cell phone will help with time management because I have scheduled everything in and given alarms to each activity. At the very least, I will feel guilty for not doing what I am supposed to do at the right times, and I shouldn’t miss appointments like I did last semester. We’ll see how it goes. My office mate says my cell phone is fascist. I tend to agree. I may not listen to the alarms just to spite it, to stick it to the Verizon Wireless Man. I still call Deer Creek by its proper name for the same reason, sticking it to the man.

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I just signed up for a life-guarding class in March. I am more nervous about it than I ever am about teaching. I haven’t done any of those skills since 1999 or 2000. Wow. I haven’t used my life-guarding skills for ten years. I just made myself feel old, as in the age of rocks or dirt or air. Signing up for a class in which I have to wear a bathing suit and be groped by other people is a bit daunting as well. I am always embarrassed of my size. In my head, I know I can run farther than some of the people who will be in the class, and I can certainly swim farther than many of them. But, there is this element of fear at being stared at, picked last, shunned as a partner because of my pudge. Trust me, life-guarding class is always weird and there are bound to be several skinny, little bitches who only want to get good tans and sit in a chair in a bathing suit all summer long.

During the class, I will be in the middle of training for the Indy Mini, too, which means I will have to rearrange my running schedule to accommodate the weird-ass hours of the class. We meet on March 19-21 and 26-28 (Fridays, 6-10PM; Saturdays and Sundays 8AM-2PM). Swimmers are such freaks. I am hoping that by this time next school year, I will be fast enough at swimming to join the Master’s Swim Club at BSU, but I need to shed a few pounds (30-50 is my goal) before that happens. Although, I am unsure if I can stand the rigorousness of their practice and meet schedules. Maybe the swimming and running can help me accomplish doing it, but we will see. I suppose I should actually try eating healthy, too.

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Last night Bec and I tried to go to Puerto Vallarta for dinner, but there were no parking spaces, so we drove over to Victor’s Gyros, Pancakes, and Ribs. Yes, you read that properly: Gyros, Pancakes, and Ribs. An odd combination, I thought to myself. We started with the combination platter for an appetizer—mushrooms, onion rings, and cheese sticks (all fried and oh, so healthy)—and I had chocolate chip pancakes while Bec chose the gyros, as I knew she would. Bec enjoyed her gyros platter, which came with an insane amount of food: gyros meat, a pita, feta, onions, tomatoes, rice, vegetables, french fries, and tzaziki sauce. My chocolate chip pancakes came with chocolate chip pancakes. They were sprinkled with powdered sugar, but I was fine with that because they were pretty doggone tasty.

I enjoyed the place more for the atmosphere than the food. It has a greasy spoon sort of diner-y feel, with waitresses who argue over tips and a hostess—maybe owner-ish sort of person, but at the very least super tight with Victor—who constantly told the wait staff to be quiet and to wash and sanitize their hands several times throughout our meal. One waitress protested that she had just washed hers, so blondy, the hostess, said, “Go, do it again,” as she flitted her hands in front of herself like distasteful birds. If I worked there, I would kick her in the trachea.

As a customer, though, you have to love a place that will work a high school student, our waitress, for more than nine hours without a break, simply because she doesn’t smoke. And who wouldn’t want to go to a diner where more than once you could hear one of the seedy attitudinal waitresses say, “I swear on my three kids ….” You can fill in the blank with whatever you think she might have been swearing about. Once it was her credit card tips. I felt right at home, honestly. It reminded me a great deal of working at Pizza King and to a lesser degree, Starbucks. On some levels, it even reminded me of the English department as each waitress jostled for favor with the man I assume was Victor.

I will go there occasionally to write. simply because of the entertainment value.

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I am thankful for seedy, greasy spoon diners and for the people who work in them.

Exercise: walked the dogs

Food: banana, orange juice, chocolate milk, Pure bar, salad, Feng Shui rice chips, sloppy-jane (veggie sloppy-joe), spinach, chocolate milk, oat muffin