Month: October 2018

Old men and fashion

It isn’t often that I hear an old man comment on clothing, – other than it being related to how impractical this or that might be – but the old men usually make it count whenever they do comment on an outfit.

Tonight, leaving the classroom, the professor asks me if my skirt is made out of coat-ties.

I tell him that it is and that my mom and I made it.

With big nods and a big grin, he tells me how he thought so, because, well, it’s one of the ones in the back part, yes that one there – he owns that tie… he has that same one!

I was totally tickled by it, and he was delighted at having recognized them as ties (because we removed the back seams and opened each of them up, making them double the width), and so we both just chuckled along the hallway on our ways out, delighting in the small world that involved my skirt. 😛

Post-a-day 2018

Babies making babies

How many 18-year-olds do you cross, where you think to yourself, ‘Yes, this person is well on his/her way to being a wonderful parent!’?

And yet, just a generation or two ago, the 18-year-olds were just about to become parents.

I haven’t even considered the fact that I don’t have children of my own, though I’m very post-college-aged, and yet my mother started having children when she was college-aged, and then she had already finished having her children long before the time when she was the age I am now.

I mean, sure, our bodies are primed for making babies when we’re around 20, but our brains seem to be on a different planet at that age.

Just about every male aged eighteen years is a total idiot so far as I’ve experienced… (Remember that I teach high school)… and, while the girls aren’t total idiots, they definitely don’t strike me as the motherly type.

Just a thought.

Post-a-day 2018

Ear-worm* mashups

Does anyone else ever end up with a mashup between “Last Christmas” by Wham! and “Lucky” by Britney Spears in your head?  It happens to me almost every time I get into Christmas music (yes, this means that I’m already getting into the Christmas music mood).  As with any song, “Last Christmas” will get stuck in my head, kind of repeating casually as I go about my business, even thinking about other things.  Whatever I do, though, the song plays like background music, just inside my head.  Eventually, I become aware of the fact that I’ve been going back and forth between “Last Christmas” and “Lucky”, and then totally crack up inside at how utterly different the two songs’ topics, years, genres, and artists are.

If you think I’m just nuts here, or even if you just are interested, give it a try.  Here’s how the words work out the switch:

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart,
and the very next day, you gave it away.
This year, to save me from tears,
I’ll give it to someone special…..
(dumm dumm dumm)
She’s so lucky.  She’s a star.
But she crie-crie-cries with her lonely heart,
thinking, “If there’s nothing missing in my life,
then [why do these tears come at night?”]
the very next day, you gave it away.
This year, to save me from tears,
I’ll give it to someone special….

And then the whole thing repeats.  Notice that the brackets part is how that line would continue in the song.  I left it, because, occasionally, my head finishes out that line, too.  Usually, though, it has a sort of fading overlap, like how what DJs do or the original settings in iTunes did, having the Wham! song come in at that exact spot as the new main line.

Fun, huh?  (Well, I like it, anyway, so that works for me.)  🙂

*We don’t really have a single word for this in English, so I used a translation of the German term Ohrwurm, the word used to reference a song that gets stuck in one’s ear/head.

Post-a-day 2018

Book characters

In class tonight, talking about literature, I mention that – and this is somewhat quietly after someone else mentions that she loves the character ‘so much’ – I mention that I kind of hate her.

The classmate who always sits by me says, almost immediately, “Hannah, you don’t ever like nobody,” and we both crack up, knowing that it is kind of totally true (at least in terms of the books we’ve discussed for class).

Post-a-day 2018

Writing papers

I panicked that I wouldn’t have enough to write about for a 6-8-page paper for class.  And so, I did loads of research, looking constantly for new sources to support just about everything and anything I was planning to say in the paper, and I collected it all in a Google Doc, adding the necessary commentary surrounding the citations, as I went along.  Eventually, I grew tired of doing this, and so decided to take a break by deleting the headings for each section of my drafty draft and deleting any quotes I’d found that I would not be using.

…

…And so, somehow, I am sitting here with some sections that have yet to turn from citations to paragraphs containing the citations and the majority of the paragraphs written out already, and it is over seven pages long…. single spaced.

Guess my plan now is just to cut out anything I found to be third-rate.  And, if that isn’t enough, second-rate comes next.  Always easier than having to fill in with tenth-rate crap after having concisely said everything I want to support a topic in a paper, but another two pages are required by the teacher.

But I still don’t want to do it.

Anyway…, here goes.

Post-a-day 2018

Just do it

Nike has really got it down, you know.

Whenever it comes up as to whether to do the right thing or not, we tend to grow concerned about the difficulty of it or the problems it could cause, and we want to go do something else, something easier, something less terrifying…, but the answer is always the same.

When it comes to the right thing, just do it.

Period.

Post-a-day 2018

Be better for myself

Those late nights when I’m desperate for a movie before bed, and I have an early morning the next day… when I don’t watch a movie, but do something else beautiful, like play uke or guitar before my bedtime reading, and then just go to sleep…, those nights are each a success.

Depression has this sneaky way of, well, sneaking up from normally-no-big-deal things, like watching a good film, and taking hold before I’m even fully conscious of it…

And so those nights when desperation longs for a film, and I do not give in, and I do do something good for myself, are key to my being the happy, healthy, holy person I want to be (and know that I truly am on the inside).

Post-a-day 2018

Crazy lady travels free

I was just thinking about when my coworker and I took a group of kids to England and France a few summers ago, and things associated with that.  At the end of the trip, I stayed in France to go visit my old stomping grounds down south, and so I left the group to go home on a flight with my coworker (per our own full agreement and arrangement ahead of time).  I waited too long to decide to do that, so I had to pay $350 for the flight change (Ugh).  We also each had to pay $937.50 for the trip in the first place (Meh).  Therefore, I had to pay a total of $1287.50 for a 10-day trip that included all accommodations, food, tours, and transport, and another ten days on location at my own expense, which is really not bad at all.  At all.

However – and this is a BIG however – as part of our arranging and hosting this trip in the first place, the tour company gave us each a training trip.

Mine, as I selected it, was a long weekend trip, with food, housing, tours, and transportation included, to downtown Rome, Italy.  Therefore, my just-under 1300 dollars actually got me two separate trips to Europe, with almost all expenses paid for most of the time on the trips.

I really do come up with the craziest stuff to have happen in my life.  And – what is possibly the best part of this all – I don’t even seem to notice how absurd it all is, until I find myself ruminating on this and thats one afternoon, years later, and it suddenly hits me that, say, taking a free trip to Europe is not a normal thing in life.  I take this moment to nod my head to my cousin for the question she exasperatedly declared one evening at my apartment a few years ago: “Hannah, do you even know what real life is like?”

Indeed, fair cousin, it seems I do not know that most of the time – reality bites, so I live somewhere else, and I love it.  🙂

Post-a-day 2018