Brain-Dead Morons

I'm not sure if I picked up the habit from Tina Fey in "30 Rock" or the character Schmidt in "New Girl," but now I really enjoy summing up the problem with kids these days by shaking my head and saying, "ugh, youths."

I find myself saying that all the time as a high school teacher.

As much as I like to pretend I wasn't exactly like them though, I know it's a lie.  I was often irresponsible, forgetful, disrespectful, stubborn, and sometimes just downright stupid.  See, youths can't help but be youths.  Their brains are re-developing.

When we're babies we make all these connections in our brains, then we prune them down to the useful connections.  Once puberty hits our brains decide to go for round two.  So teenagers are re-developing their thought processes, their understanding, and their schema for the world around them.  They can't help but be - as my mentor during student teaching so lovingly put it - brain-dead morons.

Watching my little brain-dead morons struggle with what seems like the simplest of problems for me has made me realize something: I don't want my children to go to college right after high school.

When I went to college I wasted the first two years staying up late, ditching class, and caring more about social aspects than the incredible learning I could have been doing.  It wasn't until I got engaged to The Man that I realized real life was coming fast and I needed to shape up.  When The Man went to college for the first time he slacked off too; we didn't realize the importance of what we were doing, and we didn't realize the great opportunity we had in our hands.

And it wasn't just us.  So many college freshmen and sophomores just do not get it.  Yes, there are a select few that work hard and really do succeed, but they are few and far between in my experience.  Our teenage brains weren't ready for it.

In my child psychology classes we talked a lot about the importance of factoring development into academic success.  Many young boys become frustrated in kindergarten because male brains develop in a different order than female brains, and for 5-year-old males fine motor skills (writing letters, drawing, cutting with scissors) are generally quite difficult.  Many teachers advise parents of young boys to hold them back from kindergarten a year if they're struggling; that way when they come back the next year they are more developmentally ready and they can enjoy the activities more.

Why can't we do this with our teenagers and college?

I'm not saying I'm going to let my child lounge about the house for a year and pamper them until they're developmentally ready, but I can see some merit in international journeys, backpacking trips, or even just working for a year or so, saving up for college.

When students are developmentally ready for college, they work so much harder, and they see much more success.  It's been interesting watching The Man return to college after a several-year hiatus.  Instead of returning to his B, C-student standing, he started off his first semester back with straight A's and hasn't dropped below an A in the last two years.  It's not just The Man though; I knew many adults who came back to college (or were coming for the first time) in their 20's and 30's, and all of them worked harder and succeeded more than any of the freshman coming straight from academia.  They were developmentally ready.

Now maybe I'm way off, and maybe I'll change my mind in twenty-or-so years when I'm actually crossing this bridge, but it's something to think on.

Sexidorable

Yesterday I was a total downer, and I apologize.  Let's talk about something more fun today.  Well, I'll write at you, and you'll eye the page.  That's kind of like a conversation, yeah?

Little sister came over the other night, and we watched a great video in which older, respected (some not as much anymore...sorry DeNiro) actors read the words to popular songs.  And while watching this, we were both overcome with the same thought: Kevin Kline is still a fox!  Beard and all.

How does that happen?  How do you improve on this?

So, turns out I'm kind of into hairy guys, I guess...

Well, just keep your hair, let it turn grey, and apparently grow a beard.  Instant sexidorable (trademark pending).  You know what, Kevin?  You could probably even lose the beard.  I'm not picky.

Sexidorable is the only word I can use to describe him now.

Is this a thing?  Like...ruggedly attractive young men becoming sexidorable older men?  Let's test this theory.

Harrison Ford:

Who apparently has an earring now...

Sean Connery:

Do I have a thing for men with guns too?  Hm...

Robert Downey Jr. (ok, he wasn't a rugged young man):

Maybe it's the hair...Then again, how would that explain Connery?

Steve Martin:

Looks WAY too much like my dad.  This just got weird.

Well, excepting the last one due to the weird Electra Complex vibe, sexidorableness with age seems to be a thing.  Let's try it one last time with my favorite Python*, Michael Palin:

Sexi-freakin'-dorable, ladies and gentlemen.

It's a thing.  Tell your friends.

*I tried to make this not sound dirty, but he was a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, guys.  They were called Pythons.  Get over it.

Not Wanting to Want

It's just one of those days.  Weeks.  Months.  Years.

Isn't it funny how you can be supremely happy with life, and at the same time depressed?  Well, maybe you can't, but my hormones are just impressive that way.  That's how I've been for the last year and a half.

I AM happy with life.  I got my dream job, which also happened to be the first job I interviewed with.  I live in a rather roomy apartment.  I can sleep in on Saturdays.  I'm married to my best friend, who is just killing it at school and work.  My family is happy and healthy and some of them are even nearby.  We have a reliable car.  We have enough money to buy groceries.  We even have enough money now to do things we're interested in, like buying furniture, going out to eat, and having a Netflix account.

We totally have enough money to buy frivolous things like this chicken.
We just don't have the class.

And yet I still have times where I shut down and can't seem to feel happy about where we're at.  Stupid Maslow and your hierarchy of needs.

If you're a regular you know that The Man and I tried to get pregnant for a year straight a while ago.  My body wouldn't cooperate.  It wouldn't even have a period for seven straight months of that time.  It got to the point where once a month I was buying a test and once a month I was becoming super depressed, and I just couldn't handle it anymore.  I went to a couple doctors to figure out why my body was acting so weird and all they had for me was, "hm.  Well, you're healthy, you're young, your hormone levels are great, and you're not stressed out about anything.  By all accounts you should be having a period.  Weird.  Oh well.  Now please pay us."

Hey there, Spotalotamus!  Have a terrible day!

Don't get me wrong; I loved not having to deal with that.  Except for the part where I was trying to get pregnant.  It's kinda necessary to have a working uterus/endocrine system.

So now we're at the part where I'm on birth control, we're not trying to have a baby, and I STILL get depressed once a month and think about babies constantly.  We're not trying for a couple reasons.
1. I am kind of scared that I'm sterile, and if we don't try then I won't have to face that.
2. The Man is still in school, and he is super stressed about it all the time; I don't want to add to that stress.
3. I have a full-time job that I actually enjoy, and it brings in a decent paycheck for a family of two.  I'd have to quit if I had a newborn.

And even though I keep coming back to those logistically-sound, totally reasonable answers, I still want a baby.  Beyond any logic, beyond any reasoning, beyond any soundness of mind.

If I could just not want to want a baby, that would be great.

Man Flowers

The other night The Man mentioned that he hadn't bought me flowers in quite some time, and he needed to get on that.  I heartily agreed.  Then I realized something: I've never really bought him man flowers.

Now, I'm not talking about those bacon bouquets or anything; I'm talking about the female version of buying flowers to tell her man, "hey, I appreciate you and I think you're pretty rad.  Here's something you can look at daily to remind you of my feelings."  Growing up I always heard that the men need to continue courting the women past marriage; what about the other way around?

I mean sure, I try to look nice and smell nice, but that's also because I need to be professional at work.  I also clean up the house from time to time, but that's because when things get too messy I just shut down totally and I can't get any work done at all.  I tell The Man he's handsome and I allow him to pay on dates, but gosh dangit I wanna get my man some flowers.

In my quest for man flowers (wow, this is sounding a little racy...) I tried to think about the times when I make The Man happiest.  Besides the obvious (making cookies - get your mind out of the gutter), he always gets really happy when I clean up the house.  I had my goal.

Well, I got home from school around 5:45 and got started.  I was tired from teaching and grading and planning and next-to-no sleep, but I pushed through.  By 8 I had the oven cleaned, the microwave spotless, the kitchen looking awesome, the living room re-organized the way he wanted it, the bedroom re-organized the way he wanted it (we were kind of on a re-organizing roll this weekend), the bathroom deep-cleaned (the landlords decided to not install ventilation so we get mold ALL THE TIME), and the apartment just looking all-around great.  We'll ignore the fact that I shoved everything I didn't want to deal with into the second bedroom.  And you know what?  It felt great.  Kinda like how flowers brighten up the house for anyone living there, the cleaning made our house feel all the better.

Man Flowers for the win.

I did leave an empty vase in the middle of the kitchen table.  I mean, I'm not a saint.

Sore Legs, Frozen Fingers, and a Sunburned Face

It's October now, and that means . . . winter is coming.

Okay, so I've never watched "Game of Thrones."  I'm a frequent-enough visitor of the internet to get many of the references though.

Anyways, winter.  This year I've been having the totally not-normal desire to go snowboarding (not normal for me; totally normal for other people).  The thing is, I have no idea WHY I'm having this desire.  I can probably count on one hand the times I've gone snowboarding in my life.  Skiing is a little bit more, but all of those times happened when I was a little kid.  My skiing memories come down to: complaining about my boots not fitting right, crossing the front of my skiis more than I would like to admit, being cold, thermal underwear, snowveralls (oh, I just came up with a name for those things!), not knowing what to do with my poles, and one distinct memory of my father taking me on a very steep run, where I promptly sat down and scooted my way down the entire hill.  Oh, and being on a ski trip when Sonny Bono skiied into a tree and died.  I'm not sure how real that last memory is though; I have a penchant for fabricating memories.

My snowboarding memories are a bit better, since I was a little bit older and boys were involved.  The first time I ever snowboarded a boy that I had a crush on convinced me to get clip-ons instead of bindings.  Stupid, stupid Spotalotamus.  I spent the majority of that day on the bunny hill trying to get my stupid boots to attach to the stupid snowboard because the stupid ice kept building up on top of the stupid clips and...I have some issues with clip-ons.  Oh, and he also convinced me that I was "goofy" (snowboarding term, not mental capacity).  The next time I went snowboarding was with another boy I had a crush on.  He convinced me to use bindings and that I was "regular" (left foot forward).  This second time was a much better experience, but I kept switching my stance mid-run.  I would start off regular, then feel unsafe and switch to goofy, then feel unsafe again and switch to regular.  Actually, in the...four (?) times that I've gone snowboarding, I've never really figured out if I'm goofy or regular.  What I do know is that I'm slow, I can't toe-grind, and I have a knack for running into little kids (okay, it happened once, and they didn't fall over).

So that is why I am so confused about my sudden interest in snowboarding again.  Maybe it's my almost-never-used snowboarding outfit crying out to me.  Maybe it's the need to get an adrenaline rush since I don't know anyone with horses out here.  Maybe it's that I really like semi-squatting because of kickboxing.  I have no idea.  What I do know is that I am too poor to be a snowboarder right now, the only board I kind of own is at my parents' house the next state over (and it doesn't have bindings), and The Man is way too busy to go snowboarding with me.  Case in point: it's 3pm on a Saturday, and I've seen him for a total of 30 minutes.

I'm probably not going snowboarding this year.  Maybe next year.

The Worst Love Story Ever: Part 2

So where did I leave off?  My oh-so-smooth line?  K.

Turns out that line worked, and the super-cute guy that my friend had a crush on became the super-cute guy that I stole from my friend.  Two weeks after the kiss I convinced him that we needed to start dating by giving him the ultimatum of "either we start dating or we stop kissing."  Romantic, right?  A few weeks after that I started telling him that I loved him (because...I'm like that) and a few weeks after that he finally said, "I think I might be starting to love you too."  Which I decided to interpret as "I love you."  We ended up dating for a few months, and then I left to go back to school and my new man stayed home.

I'm not sure if you've heard this before, but long-distance relationships suck hardcore.  There was an upside of my lip-locking buddy being thousands of miles away though; I got straight A's that semester.  See, when you're depressed nobody wants to hang out with you, and you don't want to hang out with anybody.  You can either get a lot of TV watched or get a lot of work done, and luckily I didn't have Netflix.  After 6 weeks of not seeing him I called him up and told him that he either had to visit me or I'd break up with him because he wasn't serious about the relationship.  And...that worked out spectacularly for me because I lost a boyfriend that night.

The end.

Only you know that it's not because if you're reading this it's almost certain that you know me in real life and you know exactly what happened next.

See, I really liked this short but attractive man.  It wasn't just his impressive facial structure; from the very first time I had hung out with him it just felt...easy.  And right.  My older brother had always been my best friend, and when he left on a two-year mission for our church I had a hole in my heart where my best friend should have been.  The guy I stole replaced that missing portion of my heart.  He was funny, intelligent, kind, and helpful, and he became the best friend that I needed.

And that is why our break-up only lasted like...three days.  A while later we got married, and that guy I stole became The Man.

And he is just the best.
This was a couple of years ago; the only time I got him to do a fauxhawk.

So our love story isn't really as cute as most you hear, and it isn't a story I want my kids to emulate ("oh yeah, Suzy, go ahead and make moves on that boy and make out with him for weeks before committing"), but it's our story.  Oh, the proposal!

Remember that night hike I went on with him?  When I called my friend from The Man's phone?  Well when he proposed he took me back on that hike.  At night.  I knew it was coming, I just didn't know at what point he would get down on his knee.  Turns out it would be at the top of the hill, as I started heading down the other side.  He yanked on the hood of my sweatshirt from behind, and I jerked back a little bit, turned around, and saw him with the ring in his hand.  I can't even remember if he was on his knee or not...probably.  Who really cares though?

The Worst Love Story Ever

So it's 3:30 in the morning.  I woke up at 2 without an alarm.  It wasn't just a look-at-the-clock-and-groan-and-go-back-to-bed wake up, it was a caffeine jolt of energy.  And all because of stupid stupid midterms.  Midterms suck, y'all.  I thought I was on top of my grading, but in the past two days I have graded hundreds and hundreds of papers.  And I'm not even close to done!  It's been on my mind so much that apparently my brain thinks I needed to be awake and grading more than I needed to be asleep.
I'll show you, Brain.

In my break time I'm going to take my mind off my students totally and instead tell you a story: the worst love story ever.

Once upon a time there was a Spotalotamus.  Wait, no...Let's start that over.

It was the end of my sophomore year of college.  The school I went to has a weird track system, so I was going to school in the summer time and one of my roommates (also a good friend since...middle school, I think) was back home enjoying her time off.  She met a nice young man and started telling me stories about him.  She also had me look at pictures of him on Facebook (as all girls do, don't you lie), but I wasn't all that impressed.  However, I was happy for her.  She was moving on from a boyfriend I had hated and enjoying her summer time with this new boy.  Due to the weird track system, she was going back to school for the fall and I was coming home for my "summertime," so she asked me to become friends with the guy so I could find out if he was interested in her or not.

Fall rolled around and I was back home, and I finally met him one day at a service project.  Turns out he was super attractive, he just didn't look all that great in photographs.  Luckily for my friend, however, the guy was two inches shorter than me, and that's just a huge no-no in my book.  Unluckily for my friend I'm a sucker for good-looking faces (aren't we all?) and as the day went on I found myself flirting with him more and more.  When I went home that night I happily (and jokingly) informed my roommate/friend that her man and I were now best friends and I would be getting that information soon.

And then the trouble really started.  See, it turns out I actually enjoyed being around this guy, so I started hanging out with him more and more.  One time I even called him at 10 at night to go on a hike; he reluctantly agreed.  On the way to the hiking area I realized I had forgotten how to get there and I didn't have my phone, so I called my roommate/friend.  From the phone of the guy she liked.  At 10pm.  Because I'm a stupid jerk.  Even worse, I called her AFTER the hike to tell her that I was starting to become interested in her man, but I could totally stop at any time if she wanted me to because, you know, friendship!  Since she was clearly the better friend, she said something about just wanting me to be happy, but I could hear it in her voice that she was upset, so like the good friend that I am I listened to her words and not her tone and decided to go for it.

I shamelessly went after this poor young man, and late one night it was I that used the cheesy pick-up line: "I'm cold..."  He came closer and put his arm around me, and I brazenly turned my face up and went in for a kiss.  He pulled back a little, saying, "I've never kissed anyone before."  So, naturally (since it's been established that I'm kind of stupid), I responded with the oh-so-smooth, "it's okay; I'll teach you how."

To be continued (since the ungraded papers are calling my name)