A Crossover from Facebook

My friend Chad posted his 25 things on Facebook. I figure my blog needed a boost. It's been too long, old friend :)

1.) I have been listening to WICKED songs for the past six days. Anytime I'm by myself, I sing the song Defying Gravity as loud as I can, and sometimes I pretend I'm a green witch.
2.) I love T.V. a lot more than I should. Maybe more than anyone else does.
3.) I do not enjoy learning about copyright. Not even a little bit.
4.) I have a blog. I don't let many people read it, and I haven't written on it since before Christmas. I also have journals.
5.) I start things. I start cleaning. I start writing. I start books. I start diets.
6.) I lollygag. I don't finish any of those things I start. I forget diets. The kitchen stays dirty. My blog remains unpopulated. Books aren't finished.
7.) I have a lot of books that I've never read, but I can't give them away because I know one day I will want to read them.
8.) I am an English teacher, but I often wonder if I would be better doing something else. Or perhaps not much at all.
9.) Witt is my best friend. Everything I do is done in the hopes that I make him proud of me.
10.) I am afraid of mice. One lives in my garage and we call him Swervin' , but I hate Swervin' with all of my heart and I wish him dead every time I think about him. I hope everyone who reads this wishes him dead too.
11.) I have washed and folded five loads of laundry today, but I don't know that they will ever be put away. Laundry: one more thing I start but don't finish.
12.) I want to write a book, real bad. I have some ideas, but I haven't even really tried writing them down, yet. I am afraid that if I start writing I will never finish. Or worse--maybe I will.
13.) Sometimes I am struck by how much I miss my mom. Still, after seven years I hope that I am 1/2 of the woman that she was.
14.) I wonder if I will ever stop feeling guilty for leaving my mom to die in the hospital bed while I went to call people.
15.) My dog Snap snores louder than most people. He sounds a lot like my Grandma Margie snoring.
16.) I love Scholar a little better than Snap. Not a lot, but enough to feel like I would save him if they were dangling from the cliff.
17.) I have never been good at sports. I hate baseball, and I always hear my dad's gruff voice in my mind when I try to throw, catch, or bat something.
18.) I am constantly amazed at Witt's ability to see small details like a crooked line on a PowerPoint. I could stare at that damn slide for an hour before I see an uneven line.
19.) I curse too much.
20.) High school students may influence me more than I influence them. So far this year I've started saying "I know, right!," "Idiot!," and "Motherf***er" aloud more often because I have heard them at school. I bet there aren't kids walking around saying "soliloquy" and "exposition" because they've heard it from me.
21.) I hold grudges. I try to talk myself out of them, and I know it's wrong to, but I hold grudges bad. I have to practice forgiveness often, and I'm not really all that good at it.
22.) When I'm sad, Witt always says or does something that makes me laugh or helps me realize that whatever I'm sad about isn't all that permanent.
23.) I cry a lot more than people would think. I cry at pep rallies. I cry at church when I go. I cry at the end of T.V. shows. I cried when Obama was elected president.
24.) I just realized I could tag Laurie Halse Anderson in this message. That's right, she's my Facebook friend and she may respond. She may not. She probably has degrees of Facebook friends, and I'm lucky to be on the fringes. I think she has over a thousand. I have barely over a hundred and I feel pretty happy about it. Her friend list is a bit intimidating.
25.) I hate finishing things. When something is over I feel a sad empty dead feeling. Except when school is out for the summer. That may be the only exception.

Women Should be Beaten

The sub who's taken over Danyel's classes while she's been on maternity leave has been the equivalent of introducing a toxin to our school. He tells girls who live in this depressed rural area that men are over women. "Women should bow down to men," I hear him explaining to a young girl who's dating sleaze from this town. Let me just state that again--he says in the hallway on a Monday morning that "women should bow down to men," that "it's been true [his] whole life." That it is still a truth now.

What I know is this: he is an ignorant joke of a man. Even though I teach and live in this lilly white conservative area, I don't often meet such openly closed minded people. I don't like it. It has been a long time since I have felt so small and ignsignificant. It has been a long time since I have felt an urgency to stop something. I hope I'll never forget it.

The BIG Review of New Moon

The third installation of the Twilight series is a bit better than the second--at least Bella isn't whining the whole time about how much she misses Edward--but she is still a bit over the top. This novel covers the revenge of Victoria who enlists the help of several newborn vampires to help her lure Bella away from Edward to murder Bella. A subplot that runs rampant through the novel is the treaty and truce between the vampires and the werewolves (who turn out to be shape-shifters in Breaking Dawn). This truce, brought on by the inexplicible urge to protect Bella Swan from the newborn vampires is a bit difficult for Edward and Jacob, but Bella is finally happy.