Today's Excitement

I saw an albino squirrel today in Franklin Square. I had never seen one before.

Scrabble and Golf

Why do I lose it when I play Scrabble and golf? Here's why:

Scrabble: I am a purported wordsmith. I got 800 on my verbal SATs. I can write okay. I am better than most of my friends and acquaintances at crossword puzzles. But I SUCK at Scrabble and I am thoroughly embarrassed by the fact. So when I try to play, my embarrassment turns into pettiness and poor sportsmanship and I get as mad as mad can be.

Golf: There are semifamous golfers who share my last name. When I took a golf class in college, my teacher was all excited because he thought I was going to be great by virtue of my last name. I did not do well. I SUCKED. I was so embarrassed that I could not live up to my name, and that embarrassment turned into the poorest of sportsmanship and the most childish of tantrums on the golf course. Since the worst of those tantrums, I took a solemn vow not to play golf ever again. This was in 1998, I believe, and I have stayed true to my oath.

So last night, Himself and I played Scrabble and I was so convinced I could keep my cool. I could not. It was a disaster.

So do I need to take an oath against Scrabble?

Something a friend did

KT Buffy did this, so I thought I'd do it too.

She says:

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.


I, Lollygagger, have decided just to do step one. I don't know what books I intend to read and I don't like to plan such things. It makes me anxious. And I can't underline on Blogger for some reason, so I'm skipping step three too.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Another Dumb Thing

So two weeks ago today, I was walking fancy free down the sidewalk and stepped in some kind of shallow depression in the sidewalk, twisted my ankle, and fell. This was not a huge gaping hole, just a small little divot that should not have sent somebody to the hospital in an ambulance. Oh yes. An ambulance.

I don't think I wrote about the last time a dumb injury of mine was blown all out of proportion. Involved at that time were the following: hot turkey stock and several men of various uniformed professions milling around my apartment gazing upon my delicious burned thigh and surely wondering why on earth I had summoned them there. Which I of course had not meant to do. It was a 311 call gone bad.

At any rate, this most recent dumb experience had me stepping in a shallow hole, hearing a snap or crack or something and just knowing I could not get up. I sat in a daze, able to think only that my ankle must be broken and that I needed to let my boyfriend know I wouldn't be able to meet him in Silver Spring to buy socks for my walking half marathon two days hence and of course that I needed to tell my marathon-mate I was not going to be walking from Kentucky to West Virginia anytime soon. My mind was so taken up with letting these folks know what was going on that I just couldn't quite deal with the fact that the folks on the street around me were really and truly calling an ambulance for me. And then the fire truck came. Oh yes. A fire truck. Those firemen, they splinted me and iced me and then the ambulance guys came and put me on a stretcher and hoisted me up into a real live ambulance. I had never been in one before, so I was sort of excited. But mostly I was just wondering how much of this my insurance was going to cover.

Here is what happens when you go to the ER in an ambulance: you get seen really fast. You don't have to wait in the waiting room for 38 years. So I found out rather quickly that my ankle was not broken but rather sprained. And I couldn't help but wonder if I had had enough presence of mind to tell the people on the street NOT to call an ambulance, could I have just taken myself home and iced the thing? Could I have gotten up and walked on my ankle if I'd tried? And would that have been better?

The truth of the matter is, I don't think I could have gotten up and walked right then. My ankle really was all swoll up. But I don't think I got the best care at the ER (shocking). I ended up in a half cast and walking on crutches. The crutches caused me the most excruciating pain I've ever had to endure in my life. That's sounds totally wimpy, but it was just plain excruciating. My arms, my "good" leg, they were miserable. Miserable. I seriously broke down crying on the bus the next day when I for some loony reason decided it was a good idea for me to go to work.

And then a week later... I went to this orthopedist and he put me in the most miraculous air brace that has enabled me to just walk around and be a person again. That week of being on crutches was not me being a person. I just wish I'd been able to go to the orthopedist in the first place. I think I could have been walking in an air brace long ago (indeed the air brace instructions say it should be used as the first treatment). And all of that ambulance and crutches beeswax would never have happened. But hey, it's a good story. And my arms are exceeding buff now.

I guess we'll know if the story and the arms are worth it when I get my insurance statement. Yikes!

Indiana Jones

When I was about 9 or 11 or whatever, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out. It was the first movie I ever went to without parents...just me and my sister and cousin and friend. A glorious feeling on the cusp of independence.

So here more than 15 years later, I wanted to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on opening night. Himself and I went to see it at the Uptown Theater in Cleveland Park. The Uptown is one of those old one-theater movie palaces, the kind I wish still dotted our cities. Ah well.

The movie was what I wanted it to be: preposterous and politically incorrect and exciting.

But the best were all the extremely nerdy guys in Indy hats. And the best of the best was the nerdiest of the them all saying this to his friend on the phone: "It was like seeing an old friend after 20 years. He may be a bit long in the tooth, but he's still the same old guy."

Yes!

This is for Slub

Slub is my nephew whose name is not really Slub. It's not a very nice nickname, but I came up with it when I was 14 or something.

Slub just sent me an email PLEADING for a new blog post and asserting that surely SOMETHING has happened in my life since October.

And indeed things have happened in my life since October.

The job I got is a job I have no more. I lasted about three weeks and then QUIT. I have never quit a job. I've always eased out of them or had to leave them because I was leaving the area or something.

I basically could not STAND dealing with the administrator of the school. Nothing I did was good enough for her and she was just a straight up lousy manager. And they weren't paying me enough.

So. Now I am back to being a secretary. It is a tiny bit demoralizing. What did I go to graduate school for if I was just going to wind up being an assistant again? Sure, I'm a better-paid assistant, and I'm working for a company that deals with a lot of international issues, so it's a good place to be.

Truly I like my job (and I'm not just saying this); it keeps me very busy, which is good for me right now. There are some super nice folks there; I feel like the company as a whole is really trying to do some good things and hopefully I'll find as I learn more that they are actually succeeding. I think my main thing is I need to get over my inferiority complex and let myself have a PERSONALITY at work. I tend to turn into a very meek automaton on the job.

I have another job too. It is just on Saturdays. It is at a dog kennel. Yes indeed. It is heaven on earth--so relaxing and stress-free. Just hang out, play with some dogs, clean up some, and head on home.

I just had my first holiday season with Himself. It was very difficult for both of us. I don't think we prepared enough. I had no idea how hard it would be for me to break with my traditions. I've never had to do that before. With both of my previous relationships, the fellow and I weren't in the same place over the holidays. And Himself and I both have the same hometown and thus much conflict. Poor Himself. Poor Lollygagger.

So is that good enough for you, Slub?

In Which I Get a Job

I now have a job. At a preschool, of course. Where else would you expect a person who just finished her M.A. in international affairs to work?

I truly do work in a preschool. I teach 2 and 3 year olds. It is a Montessori school, so I am learning a lot myself.

Here is a hard thing about teaching 2 and 3 year olds: they are SO DANG CUTE and you can't do anything about it! You have to maintain a good teacherly distance and not do what you would get to do if the kid were your niece or nephew. There is this one kid who gallops nearly everywhere he goes. He says he is a horsey. And I have been told to not even smile at these kids until January!

At any rate, all I do is work. I get up in the morning, throw everything together, commute for frickin ever (1 hour 15 minutes), teach from 9 to 6, and clean and do curriculum planning whenever the kids are asleep or in special enrichment classes. Then I have to clean up until about 6:30. If I'm lucky, I get to hang out with Himself afterward for a little while. Or I just go home exhausted, play Solitaire to stop my brain from going a mile a minute, and go to sleep.

I basically think only about my job. It is stressful. I love it and am glad I'm doing it, but it is very hard.

And why am I doing it? Well, soon we are starting an afterschool program for elementary school students that I will be running. I will get to make it as internationally themed as I want. This is my dream job: teaching kids about international issues. So we shall see how it pans out. I wonder sometimes how I will fit everything in. I certainly hope I am not headed for a nervous collapse!