Blog down, Teacher Sweaters

As I watch the Bears lose to the Lions on Monday night football to cap off my already cranky start of the week, I can't help but note how similar being a Chicago football fan is to teaching.  In both instances the season rolls out with unfounded optimism because, let's face it, there is no real precedent that should lead me to believe that either season won't be chock full of disappointment.  Despite the guarantee of relentless frustrations and heart wrenching let downs, there is also the promise of the unexpected. A Hester runback or a letter of recommendation proposal, an Urlacher interception or a mind blowing scored discussion, there are so many game changing moments that make it impossible to not stick it out and be a fan.  So, when a student asked me the other day how it is that I can continue to root for the Bears when it is just so upsetting, I told him its the same way I get through everyday working with students...a whole lot of patience and a little bit of crazy.

Monday--my mom's dress. Love me a vintage hand me down.

 Tuesday

 Wednesday

 Thursday

Friday--No students.  Collaborative staff day.

Monday

 Tuesday

 Wednesday--Topshop opened in Chicago! Thanks for the great pencil skirt, Topshop!

Thursday

 Friday

Monday--We were out on fieldwork in the mountains. So, I was wearing jeans and it doesn't really count.

Tuesday

Wednesday

 Thursday

Friday--I went to my sister's straight from work, so I need to add the pic. I was wearing a black Marc Jacobs skirt and green silk J.Crew shirt with the purple stone pendant that my sister gave me for my birthday which broke while I was out dancing!

Monday

Blogoo goo ga ga

The lack of gushing in my life was beginning to make me worry.  I have reached a life stage where its not unusual to find myself in scenarios surrounded by babies, and, for the most part, oohing and aahing over these strange people appeals to me not at all. As a female of a certain age, it seems an expectation that you should just love to get your hands all over a baby smelling baby with baby soft baby skin, but you may as well be handing me a cactus.  I especially hate when I have to feign maternnalness about the ugly ones--you all know there's some ugly ones.  So, when my best friend since kindergarten popped out her first child, I was thrilled and panicked all at once. Despite my frigidity around the babies, I am not so obtuse as to demean the monumentalness of welcoming a child to a young family. This baby was born on the other side of the country and (obviously) is not one of the ugly ones.  Clearly no one was asking me to hold the little blob, so why the panic?  Well, I had to buy this baby a gift. 

I've learned that one does not have to be married (or even particularly good at interacting with the opposite sex) to buy a good wedding gift. So, it should follow that one does not have to be a mother to buy a good baby gift.  However, I was completely useless. One might imagine that shopping would not be on a list of my areas for improvement, but when it came time to buy something for a baby, I may as well have been Snooki on a mission to buy something classy.  I looked at onesies and mobiles and plush animals and not a single thing made me gush.  Nothing aroused those deep down maternal instincts until...

The Patagonia baby puff ball jacket.  This is possibly the cutest thing ever. Cute enough for an "accident" with an unsuspecting male?  I don't know about that... But I want to thank the folks at Patagonia for restoring my faith in my procreative talents and the possibility of maternal gushiness. I might even say that I could love even the ugly ones if it were bundled up in one of these.  

Monday

Tuesday

 Wednesday

 Thursday

 Friday

It's Past my Bedtime.

The best part of 3 day weekends is 4 day weeks.  This past 4 day week was no exception. Now I'm up too late with nothing much to say... 

I have a goal of attempting more morning runs this year which means I need to stop getting distracted by things like this late at night when I should really be sleeping:

The Pinup of Williamsburg

But wouldn't this blog be so much more adorable if it were infused with just a little more Zooey?

 Tuesday

Wednesday

 Thursday

Friday

In my younger and more blogable years...

For the past four years, the first day of school has greeted me with an anxiety bear hug. It would take hold about the week before the looming return and I would find myself unable to sleep at night and consumed by worries of what was left to do to prepare for the madness.  I didn't feel that way this year.  The night before school started, I slept.  Last year, my stress level forced me to cancel a trip to Minnesota for a dear family friend's wedding.  This year, I enjoyed a carefree weekend in Steamboat tubing down the Yampa and returned to Boulder on Sunday afternoon in time for a Bloody Mary. 

I'm not sure what exactly has changed. It might be me. Perhaps I have come into my own with my job and have found a certain balance that can only come with years logged.  Perhaps my school has also started to come into its own.  My best guess would be some combination of the two making for an opening week cocktail that is not shaken but stirred.  With any luck, next year will be on the rocks. Here's to a smooth year. Cin cin. 

 Monday

 Tuesday

 Wednesday

 Thursday

Friday

Hits from the Blog...

Notes from a recreational blog user:

"He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances."

--Jack London, To Build a Fire

My Mom has always said that she worries about me least when she doesn't hear much from me.  Many mothers may assume that not hearing from their young daughter is a red flag; a cause for concern about potential ditches on the sides of roads or lunatic stalkers outside windows or a run gone wrong in the rugged Front Range wilderness or even some twisted JonBenet shit (I do live in Boulder after all), but my mother sleeps best when I don't call. Not calling is a sign that I am happily busying myself with the things of life. So, this blog started at a life intersection where it is easy to get lost--displaced amongst the things. Not quite as lost as the frozen dead dude in Jack London's above quoted story, but I was certainly directionally flummoxed and unsure where to turn at the corner of Hate My Job Avenue and Painfully Single Nearing Thirty Street. While the frozen dead guy had nobody but a dog to turn to for advice (who it turns out the dude really should've listened to cause the dog ends up neither frozen nor dead), I had massive modern outlets and I was using them all...frequently.

I was calling home quite a lot to get appropriate directions towards Happy Fulfilled City so as not to detour down the lane that leads to Bitter With Too Many Cats (And Maybe Even a Bird or Ferret That You Weirdly Carry in a Pocket with You In Public to Avoid Interactions with Actual Humans) Cul-de-sac. Dissatisfied with my job and struggling to make myself pleasant company in social settings, I found blogging to be simpler than womaning up to the real world.  And so it is that when my blog began the posts were reliable because I was miserable. The ebbs and flows of life's day-to-day minutiae felt more like title waves and droughts with each shift creating tectonic impacts worth writing about. However, now that the plates of my life have become stable, it has had the reverse effect on my blogging.

While I wish I were a better blog abuser--one who's every daily action from the mundane to the extraordinary is immediately transcribed in her head as a post-worthy story--I find that I am still struggling to acknowledge the significances in all my things of life. This is somewhat ironic because in my eleventh grade classes I am currently teaching memoir writing and a large amount of instruction time is spent reminding students that often the seemingly simple or boring parts of our lives tell the best stories. I'll try to be better attune to the stories I may be encountering everyday, but in the meantime I'll give you the looks: