In Which Miss Jill Checks Her Passport for a Visa to China

Item in a Brooklyn grocery store:



Ok, we all know that my phone photography sucks-that is a picture of turtles cheerfully swimming, not realizing that they are destined for a soup pot.

Anatolian Escapades

One of our students is foreign, but is not Turkish and she spent most of the school year living in the Turkish student dorms. When I asked her about her experience there (as the only non-Turkish speaking person), she looked straight ahead with a malicious gleam in her eye. "If Turkish were a person," she spat, "I would kill him."*

I came to school today with a really heinous, florescent sunburn and a student sighed and said, "I wish that you would have worn a white dress today, so you could be the color of the Turkish flag."

* Just to clarify, she doesn't hate Turkish people, she just hates never knowing what is going on.

Random Thoughts

My landlady is Polish and she was watching the Polish channel the other day. They did a story about a group of people who were renting in a few apartment buildings. Everyone decided that they were not going to pay anymore. Out of desperation, the owners turned off the hot water. Nothing happened. Then they cut of the cable. The money started rolling in. The commentators wondered what it said about the Polish people, if they cared more about watching tv than being clean.

The other day we were in the park celebrating my friend's birthday and two NYPD officers were walking through the park. One of the guys was Puerto Rican and he gasped and said,"For a minute I got scared and thought that they were going to ask me for my papers. Then I realized that we weren't in Arizona."

In Which Miss Jill Should Probably Be Wearing a Hair Net

I teach 6th-12th grade, but I have lunch supervision duty twice a week and have been able to get to know the younger kids. The teachers always come to pick them up late, so I've started playing games with them whenever I am down there.

The school has a separate daycare center with a playground. My landlady/bff/school secretary has two kids who go there and on Friday we went there to pick them up after school. I waited in the van while she went in to get them. As I relaxed with the window open, I heard a strange sound. It repeated, "Hey you, yeah, with the white hair." As my grandma actually had white hair, I quickly became disoriented. I looked out the window and a first grader was standing outside in a karate uniform. He pointed at me. "Yeah, you with the white hair. You're the lunch lady. The freeze dance lady." Guilty as charged.