In Which Miss Jill Cleans Out the Confederate Flag in the Closet

Quick update: Vladimir Putin is the clear leader with 29% of the quiz results. I'll post a graph in a few days so that you can determine the strength of your competition.

So I try to stick with media that has educational merit, but sometimes I find myself inexplicably drawn to the television equivalent of Spam. I took home a lot of work when I was a will writer and I spent many a Saturday watching an entire season of America's Next Top Model on VH1. Highlights were a fight in which a girl battling anger management problems yelled, "That ho got beer in my weave!" and when Tyra sagely advised, "Girl, when you are as famous as me, you can get air brushed. But in your position, you better eat that burger without the bun." I am still not adept at projecting my fierce alter-ego and seducing the camera with my gaze (looks most often captured on an iPhone with the subject's arm extended in the bottom corner), but I am sure that I learned some valuable things about an industry that I will never be a part of.

Speaking of places that are not my niche, my cousin is the king of filling his DVR with shows that I would deny watching in polite society, although apparently not on the world wide web. The other day I was introduced to another industry that is somewhat irrelevant to my daily life: Louisiana gator hunting. Has anyone else seen this show?



I can only assume that P.E.T.A. does not have a Baton Rogue facility, because these guys ride around the swamp shooting crocodiles in the face and hauling them onto their boats. The highlight of the episode I saw involved a man sending bullet pieces into his son's face after a firearm mishap. He then laments that the last thing you want to do is shoot your own kid, because they might think you done it on purpose. Luckily, his wife is able to deftly remove the bullet using a butcher knife from the kitchen. It was funny, but I don't even own a t.v., so I realized that I would probably just have to be satiated by one episode.

You know how once you learn a new word your hear it everywhere? Strangely enough, I logged into Netflix yesterday and it immediately asked me to rate what I had recently watched. It was this:



Except I didn't watch it on Netflix. I am too indiscriminate about sharing my password, which led to a certain twenty-year-old watching Pokemon 4-ever on there and other similar tragedies. I texted my brother to see if it was him and he shiftily replied, "Maybe."

In Which Miss Jill Plays Matchmaker

Speaking of non-scientific personality quizzes....

I made up this totalitarian dictator romance quiz a few months ago. Frankly, I'm shocked that I haven't had to edit out Gaddafi yet. I figured out how to do it without asking for your e-mail address, so the results are completely anonymous (unless you care to share). Don't try to manipulate it to get Kim Jon-Il, unless that is what your heart is telling you.

Who Is Your Despot Dream Boat? » ProProfs Quiz Maker

A Boring Post That Somehow Took On A Life of Its Own

Warning: This post is really boring. I will put up something entertaining to make up for it. I probably shouldn't post it, but maybe someone knows something about this topic.

If the personality test post was any indication, I have recently been kind of interested in theories and research of dubious scientific merit. Through my studies I have been able to classify a former roommate as a sociopath (I'm not saying anything, but some of you may be able to figure this one out), to ascertain the ideal mate type for my friends, to understand the male brain and to prepare for the impending era of turmoil/social unraveling.

Along those lines, the other day I started reading a blog post and comment chain that some lady wrote about high I.Q. mating rituals (no, I didn't google that looking for tips on seducing nerds-it was randomly on a religious blog) and it made me wonder about my own I.Q. I forwent socializing yesterday afternoon to take quite a few I.Q. tests online and was left with the headache of the century. I doubt that online I.Q. tests are totally legit, but I pretty consistently score around a 148. However, I must admit that I cheated on one of them and looked up the Pythagorean Theorem. I think it is pretty obvious that I am not a genius, so the result did not come as a surprise. I can only think of a few people who I think would probably score genius and one of them I haven't even met in real life. However, in New York City the number of people who THINK that they are geniuses is very high. You can recognize them from their general air of condescension and refusal to acknowledge that anyone else might have something interesting to say. If you can't tell, I am feeling some social malaise right now.

That being said, I don't understand how identifying patterns and unscrambling words under time pressure says anything useful about a person's intellect. When am I going to have to figure out the next number in a series in real life? Or know the anagram of "banalities?" And it seems to be skewed towards left-brained Math lovers. I am convinced that with some practice, a lot of people could pass the Mensa test (yes, Pamy, your dream is attainable), but it doesn't seem like joining would be that fun. Furthermore, I don't think that people commonly take I.Q. tests anymore, so how accurate can they really be?

I think I generally espouse some form of multiple intelligences theory and I think that it is important to disavow cultural ideas of the supremacy of any certain brand of intelligence (often Math and Science related proclivities). Society needs people with keen social intelligence as much as people who never noticed that physics is boring.

Pretentious is the Night

I realize that this is the third week in a row that I have reviewed the audience instead of the movie. Sorry, these posts are more for me than you. I have to make sense of the crazy world I live in. If you find yourself in a foreign language classroom or a study abroad trip and do not know the target language, you will quickly be led to believe that the teacher/tour guide is the greatest comedic genius of the century. If you spoke the language, you would realize that in spite of the quality of the joke, everyone competes with each other to laugh the loudest in order to prove that they understood. Just an observation.

Last night I saw the new Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson's character is a frustrated writer who travels through time to the twenties, where he meets notables such as Hemmingway, Dali, Picasso, etc. Every time a new character was introduced, the audience broke into frenetic peals of laughter. I briefly worried that the hipster next to me was asphyxiating.

For example:

Actress: Hi, I'm Zelda and this is my husband Scott.
Audience: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (duration: five minutes, decibels: 7 million).

I have never heard laughter like this in a movie (although I tend to like movies in which futile lives of degradation are mercifully cut short by a forgotten land mine), so I was forced to conclude that failure to laugh was tantamount to asking, "Who is Henri Matisse?" In other words, Brooklyn social suicide.

Parent Night Two: An A+ in Murder

This post is dedicated to my mother

1993: I fondly remember the days when I could come home from school, watch two Episodes of Saved By The Bell and then settle down to read something avant garde. Maybe Killer's Kiss. Or Stepsister 2. Or Who Killed the Homecoming Queen?. The best thing about R.L. Stine books was that it only took you about 45 minutes from beginning to reach the dramatic denouement. I have a pretty good memory, but all I can remember from those books is that once a cheerleader was found dead with an ice skate protruding from her back. My mom even read all of them when she was pregnant with my youngest brother, Baby Troy. I think that may explain a few things, actually...

I thought that people born on the cusp of Generations X and Y were the only ones terrorized by these low lexile level thrillers, so I was quite astonished by what transpired last night at parent/teacher conference. During the conversation with her dad, one of my students asked, "What do I need to do to become a certified translator? It is my dream!" Her English is great, so we were very encouraging and started looking up resources for translators. I imagined her perched above the General Assembly wearing a headset or brokering a peace treaty. As my heart was swelling with pride, she said, "It has always been my dream to translate R.L. Stine's books and bring them to the Turkish people." The nobility of her goal left me speechless.

The James Bond Villian Next Door

It is my free period right now, so I walked over to the local deli to get some sinus medication. I hate giving that place my business, because they have girlie magazines all over the place, but they are the only place that sells Excedrin Sinus. I have never seen it anywhere else, ever. That place is always full of the skeeziest people of all time.

Near the entrance stood a Russian man of a certain age, holding his dog on a leash. The dog started going crazy and kept trying to make sweet love to my leg. I stepped back in horror. The man took a long look at me and said to the dog, "Come on. Business first, pleasure later."

In Which Miss Jill Demands a Maternity Test

I love doppelganger week on Facebook, because it is interesting to see who people think that they look like. Usually it is wishful thinking, like when I ask people what their best quality is and 98 percent say, "I'm really funny." I finally found out my true doppelganger at church, when a toddler ran up to me yelling, "MOM!!!!! MOM!!!!" I thought that kind of thing only happened to male NBA players or California governors, but it really put life into perspective. I was afraid of garnished wages, so I calmly said, "I am sorry, but I am not your mother." Luckily her nursery teacher backed me up.

Of course, I hung around after that to see what her real mother looked like and she was a tall, skinny, brunette. I have never seen a baby with glasses, but I think we might have an emergency situation on our hands.

Miss Jill From the Block

My workplace is one of the only places in America where a practicing Mormon would be the employee with modesty issues. However, I am pretty sure that I can't pull off long skirts, because the last time I wore one, my boss* asked me if it were FLDS day at the office. I chalked it up to a genetic remnant crying out for recognition through my poor fashion decisions, so I never tried it again.

A few months ago, the eleventh graders did a project in which they had to give a speech about a famous Spanish-speaking person. I knew that my story telling style was to blame for the high percentage of dictators and revolutionaries chosen. I can't help that I get excited. One girl, however, chose J. Lo. A few slides in, I was horrified to see that one of them featured J. Lo in the green dress with P. Diddy (not sure if that was his current name). I wanted to include the pic, but my mom reads this, so just google "J. Lo green dress." I gasped and panicking, stood in front of the projector. Pandemonium broke out. Kids screamed and laughed so hard that they could not breathe. A student finally managed to say, "You. Are. J. Lo." I looked down and J. Lo's scandalous dress/voluptuous anatomy was perfectly projected onto my body. Not many women get the opportunity to see what they would look like if they exercised more/changed races/underwent major surgery, but I was stunning.

* Not current

Weekend Recap or Subway Car of Forgotten Deodorant

My little brother, Ty, was very active in sports when we were growing up and my dad always drove him and his friends to games and to summer sports camps. For that reason, his car always faintly reeked of sweat delicately mixed with the 90s predecessor to Axe. I forgot about how pungent it was until I stepped onto the N train yesterday. The nostalgic odor hit me with such force that I instinctively patted my head in search of a four-inch, shellacked, waterfall of bangs. Disoriented, I looked around and realized that the entire subway car was coming from the Brooklyn Half Marathon and I was trapped.

No segue...

Yesterday I saw the movie "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," which is about paintings of animals that were found in a cave in France. Although I probably don't have two hours worth of interest in the subject, it had some interesting points. However, after talking about prehistoric people, it ended with albino crocodiles swimming in a local biosphere. The narrator said weird stuff like, "What would the crocodiles think of the cave art?" and "Are they just dopplegangers of themselves (anyone with Facebook knows that word)?"

We couldn't stop laughing at how ludicrous it was and a quick google search revealed that we were not alone. Andrew O'Hehir said on salon.com:

"Other than the fact that Herzog has an almost manic fascination with reptiles, I don't get why the crocodiles are in here at all. (They're not "radioactive mutants," as some reviews have fancifully claimed.) It's a bit like watching a vacation video that ends with the 20 minutes when your dad left the camera on by accident and captured an entire visit to the gator ranch on the way home from Disney World."

The best part was as we struggled to leave amidst dozens of hobbling octogenarians, a woman exclaimed (luckily, in a pretentious British accent), "That ending with the crocodiles was brilliant! Just brilliant!" Her friend enthusiastically agreed.

Harlem, New York

Thanks to Emily for the photo.

In Which Miss Jill Requests A Peek Into Your Soul

I have had mixed results from personality tests-once one told me that my celebrity love match was Danny DeVito and another that if I were a dog, I would be a chihuahua.

Note: On my comp, I can't see were I put in links, so if it says "this," followed by the word link, "this," is the link.

However, I just came across this link website and it is kind of interesting. You have to type in the address of your blog and then it tells you your personality type. My blog got:

"ESFP - The Performers
[ESFP]
The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always at risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions."

It wouldn't let me cut and paste the chart, but I scored really low on the "Thinker" section. I am really extroverted (or I probably would not have all of these stories), but I was a little unsure of the rest of it, so I took this link personality test. My result was ENFP, Champion Idealist, which I agreed with. I am curious what other people get, so take it and let me know.

Although I'm still not a fan of men in white jeans...

Another confession: at some point the kids got me to start loving Eurovision, which is a European music contest. Each country is represented by a different song. Last year the singer from Spain got a funny surprise:



The toy dancers are kind of scary in themselves.

Pre-Rapture Confessional

* My friend and I telephone pranked a girl so much in elementary school that her parents called the police, who gave them an early version of caller i.d. She was mean and kept bragging that she was related to Laura Ingles Wilder. They got our number off the device, which wasn't sophisticated enough to provide a name, and called back. My mom answered and refused to give us up, which was cunning, because it turned out that they thought we were high schoolers who hated their son. Props, mom.

* I hate, hate, hate insincerity and flattery. If I complimented you, it was my objective appraisal of the situation, unless you cornered me. I also don't get emotional enough to say mean things that I don't actually think. And along those lines-if you are over 18, I will not laugh at your lame joke if I don't think they are funny. I physically cannot make myself do it, unless you are my boss. People will often repeat themselves to me, thinking that I didn't get it or don't understand sarcasm. I did and I do. I just don't think that saying "TGIF" is clever and I can't live a lie.

* I am very wary of people whose main personality trait is "Nice."

* If I get bored at a social event, I just leave.

* I just noticed five minutes ago that my sweater was inside out.

* I don't think that you really love someone if you refuse to admit that they have flaws.

* I feel like lots of women list sense of humor as an important quality in a mate. If I were the type to make lists of things like that, I probably wouldn't even put it in the top five.

* I have the longest attention span of all time; I watched Season 2 of 24 in one sitting.

* I hate short hair on women. HATE.

* I have given my Netflix password to too many people, because it just suggested that I watch Blue Crush. I am still waiting for someone to come clean for watching Sponge Bob the other day.

* A little while ago, I got sick of people advertising their good deeds/righteousness in their Facebook statuses, blogs and mass e-mails, so I resolved to never tell anyone about anything nice that I did. IT IS SO HARD.

* Couples fighting on the subway stress me out.

* My junior year of high school, I used to skip 8th period History class constantly. It is ironic, because I actually love the topic, but I knew that no one was going to pass the A.P. exam from a curriculum that included a week long documentary about Charles Guiteau, the man who shot President Garfield. If you are reading this and know me from high school, you probably didn't go either.

* If you are a regular reader, you already know this: I am really bad at comma usage. And I never proofread anything I write.

* Most of my friends love guys with lumberjack beards. I think it is gross.

* I got kind of teary while watching the royal wedding. And during "El Rey Leon" when Musafa died (in a room full of kids). And during a Turkish movie about the perils of nursing homes. I only cried every six months during the second half of my twenties, so I am confused about the origin of this recent onslaught of emotion.

Miss Jill's Brush With The Stars of the Literary Universe

A couple of week ago, I went to a storytelling event by myself. I have been 5'1" long enough to know that I needed to be there super early so that I would be able to see. I was really proud to be the fourth in line. In third place was a woman who was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of three martini glasses and the query, "Group Therapy?" She asked me about the time that the event started and used that as a way to start chatting me up about:

* Belgrade and Abu Dhabi in the early seventies
* The circus
* Every free cultural event in the entire city
* Tree diseases
* The non-profit industry
* Haggis, which was a convenient segue to Robert Burns
* Her womanizing cousin who rides a Harley
* Her troubled relationships with her boring Scottish relatives
* Her deceased lover who was a prominent jazz musician, their tour across Europe and meals with nobles. I was skeptical about this one, but she was in the Wikipedia article.
* The hotness of Salman Rushdie, who I am displaying below (THE MAN), for your review:



I will not contest that our friend Salman obviously runs some pretty solid game, but I don't think that we are going to see him peering down from someone's gym class locker anytime soon. I said as much and segued into talking about one of his books. Side note, once I read about his death sentence from the Ayatollah, I read every single one of his books. Not that I was in love with all of them (if you actually care about my opinion on that, feel free to contact me privately), but that is just how I operate. When I referenced the book in the conversation, my new friend just stared at me blankly. She obviously had not read the novel in question, so I dropped it. However, when we were finally in the event and Rushdie was announced, she exclaimed, "I am probably the only person in this room who has read every single one of his books!" At a New York venue where he was the M.C., that seemed like a bold statement. And due to her amnesia a few minutes prior, I even thought for a second that she was talking about me.

So the original reason that I wanted to go to this event was that one of the speakers was a famous Turkish writer named Elif Shafak/Safak. One of my students introduced us to her books, because she is a huge, huge fan. She has read all of them, which is unusual at my school because their primary hobbies are Math and making robots. However, said student always takes the opportunity to take a siesta in my class, which although culturally appropriate at some points in the day, is not appreciated. When I heard that there was a book signing afterward, I hatched a brilliant plan.

I quickly got into the line, where a girl asked me if she should be embarrassed that she was having Jonathan Franzen sign a book splattered with smashed banana from her backpack. I just started laughing, which she must have understood as approval. When I got to the front, I had a nice convo with Shafak, who was very nice, about Turkish school and asked her to sign a book for my student and one for my co-worker. The last line of the message was, "Pay attention in Spanish class, please. :)" How could she ignore the request of her idol? It worked for one day.

Weekend Recap

My cousin and his wife went to Europe, so I substituted their primary class today. I did it once in April and it was the best Sunday I have had in years-I honestly wonder sometimes if I missed my calling in life by not being an elementary school teacher, because I think that fifth and sixth graders are so fun. When a little girl gave the closing prayer she said, "Thank you for church, thank you for our families, thank you for the substitute teacher pause, the funny one."

Yesterday afternoon I went to a movie from Quebec called Incendies. It was nominated for an Academy Award in the foreign language category and when I saw a preview, I got hooked and wrote down the title in the book I was carrying. I talked my Turkish co-worker into going with me, because Turks are usually pros at plodding, melodramatic movies that end in tragedy (my favorite).

It was based on the Lebanese Civil War, but they never come out and say that it is Lebanon. I hadn't read anything about the movie previously, but not knowing if it were set in Syria or Lebanon made me so crazy that I texted my Lebanese friend from the theater to ask. Watching movies on Netflix has spoiled me, because I can always pause it to look up whatever I want.

The end of the movie is super disturbing and the audience did not handle it very well. As the closing credits rolled, several people remained in their seats, sobbing violently. One guy tenaciously tried to sooth his weeping girlfriend, but she continued wailing inconsolably. Others loudly stated that they would need some alcohol in order to sustain the blow. There were also people sitting silently, staring at the screen in a catatonic trance. I felt like I was reliving the school day after Selena died (let's just say that I had lots of paisanos there).

Afterwards, we stopped in a card shop and as we were browsing, my co-worker picked up a card that said, "I'm Sorry." She asked, "You are buying this for me?" Confused, I tried to think of something I had done. I replied, "Huh?" She laughed and said, "For making me go to that movie!" I guess I have a lot of cards to write... My family deserves about 50, although I think that we are even due to all the episodes of Survivor I have seen.

And lastly, I need another Internet based favor. Please go to The Mormon Bachelorette (this is a hyperlink, not sure if it looks like one) and like my friend Steph's profile. Thanks.

The Looseleaf Oracle of Doom

Do you remember that day, circa 1991, in which you found out that you were going to marry Shawn C., the kid that everyone knew picked his nose and wore a Bart Simpson shirt in his school picture? All because you picked blue and 4 on this:



Although other possible outcomes were likely "You are fat," "You love Mrs. Brown (the obese lunch lady)," and "You will be a garbageman," it was still very bad news.

Kids today don't leave such messages up to chance. A few days ago I confiscated an airplane that had been carefully crafted from my Spanish animal vocabulary list:



The only clue that I have concerning the identity of the intended sixth grade recipient is that he/she is "desprite." As soon as I figure out how this malady is exhibited in an eleven-year-old, I will update.

My H1N1 Story

The class that I have right now is mysteriously missing, so I am going to take this moment to tell a brief cautionary tale. A few days ago, I was casually chewing gum and blew a bubble. My landlady's six-year-old daughter excitedly smashed it in my face. Her five-year-old brother enthusiastically begged, "Please, let me pop one too." I was happy to comply and blew another. They were having so much fun that I sort of got pulled into it like an episode of Oprah. We did this for quite some time and by the end, I was chewing 4 pieces of gum for maximum bubble size.

Then, common sense suddenly hit my brain like a thunderbolt. I had no idea when and if they had washed their hands that day and I was pulling the germs back in with every explosion. GAME OVER

Dimes Left From The Outer Realms or the Perils of the Information Age

When it comes to making crazy life decisions, I think that I am braver than most people. However, when it comes to being home alone at night, I constantly terrorize myself with Wikipedia and youtube videos. I briefly considered checking my Internet history and listing all the weird things I have researched in the past month, but I don't think there is an audience for that. I realized that I had an addiction when I watched the original Cleopatra with a friend last week and I was getting an anxiety attack because I couldn't stop the movie to look up Cleopatra's son, Caesarion, on Wikipedia. Don't comment that Wikipedia is not a trustworthy information source; I'm not about to start JSTORing every time some bizarre idea pops into my head (all day, every day).

The problem is that I get freaked out really easily. I have had night terrors from:

The Bible Code show (I think this was an A&E special and it really freaked me out)
Watching the pre-suicide exit videos for the Heaven's Gate cult members. It is kind of fascinating though and available on youtube.
Googling Obama Antichrist
St. Malachy Prophecy
Scientology OT III

I could go on, but I just wanted to illuminate the fact that all of these things have no direct influence on my life and are not even that scary, but if I am home alone, I feel like a five-year-old whose parents irresponsibly took her to Scream IV.

I am thinking about this, because I currently find myself in such a state. Yesterday my friend, "Olivia," told me that ever since her son was born, she has constantly found dimes. She associated this phenomenon with her grandmother who had already passed away. She told me that she finds them on the floor, in her wallet after she has removed the change, in her clean car, at the bottom of bags and once on her pillow after they had already put on pajamas, when there was no money in sight. She also mentioned that it most frequently happens when she is worried about something, like when her dad had a heart attack.

One day Olivia was watching some kind of bridezilla show and she was shocked when the bride incorporated dimes into the wedding decorations because they started to incessantly appear after her father died. When I got home tonight, I googled "Finding dimes left by loved ones" and found this blog entry with tons of stories about dimes. There are even some Mormons in the comments who attribute it to tithing. Now, it is late at night and I am alone and afraid that I am going to suddenly roll over and see a ghostly dime in my bed.

In Which The Turks Have My Religious Dietary Code Back

This is my second year at my school and because the school is so small, my students know me rather well. And a lot of random things about Mormonism and my life. Today an eleventh grader opened a bottle of soda and it quickly became undeniable that he had already spent several minutes furiously shaking it. As ginger ale erupted from the bottle, it came dangerously close to ricocheting off my glasses. With disgust and fear of getting soaked, I exclaimed, "Get that away from me, now!"

Another student quickly appraised the situation and advised, "No, it is ok. There is not any caffeine* in it."

* Many Mormons do not drink caffeinated soda, although it is a polemic doctrinal issue. Personally, I don't think it is a sin (although we didn't have it in my house when I was a kid), but am not a carbonation fan.

Some Genetic Explanations for the Enigma that is Miss Jill

If I knew how to photoshop some powder onto my face, I would do it. But I guess we look ok for being in the middle of a tropical rainstorm. My mom and I hate being in pictures, so this is one of the only ones I have of us together. We are in Cuernavaca, Mexico picking up my brother from the mission home. We were supposed to go to the final testimony meeting for the missionaries going home, but we got lost and were almost two hours late (providentially?) and missed most of it. My poor brother thought that we had abandoned him. Please take note that my parents don't have gray hair yet (although my dad now looks like he had a body wave due to a freak side effect of chemo).

When I was little, the girl across the street was really jealous because my mom always looked young and stylish and her mom was always wearing a halter and hot pants from the seventies (the same woman who tried to make us play a Ouija board).

My Mom's Legacy

1. Cultural Knowledge. When I was in elementary school she made up a game with the Friend (Mormon children's magazine) called "Guess the Foreigner." She would open the section called Friends in the News, which had pictures and short profiles of Mormon children throughout the world.
Example:
Jimmy, 5, Orem, Utah...
Loves to help his mom with his baby sister. He also likes to sing songs about Jesus and play baseball with his dad.

My mom would cover up the captions and have us guess who wasn't American. In the eighties everyone was either from the U.S., the British Isles, Canada or Australia, so you had to pay careful attention to the haircuts and clothing. We got pretty good at this, but Canada is really hard without hearing a voice. However, when traveling abroad, "Guess the American" is fairly simple. Two words: jean shorts.

2. I wear makeup every single day. I wouldn't want her to see my fashion faux pas habits now. Example: If I know I will have to walk a lot, I wear tennis shoes, even or especially with black pants. I can't even imagine trying to color coordinate everything and add pearls like I would if I were still at BYU. Too much effort and too expensive...

3. I have a wide repertoire of western european folk songs. I have a hard time imagining teenagers today hanging around the piano singing "Annie Laurie" and "Molly Malone," but my sister and I spent hours and hours recreating lost love from the 16th century. And I never saw "The Breakfast Club" or "Say Anything" because we were so busy watching AMC and technicolor musicals all day. I have no idea how I had any friends, but I remember lying in sixth grade and saying that I watched 90210.

4. A friend who is learning English asked me how to use "ain't" and I really had to think about it.

5. My sense of humor is definitely from the matriarchal line* (no offense if anyone from my dad's family is reading this, although whether this is a virtue is debatable). Back in the halcyon days before caller i.d., she helped us think of telephone pranks for people at church. Once we wrote fake love notes and randomly distributed them around the church. My mom saw an octogenarian discover one in a hymn book and exclaim, "This is really romantic!"

This took me a really long time to write because the neighbors were blasting a lethal cocktail of european techno and Rhianna for three hours and I couldn't concentrate. So even though the day is almost over, Happy Mother's Day!

* I decided that I should clarify by saying that my dad thinks that ESPN and Sports Illustrated Jokes are hilarious. If you have read this blog more than once, you know that jock humor is probably not my genre.

Non-American Graffiti

Doodling on desks, textbooks and school room walls is a universal hobby of teens. In a typical American school you are likely to see declarations of everlasting love, a detailed list of who sucks and a potpourri of curse words etched throughout the school. However, my students approach it from a different angle:



It looks like a teacher intruded before the young patriot could get to "erzegovina." The only explanation I have for why the picture looks split is that my phone has an approximate value of $8.00 USD. There is a lot of hometown/national pride going around and I frequently see stuff like the flags of Albania, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Tajikistan or the names of Turkish cities written at the top of worksheets, on dictionaries or on school property. After seeing "Istanbul," "Adana," "Malatya," "Konya," and countless other cities celebrated daily, I decided that I needed to take more pride in my childhood hometown. In light of that goal, I tried it myself:



I didn't feel the rush of pride in defacing my own book that I was expecting.

In Which Square Miss Jill Sticks It To the Man

Each year, I patiently wait out the Christmas season, knowing that the real holiday comes in early February: the day my tax return rolls in. I always file my taxes on the day that I receive my W2 and I have always had huge, lifesaving refunds. This year I started working on it after school in early January, while some sixth graders frolicked joyfully around the room. As I typed the numbers into TurboTax, my enthusiasm grew, bordering on how I would imagine the manic stage of bipolar disorder feels (no disrespect intended, I'm just pretty sure that is where I was at). As I finished typing in the information, I saw with horror that it had calculated my federal refund as $1 and that I owed $82 on state. I was completely unable to process that information and stared at a biology poster in a catatonic trance.

One of the sixth graders suspended frolicking and looked at me with fear in his eyes.

He asked tremulously, "What is wrong with your face?"

Fighting tears, I replied, "Something really tragic has happened. I don't have the words to express it right now." He gave me a loving hug of comfort (first sign that I do not work in a public school) and let me mourn my loss in silence. I closed out of TurboTax and was unable to make myself file until the due date. I remembered to do it as I was waiting for my flight at the Detroit Airport. It seemed like a fitting place to be as I was in the throes of financial ruin. Deciding that it would be funny to make the government produce a $1.00 check, I requested that option and received the spoils today:

A Trip Through the Carribbean With Miss Jill

Last week we went on a field trip and one of my students lives really far from the school and didn't want to take the public bus alone at night, so I went with her. After I dropped her off, I was horrified at the prospect of taking three buses back home, so I called car service. I have been in a taxi less than ten times since I moved to New York, but taking teens to Manhattan is a little exhausting.

So I got in the car and the first thing I noticed was that it smelled exactly like this place:



If you have ever lived in certain areas of New York, you would know this aroma. I've never actually been inside, but I always get a whiff of fish/burning/exotic spices of the islands when I walk by. I started talking to the driver and he mentioned that he was from Trinidad. I told him that I had wanted to go to Trinidad since I was a little, because I had read a novel about it. I don't remember much, but I know that the protagonist was a blonde British girl who was raised by some kind of Mammy type figure. This makes me concerned that I may have had some imperialist reading habits as a child, because I also remember reading books about British people in India, China and "Rhodesia."

Anyway, my new friend told me that I would really like taking a trip to Trinidad during carnival because you just have to find a truck to dance behind and before you knew it, dawn would come. And you don't have to worry about wearing any clothes, because you always see a 300 lb lady in a g-string and all the guys want to dance with her. He also said that everyone loses 20-30 lbs during Carnival, because they can't stop dancing. He confidently assured me that I would love it, but the whole thing was strangely reminiscent of the time that my friend told me never to see Borat, because it was "the antithesis of anything you would like." Except maybe the dramatic weight loss part.

Incidentally, I did experience Carnival when I was a student in the Dominican Republic. There, they have the tradition of blowing up a pig or cow's bladder, tying it to a stick and running around hitting revelers on the legs:



Unfortunately, I was hit and it hurt. But my agony pales in comparison to that of my friend, Tiff, who was hit by a motorcycle taxi and survived.