"Cause you make such a beautiful wreck you do..."

One of the perks of teaching is that I am in the middle of my winter break. Sure I've got papers to grade, lessons to plan, and books to read, but I was actually able to go home to Maryland and stay for almost five days. Today I got to spend the day in the city running errands, seeing movies, and shopping for 8 dollar boob accentuating tops.

Typically I don't go home to reconnect with people I once knew. A lot of people that I once knew don't always understand or like who I've become, and I get tired of trying to explain my new life and new paths. This visit home though was filled with people I once knew and a life long since left behind. Tuesday, I went out with my friend Kalenn, her husband of five years Kris, and their 11 month old baby Liesel. It was surreal. We sat in the booth at the diner discussing the DC metro area, Utah, Philadelphia and diversity while the baby cooed and gnawed on crackers and fruit. I've known Kalenn since we were 9 years old and taking piano lessons. We'd gone exploring in creeks together, passed notes in English class, danced in theater dressing rooms, and giggled evenings away. We never really realized how different our lives were. She grew up a strict mormon, and I a reform Jew with an atheist father.

At one point we drove to Rajvi's house. We had been a bad joke growing up: A mormon, a Jew, and a Hindu (walk into a bar... OW!) We ran to the side door, the same way we had when we were in elementary school with the same question dancing on our lips "Is Rajvi home??" She wasn't.

Later that day, we met up with Katie who had spent the day trying on wedding dresses. We all chatted about our respective lives and perspective futures.

Wednesday, I met up with Rajvi finally. It had been maybe five years since I'd last seen her. We talked about her boyfriend who was expected to be her fiancee in a few months. We talked about school. We reminiced about our childhood.

I learned something very profound in my tine with these ladies. In a lot of respects I have things complete under control. I have a good job doing what I love. I have a great apartment. I have my friends that I love. In a lot of other ways I am a beautiful wreck.

Day to day, I get a little sappy about my lack of love life. My mother tries to ask me about my most recent failed relationship and smooths things over with "well at least you were in love" type sentiments. The big thing I realized is that I never thought about being in love until this week. At 24, with so many people around me in serious committed relationships (in this entry I have not mentioned spending two days with a good friend in committed relationship of 2 years, my step-sister's boyfriend of 2 years spending christmas with my family, and my cousin's girlfriend of... 2 years... spending christmas with my family) I realize that I... I never really think about love in the long term. I mean if my ex hadn't run off to North Carolina I think we'd probably still be together, but I never planned for it. When I plan for the future I never think about anyone being there with me. I never think about marriage or kids or even "living in sin" with another person. I wonder what is wrong with me. I had friends in college who used to talk about their ideal weddings, and I could barely participate expcept to say that I like the outdoors and roses because they're my birth flower. My grandmother always told me not to get married until I had my life figured out. As my life slowly works its way into figured out, have I wasted too much time to get the love part figured out too?

I found Amy's Blog

So I rarely do shit like this anymore... but it's more interesting than grading...

If your life was a movie, what would the soundtrack be?
How to do it:1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc).2. Put it on Shuffle.3. Press Play.4. For every question, type the song that's playing.5. When you go to a new question, press the next button.6. Be honest.

My life is: Heaven Help Me

OPENING CREDITS
Cyndi Lauper- "Time After Time"
I picture bad 80's hair do's and diary writing. Oh yeah, and there's rain, lots and lots of rain.

WAKING UP
Howie Day- "She Says"
Okay so the beginning of the song is about waking up, but so far my movie is really freakin' whiny.

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
Pat McGee Band- Runaway
It could be worse i guess.

FALLING IN LOVE
The Bloodhound Gang- "Lift your head up high and blow your brains out."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA... wow. I have nothing else to say to this.

FIGHT SONG
Fiona Apple- "Fast as you can"
Okay this is kinda cool.

BREAKING UP
Sarah Mclachlan- "Terms of Endearment"
I would be with the guy who doesn't really want to be with me, but won't tell me so we wind up having a really fucked up break-up. (There's a bitter joke to be made here about my relationship senior year at la salle...)

PROM
Tori Amos- Mother
I can dig this. It's very a melancholy coming of age song... just very final. Not very happy "yay prom."

LIFE IS GOOD
Rolling Stones- Wild Horses
Umm... okay?

MENTAL BREAKDOWN
Halifax- Snow in Hollywood
The lyrics totally don't fit with a mental breakdown, but I can totally see myself going stark raving mad and breaking shit to this song.

DRIVING
Eddie From Ohio- Clear and Present Danger
I don't know.

FLASHBACK
Deana Carter- "We danced anyway"
This fits! YAY! It's actually a song about flashbacks.

GETTING BACK TOGETHER
Goo Goo Dolls- Iris
Yes I do have the sappiest music collection known to human kind.

WEDDING
Cake- Short skirt, long jacket
There's something really cool about this being the wedding song. Short white dress, long black jacket... very mod.

FINAL BATTLE
Counting Crows- A Murder of One
Nice :)

DEATH SCENE
Matt Nathanson- Sad Songs
I just love this song... and if I had to pick a song for my death scene, i think this would be nice.

FUNERAL SONG
BoDeans- Naked
Um.... I hope not.

END CREDITS
Guster- Two Points for Honesty

This was a productive way to spend my night... ha.

"You're only as loud as the noises you make."

Tonight I saw a play. I've seen a number of plays in my life. Community, high school, professional you name it... I've never had this reaction to a play before. Even my first show ever, Crazy For You, while it sparked a love of theater that exists today, it did not invoke this kind of stay up past bed time thought process that i am getting through right now.

I just saw My Children! My Africa! by Athol Fugard at the Wilma. The acting was great, but the script is what has captured my thoughts. It was a play about South Africa in 1984. It was about substandard racist education in a society that needed change. There were three characters; three opinons on how that change needed to come about. The teacher looked at education as the way for change. To teach students the language and the words they needed to create change. He makes this beautiful speech about the gift of language and oration. There's the black student who is angry and sees change occuring only by protest and force. There's the privleged white student who looks at change as happening by forming friendships and seeing things from the other perspective. She's naive and somewhat ignorant to the world around her. These characters resonated with me. Within them I saw so much of current philadelphia. The substandard education that essentially makes sure that our students will never rise to the place they can go. The teachers like myself who want to work within it because we keep the hope that education can be the great equalizer. Believing somehow that if our students learn the language of change that they can become the change they want to see. Knowing deep down that the lessons they are learning are not about them, and struggling to show them why they should know it. The naive people who don't truely understand what is going on, but know a change should occur. And in the student that believed that the substandard education and inequality could only be erased by protest and fighting I see so many of my students.

I want to bring them to see this show, I want to make them read it, to show them all the sides. To let them see and compare these students' lives to their own. I want to make the teachers i work with read it and discuss it. I want others to see the sides of an argument that people ignore in this city.

Never in the 12 years that I have been in love with the stage, and the 19 years I've been in love with the written word have I felt this... engulfed... by a play.

More after I buy the play tomorrow and read it over and over again.

"The hardest to learn was the least complicated..."

I officially started teaching on September 5th. Since that point my life has been a series of misadventures, mistakes, and mis-steps. Last week I only really had to teach two days out of the week due to state mandated testing, yet that week was the first week that I actually felt confident in the school. For the first time in a month and a half I actually believed that I belonged there. This was only complicated by my increasingly complicated personal life.

"I don't want you thinking I'm unhappy/What is closer to the truth/That if I lived till I was 102/I just don't think I'll ever get over you."

I had a visitor last week, he spent it sleeping on my couch. We spent it making the same jokes we'd made for two years. Playing skip-bo and watching tv, running to catch busses, playing quizzo, talking about life, sharing silly stories on the porch while he smoked and I sat breathing in the cool night air and the acrid smell of nicotine. Occasionally our hands would touch and we'd retract them quickly, or let them linger with a tired sigh. It was comfortable to have him here, yet simultaneously frustrating and emotionally draining. Not enough time had passed to dull the ache, and yet so much time had passed that we couldn't go back to where we'd been. I cried alot this week, because I'm a silly girl. In a moment of clarity mixed with red wine, I walked him to the trolley. My goodbye was more final than I had intended the week to end. He's still going to be the first person that i've ever said "I love you" to and meant it. He's still going to be the only person I can share my bucket of crazy with, but it's time to let go of the hope that I'm going to get a call in a year to move to detroit. He's going to go back and live his life, and I am going to start re-living my life here. I will still call every so often to make sure that he's still alive, but once a week is too much too soon. So in this walk to the trolley, I kissed him goodbye. Our first kiss of the week, and the last for who knows how long. And with that, I am going to close that chapter.

"Stones taught me to fly/Love taught me to cry/So come on courage/Teach me to be shy/'Cause it's not hard to fall/And I don't wanna lose/It's not hard to grow/When you know that you just don't know"

There's so much more to say about the state of my life right now. Teaching, learning, and growing up. My kids teach me new things everyday. My fellow teachers constantly teach me new things about myself, and my new found career path. For everyday I grow up, I grow down ever so slightly. It's far to difficult to get into at this point in time.

I'm not unhappy, I'm just still learning.

In other news... if you were still wondering if santorum was an ass... here's some more proof.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-10172006-728120.html

goodnight.

All this talk of getting older is getting me down my love

It's a strange feeling to suddenly think of myself as an adult. I still feel like a child in so many ways. I look at people I work with as so much older, so much more mature when half of them are younger than i am. I still have silly conversations on the phone with my girlfriends about the men in our lives. I still have a myspace account. I still have drunken crazy pictures on my wall. I still feel like ice cream and melodramatic television shows make a great night. I have never held a romantic relationship for longer than 7 months. I still get great enjoyment out of stickers and puzzles. I still dance like an idiot around my room when the mood strikes me. Yet... somehow... somewhere... I got a grown up job, and more responsibility than i've ever had in my life.

I teach 10th grade. Over two days, I see 180 students for hour and a half blocks. I get up at 5:15/5:30 every morning, depending on the day I get home between 6 and 10:30 every night. I spend my weekends getting ready to teach the next week. I make a real salary. I have a real apartment and real bills. Somewhere along the way, I became an adult and I want to know when the fuck that happened?

"Life just keeps getting harder, and it just keeps getting harder to hide."

"When I said I'd take, I meant as is..."

"And I've got no illusions about you, guess what I never did. When I said, when i said i'd take it, I meant as is."

The first time my mother and I drove down north Broad street on our way to visit La Salle University, we were silent as we passed the decaying shops and dirty streets. Finally she turned to me and said, "you're not going to school here." Following the admissions office's directions we passed the Central High School football field with Central in front of us. "If that's La Salle," my mom said with panic in her voice, "we're turning around right now and going home."

It turns out we didn't turn around and go home, and I spent four years at La Salle. My mother never grew to like the city any more though, constantly complaining about the dirty streets and worrying about bad neighborhoods. I still don't think she really understands why I love this city so much.

Here I am, almost exactly six years since I first arrived in Philadelphia, and madly in love with a hopelessly imperfect city.

I have espoused before about the beautiful tapestry that is Philadelphia, the old and new weaving together to create intricate patterns. But it's not just the old and new, not just the old south philly men with sandwiches tattooed on their arms (a story for another time) drinking with 20 year old hipsters, or the Penn students living next door to the west philadelphia family that's lived there for 30 years. The tapestry is so much more complex than I can ever fully grasp.

Frequently students at La Salle rarely leave the campus. The neighboring Mt. Airy, Olney, and Logan prove a little to scary for the typical white suburban Lasallian. If they do leave the campus, they take a shuttle to the sub and go straight to Center City. So, it wasn't until I ventured out on my own that I really saw the city. The past two years, I have walked through or visited almost every neighborhood. I have worked 7 blocks from Penn and been in a different world. Walked through sidestreets in Kensington, and recently been to bars in Fishtown. I have picked up trash in West Philadelphia, and played games with kids from Olney. And there's beauty in areas that people forget about. There's crime and drugs, and kids who grow up way too fast. But then again there is still a little 6 year old boy who puts together a car out of legos and giggles with the wonder of creating something, there is still a mosaic of angles on a church that's lot is covered in trash. On a block where teenagers deal with the death of friend, there are still old men and women who sit outside and yell a hello to passersby.

The real tapestry of Philadelphia accepts the littered streets and urban decay. The personality of Philadelphia is dirty, crass and yet at the same time oddly beautiful.

My purpose here, I still don't quite understand. But while I'm living and working in areas of the city that most of my friends are afraid to go, I will embrace this city for all of its little beauties.

This entry brought to you by a broken heart and Matt Wertz

"And I don't think that I can even remember/Why it was that i came to this town"

Every guy I've ever dated has hated my taste in music. There's just something about sensitive (read: whiny) emotional lyrical acoustic music that just never did it for any of them. Funny though when the time comes for the relationship to end and I am left with my thoughts I turn to this emotional lyrical acoustic music and listen to songs on a loop. I pick a theme and run with it.

Well here I am, left with my thoughts... I have a broken heart. It's so cliche, but so true.

"This is me on the eve of an ending/To what I've known's been constant for a year/And I'm so scared of this pain that I'll be sending/Sometimes I just want to run away in fear"

It's not just this break-up that has me torn up. I don't deal well with change. City Year was my life for two years, and now I am about to embark upon a career as a teacher. Seriously? What the fuck do I know about teaching? I am terrified. And... as uneloquent as this sounds... this whole relationship ending thing... isn't helping!

"No, I haven't heard your voice in two weeks now/And anticipation's been wearing me thin/And I just can't help but wonderin' baby if somehow/We could tear these pages out and begin again"

I would like to clarify something, with 2000 miles between us, I wasn't expecting any great romance to endure. It's the loss of my friend that hurts the most. It's the lack of contact... not a phone call, an email, a fucking text message. It's the loss of one of my best friends.

Whatever, all I know anymore is...

"I don't want to be lonely tonight."

Editor's note: The song in purple is "Lonely Tonight" by Matt Wertz

"Monica, remember that it's food... not love" or the first pseudo-personal entry with no intellectual value.

**Editor's Note: In an effort to not embarrass or incriminate anyone else in my life with this journal, anytime that I write about anyone else I will only be using the first initial. If you know who I'm talking about, mazel tov you win, but they don't need to be "put out on front street" if you know what I mean.**

I think I seek out people in my life who turn to food when life takes a turn to the worse. Maybe I do it to make myself feel less weird, when I crave a cup of coffee, ice cream, or cookies when I'm feeling crappy. Maybe people just like the fact that I'll cook for them when they're feeling down. Either way, it is the reason why when E was sounding sad on the phone yesterday night that I suggested we make dinner tonight and watch bad (but oh-so-great) movies. It was also the reason why she invited C to join when she learned that C had just been dumped by her significant other.

So there we were, three "classy" ladies eating chips and drinking Pabst, when the following conversation occured:

C: I can't even go on myspace, I just keep thinking that I'll have to change my relationship status.
Me {throwing my hands up in agreement}: It's the last remaining piece of my relationship! He hasn't changed his profile yet, and I refuse to do it first, because I know how upset I'll be if he notices and changes his.
E {chuckling}: I don't think I'll ever be able to change that status box. It's like a big step in a relationship, I'll just be thinking, like, 'I like you, but I don't know if I'm ready for all that.'
Me: Seriously, I remember that I didn't change my status until he changed his, and then I decided to do it.
E: I remember that!
C: Yeah well made me change mine to "in a relationship"...

Looking back on this conversation has brought me to two important conclusions-
First: Wow my friends and I are so fucking lame. I mean people are getting bombed, living without food or water, getting sub-par educations, etc and I'm sitting around eating chicken and scalloped potatoes talking about fucking myspace. I'm such a loser.

Second: When the hell did myspace start dictating our lives?? We check it religiously, put scandelous pictures of ourself on it, we use it to send messages to each other, and apparently to define our relationship status. It's the modern equivelent to getting "pinned." You'd think the three small words that would declare to the world that you're in a relationship would be "I love you," instead we get "In a relationship". How sad has this culture gotten? And why can't I pretend to be immune to it like so many of my friends are? Even my older campers are talking about it. Today the girls talked about how when they're older they're going to get a myspace page. They traded possible songs they could download and what pictures they'd put on it. THEY'RE 10! They should be decorating binders and lockers, not parts of the web where scary men can come find them! Sheesh.

I need to get off this computer... myspace is calling.

Stop snitching and other lessons we reluctantly teach children

This summer I have taken on the daunting task of being an assistant counselor for a group of kids at a daycare in the Olney/Northeast section of Philadelphia. My group has 20 rostered kids, 14 that show up daily, and the age range is 5 to 11. So for 9 hours a day, I am breaking up fights, leading countless games of an altered "Captain's Coming", singing every camp song I know, and dealing with countless choruses of "Miss Aaaaaalliiiiiii..." Point being, my kids love to tattletale. I'm constantly bombarded with "Miss Ali, he's chewing with his mouth open;" "Miss, she stuck her tongue out at me;" "Miss, she starin' at me!"

There's this slogan: "Stop Snitchin'" that has been popping up everywhere recently. I'm not a fan of this slogan, in my mind it's associated with the witnesses to the murder of an innocent 7 year old boy that were intimidated into changing their testimony to allow the man on trial to go free. I associate it with the articles I read about shootings in broad daylight on a busy street where people are too scared to come forward and help catch the people that did it. Part of me completely understands the self-preservation aspect. The "why should I put myself out there when I didn't know the one who got killed" aspect. Typically, I side with the Mothers-in-charge "Step up! Speak up!" campagin which is trying to give people in philadelphia the courage to take a stand against violence and help stop it.

I say typically because after working at this daycare for a week now... I want to shake a few of my kids and scream "STOP SNITCHIN'!" I'm trying very hard to teach "good tattling" and "bad tattling." At the age of 7 though, most of them don't quite understand that cutting in line, or flicking ears is not a matter of life and death, and my patience only runs so deep.

It's a hard thing to teach, the line between not being a tattletale but to know when speaking up is okay. I've watched mothers smack their children in the back of the head and yell "snitches get stiches," which probably reinforces the idea that they shouldn't tattle, but probably also teaches them that they should never speak up. I can sit (sit... ha! who am I kidding, run around) at work day after day and repeat that "there are serious things that we should tell Miss Ali and Miss Tina, but there are somethings that you need to use your words and fix yourself" but does that help?

Something to ponder...

So blogging is supposed to be this hip trendy way for people to speak their minds about the state of the modern world. I'm not hip, nor am I trendy, nor do I feel I can say anything intelligent about the state of our country today (that hasn't already been more eloquently put by a real blogger). I tried to stay below the blogging radar and write on a LiveJournal, but alas I am no longer 16 and angsty, and it was time for me to grow up. So here I am, writing on a real live blog. I might write about the state of the world. Spout eloquent prose about the state of education and politics, but most likely I will simply write about my day or what is pissing me off currently about the state of my life.

PS: Don't ask me about the title, I don't know why I called it that.