On Meeting the Girl

My son has a new girlfriend.  This is no one's business but his, so I shouldn't be writing about it.  But I want to write about it in a different context.

I hadn't met her yet, but all of his friends have.  This is not odd, in my book.  I rarely introduced any of my boyfriends to my parents.  But my son's father has met her (of course), because he works in a restaurant, where he kisses ass all day and has a million superficial "relationships" with everyone, all the time.  Everybody likes him, because he pretends to like everybody.

Anyway, my son wanted this girl to come to dinner tonight.  I wanted to meet her independent of his father, so she came over; I shopped, I prepped, I cooked, and she had been in the house for all of about three fucking minutes when the father walked in the door.  So ... I didn't have the opportunity to actually meet her then, because the person who makes me more angry and sad than any other human being on the planet breezed through the door and took over with his bullshit small talk about NOTHING.  That's his milieu: Talking about nothing.

I hate his face.  I hate that his face gets to enter my home whenever it wants.  I hate that I'm just trying to hang out with my children, but their sperm donor keep interjecting himself where he is not invited.  Does that make me sound like a fiery bitch to divorced men?  Yes.  I don't care.  I want to parent my children without outside, bullshit interlopers.  I want so, so much for his face NOT to make me angry.  I have practiced the Art of Not Caring for about five years now, and I'm terrible at it.  He, on the other hand, is brilliant at not caring.  He is certainly not writing a blog about how much I bother him, because he just chooses not to care, and then doesn't.  In that capacity, I am quite jealous of him.

The one thing that kills me more than anything is that I can't move out, because I can't afford it.  And he will never leave, because ... well, because he doesn't have to.  And if he only comes around when it's convenient for him, then he wins.  He gets to live in the house, not pay a second rent, see his kids when he wants, ignore them when it's convenient, have a built-in housekeeper and nanny, and not have to deal with embarrassing personal questions from his friends and family.

How lovely.  What a perfect, suburban dream for everyone.

I (Heart) Gardening

God, I love being outside and cleaning up shit in the yard.  I might sound sarcastic here, but I'm saying, seriously, I love cleaning up leaves and planting things and landscaping.  I can almost see the end product when I'm raking and digging and getting stabbed by various plants to which I'm allergic.  And when the shit starts growing, I just want to sit outside and watch it.  Maybe take a time-lapse video of all the things which grow and bloom.

But god do I hate owning an old house.  I can break my back outside and see the results, but the INSIDE of the house - where all the plumbing and electricity and general rot happens - makes me want to throw myself under the lawnmower.  I fucking hate it.  I hate being electrocuted when I try to turn on a light.  I hate not knowing how to change an overhead light.  I hate being afraid to change that light fixture - even though I know (in theory) how to fix it - because I might just burn my house down.  I hate that the dickhead who lived here before I did "fixed" all kinds of things, but he did it in the most ridiculous, half-assed way imaginable.  I hate that my roof seems to be slowly disintegrating.  I hate that my deck is rotting so badly that I might just fall through it one day and have to be rescued by firefighters.  I hate that various windows around the house are cracked, simply because they're so freaking old.  I hate wondering if my house will burn down because someone didn't care enough to wire it right.I hate that my driveway looks like Fallujah after a bombing.

But life is coming back to the midwest right now.  And as e e cummings said,

 O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty, how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

High School, and The Art of Not Thinkinig

I was just thinking (shocking, I know) about what kind of Bouncing Betty of a job I currently have.  In a high school, everywhere I step is potentially a load of shrapnel to the face.

Every time I present ideas in class, I am accused by some group of students of trying to convert people to a certain cause or ideology.

Examples:

I said the word "socialism" in class the other day (reading from Kurt Vonnegut), and then said that America has many socialistic programs (welfare, social security, public schools, Medicare ...), and thus, I am a communist.  Nevermind that those two words are NOT the same; when you're 16 years old, apparently all words are interchangeable and offensive, depending on what KoolAid your parents are feeding you.

I also talked about transgender bathrooms a couple days ago (for the record, I was against the idea, because it seems like another form of segregation), but what they heard is that I am a flaming lesbian espousing the homosexual agenda in classrooms across America.

Today, when reading from an essay written by a philosophy teacher who played college and then professional football in the 1970s, I talked about sports injuries and how people sometimes live vicariously through athletes (armchair quarterbacks, etc), and I was accused of hating sports and not supporting high school athletics.  (Nevermind the fact that I coached all my kids when they were little and have watched about five thousand games of various kinds and watched my son tear his body and brain apart playing high school football - being supportive even when I wanted to throw up from nervousness on the bleachers.)  Apparently, I hate sports.  (go Bears)

So I guess when I taught Machiavelli's "The Prince" I was supporting deceit, manipulation, and murder.  And then (god help me) when we read part of Hitler's Mein Kempf" I was supporting the idea of  murderous dictators.  And of course when we read "The Glass Castle" I must have been subliminally telling students to abuse and neglect their children.  And obviously, when we read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", I was literally telling them that we should eat Irish babies in order to fix the economy.

Holy shit.  Never underestimate the ability of teenagers to twist ANYTHING and EVERYTHING you say into something which you DID NOT say at all.  (Actually, I did SAY all of those things out loud, but they were quite clearly presented as someone else's ideas.)

I appreciate those students who get it - we're learning about ideas - but I want to punch those who put their asinine, skewed reality onto what I say.  And if this were back in the day when I went to school, the students would just bitch about it after class or something, but now they're tweeting their bullshit during class.  Maybe if they stopped to THINK for a second and put their goddamn phones down, they'd know what was going on in real time.

Addendum:  The Pledge of Allegiance is optional.  It is absolutely AMERICAN to not say it on demand.  People can respect the United States of America  and not stand up North-Korean-style to say words at a flag.  dissent is the foundation of America.