The Object of My Taboo Love

Always one to join wholeheartedly in any improper shenanigans, I dropped in to see what Tammy had up her sleeve in her weekly Improper Poll. Turns out it was a lovely bejeweled watch, apparently one of many in her Tacky Watch Harem. Tammy posed the question: 

"Do you have an object you love and just can’t explain why?"

Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. Nothing as good as Tammy's hot little wrist-hugger. Because I'm a big ol' nerd. Office supplies are my passion. Specifically, I adore my maroon Swingline business stapler, model #74728. I don't watch The Office, but I hear there's some kind of special connection there with a RED Swingline. Mine is NOT red. It's maroon. And don't you forget it.

My sweet, sweet Swingline uses only the best high performance staples. From the cool, smooth tip of his contoured metal cap, to the soft cushion of his padded rubber bottom, my made-in-China cohort gets me through the day. He resides in the top right drawer of my wooden classroom desk, out of sight of the prying eyes and sticky fingers of my students.

Swinger, as I think of him, is quite the attraction in an otherwise unremarkable institutional setting. The kids are always asking about him, though not by name. That's just between me and Swinger. "Do you have a stapler? Can I use your stapler? Where's your stapler? Don't you have a stapler?" I protect Swinger from their amateur advances. Only I take Swinger out and let him bind their papers together. Like a well-trained service dog, Swinger responds only to MY commands. That's how he's survived so long. We've been together for ten years now. And he's as spry as the day we met.

About a year into our relationship, Swinger was swiped by persons unknown. And non grata. I left him to enjoy the summer in the top right drawer, his vacation destination of choice. When I returned in August, Swinger was missing. Six long days I pined for him. And on the seventh, Swinger reappeared. He sat in the top right drawer as if he'd never left. I was so happy to see him, I trimmed a tiny nameplate out of index card, and taped it to his silver belly, inside his maroon outer skin, up under his staple trough. A kind of camp nametag, if you will. For Swinger's next vacation without me.

Some stealthy snooping revealed a large pile of athletic handbooks, freshly stapled, piled in the teacher workroom. The workroom just a boy's room, janitor closet, and girl's room away from my classroom. I knew Swinger's kidnapper. And maybe, just maybe, I was less than polite when he wheeled in my missing TV/VCR cart.

Every day is a battle. A minor skirmish in the ten-year campaign to keep Swinger sequestered from those who would harm him. He's mine. All mine.

My Faux Family Reunion

Sometimes I waste time reading blogs, sometimes I waste time sitting in front of reality television, sometimes I waste time staring into space with my mouth hanging open, and sometimes I waste time by creating alternate worlds to suit my needs.

In one such world, I am the backwoods hillbilly cousin of Jen Lancaster and Celia Rivenbark and Paul Feig and Wade Rouse. I see Cousin Paul as kind of a city hillbilly, what with his home town having four times the population of mine. But Cousin Wade had to pull himself up by his Ozarks bootstraps to escape Missouri and his backwoodsiness. Which he did by ending up in the backwoods of Michigan. Where Cousin Paul grew up.

Just imagine our family reunions. In Missouri, of course, because my cousins are world travelers, but I am not. I would take charge of booking the park pavilion for our potluck barbecue picnic. It would be the second best pavilion, because that girl behaving badly, Chelsea Handler, booked the best one. That's how she rolls. Because four books and two TV shows aren't enough. She's always itching to be the fly in the ointment of anybody who needs ointment...or who is simply trying to enjoy a faux family reunion.

There we'd sit, Cousin Jen and Cousin Celia imbibing some tasty cocktails and dishing on the sartorial choices of unrelated hillbillies in the park, while pointedly ignoring Chelsea's unsuccessful attention-getting antics. Of course, the cocktails would have to contain alcohol other than vodka, because Ms. Chelsea sent her minions ahead to buy up all the vodka in the county, and is, in fact, perched upon a throne made from cases of vodka.

Cousin Wade would be nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers at being back in Missouri, having worked so hard to put half a country between it and his current abode. At least he can use the trip to mine material for his next book. And I know wild raccoons couldn't keep him away from visiting me, his hillbilly Cousin Val.

I would spend some quality time with Cousin Paul, trying to persuade him to go back to memoir-writing, to chuck the whole directing/producing/acting thing. Who needs money when your words can make people laugh?

This reunion is running longer than expected. I blame the significant others who are fiddling about with the barbecue. It's enough to make me wave a white flag and ask Chelsea for some vodka. Maybe she can spare one of those little airline bottles. I'm certain there will be some type of humiliation (mine) involved for her trouble.

Time, the Essence Of

I don't get it. Blogger was down for a day. People were frantic. My post disappeared! I can't update! My comments are lost!

To steal and manipulate the tagline from Aliens: On the weekend, nobody can see you blog.

What was such a big deal on a Wednesday/Thursday is par for the course on Saturday/Sunday. The posts will appear. You can update at will. Comments stay put. But nobody cares. The weekend is a vast blogging wasteland.

Do people have actual lives to live on the weekends? Do they use work time to blog, thus no updates are forthcoming because they are off the clock? Or do they see blogging as a kind of work, with a well-earned weekend holiday?

I have more time available on the weekend. It's when I can catch up. If the great blogpocalypse had occurred on a Saturday afternoon, few people would have noticed.

Timing is everything.

High on a Deere Sat a Lonely Goatherd

Hick fancies himself a gentleman farmer. Two years ago, he bought his first goat at an auction. That set him off. One goat was not enough. Nobody can have just one goat. They're herd animals, you know. Everyone in the world knew, except Hick. He learned about it on the internet at work. In a job that has nothing to do with goats.

One goat led to another, until Hick had hoarded eleven of the little caprine cuties. I declared a moratorium on goats. Which means the herd has shrunk to six. But one is pregnant, possibly with twins. The goat gestation period is five months. It is with great anticipation that my 13-year-old son, The Pony, inspects the herd when we arrive home each evening.

Today we observed Lonely Goatherd Hick parked out by the driveway on his John Deere Gator. He was supervising the grazing of his furry children. He used to turn them loose, but two rosebushes, one lilac, and a 2008 Arbor Day free 4th grade red maple later, I pointed out the error in Hick's judgment. Goats are not good candidates for the honor system.

Hick's argument for acquiring so many goats was their grass-eating capabilities. He would not have to mow so much of our spacious front yard (field), which would save on gas and on his valuable time. Too bad he did not interview his goats before purchase. They do not so much enjoy grass as they enjoy rose thorns, underbrush, dead leaves, and tree bark. They are like four-legged locusts for any plant product other than grass.

Now Hick uses gas for the Gator to herd his goats to acceptable munching areas. He spends at least an hour a day watching them chew up the woods. The grass is as high as an elephant's eye. The goats don't go into it. If they eat any grass at all, it's from the trimmed sections along the driveway where Hick has mowed.

In the meantime, gas consumption has increased, and leisure time for Hick has decreased. He hasn't noticed yet.

The Bad Hair Random Character Association Test

Ack! This haircut is driving me crazy! It's foremost on my mind. I repeat that thought over and over. My haircut is like the pretzels from the Woody Allen movie that made Kramer thirsty. I can't help myself:

This haircut is driving me crazy!
This haircut is driving me crazy!
This haircut is driving me crazy!
This haircut is driving me crazy!

All work and no play makes Val a poor imitator of Kramer and Jack Torrance.

My sixteen-year-old son, Genius, stopped by Great Clips for a haircut on Monday. By some mysterious alignment of the universe, he drew Zigaro, the Butcher of Seville. It was as if he'd flipped four coins and they all came up tails. As Teddy, Chris, Gordie, and Vern would say, "That's a goocher!"

I knew it the minute I saw him walk in the door. "Did you get the blond girl at the first station behind the mirror?"

"Yeah. How'd you know?"

"Oh, never mind how I know."

"It's bad, isn't it?"

"Pretty bad."

"I KNEW it! I thought it looked bad in the back when she held that mirror behind my head."

"She gave you a bald spot. And the front looks like Eddie Munster."

"I don't know who that is, but I hate the front. It's all pointy. I want you to cut it off later."

"She gave you a widow's peak."

"You have one, too."

"Don't I know it! I told her to cut it even with the eyebrows. But it goes up and down like the stripe on Charlie Brown's shirt."

"I'm never letting her cut my hair again!"

"You're preachin' to the choir, sonny. You're preachin' to the choir."

Every day my hairstyle looks worse. No region of my noggin appears presentable. Stalks and chunks and wads and wisps stick out. It's like a head-sized jawbreaker fell out of your mouth rolled across the cat's bed.

I'm going to have to find the time to take action. In the meantime, I am studiously avoiding the Hall of Mirrors. It's true. No tour of the Palace of Versailles is on the calendar for me. No house of mirrors, either. I can't look myself in the eye.


Disclaimer: this is not a real test. Your permanent record will not be affected if you don't know all the references.

The Butcher of Seville

Pardon me if I seem preoccupied with hair. I blame the fact that on Sunday, I received the worst haircut in the history of womankind. I don't mean to aggrandize my misfortune. I would much rather understate it. If only that were possible. How I long for my reliable lady-mullet, my nondescript hairstyle that can be forked at 8:10 a.m. for lack of a comb, and look stunningly generic for the bell at 8:15.

Now my hair looks akin to the fur of dead, stuffed Sorrow in The Hotel New Hampshire. Nothing I try imparts a semblance of normalcy. It's even worse than the time I trimmed my bangs, and the students asked me if I cut my hair. And further inquired, "Did you use a mirror? Did you turn on the light?" At least my auto-trim was even. The Butcher of Seville managed to make my bangs all zig-zaggy on one side. I shall hereafter refer to her as Zigaro.

Of course I should have known better than to trust my head to Great Clips. I used to have a regular hairstylist on Main Street, right next to Subway, and across from the Senior Nutrition Center. She moved up the street a block after a disagreement with her landlord, into an old jewelry store next to a comic shop. She must have grown tired of leaning on people for a living, because now she runs her own successful catering business, and I must resort to Not-So-Great Clips.

The chopper I prefer looks and acts like Janice Dickinson. But she was not available. Instead, there was a poodle-haired short gal, and Zigaro. They were in the midst of a Public Servant Standoff. I recognized their tactics right away, having spent five years working at the unemployment office. One person thinks she's doing more than her share of the work, so she slows down. The other is naturally slow, but gets slower when the discrepancy is lessened by her competition.

Poodle told us that the wait would be forty-five minutes. I snorted. "Well. I'm meeting someone in an hour, and don't have anywhere to go, so I'll wait." Poodle did not look happy. I thought she was bluffing. There were three people ahead of us. All middle-aged men. How long could it take to cut a man's hair? Thirteen minutes, precisely. But Zigaro got rid of a customer, so they each called one back at the same time. That left only one ahead of us.

Poodle called him after her first thirteen-minute buzz job. Zigaro lingered over her customer. She was behind those crazy mirrors, but I heard her ask him if he wanted the back cut straight across. He agreed. Little did I know the other choice was zig-zag. Wouldn't you know it, Zigaro came for a new victim after twenty-six minutes. My son, The Pony, a little chicken, made me go first.

Zigaro asked for my input. "An inch-and-a-half off the back, and make the bangs even with the eyebrows." Simple enough. Zigaro sprayed me down and started snipping. Then stopped. To go to the edge of her mirror and take down her two receipts and hide them in a drawer. She then told me to put my head down, and started on the back.

"So you don't have any layers?"
"Um. Yes. I DO."
"Oh. I didn't see them. There they are. Do you always part it on this side?"
"Yes. Always."

Zigaro snipped slowly. She tried making conversation. When she found out I was a science teacher, she asked me why lightning wasn't straight. I suppose she expected it to shine like a flashlight. Zigaro was not impressed with my explanation of static electrical charges and path of least resistance. She acted like she didn't believe me. "Huh. Some science teacher." Normally, I would take offense. But I don't argue with a person who is standing behind me with scissors, whose reflection looks like Brittany on Glee. I tried to tell myself that she meant it like Charlotte the spider meant some pig. But that would have meant she was calling me a pig, so I just let it rankle me. I wanted to say, "I don't come to your work and knock the..." but that was Kathy Griffin in Times Square with Anderson Cooper on New Year's Eve, and I can't steal Kathy's material.

After pretending to layer my hair, and looking like she trimmed the bangs evenly, Zigaro swooped a big hunk of hair over my part, just because, and told me that she only took an inch off the back, and could take off more if it wasn't enough. I had already been in the chair thirty minutes, and missed two phone calls while this brazen butcher hacked my tresses. I knew when to say when. Zigaro did not even give me the courtesy of a blow-dry. I was not too concerned. At least I made it out with my eyebrows intact.

Now I'm going to have to find someone to repair that Great Clip. The back won't comb under. It's long and shaggy. There are no layers. My bangs rise up over one eyebrow and then droop like a fancy kind of curtain at the side of my head. How I yearn for a good old-fashioned Moe of Three Stooges fame head-of-hair.

This cut is so bad that my students have not commented once. It's the pity silence. Ignoring the elephant (or pig) in the room.

Hair of the Blog

In a police lineup, I might not be able to pick out the perp. But I guarantee I could pick out the teacher, IF teachers went around stepping into police lineups just for the fun of it, because heaven knows they have all that spare time on their hands, especially during the summer, when they don't do anything except sleep until time to get up to watch The View, and still get paid for it.

Where was I? Oh, picking teachers out of a lineup. That's possible because of their hairstyles. A more poorly-coiffed subset of the human population does not exist. Aging Barbies in a box in the attic or garage, maybe. But teachers have the market cornered on living, breathing examples of terrible tresses. That's because we just don't care. The do would quickly become disheveled anyway, what with all the jumping through hoops that we do each day.

Male teachers favor the shaved head, or the buzz cut, or that fringe around a gleaming dome. Rare is the comb-over. Too high-maintenance. It also seems that the Gabe Kotter has fallen by the wayside.

The women like to live in the past. What worked in the sixties and seventies will surely work today, even though the head under the hair is too young to have seen such hairstyles in television and movies. A frazzled Up the Down Staircase Sandy Dennis look is not uncommon. Or a Karen Valentine, Miss Johnson from Room 222, anybody? The Jane Fonda or Carol Brady shag kind of morphed into the mullet. The eighties gave us the Facts of Life Edna Garrett look for the more mature set. The nineties brought The Rachel, which is looked upon as very modern, that new hairstyle, in the halls of academia.

This is not meant to disparage those of my bloggy friends who teach the light fantastic. There is a sliding scale of style, and I'm sure you are at the very tip-top of it. I, myself, have slipped right off the bottom. 

I really did have a point when I started. I'm thinking it was about the really bad haircut that was inflicted upon me yesterday. Not that anyone at school would notice.