When I was in grade ten, I had an algebra class in the afternoon housed in this dim little classroom that was hemmed in by grey-brown brick walls. The teacher, Ms Whelan1, was cursed with half of our small class being comprised of eleven of the worst boys who had grown up together through elementary school. They swore, taunted, threw erasers, and generally made it difficult for a Poindexter like myself to learn math. I had to start sitting at the back of the room just to avoid the experience of having chunks of chalk pinged off the back of my head.
I easily scored 90s in most subjects and was on the school honour roll that was posted in the hallway outside the principal's office, but algebra felt unnatural to me, and my brain railed against the seeming nonsense of imaginary numbers and negative exponents of variables. Ms Whelan was patient with me, though, and helped me navigate my way through formulae while Jason and Jason and Todd wrestled over stolen magazine porn and pencilled the word poontang along the pages edge of their textbooks.
Ms Whelan fascinated me. Whereas other teachers tried to be jocular with their students, like Mr. Wilson2, a science teacher who made six-shooters with his fingers and alluded to youthful indiscretions, Ms Whelan was reserved. She spoke of nothing but algebra, but something about her hyper-conservative appearance and how she held herself spoke of much more than differential equations. She wore her coarse, black hair parted in the middle and held together in a bun at the back. She wore only black or grey skirts, each of which came to below her knee, and each of her blouses had long sleeves and buttoned up the front to her neck. Each outfit was completed with a pair of black pumps.
It was rumoured that she had been a nun in Quebec before she left her order under mysterious circumstances. I wanted to know what would make her leave her old life thousands of miles behind her to pursue a career that involved this unruly group of teenagers corralled into a gloomy room. While we worked on equations, she stood off to the side, hands clasped behind her, toes inward, lips pursed. If there was a story to tell, she was keeping it to herself.
One day, I came to class several minutes early. The room was empty, so I let my curiosity get the better of me and wandered across the room to the green cupboards with sliding doors that lined one end of the room. I slid one of the doors back with my toe to reveal a pair of black pumps. I slid it a little further, and there was another set of pumps nearly identical to the first. I gave the door a quick kick, and it banged open along its rail to show a line of six or seven interchangeable pairs of black, low-heeled shoes. They were all just shy of brand new and perfectly perpendicular to the cupboard door's track. I noted that the spacing between each pair looked measured.
There was something wrong with Ms Whelan. I could not put my finger on it, but the creeping heat that spread up the back of my neck confirmed it. Until that moment, she had seemed fastidious. Now her wardrobe of identical somber outfits and nearly new shoes made her seem psychotic.
"Hello," Ms. Whelan said.
I jumped. She had entered the room without a sound and had watched me snooping through her cupboards. I don't know how long she had been standing there.
"Um, hi."
She walked the length of the room and gently slid the cupboard door closed.
"Did you find what you were looking for?"
"No," I said. "I was looking for extra paper."
"No you weren't," she said.
The bell rang, and Jason and Jason and Todd and everyone else filled the room. I expected her to pull me aside when class ended, but she did not. Then, I expected her to pull me aside before the next class began. She did not.
Instead, the odd teacher who had so patiently guided me through algebra now seemed menacing, which impression was fomented by the fact that she took to occasionally looming in an office doorway near my locker. Something about my finding her shoes had apparently sparked more interest in me. My fertile imagination and I began to suspect that she had left the nunnery for an unrequited lesbian love, which obsession she had transferred to me, thoroughly risking her mission as a spy for the Bavarian Illuminati, or maybe I was just paranoid. At any rate, I chose to skip every other algebra class and come late to those I did attend to avoid being in the room alone with her. Whatever was up with Ms Whelan, I was going to avoid it, Bavarian Illuminati or not.3
One day, she approached me in the hall between classes. "Do you smell gas?" she said.
1 Her actual name escapes me at the moment, which I'm kind of glad about, because otherwise I would have used her real name without thinking about it, and she would have googled herself, because we all do it, and for some reason I find my old attachment to my creepy algebra teacher embarrassing.
2 My science teacher's real name has also been lost to time. It's probably due to the post-traumatic stress I've suffered ever since he made me rub the fur from a skinned cat up and down a glass rod in order to demonstrate something about static electricity to Ming, a Vietnamese immigrant without a lick of English who just smirked through the whole thing. I felt like the punchline to a dirty joke.
3 Ms Whelan's strange looming was creepy, but that's about where the story ends. She stayed creepy, I passed algebra, and then I left that school at the end of grade ten, never to see her tidy, black pumps again. There's just not much to talk about when a stalker does little more than loom and give you polynomial equations homework.
4 I figured that this entry needed a stronger conclusion, but I felt like I'd hit a dead end, so the Palinode helped me out with the explosion bit. He says that blowing up all your main characters is a viable end to any story.
This week's roundup of excellent weblog entries is brought to you by dancing, disability on Glee, memories of then and now, libraries, domestic violence, grief over loss of intimacy, socialized medicine, frequent use of the words I love you, a mom being right, cuddling overnight in a car, Shakira, girlfriends' pets, a call to nuzzle, a friendship, how we die, an absent father, Wright Blocks, letters, the Christian side hug, Adam Lambert's homosexuality, and New Moon.
I was in a shopping mall recently, picking over Hickory Farms cheeseballs, which are a terrible weakness of mine. I call it terrible, because one mound of that soft, cheesy goodness on a cracker invariably turns into many more mounds on many more crackers until the goo in my stomach threatens mutiny.
Most cheeseballs aside, though, there was what seemed to be a regional manager talking to his new store manager out in middle of the mall only a couple of feet from me, and the regional manager was giving the store manager what I am sure he might have thought was a motivational talk, but it kind of made me want to kick his knees out from under him. The store manager, a young woman who could not have been more than twenty-one, listened quietly and, I can only assume, wanted to do the same thing to him that I did.
I was so inspired by my witness of such exquisite retail hell that I wrote down what I heard on a piece of scrap paper on top of a Hickory Farms gift box while I eavesdropped. My training in the ancient art of shorthand comes in handy now and again:
Mr. Regional-Manager-Guy-With-the-Pencil-Moustache-and-Douchy-Ed-Hardy-Shirt's Motivational Speech
There will be times when I'll hold your hand, but there will also be times when I'll hold your head under water, stand on your neck [mimics standing on a person's neck with his right foot], and you'll be sputtering for air, but I'll still hold you under until you know how to ask for help, even if you're grabbing at my leg for me to save you, because that's why Julie failed, because she tried to fix things herself.
You will have days when you think that you don't have what it takes to do this job, and you might not, most people don't, and you'll have days when you think I'm a bastard, and I can be a bastard, but it's for your own good, because you have to learn that I am right.
If you want help, though, you'll have to ask for that help before January, because come January, I won't be risking my life driving on black ice on the highway in Saskatchewan. I might fly, but I won't risk wrecking my BMW to solve problems you've created.
You got that? It's up to you.
I betcha Mr. Regional-Manager-Guy-With-the-Pencil-Moustache-and-Douchy-Ed-Hardy-Shirt is popular with all the ladies.
I had a manager once way back when I worked in fast food who sidled up to me while I made salads one afternoon and told me that his body was completely hairless from the neck down and did not sweat. He also informed me that this meant he was "hairless and soft like a newborn baby all over", and all he ever had to do deodorant-wise was pat himself down with baby powder. Although that body-wrackingly shudder-worthy moment was on a completely different level altogether than Mr. Regional-Manager-Guy-With-the-Pencil-Moustache-and-Douchy-Ed-Hardy-Shirt's totalitarian dictatorship management style, I can assure you that it was likely no more enjoyable.
Hit me with your favourite manager stories in the comments and entertain me while I power through my last 15,000 words for NaNoWriMo. Please and thank you.
Even though I am utterly broke, I chose to spend a couple of hours trolling through Etsy, because there is nothing like window shopping when there's a recession on. Here's what I found in the way of accessories and outerwear, top down:
1. I love vintage eyewear, so these 1950s cat's eye spectacles caught my eye, even though I could never pull them off because they're too small for my sizable noggin.
2. Check out this honey dijon scarf. It's simple and sweet. Also, I have developed a thing for yellow over the last couple of years and have started to secretly believe that it goes with everything. It does, right? Right?
3. I am often not a fan of belted jackets, but this one is a belted cloak, so there is still some of the looseness I like along with some definition from the belt. I am a fan.
4. I own about four different variations on this theme, but I think I can make room for one more messenger bag. It's just so handsome, and it is more structured than most others of its class. You can just tell that it turns its nose up at its lesser, shabbier looking brethren.
5. If you don't like these lotus mary janes, there is something wrong with you. Seriously. Get thee to a therapist and work on your issues until you can see the absolute rightness of tiger’s eye coloured carved stone buttons.
What do you do when you are writing a minimum of 50,000 words in November for NaNoWriMo and the main character that you so loved in the beginning has become an irritating Scrooge McDuck? You find ways to procrastinate!
1. Knit one handwarmer.
2. Cut your own hair and accidentally slice up the back of your neck with scissors. Oops.
I was a guest on Karl Erikson's radio show, SecondHand Radio, tonight. Despite the fact that I drank coffee to wake up, wine to calm the hell down, and combined that mess with some possibly expired cold medication that I found in the back of the cupboard, I think it went pretty well, aside from our lengthy discussion of the imperial vs. metric systems of measurement, that is.
If you missed it live or just can't get enough, you can listen to all 1 hour and 18 minutes of Karl and I shooting the poop:
Tonight's episode of SecondHand Radio will air at 10 p.m. Eastern or 9 p.m. Central or 8 p.m. Mountain or 7 p.m. Pacific, depending on where you happen to be on this lovely continent. You can even call in to the show and talk with Karl and I in person at (724)444-7444, call ID #23738, which I encourage you to do. I can't bite through the phone, so it's totally safe.
I completely stole the above picture from Karl's post about tonight's show. I didn't even ask, because I am a terrible person. Okay, I am not a terrible person, but I do tend toward laziness, so I figured what the hell. I had to, though, right? Because we look so damn fabulous side by side like that. It's like we're twinsies or something.
He asked if there was anything in particular that I would like to talk about, but I can't think of anything, because my brain is overloaded with the conclusion of my year of Grace in Small Things, keeping up with NaBloPoMo, and banging out 50,000 words this month for NaNoWriMo, so I was wondering if there was anything you would like me to talk about tonight.
Actually, pretend that I am holding a knife to your throat like I am mugging you for your curiosity and come up with something in the comments, pronto. Otherwise, I am going to end up babbling on about how half of my diet this last week has been entirely made up of burnt bagels. Fascinating, I know.
What would you like to hear me talk about?
See you at the show!
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PS. I'm sorry about the knife thing. I just want to talk about more than my cats and bagels. I'm guessing that you probably feel the same way.
3. That well over one thousand members have made and will continue to make GiST one of the happiest and warmest little social networks on the internet
4. That when I began this project, I felt fairly defeated, but that now, a year later, I have 1825 things from my daily lists to prove that I am not
5. That making this final point in my last public, daily GiST list is so difficult
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This has been an incredible year in some ways, and I will write more about my year with Grace in Small Things soon. I just wanted to let everyone who participated in any way — be it as a daily/weekly/monthly/one-time participant, a commenter, or a well-wisher — know that you helped make my year and the years of everyone like you who became a part of GiST, and even those who have yet to join. Thank you.
Also, let me assure you that I will continue to be a presence at GiST making my occasional lists, sending out our Monday newsletters, and checking in on all of you. GiST will live long and prosper!
I have always thought that the saying that goes "They're just like everybody else: they put their pants on one leg at a time" didn't make much sense. Then, I found out that most people actually do put there pants on one leg at a time.
I put my pants on two legs at a time, even when I do it from a standing position.
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There will be times when I'll hold your hand, but there will also be times when I'll hold your head under water, stand on your neck [mimics standing on a person's neck with his right foot], and you'll be sputtering for air, but I'll still hold you under until you know how to ask for help, even if you're grabbing at my leg for me to save you, because that's why Julie failed, because she tried to fix things herself.
