Eh? All? sez I.

Yeah. All of ‘em, she clarified, failing to register the fact that I am a Washington driver.

Sometimes I wonder why I don’t have as many friends as other people. It’s probably because I quit listening to people like this.

This is the response I got, word for word:

Dear Chelsey

Dear Sam Sample,
On behalf of Taco Bell Corp. (¿Taco Bell¿), I want to thank you for taking the time to contact our Company. Because your communication contained within it a suggestion for either a product or advertising idea, we felt that is important that we clarify Taco Bell’s policy regarding accepting unsolicited ideas. As experience has proven that the practice of considering unsolicited ideas can give rise to misunderstandings as to the origin and ownership of such ideas, Taco Bell has adopted a general policy of not accepting unsolicited ideas and suggestions. Although we regularly receive many unsolicited ideas concerning our products, advertising and a wide range of other subjects, experience has shown that most of the unsolicited ideas we receive have already been considered or used by Taco Bell or its competitors. While we thank you for taking the time and effort to submit an idea or suggestion, in keeping with our Company’s policy of not accepting such ideas, we will be unable to pursue your idea submission.
Sincerely,
Guest Service Representative

Sincerely

Raye S Taco Bell Customer Support

Mr. S. Taco Bell Customer Support, can I just say that you should win an award for shoddiest customer service? And by “shoddy” of course I mean nonexistent. Also you missed a couple important commas. Idiot.

Rah rah ree
Kick ’em in the knee
Rah rah rass
Kick ’em in the other knee

You’ll be brilliant.

So I have an excuse for my ignorance; what’s the rest of the country’s?

Oh, and if anyone tells me to stop watching football in order to lower said blood pressure, I will commence head-in-sand activities. Broncos are on a bye this week anyway, so…la la la….

Seriously: how can you be so articulate about what we talk about in class and then NOT APPLY IT TO YOUR PAPER?

*

I have just given a paper 27%, an all-time low not counting plagiarism. The paper before that got a 90%. WTF, people.

Holy hellballs, people. Knowing what these were for would have kept my virginity intact a good ten, fifteen years more.

NO IT’S NOT. The SOURCE may have paraphrased, but YOU did NOT.

*tearing out my hair*

****

Update: Have fixed typo in title. Now am considering live-blogging Meltdown to Baldness 2010. Ugh.

****

Those faint screams are the sounds of me checking my students’ sourcework.

****

I must speak a different language when I teach. It’s the only explanation for a couple of these research papers.

****

It’s really only three out of twelve papers (and two of those weren’t my students in ENGL 101) that are so awful, but they’re THAT AWFUL. (And this is one benefit of teaching at the pen: my students will never know I liveblogged my hairloss.)

****

I think the key here is to not read all the good papers first. Stupid, stupid planning.

****

Remember copyediting? That was a nice, stress-free career with regular hours….

****

The delusions are getting stronger.

1. If you use the words “preggo,” “preggers,” or “womb,” I will glare.

2. If you tell me, “Everyone’s hoping it’s a boy,” I will respond, unoriginally but cuttingly, “We just hope it’s healthy.” Then you will say, “Well, of course,” and feel foolish.

3. If you criticize or question my dietary choices, I will probably cry. I’m pretty sure I can tear up on cue these days. And if you’re lucky, I won’t also vomit on you, which I can also just about do on cue.

4. If you comment on my “baby bump” (another term closely related to No. 1), I will mince no words in pointing out I’m a lot fatter right now than I am pregnant (see also No. 3); it’s just that I can’t suck it in any longer.

5. If you ask if it was on purpose, I understand your curiosity and I will try to be polite through my gritted teeth instead of screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD YES, but that’s still a rude question.

6. If you ask me if we “tried anything” to have a child of a certain gender, I may be tempted to answer with graphic detail. G-R-A-P-H-I-C. Maybe even demonstrate. (Seriously. I can’t believe I’ve been asked this.)

7. If you so much as touch my belly, so help me god you’ll lose that hand.

Other items for the shit list:

8. Polka dots — seriously, why? On clothes, decorations, baby gear, etc. Is it the roundness that people associate in some Freudian manner with the pregnant belly? LIKE I WANT TO LOOK ANY ROUNDER.

9. Winnie the Pooh. The strength of my irrational distaste for that animated series is beyond words.

10. Baby-talk. Gag me.

I’ve eaten plenty of my own words lately (cf. “I’m never having kids!”), and I’m sure I’ll have a few more portions to consume before all this is up, but getting this off my chest feels better.

Yet…last night I was talking to one of my students about what he’ll do when he gets out. He wants to go on for his bachelor’s degree, and he’ll have an HVAC certificate as well, so he’s hoping to work his way through college.

But, he said, I’m competing against people who haven’t been in jail. You’ve got me and a guy without a record, who are you going to hire?

Who, indeed. It’s such a struggle just to avoid getting into a defeatist mentality about life after prison, life as an ex-con. But my students know this, because I tell them all the time: even if life after prison is tough, education is one of (or, as I believe) the only proven ways to reduce recidivism. Line cooking out there, or struggling to start your own business, beats the hell out of coming back here, doesn’t it?

From what I’ve seen and heard, there are some tremendously good guys in my class. I know they could be playing me, so I keep my distance, but these are guys who were doing okay in life until they got sidetracked by drugs and/or drinking, guys who say that they weren’t criminals before they came to prison, but prison made them into the criminals that they now see themselves as. And Internets, I know there has to be a price for crime, but I can’t help but think here in America we’re doing it wrong when we lock them up without treatment. Because when they get out, and they’ve got a record in addition to an untreated disease or addiction, what kind of success can we really expect? I don’t know if that’s something education can fix.

…Ugh. That’s it. I am starting my own country and it will be totally anarchist and I will be the only person there, so I will have total freedom. Total freedom and total control. I’ll have it both ways, too.

I turned and looked in a very Miss-Manners-ish way, not quite believing my ears. Have you heard our symphony? Have you been to the chamber music series? Hell, even the senior recitals around here are pretty good. And jazz at Merchants and Backstage has been good, and I’ve even heard a good fiddler in downtown playing for tips. Hence my look.

He continued: “And I think it’s a disservice to music to play what people want to hear instead of what is good.” Other said something I couldn’t understand; PA said, “All anyone wants around here is butt rock.”

This time when I turned and glared, I made sure he saw me. He had the grace to look uncomfortable and lower his voice. Arse.

I would bet good money that both these guys are Seattle-area transplants, not native or recent Walla Wallans. Sure, we leave potholes in our streets and have a century-old sewer and water system that no one wants to pay to upgrade, but dammit if we don’t like all kinds of music in Walla Walla. And gentlemen, it doesn’t take balls to come into a community and [wrongly] criticize it; it takes ignorance. Fuckers.

Internets, I have a hankering to discover the world. Sooner rather than later, preferably. So my plan is as follows:

1. Sell our house, preferably for about $10k more than we paid for it (ha, ha?) in order to break even, what with fences, hardwood floor redoing, landscaping, and other miscellany we’ve done to it, plus closing costs. I don’t know if this is even possible, but judging by what other houses are going for on our street and in our part of town, it seems plausible.

2. Loan Lucy to my parents. We’d miss her terribly, but she might not be the best traveling companion.

3. Give Trollop back to the devil, from whence she came, and Orwell to my parents or any other nice home where he’d be welcome to hide under a bed all day. Every day. For all his life.

4. Sell or store our junk, including our car and pickup.

5. Renew our passports and get vaccinations.

6. Once steps 1 through 5 were secured, we’d quit our jobs. This would be painful, as we both have jobs we enjoy, and income is always a bonus, but it’s the last thing tying us down, and a necessary step.

Aside from our mortgage, which we would no longer have, we don’t have any long-term debt obligations. We could leave our 401ks dormant, withdraw from savings and put the cash from our house sale in the highest-interest-yielding account possible. Then we’d kiss our mothers goodbye and go see the world.

But.
Just “seeing the world” isn’t a good enough reason for me. It’s fine for others, but I’m not content being a tourist-consumer — I hate that feeling. (That also explains why we never get gifts for people when we travel. Just see the claptrap of a tourist shop makes me shiver.) I envision being more of a tourist-worker, even if it’s not for pay, because I want to not just see new places, but see who lives there and how they work. Specifically, I would love to do agri- or eco-tourism. And when I’m done, I can come home, live in a tiny house on a river with a big garden and composting toilet, and officially apply for hippie status. I may even grow out my leg hair which, come to think of it, could be Matt’s biggest reservation with the plan. (Easily solvable problem: I’ll let him grow out his beard.)

But in my current state, I am not a bona fide hippie or environmentalist. I fell off the biology bandwagon in college (curse you, chemistry, my nemesis!) and have regretted not working with hands and plants and animals ever since. (People are just so fucking complex, you see.) Fortunately, there are organizations willing to take and train people like me, which is good since I’d like my husband to go along with this perfectly logical, well-thought-out scheme. Organizations include:

• WWOOF.org, the Worldwide Organization of Organic Farmers where we go live and work on farms for short stints in exchange for room and board. Imagine getting to learn how to build and live in sustainable shelters and grow organic products for free or at a very low cost. Plus you can do this all over the world!
• the7interchange.com arranges eco and social volunteer projects around the world. Some range from several days to a year (maybe more); some require you to know local languages, and some don’t; some are exotic, some are in the U.S.; for some you need specialized experience that we wouldn’t qualify for, but for others you just need hands and a brain and a willingness to learn.
• Then there’s voluntourism.org, another site that coordinates volunteering in short, vacation-length stays. This organization seems a little more lengthy in its application process and I’m not sure it would work very well for traveling from one destination to another, but it might.

And I’m sure there are others.

Voluntouring would be the catalyst for moving from point to point; we could take side routes on the way, work cash jobs here and there if we could find them, and take a few days to see around the areas we’d be working. But voluntouring would make the trip all the more meaningful. We might not have fabulous trinkets when we get back, but I bet we’d have great stories and ideas.

What if…
There’s always the insurance question. Sure, we’d no longer be paying auto, home, or other normal insurance policies, but what if something happened in the course of our travels? Emergency appendectomy, lost tooth, etc.? There are companies who cover that type of occurance. I’m sure it’s slightly more expensive, but one quote I got from World Nomads was six months of insurance for $260 per person. It doesn’t cover everything, of course, but it can provide emergency help — which is all you really anticipate.

Traveling
Traveling is sure to be the most expensive part of the deal, especially since it can cost a thousand bucks from one continent to the next, per person. But here, too, there are options. Courier.org allows you to fly as a passenger on courier planes (oops, wrote “pigeons” there for a second…my head got really happy with that visual) for slightly cheaper than you might a commercial plane, and I hear there’s no fee for checking baggage (not that we’d need to; I suspect this would be a backpack-type trip). You can also book multi-destination tickets for cheaper than buying them one hop at a time. For example, flying from Portland to Honolulu to  New Zealand, and to Sydney on a multi-destination ticket costs $1,000; flying straight to Sydney costs the same amount. Schedule your flights roughly two to three weeks apart, and you’re gold. If you want to leave early, you can just go on standby on the next available flight.

It won’t be cheap, but I estimate that we can do the bulk of our traveling for just a few thousand dollars each. Food and lodging when we’re not with a host will also be expensive, but hostels are cheap and relatively plentiful for our intended destinations, so I think we’ll be able to afford it. A few good books (and used bookstores wherever we go), and we’ll be able to wile away the hours in airports waiting standby.

Voíla!

Places to go
Because he is a nice person, and he may have felt terrible for having such a great time without me over a three-day, Valentine’s weekend, Matt has been accommodating my current, ultra-planning mood. He even went so far as to list his preferred worldwide destinations, with the caveat that we end up in Europe and take as long as we like (and as long as we still have money) to see every square foot of Germany. He even volunteered to learn German.

The language barrier is a huge issue, though. Unfortunately, neither of us speaks more than a little Spanish, so we thought it would be best if we confined our tourist-worker destinations to places where we would speak the same language as our host family or group. Thus, I researched countries that speak or primarily speak English, cross-referenced them with countries the U.S. State Department doesn’t recommend U.S. citizens traveling to (nothing would put a damper on this trip like being, say, kidnapped) as well as the countries where visa restrictions are problematic, had Matt rank his favorites, and came up with a map that shows just the places we may tour as workers:

It goes something like this: a couple places in the Caribbean, Suriname, Guyana, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Israel, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Israel, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, then Europe.

I realize that some of this is heavily anglo-centric (New Zealand, Australia, Ireland), but again — this is the map of where we might travel and work. It does not include the places we would stop at on our way. Personally, I want to see more of China, Japan, Argentina, and Brazil, not to mention Malta, Turkey, and India, which I hope we’d be able to do along the way, or on trips that aren’t too far out of the way.

We can’t see all of it, but I bet we could see a pretty huge chunk.

In the end, if we do this, I can’t imagine we’ll be worse off for having seen so much of the world. We’ll have learned skills, customs, and lifestyles different from our own; we’ll have met people and made friends along the way. Sure, we’ll be a lot poorer at the end — but so what? So we work a few more years. And anyway, life isn’t guaranteed to go on that long, is it, so why not do it now, while we can?

Hell.

Teaching three writing classes is not doable, or at least not for me. The only way I have a single nostril above water right now is because my research writing class is in the research phase; even that is slated to end this week as the annotated bibliographies come in. Of course part of the stress is teaching two new classes, where I have to devise new lesson plans (oddly, it’s the daily grammar lessons that are sapping my will to live…hmm, tangent:

I learned this teaching ESL learners: if you don’t teach grammar, students complain that they don’t learn grammar. If you do teach grammar, students either don’t apply what you’ve learned (because writing is more complicated that sample sentences on an overhead projector), or they don’t care, or they believe they are the exceptions who may abuse grammar because they think they know better. Which they don’t. In my experience, the only way to learn grammar is to use grammar, and revise until you learn how to use it correctly. I don’t know how to teach this effectively.).

Anyway. This is week five, I think, so we’re nearly halfway through. That does not, however, in any way help me get started on what needs to be done this week. It’s a strangely paralytic feeling, knowing how much needs to be done and not being able to actually summon the strength to do it, then stressing about the mounting stress, then imagining my dad saying, “Quit fiddling around and get started,” which only further stymies my will to live.

And the water, I can feel it seeping into that last remaining nostril.

###

Edit: five hours later, I have more or less gotten my shit together, have quit feeling quite so sorry for myself, and am … er, don’t remember how this sentence was going to end, as I’m not fixated on whether “gotten” is a word. Okay, it is. Life can go on.

###

Edit No. 2: six hours later, I am finished; better yet, the last few papers were great!

Anyway, I gladly accepted the gift. My grandparents enjoyed collecting the finer things in life: gems and crystals, pottery, jewelry (which of course they never wore, being staunch E.G. White-thumping Adventists), and I assumed that this teapot was a treasure they had picked up on one of their many travels, perhaps in China or, given the design of the pot, England. So today, as I beheld the pile of grading ahead of me, I decided the only way through this involved tea.

I lifted down the pot and took awhile to examine it. It is ceramic and cream-colored, with a wicker-like texture (the kind you may have seen in wedding cakes frosted back in the 1980s). On its front are a few pink, nondescript flowers clearly envisioned by a ceramic artist who spent most of his time indoors. I would hazard that the flowers are something of a cross between roses and camelias, with perhaps the stamen of hibiscus thrown in for artiness.

I am very careful whenever I handle this teapot, as it has an elegant spout that pours well (something that can not be said for every other teapot I’ve owned) and I don’t want to chip any part of the squat little thing. Yet today, as I rinsed it carefully in the sink, when I turned it over I noticed the following inscription on the bottom:

So much for a family heirloom. Now instead of the spirit of my dearly departed grandmother inspiring me to finish grading, all I can think about is how overpriced and ugly nearly every Teleflora arrangment is that I’ve seen. And given the date on the stamp — 1985 — this was probably sent as a gift to my grandmother just after she’d been diagnosed with incurable breast cancer. Thanks a lot, fate.

Substantially, the post is really the sweetest on this notable topic. I agree with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your forthcoming updates. Just saying thanks will not just be sufficient, for the fantasti c* clarity in your writing. I will right away grab your rss feed to stay abreast of any updates. Pleasant work and much success in your business efforts!

*[ironic sic]

p.s. it was in response to the snuggie haiku poetry. shiny!

• Dancing with the Star Trek Wars: extra points to anyone who costumes up as Jabba; minus points for any Jar Jars; Data might have a bit of trouble really feeling the music, but I imagine he’d be able to process it.
• Survivor: ‘Real America’: Equipped with the latest Glenn Beck novel, contestants learn to survive using only personal freedom and family values.
• Iron Chevre: Contestants get to eat all the cheese they want. (I would so go on this show.)
• The Biggest Loose Woman (or Man): Oh wait, they already have this — it’s called “The Bachelor.”
• The Real Housewives of Remote Alaska: When your groceries get flown into you once a month or less, see what it takes to plan ahead and make do. And anyone who even mentions the erstwhile governor gets voted off the show and immediately deported to Russia.
• Extreme Makeover: Infant Edition: Is your child bald? Fat? Are her cankles too chubby or his head too melon-like? No worries — plastic surgeons are standing by to make your child into the shape you always dreamed of.
• Project Runaway: Fashion shows actually do something worthwhile and raise money for homeless teens.
• Are You Smarter than a PhD?: Seriously, let’s get some respect for people who devote a decade of their life to getting academically hazed. And all teacher-contestants automatically win a chili pepper on RateMyProfessor(dot)com.
• Big Brother: TRL: Unlike the no-privacy house where fabulously beautiful people do stupid things, this would just be normal people, all videos courtesy of governmental security cameras. The show will suck, but thankfully that doesn’t matter in reality television — the outrage will power huge ratings.
• Keeping Up with the Whoosiwhatsits: Stories about people who really don’t deserve to be famous. First guest: Balloon Boy!

In other news, tomorrow is MY LAST TUESDAY IN PULLCOW and Thursday is MY LAST THURSDAY IN PULLCOW and holy tomatoes, people: THREE MORE DAYS AND I’M DONE WITH GRADUATE SCHOOL. Sure, I have to write a paper and grade a set of papers and enter grades after that, but no more commuting.

A rough estimate of the miles I’ve put on the poor Prius is 23,000 in the last two years, just commuting; a rough estimate of the gas money on said commute is around $2,000. Still, I made just enough money to pay the mortgage and my travel expenses every month. So while I wasn’t saving, I wasn’t taking us into debt, either.

And now…now I’ve got to find a job.