Category: To Occupy my Time

The song I can’t get out of my head right now.

This came about because I wanted to hear the song “I do” by J. Giles Band. When seized by this desire of late, I have taken to finding the song on YouTube. If there isn’t an official video there, someone has done their own mediocre slide show/video that I can not watch while still hearing the song. While listening to “I Do,” I stumbled across someone’s 80’s play list and it was quite good. I YouTube spiraled for a bit until I stumbled across this song.

Reading the title, I thought to myself “I have no idea what John Couger Mellencamp song this is.” I hit play and dimly from the back crannies of my mind remembered it from so long ago. And bam! Stuck in my head. I really like the lyrics, though. In a sparse song way, they rightly capture young love and all its fumblings

Civics test

This post has been hanging around since January!

Always one for a good test, I took the American Civics Literacy Test back on January 26. There are 33 questions and the header for the test proclaims “OUR FADING HERITAGE.” As a certified Social Studies Teacher, a proud American, a History Major, I can tell you that it is important that people know the items on this test.

I was gunning for 100%, but only got 28 of 33 correct. That gave me an 84.85%–I love that they give your score to the hundredths place–which wasn’t as fabulous as I wanted it to be, but better than the average score of 73.8%.

Aside from testing you on knowledge I find important to know, you will receive an email with your results, what questions you missed and their answers and also a link so you can see how citizens and elected officials scored on each question. Answer: not as well as the citizens.


I missed the following questions: 7, 13, 15, 29 and 33. Can you do better?

http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/resources/quiz.aspx

Flower Communion

Flower Communion was today at church. I love this ritual. It is simple, but moving. Everyone brings a flower and places it in a basket, the flowers are blessed and everyone takes a different flower upon leaving. It was started in the 1920s in Czechoslovakia by Norbert Capek and brought to the United States in the 1940s by his wife. Unitarian Universalists adapt many religious traditions as part of their faith; this is one of the few that was created within the church.

The only poem I’ve ever memorized

Juke Box Love Song
Langston Hughes

I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem’s heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day–
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.

I studied Langston Hughes my junior year of high school. We each had to pick an American author to read for the year and I chose Hughes, partially because of this poem, partially because he was black, and partially because I knew that it would be easy to read the majority of his works because poetry goes down more quickly than prose. I was a lazy high school student.

I enjoyed reading Langston Hughes much more than I thought I would and so I will always be thankful for Mrs. Pirose and that year-long assignment. Though Mrs. Pirose and I didn’t get along. I ended up transferring out of her class three-quarters of the way through. Still, there was some good with the bad.

I am embarking on a new project. Each month, I will choose a poem to commit to memory. I think someone famous like Winston Churchill said that if you have memorized good poems, you will always have good company. On my bike rides back and forth to school, I have ample time to declaim to myself. Check back at the end of the month to see how I did with this month’s selection.

Bands

The location of my work is near several live music venues, with one of them large enough to get moderately famous acts able to have a painted truck and a fancy tour bus. Sometimes when walking to work from the train I see the various tour buses and vans that make up the gypsy train that is modern music touring. Once in awhile, when I am on recess duty in the park across the street from my school, a van with a tow-trailer will pull up and park and out will tumble a pack of grungy musician-looking people. I once saw someone brushing his teeth right there at the edge of the park.

I’m guessing I will always remember that guy brushing his teeth. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, back in the day I wanted to be one of those modern-day minstrels. I knew I wasn’t good enough to actually be a band member, but I had hopes of moving equipment in fifty different states and around the world. In my current life, the roadie lifestyle is my idea of hell. Charles Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven painted a very clear picture of life on the road: selling enough t-shirts to get to the next town, choosing between food and gas, sleeping in horrible motels and no time to yourself. The kind of things that would make brushing your teeth at a city park in the middle of the day an entirely normal act.

Though I will never experience that lifestyle, I love that I wander by it during my daily routine.

Administrative Professional’s Day

Did you remember to thank your Administrative Professional? My co-workers did. It was a great day.
Flowers from gardens, cards, an itunes gift card, a shrinky dink Buddha, and KALE! What more could a girl ask for?
Not much, but that incredible generosity was compounded in the afternoon when FES, the parent group at school brought in this jaw dropping flower arrangement.
Thanks to everyone. It was a magical day.

Test results are in!

It had been more than four weeks since my Praxis test, so yesterday I called to see if the reports had been mailed. They were mailed on Tuesday from New Jersey. I was thinking I would see it Friday at the earliest, but today they was waiting for me. I was thinking I needed a 169 to pass the test in Oregon, so I was thrilled to see that I got a 176 (of 200 possible). But it turned out I only needed a 156. So I hit the ball out of the park. Or at least had a double play.

No more frantic studying in addition to my math classes! Good job me!

Included in my test results were the other Praxis tests I’ve taken. I was thinking this was my seventh Praxis test, it turns out to be my ninth. Thanks Praxis, for making me a highly qualified teacher. Even if I’ve never taught a day for pay in my life.

Bus tip. Throw away your garbage…

In the proper receptacle. Like the handy trash can sitting not 10 feet from this bench.

Look. It’s like this: at your home, you can throw your waxy q-tips wherever you choose. But here, at the platform where many, many people wait for trains, please take the time to deposit your detritus in the trash can provided.

I could write a separate post about not cleaning your ears in public, but I think you might be too far gone to understand why personal grooming is best done in private.

Things I love right now

It is still cold here and my toes freeze a bit in the evenings. Enter the hot water bottle! It looks exactly like the one we had when I was growing up and it is a low-tech way to keep my poor toes tosty warm before I fall asleep. Though it kind of reminds me of chin hairs and nursing home smells, I still like it.
These jars have changed my life! They are normal 4 oz jelly jars that are available at every Fred Meyer in Portland that I’ve been to, but they have transformed my brown bagging experience. I take breakfast and lunch to work with me every day and I tend to have a variety of different things. These tiny–actually they are normal serving sized, but they don’t seem it because our collective portion size is so bloated right now–jars let me take a bit of this or that. I eat less and still get all my options. They come with the rings and lids on the right, or you can buy the plastic lids that screw on both these and the half pint and pint jars.