Waterloo: an embarrassing defeat

May 13th, 2009

I checked my cell phone at eleven this morning or so.  I spent the afternoon checking my email (I got a message from Sister Souljah!  I’ll add it to this post this evening) and facebook on my phone, and texting my sister.  So yeah.

But anyway I think the brief power(less) outage did me good and maybe got my mind reset.   I can’t be trying to explain myself to this person, because it’s all been said and speaking different languages and don’t agree.  That’s a recipe for crazy and pissed all the time.  No series of arguments is going to bring about an epiphany here, not on either side.

I suffered a workshop today where a guy basically talked for six hours.  We moved around and were supposed to talk for about an hour.  That’s so frustrating!  Why do they think, just because we are grownups, that we are going to learn and produce quality thinking in response to that monotonous pedagogy?  Nobody learns that way!  Nobody enjoys it!  I like learning and I like working!  Surely you can give me something to do besides sit here and try to listen while you talk, move around, and use the laptop clicker.  Can’t I do something?  Don’t you have any chart paper?  Can we play a game?  Let’s read something and then make a plan, let’s talk…

Oh, and here’s my email from Sister Souljah.  I wrote her last night about the experience I had reading her books.

Peace Desiree Gladieux,

First and foremost, thank you for loving and being dedicated to your students, our youth.
Master teachers, with big hearts, powerful minds and a solid curriculum is what is needed
today. It sounds like that is who you are and that’s really great for you and for them as well.

Thank you for purchasing and reading and feeling and enjoying and understanding and also
for utilizing, MIDNIGHT, A GANGSTER LOVE STORY. Thank you for encouraging and “tricking,”
or leading your students into considering and reading my work as well!

If it has been useful in moving your youth into a better thinking space and better way of life,
praise GOD, I am so grateful.

Please continue to be a reservoir for our people. You are loved and needed. Also, thank you
for your warm and kind acknowledgements of my efforts as well.

Respectfully,
Sister Souljah

Comments ( 2 )

,

Further Abstinence: Cellf Denial

May 12th, 2009

I am starting another fast, but I don’t think I will describe it here in intense detail.  Okay, I guess I will.

I am turning off my cell phone, probably from now until next Monday, provided I can check voicemails from somewhere.  Do they still make payphones?  How much do they cost?  Is it $0.44 now, or is that stamps?  (I buy stamps one at a time since I mail like three envelopes a year.  Who cares what the postage rate is?  I’d pay a dollar to mail things if they would just stop cramming my mailbox full of garbage every three days.  Damn that makes me mad.  It’s ridiculous, it’s theater of the absurd:  The mailman stays employed by bringing me something I didn’t ask for and don’t want, then I shuffle it up the stairs, shake my bills out of it, and put it in the trash.  A few days go by, then I carry it downstairs covered in coffee grounds and chicken fat and banana peels at arm’s lenth.   Each month, I pay the garbage men to take it away.  Corporations not only have the right to harrass me by mail through the federal post, but I also subsidize them to do it?  That’s beyond asinine.)

Anyway, I am not sending texts, I am not reading texts, and I am not returning calls.  If you want to speak to me, send me an email, or drop a comment on this post.  Message me on FaceBook, send a pigeon, send one of your kids to my house to ask for a pat of butter or whatever, stop by, but don’t bother calling unless you’re going to leave a message, and don’t send a text because I’m not going to read it.  I have one of those curly tailed, hard plastic affairs in my office, old school.  It has letters, but it does not text (why?), and anyway I can just use that.

They say cold turkey is the way to go for these things.  I have very, very little self control or will power, so if I just have the phone OFF, period, that might work better than, “How about you just don’t text him, mmK?”  There are persons who think otherwise of my capacity for restraint that think they know me well, but I’d say I’m the authority on that one, don’t you think?  I’ve known me longer.  If the thought of a turkey sandwich crosses my mind at two am, I won’t be able to rest until I make it and eat it.  I don’t even have to be hungry!  Another more harmful compulsion might begin with “Oh!  My glass is empty!”

Something else I seem compelled to do send texts where they fall on deaf eyes and do nothing but lay waste to whatever progress the recipient and I have made extricating ourselves from the mess we made of each other.  I’m all like, “ButIjustwanna–,,  Ineedasaythat–,,,  Can’tyoujust…?”  Um, no.   Oops, I wasn’t going to lay it out like that.  Well, there’s an example of mygift of unceasing blather and nearly shameless self-disclosure.  I can keep other peoples’ secrets just fine, nearly 100% of the time, except this one teeny thing I accidentally blabbed at work, but technically what I promised was that it wouldn’t leave the room and I blabbed in the same room I heard it in, at least I did after I blabbed it somewhere else first, but anyway I’m usually good about OPB, though I am prone to tell anyone who will listen all about my own.

So yeah, I need to stop.  It’s been clearly demonstrated that I was caught, tried, convicted, and condemned without having been able to utter a word in my own defense that was even entered into the court record.  No proposal that things may not be as presented by the prosecution, no appeal, no plea for mercy, no character reference, no expert witness, has ever been seriously entertained by this judge, and there’ve been far more innocent defendants than I who weren’t able to sway him from the mandatory sentence of life in solitary confinement.

It’s time to hang it up and quit trying.

Comments ( 2 )

,