I'm starting to think that maybe children aren't universally terrifying after all.

I don’t really know what to do with small children. I didn’t have to acquire much experience in this department growing up—my brother is only three years younger than I am, all of our cousins are older than that, and by the time I reached babysitting age it was already firmly established that I was not the right teenage girl to ask to help out in the nursery.

Despite having known this fact about myself since elementary school, I managed to forget it entirely in my senior year of college. That’s when I encountered the attractive whirlwind of powerful marketing and well-meaning hubris that is Teach For America.

For anyone unfamiliar with the organization, Teach For America (TFA) is a program that recruits brand-new, maximally idealistic college graduates and enlists them to teach for two years in severely underperforming schools. TFA specifically seeks graduates who did not study education in college, because the organization prefers a fresh receptacle for its own systems and values without interference from clutter such as “years of training” or “classroom experience.”

After acceptance into the program, TFA teachers undergo a five-week summer training called “Institute,” which is obviously sufficient to cover all of the skills a 22-year-old could need in order to manage and serve a classroom of academically disadvantaged students. The TFA website calls Institute “a rigorous and intensive experience,” which is presumably the result of the public relations team reworking their original slogan.

From Institute (where I learned that showers are so your roommates can’t hear you cry), I went on to my very own classroom of first graders in rural southern Louisiana. There it quickly became clear that those hours of instruction and practice in lesson planning had not addressed my extreme lack of experience with six-year-olds. My determination to eliminate educational inequity did not prepare me for the child who brought a pocketful of playground gravel back to class to throw at me...

... or the child with surprisingly good spelling and penmanship for a first-grader.

I want to be very clear on this point: These problems sprang from my extreme lack of confidence and ability in classroom management, and not from any fundamental fault with these children. They are almost definitely not evil in their cores at all. And they certainly didn’t ask to be subjected to the authority of that shouty white lady who kind of sounds like she might cry.

After a couple of months, it was obvious to everyone that my ability to explain subtraction was no match for my inability to get anyone to sit still, keep their shoes on, and stop spitting sunflower seeds at each other long enough to listen. I left the program early and came home with more than a little psychological baggage.

 Fortunately, there have been a few changes over time. For one thing, it’s been eight and a half years since I left Teach For America, so I almost never have the nightmares anymore.

For another, I have recently gotten to know a few little kids who seem not to mean me any physical or emotional harm! This experience is distinctly preferable, and in fact I have found that it can even be fun. For instance, several months ago I had a graduation party at which the first guests to arrive included friends of mine with their 5-year-old twins, Lucy and Batman. Also in attendance was a large and delicious-looking cake. I let the kids know that there were not enough people present yet to cut the cake, and we would have to wait until some more arrived. Lucy spent the intervening time making sure that the presence of a cake in the room remained at the front of my mind.

By the middle of the party (during which Lucy got plenty of frosting on her cake), there were four children under the age of six in my house. I am proud to report that I did not find this situation even a little bit harrowing.

Funny how context can change your experience. It’s almost as though Teach For America has significant organizational failings that should not be interpreted as a direct indictment of children’s character or my worth as a person. Huh.

Extra Credit: Sure, it’s satire. But it’s true.

Hi. Hey. Hi. Hi. Hello. Hey.

Hi there. So, I went to grad school for three years and just finished in December. Let’s say that’s the only reason I haven’t been writing at all, and that sloth and inertia didn’t play any part. Cool? Cool.

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A few years ago, my roommate Petunia gave in to her grandma’s repeated suggestions and signed up for an online dating site. I decided to do it too, for moral support—though the buddy system doesn’t really work on the internet. Unlike when you persuade your friend to come with you to a party, you can’t just stand in a corner and talk only to each other.

Petunia was willing to pay for a membership to one of the classier sites. I was not, and I ended up on Plenty of Fish for free. I can affirm that this is not the skeeviest dating site possible, though. I know this because of the other sites that advertise in its sidebar. Here are some helpful screenshots to prove that I am not making these up:

For some reason these sites do not advertise the number of lasting relationships they have enabled.

Plenty of Fish allows you to craft a description of yourself, thoughtfully answer questions and prompts about your personality, provide information on your interests and the qualities you are seeking in a match, and then receive insistent messages from people who have read none of these things.

I was not prepared for this attention, and at first I applied the same flawed strategy I had used for college mail. After taking the PSAT in high school, I received mail from a number of colleges that had no immediate appeal or connection to my future plans.

They all included a tear-off postcard to send in for further information, and it seemed reasonable to collect as much information as possible before making such a big decision. Even if the initial pamphlet looked unpromising, how could I be sure from first impressions that I wasn’t passing up the perfect opportunity?

I eventually compared notes with friends and realized my mistake. Unfortunately, I did not learn the lesson in a lasting way.

When it came to online dating, I initially assumed that it was only proper to reply to everyone who sent me a message—especially those who wrote more than just “Hi.” That’s how I got myself into the following mess:

This sounded to me like a reasonable and fairly self-aware request. Also, I had one clear reason in mind, and it was something he should be able to fix pretty easily in order to improve his future prospects. Providing this sort of advice—when someone specifically asks for it—is clearly the kindest and most helpful thing to do, right?

To my surprise, he did not appear to consider this a helpful response.

By this point, I still had not begun to suspect that he was not actually interested in my suggestions for improving his approach. I helpfully tried to explain.

Having learned a lot about the norms of online dating messages from this exchange, I then wisely…repeated almost exactly the same conversation with a different guy the next week. Optimism and stupidity often share surface characteristics.

In the end, I deleted my profile after reaching my limit for people coming on way, way too strong.

Whatever approach Petunia took worked noticeably better. She steered clear of Well-Meaning Pedantry traps and managed to avoid the fecally inclined, and I got to be part of her wedding last summer.

As for me, I'm thinking of starting my own site:

Extra credit:

Thoughts on the supply of fish.

I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves

In the tenth grade, my Great Books teacher mentioned that she enjoyed telling ridiculous stories to extremely gullible people.

Hoping to provide her with more material, I promptly explained why songs get stuck in your head: Certain radio frequencies resonate well with human tissue, and those snippets of music get trapped inside your skull and bounce around on their way through the air from the local soft rock station.

My teacher was so enthralled with this new piece of scientific knowledge that I felt bad having to suggest that maybe she should reconsider throwing around the phrase “gullible people.”

I can hardly blame her, though. The mysterious force of song-head-sticking is not to be trifled with. My roommate recognized its devastating contagious properties and finally declared that I am not allowed to tell her what’s lodged in my head if there is a chance she knows the tune. One of my friends at work is bound by a similar domestic edict, so she and I started inflicting the brain virus on each other instead.

Of course, music carries other dangers aside from relentless repetitions of “Hey Mickey.”

A few months ago, just before the office radio rolled over to non-stop Christmas music, the awesome power of classic hits suddenly moved me to dance while sitting at my keyboard.

The woman at the next desk did not heed the call of the same muse. She did, however, notice my arrhythmic jerks and strained humming and spring into action.

Next time, though, I know just how to explain the situation:

Objects in Head Are Further Than They Appear

I’m finally watching Breaking Bad. For my fellow latecomers, it’s a TV show that follows the heart-warming story of a middle-aged chemistry teacher destroying his family as he becomes a drug lord to pay for cancer treatment.

The whole series is set and filmed in Albuquerque, so I keep seeing familiar locations and/or high school drama classmates in every episode. It’s a weird feeling.

People who live in sexy cities like New York experience this all the time, except that their shows are about witty friends or witty cop friends or witty crime scene investigator friends or teenage mutant ninja turtles, and mine is about crystal meth.

I imagine that New Yorkers and Angelenos become desensitized to seeing their landmarks on TV, just like I assume that people called Ashley or Jessica get used to encountering strangers with their names. I, however, am not accustomed to this phenomenon at all.

The combination of gritty, violent intensity and local surroundings is messing with my grip on fiction versus reality. I’m going around with the feeling that something dire and unpleasant has recently happened to me and resulted in amnesia. People ask what I’ve been up to lately, and it seems like I have a lot of important news that I can’t quite recall.

It doesn’t help that I’m also halfway through the last Hunger Games novel, since stories about teenage deathmatches don’t really create a feeling of security.

This pathetic level of limbic system gullibility is why it’s always a bad idea for me to watch horror movies. After five minutes of possessed hotels or masked strangers, I’m positive that those events could repeat at any moment and the next victim will be me. I have to venture out into the farthest reaches of bizarre improbability to find a film that will still let me stay in a house alone within the next six months.

After some harrowing Girl Scout experiences with urban legends (“Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody NONONONONONOIQUITDON’TLETHERGETME!”), I took a lot of comfort in the Snopes.com page debunking them. Then I realized that the site has a whole category for legends that nobody can prove didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, I hear that the words “embarrassingly suggestible” aren’t in the dictionary.

Not Writing

Not writing is so, so, so much easier than writing. Even so, it is a specialized skill, and you can improve through dedicated practice.

The art of not writing is different from regular procrastination. Procrastinating is putting off work until the last minute by playing tetris, going out for ice cream, or watching three straight seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix.

Not writing is the next step. It’s the stage that begins once your guilty conscience strips the Blendtec YouTube channel of its power to thrill. In order to feel better while still avoiding work, it’s time to start lying to yourself.

I was already pretty accomplished at not writing in college, but deadlines and grades kept getting in the way of truly perfecting my craft. Now that all of my literary deadlines are self-imposed, though, I am rapidly approaching mastery. My most effective techniques for not writing fall into two categories:

Things that I tell myself are more important than writing

The key to satisfaction in not writing is believing that the other stuff you are doing is just as worthwhile, if not more so. In school, this category includes finishing the next three weeks of astronomy homework or putting 20 hours into that papier-mâché diorama of the Boer Wars that’s due after Christmas.

In the post-collegiate environment, I’m more likely to start with baking duck-shaped cupcakes for work or finally listening to that band my brother likes. These activities are obviously legitimate uses of time, I explain to my blank Word document, because I’m doing them for others. How could writing narcissistic comedy even hope to compete?

As the level of self-reproach increases, I escalate against it with home-upkeep oriented tasks, like alphabetizing the spice rack or trying on everything in my closet to decide what should go to Goodwill.

Eventually all of the sinks and toilets are really clean, and I sit down at the computer. I’m still open to more self-delusion, though, so it’s time for the second category of crafty ploys:

Things that I tell myself actually are writing

This is the real balancing act: avoiding the project by pretending to work on the project. The secret is developing ironclad mechanisms for achieving imaginary progress. In school, these tricks include picking fonts, setting margins, organizing sources, creating headers and footers with automatic page numbers, and figuring out how to type the accents in “papier-mâché diorama.”

Now, I prefer to start off by rereading my own existing material. This process is absolutely intended to help Maintain a Consistent Style; it is clearly not about Reliving Past Accomplishments Instead of Doing Anything. It also means that every post I finally finish gains me a few more minutes of delay for next time.

After all that staring at a screen, it’s about time for a round of cleaning out my purse while focusing single-mindedly on writing ideas.

When I eventually run out of fuzzy hard candy, I’ll turn to practicing ways to draw facial expressions in case I need them later.

As it turns out, not every picture is worth a thousand words.

In college, the not writing always had to end before the paper was actually due. But as a graduate who is neither graded nor paid for writing, I get to decide when everything is due. Sometimes I decide it’s never. When all else fails, though, there’s always writing an entire column about not writing things.

Speedy Grease

I recently got an oil change at an establishment that, to avoid attention from their legal department, I will call “Speedy Grease.”

My town has almost 20 Speedy Grease locations, which is good because I can never return to any of the three I have used so far. The first time I couldn’t figure out how to pull up to the service bay, so now they know that I’m not competent to care for a vehicle. The second time I absentmindedly tried to get in my car without paying, so that crew knows about my tenuous grasp on the conventions that govern society.

In my shame, I slunk away to a third Speedy Grease shop. This time I managed the whole transaction with only minimal failures of sentience.

All that success went to my head, and it took until Monday to notice the impressive constellation of scratches on my windows. These new decorations can only have come from that adorable little dance where they pretend to wash your windows, presumably using an old sweatshirt stuffed with gravel.

I was upset for about ten minutes, and then the battle joy started seeping in. After work, I got to go yell at Speedy Grease!

I love the prospect of a conflict that calls for righteous speech-making. Planning out a biting diatribe satisfies my primal need for occasional violence, with the added bonus of minimizing the bloodshed. On the other hand, 100% of confrontations work out better in my head than in reality. Typically, I’ll plan something like this:

…but thanks to a genetic tendency toward anger-crying, I usually discharge that frustrated energy through my eyeballs in the most humiliating way possible:

This is the same recipe by which I accidentally got a grade changed in college. It only takes a few key ingredients:

One misunderstood assignment...

One attempt to explain...

A double handful of panic about damaging a GPA over an elective music class...

…and one terrified grad student instructor who did not see this coming.

Ultimately, though, I did not so much as sniffle at the Speedy Grease guy. I also didn’t get such impressive results. In fact, the reward for my little wrath spree doubles as its own punishment: I have to go back and face that same crew to redeem my 50% discount on another oil change.

At least now I know which direction the door opens.

P.S. If you are forming a band, you can have "Wrath Spree" for free.