Si, Habla Ingles

A lot of Americans do not realize that New Mexico is part of their country.

I first learned this fact in elementary school, when we lived in Oregon and occasionally travelled to visit my grandparents in the desert Southwest. I announced one of these trips to my gym teacher, who was from Alaska herself and should have been familiar with nonstandard states.

I was not the kind of child who let inaccuracy slide, and I think my teacher showed a lot of restraint for someone being vehemently corrected by a seven-year old.

Sadly, this geographical ignorance persists, even in areas much closer to the state in question.

I lived in rural south Louisiana for six months while failing at teaching the first grade. My Teach For America coworkers and I had to cross the Mississippi once a week to attend training classes in another little town, and on one of these trips we met Perry the Ferry Man.

(TANGENT: I loved taking the ferry. A westerner by birth and raising, I had never seen a river the size of the Mississippi. My first day in town I drove across the bridge to Baton Rouge three times just for the heck of it, and the ferry is way better because you’re still in your car, but now you’re on a boat. In your car. On a boat. You can even get out of the car, and you are still ON A BOAT. I could say this all day: CAR. BOAT. RIVER. ON!)

Perry could tell we weren’t locals, and he came over to talk with us. He headed for my two fellow teachers, who had arrived in a truck with Illinois plates, and asked a few questions before turning to me.

I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, but then…

Now, I realize that my license plate says “Mexico,” right in between “New” and “USA.” But I had not prepared an appropriate comeback for this type of misunderstanding. I was also several weeks into a neuron-destroying cycle of sleep deprivation, so my response lacked a little punch.

Perry seemed to decide that I didn’t understand all that much English, so he spent some more time interviewing my friends. Eventually, though, he couldn’t resist:

This is where I really, really wish that I had been firing on all cylinders.

Instead, I just left the man wondering how on earth this half-mute Mexican could teach school.

As a teacher, I probably should have put more effort into American Geographic Awareness. All I can say to that is, “What did you think was on the other side of Texas?”

P.S. You’re welcome.

I'm on Vacation, Including from My Hobby

My laptop and I are currently attracting all of the insects in Texas.

We're sitting outside at one of the few electrical outlets that fall within the narrow beam of internet connectivity at the 40th annual Kerrville Folk Festival, surrounded by guitar-playing hippies. Neither I nor that Wikipedia link are any good at explaining why it's so wonderful to camp in the chigger-infested Hill Country heat and listen to banjos at 3 a.m., so just understand that I'm doing those things instead of posting this week.

Until I get back next week, you can spend the time thinking about the lunch I watched someone eat today: Peanut butter straight from the jar, a brick of dry Ramen noodles (Oriental Flavor), and a tepid can of SpaghettiOs. I'm also pretty sure I saw him debating whether to use the spoon on the SpaghettiOs while it was still half full of peanut butter.

Camping. Yes.

Parking Lots

This is me in the wee hours of Saturday morning, running laps around my car in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

From what I hear, the party I had just left continued for three or four more hours, though I can’t imagine why because the cheese crisps had run out. My ability to sit still without falling asleep had also run out, which is why I pulled in to Wal-Mart for some crash-prevention calisthenics.

This negligible energy boost did not last me all the way home, though, and I ended up mumbling memory drills out loud like Hawkeye Pierce with a concussion.

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This is me on Saturday evening, dashing furtively across the dark grocery store parking lot with a glass bottle of amber liquid stuffed in my coat.

I had rushed into the store for something legitimate like orange juice and emerged with a bottle of hazelnut flavoring syrup instead. Plastic bags will likely play into the coming apocalypse, so I just swept out the door clutching my prize. I really wanted to taste it on the way home, but I really didn’t want to explain to the cops that my big weekend plans featured an instant Folger’s latte and four hours of sci-fi TV on NetFlix in my kitchen.

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This is me after work on Wednesday, flattening other people’s moist cardboard boxes to make room in my apartment complex’s recycling bin for more than just a single-family supply of Orange Crush cases.

This is the concerned citizen who pulled up behind me to monitor my suspicious activity.

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NOTE: Those of you who follow me on Facebook may recall a statement I made about this week’s post not containing butts. Looks like I was wrong on that one.

Change Is Bad

This is my pillow.

* It is covered with pictures of African grassland animals, not a thriving biohazard community.

This is not my sleeping-at-night-in-a-bed pillow. I am a Grown-Up and I have a fluffy, white, safari-free one for that. It is my napping-on-the-couch-instead-of-balancing-my-checkbook pillow.

It is not actually very comfortable. My mom made it when I was three or four, and I used it for car trips and hitting my brother until the stuffing formed five or six large, tough clumps. This development made the pillow less satisfactory for sleeping but much more satisfactory as a weapon.


Eventually he got big enough to fight back, so the pillow was retired to a corner with the creepy stuffed cat and that baby doll whose legs were eaten by the dog.

One day in middle school, I came home to discover that my mom had been sewing. She had retrieved my decrepit pillow and lovingly refilled it with fresh, fluffy stuffing, cleverly transforming a disused childhood treasure into a functional element of my young adult life.


This was not okay.


The old stuffing had suddenly become crucially important to my emotional wellbeing. After several volleys of tearful accusations, my poor, bemused mother pointed me to the sewing room trash can, where the discarded clumps were headed for their eternal rest. I cleaned away all the clinging threads and scraps of fabric, savagely cast out the new filling, and returned things to their proper and natural state with a great sense of righteousness.

Using this pillow now is a lot like covering the ground with a sheet and some rocks and hoping you hit just right. I triumphed over the demons of change, though, and those lumps are my badge of honor. Along with the bruises on my head.

Your Mother Should Know

I made Muddy Buddies this weekend. That’s where you soak Chex cereal in calories to create the most divine chocolate-peanut butter snack food ever to exist.

I was making them late at night for a Halloween party, and of course I had to keep tasting to make sure they came out okay. The following chart summarizes my experience with this process:

As it turns out, eating a pound and a half of sugar at midnight is not just a bad idea right then. It is also a bad idea the next morning.

Waking up with the digestive equivalent of a hangover was the latest in my body’s series of educational seminars, together titled “Your Mother Was Right.”

Apparently, “All that sugar will make you sick!” is an actual fact of nature and not just a way for parents to suck the fun from Halloween and birthdays. Who knew?

I also owe my mom credit for “It’s past your bedtime!” Sleep deprivation has been an awesome way for me to accomplish important stuff like reading Chuck Norris jokes online, but I’m gradually realizing that it has legitimate consequences such as exhaustion and acting stupid.

Extreme sleepiness routinely makes me too dumb to get another blanket or go to the bathroom when I wake up cold or...whatever. But I reached a new low last week when I woke up at 4 a.m. too dumb to roll over.

I had fallen asleep immediately upon contact with the bed, and it took a couple of hours for my body to work out that it was really uncomfortable and try to get my brain to fix the situation. Unfortunately, when I regained consciousness with my neck bent like an elbow, I couldn’t work out what to do about it.

So, Mama, I’m going to bed now. And I ate real food for supper along with my ice cream. I’m definitely going to keep swallowing watermelon seeds, though.

Extra Credit: Though she was born a long, long time ago...

My Brain Is Fighting Against Me and Winning

I heard about some research indicating that humans aren’t very good at anticipating or remembering what it’s like to feel other ways besides how we’re feeling now. Like how when it’s 120 degrees in your car because you forgot to park in the shade in July and the AC stopped working in 1997, you drive home with your sweaty hands slipping off the wheel and can’t seriously believe that it will ever be January again because “too cold” is clearly not a state that exists in the world.

This idea makes sense to me because it’s usually how I feel about food. When I’m stranded in the half-mile line at Chick-Fil-A, likely to waste away at any moment, all I can think about is the last time I had access to a veritable smorgasbord and how foolish I was not to eat more of it to protect against this cruel starvation.

On the other hand, when I am suffering under the weight of my “one of everything” approach to potlucks, I become convinced that no food will ever appeal to me for the rest of my life and I might as well spend my ice cream budget on posters of Han Solo.

This phenomenon is also to blame for my perpetual self-inflicted sleep deprivation. I can spend the entire day exhausted, doze off in my Cup O’ Noodles, bite through my lip trying to stay alert for a staff meeting, skip the gym on account of a potentially fatal lack of muscle control, and drag myself home willing to miss dinner in favor of an extra half-hour of sleep...but first I have to check my e-mail just for a second in case I have another Nigerian lottery prize waiting.

Now the internet has already won.

Google’s home page has Pac-Man on it, so I have to play that for a while. Then I’m not sure when Ms. Pac-Man was introduced, so I need to check Wikipedia. That article has a link to Atari, so now I have to look up that one game with the castles. I’m definitely awake now, so I might as well draw some pictures for my blog. Then I need to check four or five other blogs in case they have new posts, and I should watch that video my brother sent me again. That reminds me of the book I was reading, and I can fit in one more chapter before my reserve back-up emergency late bedtime. Or maybe two more chapters. Heck, I’m already up this late, so what’s another fifty pages? Besides, it’s not like I’ll be sleepy tomorrow—I’m awake now, and it’s the middle of the night, so how could I not be awake at 7 a.m.?

So the next day I arrive at work feeling slightly less alert than the furry take-out enchiladas in the breakroom fridge.

Superpowers, Part II

Like any good superhero (as opposed to, for instance, Matter-Eater Lad), I have more than one power.

#2. Falling asleep in any location, no matter what is going on

This ability began to develop in my senior year of college, and it blossomed into a true superpower during my six-month stint as a first grade teacher with Teach For America. By exercising this power, I have fallen asleep

• while attending a five-church southern gospel choir extravaganza
• at a dance club on Halloween
• 50 feet from the stage at a John Mellencamp concert
• eighteen inches behind a performing bluegrass band, while standing up

During this last feat of strength, I was awakened from my super slumber only when the double-bass player backed up and accidentally stepped on my foot.

As a college student just beginning to recognize the scope of my abilities, I once used the power of super sleep in a one-on-one meeting with an adviser. I managed to lose consciousness any time I was not personally speaking, as follows:






The best thing about using this power is that it’s completely undetectable.