It's Christmas Times, Cat

This is my daughter's first Christmas, so 'hiding' Christmas presents from her is about as difficult as buying them. She was with us when we found the little bath-finger-puppets, heard us talking about them, and I still suspect that she will be appropriately surprised to see them Christmas Eve in her stocking. I mean, everything is still a surprise to a 5 month old. ("Look! A clean diaper!")

I anticipated some searching from the dog, considering her nose knows she got a chewy stick and where it's located out of reach, but who I should have been more concerned about is the cat.

I knew I was in trouble when I first got home with it. It's a 'rat' stuffed with real, organic catnip, and a bell. Unfortunately, it was a little too perfect considering that he took it out of the shopping bag it was in (under everything else from my other trips yesterday,) and was swatting it around on the floor. So I put it into a Christmas stocking, under something else, anchored by a basket, and by this morning, stocking, basket, and everything else on the dryer was on the floor.

Other attempts to keep the cat away from his Christmas present have failed in the past, but not to this extent. It's hard to keep from thinking that he looks forward to this game we play every year, (a bit of cat and mouse?) but the most frustrating thing is that once I give it to him he is just going to take one swipe at it and it will land under a chair/sofa/dryer/other piece of heavy furniture and will stay there until we get back from Christmas.

Then, he will just ignore it.

Ediface

One thing I have learned by teaching is the best way to control a large group of people is by learning their names. As soon as what they do is no longer anonymous, they suddenly start thinking that these things can come back to haunt them. This makes this a little difficult for me since I seem to be handicapped by something far worse than my inability to spell - I cannot recognize faces or names.

Usually, I remember a kid's name for all the wrong reasons - he/she is usually acting out in class, to remind the kid to get me some work they missed due to excessive absences, or some other obnoxious reason for me to ask them something. I, for some reason, never see those kids after graduation. I only see the kids that I really enjoyed teaching, and for the life of me I cannot remember their names.

I can remember dog's names, but that's usually because dogs actually look like their names. Stubby, Reagan, Bellatrix, or Rusty are memorable; Jason, John, Abby, or Taylor are not. Is it because dog owners are better at naming than the rest of the population? Obviously not. I think it's because we spend time with dogs before naming them, unlike the practice with our children. I cannot imagine a parent deciding to name their child Twinkle Le'Star after knowing the child for any period of time, realizing that this would be social suicide.

But my problem is not only names but faces. If people wore the same thing every day, never changed their fair, or if there just wasn't so many people to remember in the first place, I would be better off. I have this one child in my class that looks completely different from each week to the next so as soon as I start to recognize the child, she changes. Just today I went to my box and pulled out a package of pictures for the yearbook that I could not recognize. It was obviously air-brushed, and that person was wearing way too much make-up.

Then I realized it was me.

Pets and the Neurotic

I don't know if pets are only a mirror to their 'masters' or if owning a pet makes you crazy, but I know that sanity is usually in short supply during the work week, and the cat and dog mirror my sentiments. Usually, since the dog goes with me to work, she comes home and crashes and the cat... well, he's usually crashed. But lately, both cat and dog have been acting out.

The dog has decided that she wants to sleep on the bed. This is commonplace for many well meaning, otherwise sane people I know, but this is gross to me. I see what she rolls around in, and I know what she thinks is perfume - I don't want that in the same place I go into deep REM. This is compounded with the problem that there is no room. My cat has always slept with me and the hubby, which has never been a huge problem (hey, he doesn't roll around in his litter-box,) but now that my daughter has come into the picture, our little bed is really crowded. We do not need another animal in the bed, furry or not.

But she does not see it this way. She has been convinced that she is a little lap dog since she was a puppy, and now that she is 60 pounds, she still is not aware of her girth. She just sees the baby, the cat, my husband and me enjoying a night of nursing while she gets the rug. But my dog is not a pacifist. Oh no. Passive-aggressive, maybe, but she is not going to just roll over and play dead on this issue. Now, any time she gets a chance, she goes and sneaks a nap on the bed, making my OCD husband paranoid.

Now, if this was it, I think we would be okay but no. The cat has now developed a penchant for baby socks. Yes, baby socks. I go through all this trouble to pair and ball up my infant daughter's socks, and the cat goes through an equal amount of trouble to stalk them down and bat them onto the floor. I did have them in a convenient basket until I woke up one morning to find the basket half empty and socks everywhere. I tried covering the basket up to no avail. I tried putting them into the drawer, and in walks the cat with Snoopy Socks in his mouth like he just killed them.

Maybe a person is already crazy if they get an animal, expecting it to be loyal and loving and sit on your lap only when it is convenient to you and greet you at the door. I will admit, as long as you are willing to accept compromises, you can get an animal to do most of those things, but forget it being convenient to you. It is a wonderful thing; however, just as there is never such thing as a completely sane human, we can never have a completely sane/normal/predictable cat/dog/pet.

(And we thought the shedding would be the most of our worries.)

Kids These Days

I remember people constantly complaining about my generation and getting annoyed at it. There were these sweeping generalizations about how people my age act, all we seemed to be interested in, and, more often than not, how much harder the people of the previous generations had it and how much better it made them. I didn't feel like such statements were true or helpful, so I am going to try to not succumb to the temptation of doing the same thing.

With that said, I must mention the students that I teach. For the most part, they are normal, middle-class, but run the gamut of overly exposed to popular culture to not exposed at all. I have never seen so many students who were once home schooled, and now I know why. Earlier today, I had a student approach me about a speech I had recommended to her to memorize for theater. (I had cherry-picked it because she 'didn't feel comfortable' doing a soliloquy that was not meant for a girl.) She told me that she didn't like the language. Knowing that this was Titania's speech from A Midsummer's Night's Dream, I was worried that perhaps I missed a 'jackass' or something about Bottom, the man named Bottom who was turned into a jackass - the animal, not the 'bad word.' But, no. There was no mention of him. I asked her to please point out what she was seeing.

"'But she, being mortal, of that boy did die; / And for her sake do I rear up her boy.'"

"What was inappropriate?"

She then points to the word 'rear'.

Are you kidding me? Have kids these days warped their minds so much that "rear" no longer means "to raise"? What in the world did she think Titania was doing to the child anyway? The worst part is that I know this kid was not doing as some kids do (including me at that age,) by making something gross/inappropriate using word association. She genuinely did not want to say that because she thought she was saying something 'bad'. Most of the time at her age I was looking for opportunities to say inappropriate things. What does that make me?

It goes without saying that she is an exception to the rule - not the general rule, and that she is the product of being so overly-sheltered that it is affecting her ability to exist in the free world. It shows us what happens when someone doesn't have the mind to question (in her case) a religious doctrine that says something vaguely, which is in itself not a bad idea, but when applied to the world at large and taken to an extreme, can be worse than damaging. It also goes without saying that this is a forewarning of troubles to come. I told a lady in the office about this and she looked at me like I was crazy.
"What are they doing to kids these days?" she asked.
I often wonder.

'Tis the season to kill Romeo

As an English teacher, seasonal movies mean something completely different to me. Because I always end the first semester with Shakespeare, I usually am living, breathing, talking, thinking Shakespeare when Christmas rolls around; so, when everybody else thinks about Charlie Brown's Christmas, I think about Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, or Hamlet. This became really difficult one year when my drama students were performing The Taming of the Shrew while I was teaching three grades, so I was reading The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and Much Ado About Nothing. Yeah, that was brutal.

What I have learned, though, is how much I can remember from the movies of each of the plays. The soundtrack to the Franco Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet sounds like Christmas carols to me, and the dialogue and the soliloquies get stuck in my head like how other people cannot get "Frosty the Snowman" out of their heads. Today, I showed my drama students soliloquies from different productions of Shakespearean plays, including Zeffirelli's version of The Taming of the Shrew when I realized the guy playing Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet plays a suitor (with blond hair!) in this movie. It was awkward seeing him trying to woo Bianca after I had seen him saying, "Peace, I hate the word as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee."

Probably the most disturbing side effect of watching these movies way too much is the irresistible urge to give a Mystery Theater commentary through some of the most serious scenes. There is a priceless moment during Juliet's funeral when Friar Lawrence looks down and smiles, then remembers he's at a funeral and looks sad again. I just want to say in a funny voice, "Look! She has a funny hat on! Wait, I'm at a funeral - look sad!" but I can't because the students are trying to learn and I'm the teacher, after all.

Now, the Christmas season is in full swing: we just started the Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo and Juliet today, which is so much fun, and in the Sophomore's class, they are almost done with Julius Caesar. Besides, I never tire of seeing Marlon Brando, even if he is wearing a skirt as Marc Antony no man should ever wear. At least I don't have to hear the comments about the tights during this movie.