Me: “Hey, I need your three sentence summary of the student news.”
D’Avonte: “Ms. M, you KNOW I hate the damn news.”
Me: (teacher face)
D’Avonte: “Fiiiiiiiine.”
Turns in summary…
“They’re talking about Trump and all his bullshit. It’s the same stuff with his bitchass every day. Why do you make me do this?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah…I’ve been slacking with the writing, but I’m going to defend myself and say that I’ve been tied up with Christmas, getting back to work, and my ex-husband holding my children for ransom. True story.
Anyhoo, one of you, and you know who you are, emailed me, asking if I’d secretly won the lottery and had taken off for parts unknown. Another of you emailed asking if I was “Seriously dead or just sitting in an asylum and haven’t earned internet privileges, yet”. I think we can all agree that the second option is far more likely.
Regardless…if any of the following things happen, you’ll know who won the Powerball.
Let’s be honest…this movie was an episode of Criminal Minds with chocolate.
10. Oprah Winfrey names me one of her new favorite things.
I’m just gonna go ahead and show you some flowers first, before I make half of you mad.
I’m going to go ahead and apologize, because while this entire post will be fraught with references to dicks…none of them will be remotely funny. Maybe if you’re new or just really into a good dick story, read about the time I broke up with someone over Jon Hamm’s penis. It doesn’t disappoint. (Okay, huge lie, it’s an enormously disappointing story on every level, especially for Jon Hamm.)
Anyhooooo…
Today, I want to take a moment to thank Planned Parenthood. I want to thank them for the education that I was able to pursue, my health which is relatively stellar, and mostly, for giving me control over my future. It is because of Planned Parenthood, that I have never needed to have an abortion, and for the fact that I’ve never HAD to make a choice.
Thank you for giving nonjudgmental, factual, realistic education to anyone who wanted it, along with affordable birth control, to keep them safe and healthy. Your work has enabled so many millions of people to live full and happy lives, so that, when they are ready, they can have healthy families.
Thank you, Planned Parenthood, for getting me an immediate appointment when I was 20 and thought I was dying, only to find out that I was the victim of too-tight underwear. Thank you again for when I was 33, and convinced I definitely dying this time, because of a chronically unfaithful partner, and for literally holding my hand until the rapid test showed I was safe.
I’m hardly alone…I know my hands aren’t the only ones you held. Thank you for holding the hands of people that I love, who didn’t get good results, and for handling it with such love, compassion, and care, that they didn’t jump in front of buses or swallow every pill they owned. You steered them to medical help, counseling, and showed them that their lives, while altered, were not even close to over.
Thank you for providing prenatal care to women who have no insurance, but who wanted to do the right thing, and for giving easy affordable cancer screenings for women, who otherwise could never afford it, and maybe wouldn’t have gotten help until it was too late.
And yes, thank you for also providing safe and LEGAL abortion services for those that need it. Thank you for being a beacon of light, so my college roommate didn’t have her sexual assault compounded, by having her body taken over, again, by the son of a bitch who raped her. Thank you for hiring AMAZING staff, who treated her with such gentleness and compassion, that the only emotion she ever had following her procedure, was a deep and profound sense of relief. Thank you for ending the days my mother lived through, as a nurse in New York, in the 1960’s, where she saw many, many women lose their lives to blood loss and infection, because they were left to butchers when they were too poor to fly overseas, where it was safe.
Thank you for fighting for all of us, even those who fight against you, because you believe we should have options in our lives. Thank you for fighting the good fight, and getting so many millions of women through not only the best most amazing parts of their lives, but also the hardest and scariest. Thank you for taking care of our brothers, boyfriends, husbands, sons, and friends, who also count on you for their futures.
Just thank you…
(Texting from an inservice training for the upcoming school year.)
Me: I’d like a medal for NOT breaking out laughing either time the trainer said, “This is what you do when you have a big unit.”
Ryan: Gold star!
Me: I did not, however, manage to maintain myself any of the times that they said we needed to “continuously probe our students.”
Ryan: Please, please don’t probe students. It is a sure way to get your picture in the paper. Your picture would even be in my paper. I might even have to give them one off my phone.
Me: Just make sure to use a filter and that I’m smiling.
Ryan: Least I could do.
Ryan: “If you could get anything you wanted for Valentine’s Day, what would you want?”
Me: “I’d want for Jon Stewart to take back his resignation and promise to stay on the Daily Show until the end of time.”
Ryan: (Blank stare.)
Me: (Raised eyebrow.)
Ryan: “Anything else?”
Me: “A unicorn.”
Ryan: “Soooo…tulips and chocolates it is!”
Seamus: (Reading from his phone.) “This study claims that men who take lots of selfies are generally crazy.”
Me: “Ruh roh…having some self-reflection?”
Seamus: “Apparently, men who post them unaltered have poor impulse control and have a higher incidence of being psychopaths, but men who edit them and add filters before posting are just plain old narcissists. I always edit.”
Me: “So, the only thing keeping you from being a fucking serial killer…is a sepia filter.”
Seamus: “I better keep editing my photos.”
Me: “You better stop eating your neighbors.”
Me: “So who wants to hear about how I’m the most embarrassing person alive?”
Tracy: “I do, I do!”
Me: “You know how I’m basically blind in the dark?”
Tracy: “Ohhhhh, this should be good.”
Me: “So, I was handing out pamphlets at the football game, and I walked STRAIGHT up some guy, with the biggest idiot grin on my face, asking if I could talk to him about the budget override…”
Tracy: “And…?”
Me: “He starts talking to me, and I realize he’s the principal I dated summer before last… the one where we broke up and it ended horribly, and we never spoke again.”
Tracy: “Oh, my, God…what did you do?”
Me: “I stammered about how he clearly already knew about the override and then ran for it.”
(deafening silence)
Me: “Nothing? You’re not going to say ANYTHING about this?”
Tracy: “You exist to make me feel better about myself.”
Me: “I want to argue, and I can’t.”
Okay, this is actually an old conversation, from last summer, when I took the kids to Disneyland, but someone reminded me of it last night…
(As the “bellhop” character welcomed us to Tower of Terror.)
Liam: “Library!? They’re going to make us READ!?”
Fisticuffs and Shenanigans 