I've had 25 jobs and only got fired from 1.

That's right, 25 jobs in the last 15 years. A few friends and I were talking about crappy jobs we've had recently, and I figured it was high time I got this down and really examined my employment history. Gladly the job I have now I like very much. Crissy used to be amazed at the range and variety of positions I've held, and looking over the list, it is pretty impressive--I am proud to say I am self-made and hard-working. So, join me on a jaunt down Employment Memory Lane, won't you...hope you have hiking boots.

1. Corn Detassler--what? Yes. I'm from Illinois. Here's a good description, a la Bob Wallace's blog: "Corn has to be detassled so it doesn't pollinate itself. If it does, you get weaker corn that isn't so sweet. The detassling itself consists of walking up and down rows of corn for eight hours a day, doing nothing but popping the tassels out of the corn and dropping them on the ground. If you've ever seen a row of corn, you'll find some of them are half a mile long and five to eight feet tall. Imagine eight hours a day, pop, pop, pop, in the heat and humidity of a Midwestern summer, sweating and sneezing and twitching and getting "corn rash" from brushing against the leaves, for about three weeks." We'd pile on the school bus at the ass-crack of dawn in long sleeve shirts and jeans to sweat buckets all day in the 100 degree summer sun, braving gigantic grasshoppers and an occasional corn smut attack. Sidenote--corn has a fungus on it called corn smut. It looks like green playdough. It is gross when thrown at you. Hey, $6 an hour is a lot when you're in 8th grade.
1. Marina--I worked at a marina on the Mississippi in my hometown when I was 14 with my older sister. This is like a floating gas station attached to a dock. We sold gas and snacks and bait, which meant digging night-crawlers out of a tub of dirt. I learned how to tie good knots to hold boats to the dock.
2. Red Apple--this was around 16 years old, a mom and pop diner run by a dirty Albanian who sexually harrassed his waittresses. Not a fun job, not a good time in my life.
3. Blockbuster--slightly more fun, I got 5 free movies a week. Unfortunately the store was in a horrible part of town and I worked til 11. I shrink-wrapped random objects like staplers and phones when I was bored and worked with an aspiring "actor" named Brandon. I wonder what happened to that guy...
4. Gas station 1 and 2--when I went to Northwestern for college I got a job at 2 of the 4 gas stations in the tiny town. Not at the same time. 1 was when I was a sophomore, the other when I was a senior, and after I returned from a year's stint in Texas. They were across the street from each other, and the radio station that played every night I closed always played NKOTB. I was working at the 2nd one the day the screwed up election results of 2000 came in. I also remember a sunny Sunday afternoon when I spotted about 7 of my male friends flying kites in their underwear in the soccer field across the highway.
5. The Hatchery--1 of the very few restaurants in Orange City run by a guy who was a dead-ringer for Archie Bunker and his wife. It was a tiny joint, and I usually walked with $60 most nights. I walked about 12 blocks from campus to it. Archie was the kind of guy who had no problem asking people to move to another table if he needed to push some together. There was a bartender who would smoke at the bar and I swear, she'd not exhale any smoke. It's like it just stayed in her wrinkly little body.
6. VIP Steakhouse--a "sports bar"/restaurant about 9 miles away in Sioux Center, Iowa, run by an angry Vietnamese man I could never understand who yelled a lot. Also about $60 a night. There would be a regular crowd of Nascar fans who'd show up with their gear on and pretend they were watching a real sport with athletes.
7. Product spokesperson--yeah. When I got sick of Iowa and moved to Arlington, Texas, one of the jobs I held simultaneously while also going to school was being one of those sample people you see in supermarkets. You get paid $10 an hour but it's the most mind-numbingly boring and demeaning jobs available. I hawked hair products and Swiffer. Quite often I'd smile my prettiest smile to the manager on duty and give a convincing excuse, and leave early.
8. Caravan of Dreams--a sweet job. In the heart of downtown Ft. Worth, this place had 500+ seating for live music where I spent the majority of my time cocktail waitressing for the likes of Rev. Horton Heat, Pantera, Mingo Fishtrap and other local sensations. The middle level had a theater for a regular improv troop as well as a reception/party venue with a terrace and a music room. The top level was a double level rooftop bar with a cactus garden and a waterfall. I met Harrison Ford there. He's quiet. After a tornado in 2001 or so, the Banktower building across the street shed 2 inches of glass all over the rooftop and blew out most of our windows, and the Riata people bought it from the Bass brothers and turned it into a fancy restaurant.
11. Refrigerator factory--one of many summer jobs. Probably the most intense. I was the hottest chick in the plant, simply because I still had all my teeth. I learned early on that it got so damn hot in there that underwear was a deterrent--too much sweat. I moved to graveyard shift after a few weeks of nearly dying of heat exhaustion from 8-3. I slept in my parents' dark, cool basement and they tried to be quiet during the day. There was a hole about the size of a walnut in the wall that I'd watch--when there appeared to be some light coming through that hole, I knew it was nearly time to go home. Sad. Everyone there encouraged me to stay in college, speaking from personal experience.
12. Nuclear power plant--another bullshit summer job. Another girl and I cleaned up in various areas of the plant. One time we entered the male shower area after dutifully knocking and thinking we had the all-cllear, only to come upon a naked man obliviously drying his chest hair under the hand dryer. We made a hasty retreat. It's an image I'm still trying to erase from my mind.
13. Hotel maid--you want pee-low? You want towel? Yeah, that. Lasted 2 weeks at 6.50 an hour, maybe 2 hours a day. Total waste of time. Leah and I did this together while at Northwestern. This was the one job I just never showed up again and never called in. The owner finally called me and asked if I was still working for her....uh...nah.
14. Rastrelli's--another mom and pop place. They're mostly the same. I always thought it was pretty decent Italian food. Free pizza. Not that bad, for waitressing.
15. Substitute teacher--if you can do this, you can do anything. Trust me. All grades, all subjects.
16. Cheesecake Factory--Cripes. Nazi Germany. This require completely white shoes, a white long-sleeved shirt (which sucked when you have to walk a half hour to work in the Texas heat), white pants and a white apron, which, if it wasn't properly ironed, management would make you clock out and go to the back to iron said apron to get the proper crease. I didn't really try at this job because I was so miserable, so I was lucky to get 100% rating on a secret shopping one Sunday morning. Lots of snobby N. Austin folk.
17. Real teacher--2 years in East Austin. Webb Middle School, 7th and 8th grade English. Made a lot of good friends here, but couldn't see eye to eye with administration in the light of NCLB and the heavy emphasis on TAKS testing. Honestly I probably might've been fired if I hadn't left, it upset me that much.
18. Alamo Drafthouse--possibly my favorite job, at least in the service industry. Some of the sweetest cash and best shows I've ever seen, and it was fairly easy work. I can't even go into all the good times here, it'd make the post too long.
19. Summer school teacher at a juvenile detention facility--contrary to logic, this was one of the best teaching experiences I've ever had. About a dozen high school boys, doing time from anything to robbery to rape, sat in my room and talked about literature and poetry for a few hours every day. They wrote some of the most painful and raw texts I've ever read, and were hungry for knowledge. I ate lunch in their cafeteria with them once, and offered a kid my pudding--he refused, citing possible manipulation. I ended up doing a lot of research about juvenile facility education--it's an overlooked and vital area of research. Damn my ADD--I should've done more.
20. Long term sub for a juvenile offender--Shauna spent a month in jail after beating the living shit out of a classmate. I was hired to be her bodyguard/teacher/friend for about 2 months at the end of the school year. Half the time she didn't show up, and about a quarter of the time she'd leave campus, so belligerantly crazy and angry. We did have some good conversations, and I like to think I did help her...
21. Facilitator for UT--this consisted of supervising 25 college student doing their student teacher for 2 semesters. I got the call while teaching for IRD, minus an interview--just a new instructor at UT looking for help, within the same week of being let go from the Alamo (I was out of town the opening weekend of Pirates of the Carribean, thinking I had wrote the thing on the schedule--turns out I hadn't. Boo hoo. So I guess technically I've been fired from 2 jobs.) I got to observe student teachers in kindergarten and elementary classrooms and conference with them and their teachers, trying to make them better teachers. Great job.
22. Institute of Reading Development--yet another summer job, and a good one, starting with almost 2 weeks of training in Chicago. For 10 weeks in the summer of 2007, I drove to Killeen, Waco, and Corpus Christi to teach reading courses for kids from 4 to older than me. Good fun. I especially liked the nice hotel on the beach they set me up with . Lots of work, but fun.
23. Summer Institute for the Gifted. Att UT. I taught 4 classes--Pirates Past and Present (seriously!!), Biology, Self-Defense (where my Krav Maga came in handy), and Zoology. More good fun. On the demo night, I used the UTPD dummies to show what my kids in Self-Defense had learned when it comes to kneeing an attacker in the groin, etc, and put a picture of Bush on the head area. FUN.
24. Sylvan--I'm currently at Sylvan as a director of education, so this set me up to know the job in . Tutored math and reading.
25. Director of education at Sylvan. I'm a progress manager for 77 kids currently, have regular progress conferences with their parents and sometimes classroom teachers to best help them, and handle inquiry calls, initial testing, and daily stuff. I love it.

So that's it. What have you done?

In junior league with the devil

Call me stupid--I didn't know what Junior League was til fairly recently. Same goes for Ladies' Auxiliary. Such concepts are lost on a neo-girly tomboy from a small town in the midwest where the richest folks have just multiple cars and newer houses. I still shave my legs and everything, I even enjoy an occasional pedicure or pretty skirt, but this is just out of my realm. In case you're as ignorant as me, such organizations function as a sort of social group hiding behind ridiculous boots and empty wine bottles and talking about how much they do for the community for the real-life well-off white wives from the next town over from Stepford. Maybe that's unfair--just my take.

A few nights ago, I had 2 hours to kill between work and the staff meeting and was planning on spending birthday money on a coat at Kohls (since I lost all of mine in Austin--that's another blog). My boss's wife begged me to go to the Holiday Happening, sponsored by the Junior League of Lubbock. Oh yeah, I said--I remember when that girl came in at work and gave me the tickets to give to you and gave me the poster to put up advertising for said Happening. I deliberately threw that poster behind a desk in the corner. I didn't want to go, but it was my boss's wife, so I did. She lured me with the promise of good food and promised to not be "one of them." The HH has the same basic concept as First Thursday in Austin. It manages to be completely different. For one thing, I have never in my life seen so many things made of pink fuzzy material. Secondly, I do not understand the purpose of live models--in this case, perfectly still women standing on top of big cubes wearing ridiculous and ugly clothing. We know they're not mannequins. The whole concept makes me uncomfortable, and I had to fight off the urge to mess with them. Sidle up and talk about something itchy. Rip an inappropriate noise in close proximity. Something to break up the monotony.

The food was good, I'll give them that. There was a Greek stand, an Italian, Mexican, German, Chinese, and good ole snotty rich people American food. The only people of color I saw at the shindig were those working these stands. Everyone else (mostly women plus a few married shmucks whose ball-lessness led to their being dragged to the function) was deliberate to the point of pain. Deliberate hair, deliberate makeup, jewelry, outfits, boots, manicures, everything. I felt uncomfortable. I felt like I had not spent enouh time attempting perfection. It was a like a huge and indiscriminate sorority for those who were too old for such nonsense. I'm not saying these women aren't nice--I'm saying it's hard to tell under the fakery.

A few days later, a phone confirmed the irony of me being at such an event. Tiffany or some such name said some numbers had been transposed on the silent auction (which was kinda cool--mischief at the Holiday Happening?), and had I bid on a tea kettle? A quilting session? A gift card for Chili's? Clearly, madam, you don't know me.

I did end up winning a 3 month membership to Premier Fitness, but didn't claim my prize, as I didn't have enough money after going out for drinks last night.

Shit List No. 4 (and then some)

1. M. Night Shyamalan. You bastard. I sacrificed 90 minutes of my afternoon to watch The Happening. I'm still not convinced it's not a comedy. What makes it worse is my undying love for Mark Wahlberg. Now I don't even know about him. Did you write this while drunk?

2. Tyra Banks. This might be a tad harsh, but you are a ridiculous, hypocritical, insane bitch. Both your shows are terrible. I'd rather watch court tv. I will not "kiss your fat ass."


3. Waiting. So I was supposed to get this sweet job, and I didn't. Hearing the ladies in charge tell me how delightful I was and how much they enjoyed meeting me did not take the sting out of this rejection.

4. The Supremely Idiotic Court for banning the death sentence for child rapists. If they don't deserve to be put down, I don't know who does. Other than equally evil people.

5. The large and elusive mystery bug that refuses to let me sleep. I'll find you, jerkface.

6. Gas prices.
6a. The fine folks at Ford who so generously are now offering employee pricing on their gas-chugging trucks. Don't try to fool me into thinking you're helping us all out in these tough times--you just can't unload the things anymore. If you wanna help me out, make my payments less.

7. Myself for not being a more positive person. For bitching. To this end, I add some non-shitty things. Happy things.
- being in a great relationship
- my awesome family and friends
- puppies
- The Colbert Report
- naps and daydreams
- Krav Maga class
- new beginnings

in absentia

I've never been emo or goth, but I have always had what I consider to be a healthy fascination with death. I'm hooked on Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State. It worries my mom. I won't touch a ouiji board, but the question of what happens to us, really, when we die, and even what dying itself is, is very interesting to me. Religion seems wholely based on living so that you don't go to hell. A great uncle of mine died at age 16 because of a freak and mysterious hunting accident, and said "it's so beautiful," looking around before he breathed his last. As I get older, it becomes clearer that birth and death are the truly uncontrollable things we go through--maybe that's why they are so strange. I read somewhere that the body is 3/4ths of an ounce lighter upon death--soulweight. The only thing that really distinguishes death from life, an element totally immeasurable and inescapable.

This was all weighing heavily on my mind when I took a walk through the cemetery (morbid? maybe), bored out of my skull after being home for nearly a week. The twilight of 4:30 and the monstrous hill where our Fulton dead rest, some stones hundreds of years old, became beautiful to me. I read the inscriptions, the only stories left--the oldest stones didn't even have names, just "mother," "father." The important things, birth date and departure date. My cousin had a baby Christmas day. I think about that girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash. I think about the hundreds and thousands of people killed daily, mere blips in the newspaper, dead because of the soullessness of others. I don't necessarily see death as something to be afraid of--I think reincarnation...yeah, maybe reincarnation makes sense.

Sorry to be so heavy. Still figuring this one out.

Pictures. The one is my uncle's grave, born and dead on the same day.

Adolesense Pt 2

Rosenblatt's description of adolescent upheaval includes some insight to confusing aspect of sex. She claims there's an inadequate amount of preparation in the discourse of the bedroom, and avoid or misrepresent sexual matters, leaving young people to draw their own conclusions while being bombarded by sexual messages in the media and from other unreliable sources.

This book was discussed on Mike and Juliet's Morning Show today. Ms. Levkoff managed to say "vulva," "masturbation," "erection," and "wet dream" in the first five minutes. I tried to watch, as it directly relates to the topic of conversations--what you can and can't talk about and why. But when Mike offered up that he remembered having a wet dream, I had to change channels. I can talk about sex probably more than the next person, but I was trying to eat.

Ellen DeGeneres also discussed the difficulty of explaining sex to kids as she had a guest to her show read a passage of her rereleased book, "My Point (and I Do Have One)." The passage was a funny dialogue between a young child and a parent, who attempts to explain the youngster's query by metaphors of an egg, a mama bear and papa bear, growing a baby in their stomach, Daddy's special sauce, and ended on a mutual liking for hamburgers. The guest reader, by the way, was a woman who claimed in her survey (the whole audience was surveyed about their sexual lives in order to examine America's lacking sex life and need for frank, open conversations) that she had sex everyday. She looked healthy, relaxed, happy. Her husband was a piledriver. No, that's his job. Seriously.

Adolesense

I've found that if I stop to post on every interesting chunk of Rosenblatt I will have no time for any other classes. Nevertheless,

In the 3rd and 4th chapters, she begins to address concerns as an English educator--schools are too often failing to provide contexts for students to experience a vital personal reaction to art in the form of text. Schools make a frame with no picture--students regurgitate what they think the teacher thinks of a story, and fail to give a real response. Things don't change because teachers uphold certain expectations (as do parents and everyone raised in traditional mainstream public schools) of what school should do and look like: writing traditional essays and answering multiple choice questions about who the main character was. Teachers have to value true literature experiences themselves, liberate pupils from self-defeating practices, give them freedom to wrestle with ideas and emotions, and not place so much value on a particular form of response.

"The study of literature should give the student the form of emotional release that all art offers and, at the same time, without strain or pressure, should help him gain ever more complex satisfactions from literature." (71)

"A poem or a novel should provide fresh insight. Readers, therefore, must be helped to develop flexibility of mind, a freedom from rigid emotional habits, if they are to enter the aesthetic experiences the artist has made possible." (98)

Rosenblatt does a decent job of capturing the upheaval of the adolescent mind--changing body images and obsessive self-consciousness, a desire to reflect what's "normal (and here I suggest more attention to media awareness in our curriculum is needed)," struggling to find independence and emancipation from familial structures. They need links to their experiences to be present in the books they read. They need to be emotionally and intellectually ready to reevaluate assumptions and cultural suggestions, and to adjust accordingly. This is how readers live in the world.

Easy to see why fundies are so scared.

I return to my question about whether or not some books may be universally accessible. I feel like Rosenblatt's saying yes. But not without a lot of trickiness.

what a car wreck smells like

Car wrecks have a distinct smell, one that lingers on you for several hours after you blow out a tire at 80 mph, spin around and smash into a wall twice. I sat on the shoulder of northbound 35 in traffic around 6pm today by Kyle and cried for a minute. A few seconds before I had issued a blood-curdling scream that rivaled Anne Darrow's in King Kong as I tried to control my severely swerving car. A rear tire blew out and I saw two hubcabs rolling comicly in front of me as the soda between my legs exploded all over me. A 180 busted the front right end until another 180 found me resting safely on the shoulder, out of traffic. I don't even know if someone was behind me.

Since I had been in San Antonio, I had my digital camera with me, thinking I would go take pics at the missions or something after work. Ironic.













One second you're enjoying your Diet Dr. Pepper, the next you're in a fucking movie scene. I thought after seeing Deathproof I'd like to be a stuntwoman. Now I'm not so keen about driving at all. Props to the Kyle PD who arrived almost immediately. I wish I had taken advantage of a good whiff of O2 before the ambulance took off. Progressive Insurance lady, I don't appreciate being asked if I damaged the wall. Thanks to the wrecker yard lady for staying with me til Dana got there. There are nice people everywhere.

My parents pray for me everyday, and I'm convinced this is why I didn't get hurt or hurt anyone else. My back feels kinda wonky, but I'm feeling pretty calm at the moment, enjoying a glass of wine and a smoke. Trying not to play the what-if game. I'm a lucky girl. And I didn't like that car anyway.

I love you all very much. Some more than others. You know who you are. :)