Lizzieblog

My muse. That vile whore. She has spent the last few months strung out on Meth and giving out sexual favors at the Greyhound station. I have been unable to create anything. Anything!

On this day, perhaps 22 years ago, I probably thought it was pretty cool and original that MTV played the video for the U2 song. No, it’s not the most overplayed song from War at all. I don’t count “Two Hearts Beat As One,” because I always managed to hear the extended remix of that little ditty. On the Pitt college station. Yes.

Having spent 1984-1988 at a school where the cheerleaders did their Homecoming halftime routine to “A Sort of Homecoming” and even the jocks got teary-eyed and emphatic during “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” (I can see the freshman quarterback doing the drum bridge to that not at all overplayed song during my freshman Political and Economic Systems as I write), I can tell you that the whole U2 Rules! routine made my Irish heart sink even at its most annoyingly Irish of moments.

Rambling aside, the lyric about the world in white getting underway might transcend other possible interpretations and might actually just mean snow, but let’s apply it here to the metaphor about new beginnings (like that’s never been done before either — I dunno, I’m groggy from staying up past ten, and that makes me use clichés more often than when my well-rested font of wit and cynicism).

Anyway, my well-developed thesis here, which is clear as day to you, gentle reader, is that I hope to write more in 2008. Heck, it’s 10:00 a.m., and I’m already putting my precious words in type.

More to come. I swear.

Okay. We live in a world where the rare gems among the vast broken glass of television moronia such as Freaks and Geeks and TV Nation get cancelled, seemingly before they even debut.

But the geniuses at ABC have decided that in a market already saturated by cheeky nobodys in their collective quest for the Holy Grail of fleeting fame, they will present a show called Six Degrees of Martina McBride. Yum, reality television and “New Country” music in one show. Alert the Nobel nominating committee.

I really liked Big Love when it started, but it’s really starting to get kind of boring. Yeah, yeah. Three wives, wacky religious leanings, the guy from Repo Man is evil, and there’s no profanity. Blah, blah, blah. I’m throwing my wan enthusiasm behind Mad Men, which features the 1960s world of Madison Avenue advertising executives, inclusive of smoking in doctors’ offices and pinches on the secretaries’ butts. It’s brilliant. Hope it makes it.

For Lent, I am giving up swearing. I cannot invoke any of my favorite oaths. Perhaps what I shall miss the most is the word “jack@ss.” I love it so much, and since I work with adolescents, it works in so many situations and on so many levels. Farewell, sweet utterance. I shall see you again when the lilies are in bloom.

I also want to accomplish something I’ve been thinking about doing for a couple of years. I’ll let you know about that in a future post, though.

I bragged and bragged and bragged.

After spending the first few years of my teaching career catching every imaginable version of the common cold (I had an EAR INFECTION when I was 28), I seemed to have built up that legendary teacher immunity. One of the last sick days I took was used last January for a trip to The Bronx Zoo on an unseasonably warm day.

Allergies and allergy complications notwithstanding, of course.

Indeed, discretion is the better part of valor; however, I neglected to remember this when I shared news of my winning streak to a few of my colleagues in the faculty room. One of the special education teachers then informed me that since I no longer work with little ones, the party’s over. “And didn’t your son just start preschool?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. When I nodded, the group started to laugh.

It started last Saturday. I sat in the shoe department at Nordstrom and felt awful. While the salesperson rang up my purchase, I looked longingly across the main floor to where the Philosophy counter was, wanting and needing to go sniff the newest wares. Defeated, I left.

Last Sunday, I felt like my head had detached from the rest of my body. On Monday, one student told me that I looked like I had been out all night partying. On Thursday, I regretted leaving my bed and felt bad about coming to work at all. On Friday, I had my classes lead themselves in discussion, which mostly centered on the book we’re reading. I glared menacingly at my ninth period class, unable to voice my disapproval at their shenanigans.

I’m not going to say whether I’m feeling better or not, because I felt great for about ten minutes last week. I don’t want to jinx it.

When I was in 8th grade, I was horrified to realize that I was, in fact, the tallest person in the class. There was a kid in the other homeroom who was taller than I, but he had been held back twice. Sure, he was tall, but he was also shaving and paying child support. At school dances, I was always asked to dance by the boy who I was absolutely smitten with, but his nose was at my chin level. I would have to slouch in order to hear him talk to me as the DJ played Journey’s “Open Arms.”

I played basketball up until then, when it was clear that despite my vertical prowess, I was also as coordinated as a Dodge K car and had the follow-through of a rhesus monkey. Girls from the Catholic schools league routinely fouled me because that’s what you do, foul the elk-like girl under the net. Of course, I was usually looking out the window dreaming of the day that my one true love would ask me to “go with” him, so these infractions always took me by surprise. I would look to the stands to see my father bury his face in his hands.

My most outward sign of awkwardness matched the other little things that went along with it: on weekends, I dressed far more preppy than the other kids in my school, favoring plaid kilts and cardigan sweaters to jeans and Michael Jackson jackets. I had Coke bottle spectacles on my freckled face. My teeth enabled my father to fund my orthodontist’s son’s first year at Brown. I had unruly lemon yellow hair. I listened to music that none of my classmates had ever heard. I knew all of the answers in class. I took piano lessons during recess on Tuesdays.

Because of these things and the subsequent treatment by my peers, I never really accepted that the boy of my dreams liked me, even when he caught me outside the cafeteria and asked, “Will you go with me?” which was 1984 south suburban Pittsburgh Catholic school talk for “Can I call you on the phone on a regular basis and try to kiss you at some point in the next several weeks despite the elaborate metallurgy going on in both of our mouths?” My response, rather than an elated “Of course!” was instead a smart-assed “Go where?”

Once in ninth grade, I blended in with greater success, mostly because I went from a class of 35 to a class of 635. Blond, blue-eyed Protestant kids from the tonier neighborhoods in my little town towered over me, and my theater teacher told me how photogenic I was. I sang in a band from time to time and was a goddess to a couple of boys much, much smarter and nerdier than I ever was.

Still, there were the moments that brought me back to the pain I felt as a gawky 8th grader up at St. Bernard’s. During a basement game of quarters, a cute senior grabbed my hands and marveled at how much bigger they were than his own. Another guy asked who I was to one of my friends, describing me as “that Amazon girl.” Though I traded my glasses for contact lenses as a Confirmation present, I was in constant agony and was frequently missing one lens. I learned a couple of years later that two of the dreamboats who graduated two years before me referred to me as the “Bill the Cat girl.”

I still sport the slouch and find that I’m very self-conscious of the width of my shoulders. I find myself looking at my hands and wishing that they were daintier, that I was daintier, but I realize that if this wish were ever to come true, my personality would never match that of a 5′2″, 115-pound trophy blonde in a St. John suit.

And Regis, wherever you are, I’m sorry.

The kids at school never cease to amaze, delight, and horrify. After all, isn’t that their job?

After heated discussion on the senior Mr. Radley’s ecclesiastical shortcomings, I marveled at one group of sophomores at how much I enjoy them for their humor, their insight, their divergent opinions on what is right or wrong — I also confessed to them how their class was one to which I did not look forward to earlier in the year thanks to … well, key individuals who are no longer enrolled.

At the end of my swooning and gushing, I said, “What a difference a semester makes.”

One boy, a smart and very funny but work ethically-challenged kid, responded, “What a difference a book makes. That boring nature crap we read at the beginning of the year sucked.”

Wow.

Sorry, reader. Listen to The Posies sing “Apology” and you’ll know how I feel for having betrayed you. I’ve been spending time on my literary untruths of late, so any non-fiction musings have gone the way of my guitar, my MFA, my revived acting career, and my many, many gym memberships. Mea culpa, mea culpa.

That and I’ve embarked upon the final frontier today. I wandered into Lowe’s today and stood in the center of the cabinetry section. The feminine vulnerability act seems to go well when it comes from me and not from anyone else I know, because three different men — non-Lowe’s employees — approached me and asked if I needed any advice. I told one, “I’m feeling a little overwhelmed.” He offered the following: “Just take it day by day and stock up on takeout menus.”

Thank you, kind, flannel-shirted stranger from somewhere in Middlesex County.

The legalized domestic partner and I have toyed with the idea of broadcasting little documentaries of our forthcoming kitchen adventure on YouTube, but we’ll see.

And now, for no reason, here’s an apron-fronted, under-counter-mounted fire clay farm sink:

The 1970 movie Scream and Scream Again freaked the hell out of me. I saw it while sick one Saturday afternoon at the tender age of 13 or so on WPXI’s afternoon chiller theater (Why don’ t they have those anymore?).

It was your run-of-the mill political sci-fi swinging 60s vampire zombie mad scientist police action robot flick. I don’t think I went up to my third floor bedroom by myself for a month.