Back to the Grind

Welp, it looks like I need to go back to work full-time!

My financial situation has changed to the point that I might not be able to go back to school full-time in the fall. I hope this works itself out before registration starts, so I'm hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. I still have four semesters' worth of classes before I qualify to transfer to a university (and two more semesters before I can apply for an AA!). To that end, I asked to increase my hours at work, and, to my surprise, they agreed! It's a mixed blessing. I'm happy for the extra money, but I'm getting sucked back into a career I was hoping to escape.

Speaking of work, though, I had the strangest experience the other day. I attended a departmental lunch, and I was informed that employees are not allowed to drink during their lunch break. I can understand not going to work drunk, but we're not even allowed a glass of wine during the meal. I almost fell out of my chair, but everyone acted like it was the most normal thing in the world. Now, every place I've ever worked has had a drug- and alcohol-free policy, but I've never worked at a place where the employees are not allowed anything at all, ever.

So, yeah, I'm currently visualizing financial independence.

images courtesy of Flickr: bread line sculpture by krossbow; vision board by marissabracke

Seems like old times.

My math teacher returned our tests today, announcing the As as he came across them. When he handed me mine, he said, "And by one point, you got an A!" He put me to mind of last semester's programming instructor, who, upon seeing my program, remarked, "This is very good . . . for you."

Thanks, gents! It's this kind of reinforcement that will undoubtedly land me a bachelor's degree in what will seem like no time! /sarcasm

First day of school!!!

Holy crap, has it really been five months since I last posted? So much for my resolve to post once a week. New semester, though, so new resolve!

Well, maybe not such new resolve. With this being the first day of school and still being early enough in the year to count as a resolution, I was supposed to get out of bed at 5am-ish to start my new habit of eating breakfast and to leave the house by 7am to walk the two miles to my bus connection, which I thought would be a simple way to incorporate exercise into my daily routine. Ha, I say. My insomnia kicked in at 3am, and I didn't get drowsy again until 4:30am, which meant I hit the Snooze button until 7. Happily, I still managed to get to class on time, but I was hyper-aware of my stomach rolls once I saw all the teeny-weeny students at school. On the plus side, the fashion parade on campus was out in force today - the shoes and boots worn by my fellow students are to die for! And there's always tomorrow, right?

At the least, I have to start eating breakfast because, about an hour into my morning class, I had a low-sugar moment. I was so hungry after class ended that I decided to walk the mile (incorporating exercise into my daily routine!) to my local California Pizza Kitchen where I ate the entire 1069-calorie portion of kung pao spaghetti with chicken and shrimp (self-sabotaging at every turn)! Would that I had stopped there, but no. I ordered the focaccia appetizer and ate half the complimentary order of bread I was served while I was waiting for my app. Yeah, the meal wasn't over until I hated myself. The kicker was that not one hour earlier I was totally disgusted at how my gut was touching the edge of my school desk. Funnily enough, my gut also hit the edge of the table in the booth at CPK!

Enough of my fattitude, though, since this is supposed to be a school blog! Not that I have a school story ready right now, but soon, my pretties, soon.

image courtesy of Flickr: Abandoned School Desk by Whole Wheat Toast

Speak in Spanish for Five Minutes

My Spanish class was a petri dish, and I was penicillin. My teacher, who name-dropped UCLA as if she were getting paid by the syllable, adored a group project almost as much as talking about her upcoming retirement. Every time she said, “Separate into groups,” I could almost see the sonic boom rings as my classmates all scurried in the opposite direction of where I was. Interestingly enough, there were two other women in class who appeared to be in their forties, so I think everyone assumed we wanted to keep to our kind. Uninterestingly enough, they were both taking classes to combat empty nest syndrome and had nothing in common with me. I hated being relegated to Old Lady Corner.

Old Lady Corner consisted of Maria, Not!Maria and me. Maria and Not!Maria had surly teen-age children at home and would discuss it to no end. Every so often, they tried to include me in the conversation, but I don’t have kids and had absolutely nothing to add. Additionally, they were both native Spanish speakers, and, even though this class was Spanish for Spanish Speakers, my Spanish sucked by comparison – there was no way I could keep up with them. I didn’t dare use English in that class, though, because Professor UCLA-Snob had dog-hearing and could hear a whispered, “How do you say . . . “ from a mile away – and she would make you pay for using English in a Spanish class (public ridicule, thy name is retirement-age Spanish instructor)! Therefore, when they became dismayed that I was so old and still so barren – which was every time because they never seemed to remember anything I said – I couldn’t fully articulate that children are not for everyone and, despite the lack of a working knowledge of diaper genies, I could still lead a capable and fulfilling life. Instead, I would just sit there mutely trying to figure out how to translate diaper genies or fulfilling life until they would give up and go back to talking about their lives.

Not!Maria once feigned interest in my life, but, really, she should have stuck to complaining about her children because she was not good at it. At all. I was volunteering at a yoga studio at the time, and she asked me about it, claiming she was interested in taking a class. While I was digging through my bag for a class schedule and trying, in Spanish, to explain that all classes were by donation, I happened to look up to see her very exaggeratedly winking at Maria as if to say, “I don’t really give a shit,” while making yes-I’m-interested-please-continue-talking noises at me. I was so pissed that I fell for her bullshit that, of course, I immediately stopped, and snapped, “Oh! You’re not interested!” She insisted, “No, no, I really want to know!” What? No, I just totally busted you! You can’t keep lying! Of course, I wasn’t able to translate any of that and sat there glaring at her while she smiled encouragingly at me and poor Maria squirmed uncomfortably. I’m such a repressed Catholic, though, that when it came time for me to wax triumphant at her later comeuppance I wasn’t able to enjoy it.

The semester ended with each student giving five-minute oral presentations, and, boy, did they suck! The only one that was intelligible was Maria’s. Everyone else – myself included – sounded like an unfunny, Spanish language version of David Sedaris’ Jesus Shaves. Not!Maria’s grammar was atrocious – her English-language equivalent would be someone who thinks supposably is a word – but I still thought she would breeze through an oral presentation. I didn’t, however, take into account her fear of public speaking and complete lack of organizational skills. Would that I had snapped a quick picture of her notes to share here! Her notes were a zig-zag configuration of printed Wikipedia pages (en español) that had been cut up and repositioned using tape and a stapler. In addition, she had used three different colored highlighters to highlight every single word. I don’t know what she thought she was gonna do with all that, but she was waving it around for all she was worth during class. When it came time for her to give her presentation, she tried to demure, but her DIY, jagged-edge margined, legal-sized paper notes gave away her prep time and  Prof. Dog Hearing, PhD, was adamant Not!Maria stand up and talk for five minutes. So, Not!Maria shuffled up, knocking over her purse and leaving it to spill onto the floor, and stood at the teacher’s podium trying to start.

Without looking up, she alternated opening her mouth and clapping her hand either to her forehead or her mouth. Then she picked up her notes, shifted her weight, and put them back down again. She did this for about two minutes, and, at first, I could barely keep from laughing. I’ve never been a more attentive audience member, and so was the rest of the class because you could have heard a fucking pin drop! The suspense was killing me as to how long she was going to stand up there hemming and hawing. And then the suspense turned to boredom, and boredom turned to awkwardness. She stood up there so long, gaping like a goldfish without any help from the teacher or her fellow classmates, that I started to feel sorry for her. And I could not have been angrier with myself!

She had been giving me the cold shoulder since the day I busted her winky-eyed winkingness, so why did I feel compassion for her inarticulate ass? It’s not like I would win any points with her, my teacher or my classmates because it’s not as if any of them would have picked up on it. I hate that I can’t even quietly enjoy the schadenfreude. I mean, really, who is going to die if I silently titter at someone’s crappy public speaking skills?

Again?!

Well, I managed to do it yet again. After a year-long search, I managed to find another inflexible boss. Yay, me.

This job was supposed to offer flexibility in relation to my school schedule. During my interview, I made sure to say that school was my priority, and he told me that as long as he and I connected one day a week it would be fine! So imagine my surprise when I asked to change my work schedule from Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday to Monday-Wednesday-Friday for the four-month semester that the answer was, "That won't work for me." He's semi-retired and barely makes it into the office twice a week much less three, and even then I'm scrambling to find work because he's totally hands-off. Does business pick up in the fall? Is he anticipating needing my assistance every Tuesday and Thursday from August to December? I hope not because I'm banking on all that downtime to get my homework done.

Gah! My GPA!

Finals start this week, and everyone is a mass of stress and anxiety. The woman who sits next to me in trigonometry showed up with angry, red, cyst-like zits on her face, which was gratifying because I had broken out, too.

I’m hanging on to As in all three classes, and I plan on celebrating with a facial regardless of the final outcome because summer will be spent working and reading Schaum's Outlines for Precalculus.

I'm telling you, folks, this Second Coming of my inner nerd girl better pay off with a UC degree, or I'll, I'll . . . I'll - well, I don't know what I'll do but it'll be desperate!

People are Strange

My fellow students didn’t want to talk to me back when I attended City College twenty years ago, and they don’t want to talk to me now that I’m twenty years older than they are. I should be grateful for the consistency, but I have a fond memory of a study group from my US Government class. And so I continue reaching out to those seated around me, and this is the story of one of those times.

As part of the educational track I’m pursuing, I had to take an introductory Excel/Access class, and in that class was a woman with the coolest cat-eye glasses I’d seen since leaving San Francisco (I’m thinking specifically of the frames worn by the owner of Cafe Madeleine on California Street for those of you in the 415). They even had rhinestones in the corners – girl was working it! Since I’m always on the lookout to score unique frames, I make it a point of asking people about their eyeglasses if I find myself admiring them. The class was incredibly basic, to the point of being stultifyingly boring, so at the first break I made a beeline to, I’ll call her, Dory.

Turns out the frames were vintage and were inherited from a family member who had worn them in the 60s, and, in talking to her further, it turned out that Dory had recently moved from San Francisco, too. She had recently recovered from cancer and had moved to a cheaper town to be able to afford living off a disability paycheck. She had worked for a large computer-related firm for many years before having to quit due to illness. What luck, I thought, not only do she and I share the love of vintage frames but also are newbies to town and are interested in computers! By asking one question, I found someone with whom I had so much in common. We chatted over the course of the semester, and, even though we didn’t have any more in common, we amused each other to the point that we were able to keep from falling asleep in class. Mistaking that connection for something much more worthwhile, we hung out a handful of times, which is where I learned of her deep, abiding hatred of everything Long Beach.

First of all, I should have known better than to agree to meet her outside of class because, as funny as I found her, all her humor revolved around everything sucking. Nothing was ever to her liking – not her neighbors (apparently, her deaf neighbor was too loud), not the school’s out of date buildings and instructors, and definitely not the citizenry of Long Beach. I distinctly remember her constantly disparaging the school’s facilities for not being state-of-the-art elegant like San Francisco City College’s. I was stumped at her love of that campus as I had spent the better part of ten years there jumping through prerequisites for four or five different majors, and those buildings haven’t been state of the art since Jerry Brown’s first governorship. I alternated between freezing my ass off in the Science Building, built 1942, and suffocating in the poorly ventilated Batmale Hall, built 1978. I finally asked if the chemo had affected her memories, and she admitted to having only ever taken PE classes, which met in the gymnasium that had been built in 2008. Clearly, making a thorough evaluation before reaching a conclusion was not her strong suit. However, I persevered! How could I not empathize? We were both new in town, but she was even more broke than I was!

I next entertained her complaint of our teacher’s mediocre instructional style. I really couldn’t fault her there because our teacher was so obviously phoning it in. Her lecture material was the PowerPoint provided by the book’s publisher, which she slavishly read, slide by slide, without stopping to answer any questions that might pop up. Even answering questions after lecture depended on her mood, and Dory and I found ourselves fielding questions and assisting other students through lab assignments. Dory, once again, used this example to decry the value of an education at LBCC in comparison to one at CCSF. Until I pointed out her mistake, she thought hiring rules for instructors were different at each school even though the community college system is run by the state. She had convinced herself our teacher had only a high school diploma (and had also added a backstory about the instructor being a hoarder – I couldn’t figure out the how or the why, so I just let that one go), so I pointed out that the State of California requires a Master’s degree for teaching post-secondary education. Our teacher wasn’t uneducated, she was just lazy. Another time I mentioned fondly the many PhDs who had been my instructors at CCSF, and she snapped, “Well, that’s gonna be the last time until you get out of this school!” Her mouth was literally agape when I told her my current Spanish teacher had a PhD from UCLA. Up until this point, I thought that if I listened to her bellyaching that, eventually, she would work it all out of her system, except that day never came. I think what ended up happening is that she took my patience as tacit agreement and let ‘er rip!

I finally had to draw the line after the time she and I were at a crowded restaurant, and she loudly exclaimed that everyone in Long Beach is illiterate. She and I were talking about our class, and I wondered at much less computer literate I was finding people in Southern California than in Northern California, except she heard “illiterate,” and yelled at me, “YEAH! EVERYONE IN LONG BEACH IS COMPLETELY ILLITERATE!” The five-top next to us stopped talking to turn and stare. I was so embarrassed that all I could do was sit and stare, too. I was caught completely unaware and had absolutely no come back, while she glared at me malevolently as if defying me to argue with her. Looking back, she was probably spoiling for a fight and was looking to take out the many frustrations of her life on anyone nearby. Needless to say, that was the last time I made plans with her.  

I would have been happy to remain friendly with her in a classroom setting, but I think Dory sensed my lying down a boundary and flipped right the fuck out. I remember one time she was crazy pissed off that smokers were standing too close to the classroom door and ignored her when she tried to move them. I think the problem may have been that she told them they had to stand fifty yards away from the door while smoking (I think the rule is forty feet). Anyway, I laughed when she told me because how is anyone going to walk half a football field away just to smoke?! Of course, she launched into a lecture about how she had recently recovered from CANCER and that her health was important to her! She was so ticked off that about an hour later she slipped me a note telling me I had hurt her feelings and that she couldn’t believe I had reacted that way. I didn’t have a reply to that – well, nothing constructive – so I ignored it, and when she didn’t mention it either I thought it was a done deal. I mean, really, if she’s so sensitive that secondhand smoke will kick her out of remission she should be wearing a gas mask or a plastic bubble or something!

The final straw came one day when I was using the school’s computer to get some work done. During this time, I was knee-deep in a volunteer job and had just been offered a paid position thanks to all my hard work. One day, I arrived in class extra early so that I could send out a mass e-mail on behalf of my soon-to-be boss. I remember I was sweating the grammar on this one, and, after taking forever writing the damn thing, I was reading and re-reading it to make sure it was perfect. Dory showed up a few minutes before class and wanted to chat about her weekend and her ongoing job search and blah, blah, blah, me, me, me. I was in the homestretch of checking my e-mail, and I knew that if I didn’t send out the message before our mood swing of a teacher arrived that I wouldn’t be able to send this message until the early afternoon (it was a six-hour class: it met once a week and combined lecture and lab in one session). Consequently, I was only half paying attention to Dory, who mid-sentence asked me, “Are you all right?” I did a sort of double-take and told her I was fine, but just then the teacher walked in and shut down all further talk. That didn’t stop Dory, though! She sent me a text message, “Are you OK? You don’t seem your normal self.” I wasn’t about to get busted playing on my phone, so I didn’t reply, but during our break she asked, “What’s wrong?” By this time, I’d lost my patience with her concern, especially since I’d already answered the question, so I very exasperatedly told her, “I’m fine. Just accept it as an answer!” And that was the last time she talked to me.  

Mine is a minor, if wordy, tale of woe, but, happily, crazy is out of my life. Now I have to learn the warning signs before I instigate conversation with the next freak (but I’m still going to ask people where they got their cool eyeglass frames)!