Exiled

First, I broke the trackball, via a series of carefully orchestrated "drops" in various locations.

Then, as is my wont, I dilly-dallied. Carrying the thing around in a sandwich bag was secure enough until we were done with the summer traveling and such.

But you shouldn't treat your CrackBerry that way. For some reason, a handheld minicomputer bristles at weeks of ziploc containment. And then the keyboard will up and quit somewhere along I-10.

Really what's happened is that I have been sent into exile. Five years ago, I was perfectly happy to go on vacation without the ability to instantly send 140-character updates across the globe. It's time to rediscover that joy in going technology-free...ish.

Upon my return, I shall tell you all about

Why you should read Kathleen Norris' new book, Acedia and Me

How the Lord is speaking to me through my BlackBerry

When I am not in exile, I mean

Ways in which the baby remains cute

Ah. You were wondering how I am posting this, given the exile. (Or else you think I'm a spoiled brat to be whining about having to go to the beach with no toys. I get it.). Well, if you take the battery out for about 24 hours, sometimes the keyboard gets its groove back.

But I'm still going to honor this time in the wilderness.
"Destin" sounds sort of like "desert." Besides, I have to hold the still-broken trackball in with my thumb. More on "Exiled"

Coming unattractions

I’m really glad we saw the preview for Ice Age Dinosaur Thing today. It’s coming out soon! I’ll be first in line that weekend…to buy tickets for a second showing of “Up.”

For it’s my opinion that a children’s movie that needs to make a accidental-bull-milking joke to get parental butts in the seats is not worth my $30 for a family of four.

COME ON. If you are stealing a joke from “Kingpin,” maybe it’s time to go back for rewrites, Movie With Happy Meal Tie-In.

And I’m going to see if there’s some special option for ticket-as-trailer-protest. I think I’ll do my darndest to make sure that “Up” is still in the theaters when that gerbil-Bill-Nighy movie comes out, and the one with the eight zillionth “why is this water warm” pool joke.

I’m not a perfect mother, but I’m pretty unselfish when it comes to sitting through children’s entertainment. You don’t have to compensate me for my viewing time with a little double-entendre here, a little almost-cursing there.

I pass over the insane rage of loathing inspired by Rotten Tomatoes’ trumpeting the presence of Megan Fox and “a very naughty bot” in the freaking TRANSFORMERS MOVIE. This is a movie ABOUT TOYS. It doesn't need to have something-for-everyone. It's a movie about alien robot life forms that conceal themselves as ordinary machines.

G.I. JOE, don’t you try to sneak out of the room. I saw those little outfits on the babezoids. You are a movie ABOUT TOYS.

I want to know who is the one sitting in on the development meeting who suggests, “we can probably improve our box office take if we joke about masturbation in the movie about the toy robots in disguise.” How do you make this suggestion with a straight face? Who brightens at that idea and pulls up charts showing the ticket-purchase habits of Demographic Grody? “We might lose some uptight blogging ladies in South Texas, but we’ll gain five times that in repeat viewings by troglodytes.” Is there really a viewer sitting at home who says, "well, I wasn't going to watch those alien life forms transform themselves from tricked-out cars and dishwashers into deadly weapons that battle for control of the universe, but now there's a random hottie, so - I'm there!"

Do you not get why this household pays full price for every single Pixar movie, but skips almost every single other children’s movie in the theaters?

Being a parent means being a grown-up. Grown-ups have learned to wait their turn.

So – everyone go see “Up,” and be prepared to cry. “Up” deals with some pretty mature subject material – a couple’s pain at not being able to bear children, the loss of a beloved wife, divorce’s effect on a child. It also has lots of light humor, beautiful animation (especially the moment when the house first lifts from its foundation and soars through the city), and exciting adventure sequences. That’s what makes it an enjoyable movie for grown-ups while still entertaining kids. That’s why we’ll be buying the DVD to add to our limited collection.

My one caveat is that I found parts of the movie too scary for smaller children. Several scenes of menacing dogs, and the death of two characters in the film. My five-year-old was a little frightened but still said she enjoyed the movie.

If you go, wait just a couple of weekends – that’s when the Ice Age movie will make its debut.
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Seven quick takes!

Whee! I've never done this. Thanks to the excellent in every way Jen at Conversion Diary for hosting. Here we go!

1. I find myself using more and more modifiers to get the children to appropriately follow directions. (See? I just did it again). I know that if I were one of those really effective stern mothers, I could just fix my gaze upon them, whisper, "laundry," and get compliance. Instead, I go with "Please put your laundry away correctly in the drawers where they go now." "Please work together to carefully unload the dishwasher and put things correctly where they go." I'm hoping this approach at least improves their vocabulary.

2. Like Jen, I seem to always leave town when there's a majorly cool Catholic event. Without fail, we scheduled our beach trips to coincide with the Eucharistic Congress in Atlanta each year. Now that we're in Texas, my subconscious found another event for us to miss: The Catholic New Media Convention in San Antonio. Read about that one right after making the plans for the trip to Florida. You should go, though.

3. I learned few things from FlyLady that really "stuck," but one of them is the mantra, "Housework done incorrectly still blesses your family." Today I had the epiphany that you could add "by the children" to that sentence and make it infinitely mo' bettah. I kept my mouth shut and let them Swiffer to their heart's content. Joy ensued.

4. On that note, Cleaning Products Makers of the World, just leave out the scents. Especially Target brand Swiffer cloths. Maybe Target put that scent in there to motivate me to spend the ten minutes needed with my serger to make my own darn cloths already.

5. Having recently returned from one big trip and soon to embark on another, I find it difficult to motivate myself to go back to cloth diapers in the meantime. Sorry, planet.

6. I'm so happy there's Facebook to help me keep in touch with all the friends who live in places I've moved away from. I haven't met anyone here in our new home who is on Facebook, to my knowledge. It is weird to me, like I have a secret Internet friend life.

7. I changed my template to do expandable posts and to make the margins of the paragraphs wider, because I find it easier to read other people's blogs when I don't have to keep scrolling down. But now I'm thinking it's annoying.

Ta-da. More on "Seven quick takes!"

The best show on television

It’s quite depressing to sit down to compose a riveting post on what I thought would be a niche topic and discover that it’s all been said already at Stuff White People Like*.

But that’s my truth, and I’ll own it. Even to the point of admitting that my sleep schedule has been completely destroyed by staying up watching episode upon episode of “The Wire.”

If you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend it - but not as something to be watched with Gramps on Father’s Day. The language I don’t mind, because – you know, it’s authentic that way. My only complaint about this show is the prim observation that every couple of episodes has to feature an extended scene of “This is HBOOOOOOOO, people, and we keep it real! Here’s yet another way for characters to copulate!” I don’t even think most of the violence is that over-the-top, with a few exceptions.

My husband is AT THIS VERY MOMENT READING OVER MY SHOULDER while the theme music for the DVD plays in the background. It’s 10:39, and we have 2 episodes left in Season 4. I’d better keep this quick:

• Maybe rethink the habit of watching with the subtitles on, especially if you have an Eager Reader in the house who likes to wander into the family room to report on what The Sibling is doing instead of going to bed

• Staying up until extreme almost-morning-time to watch one more episode, coupled with the intense vocabulary one is exposed to as a viewer, is not the best preparation for dealing charitably with small children the next day

• Season 4, which is largely set in a middle school classroom, is a direct transcript of my first year of teaching…minus the part where the teacher eventually wins them over after the really hard cases are removed from the classroom. It’s one humiliating flashback after another. I see the teacher carefully chipping gum off the bottom of the desks and I know what’s coming…oh NO…it’s a STICKER CHART IN THE HOOD…covering my eyes now.

• JUST ONE MORE BULLET POINT AND THEN I’LL COME WATCH…one of the things I like about the show is that, so often, you can see how the story line could be neatly resolved with a hopeful life lesson, and then it goes in another direction. It’s bleak, but it’s also…oh, no, getting all SWPL again…authentic.

• It’s certainly better than “Troy.”.

*This actually happens a lot. More on "The best show on television"

No, really, this is my name here on my blog

The recent “outing” of blogger Publius and subsequent aplogy by Ed Whelan reminds me of my own brief experience with pseudonymous blogging. For those of you late to this party, I began this blog when I started a new job as a theology teacher. I hadn’t taught the subject before, and wanted a place to air thoughts like “I have no idea what happened at the Council of Blahdeboo” and “I really hate answering questions about Onan” without being connected to the school. I blogged under the pseudonym “Anonymous Teacher Person” (um…yeah) for about a year and a half.

The best thing about having a pseudonym was my repeated experience of revealing my actual name to a commenter and having them assume that “Dorian Speed” is also a pseudonym. Mine is the name of a baseball player (and, interestingly, when I Googled my name, I found myself, and when I bing-whatevered my name, I got the baseball player). When I married Mr. Speed, I thought I’d have a completely unique name, and that’s how I found out about Baseball Dorian Speed.

Incidentally, searching for my name is also a great way to find out about the technical aspects of speed-metal, if you leave out the quotes around my name.

What? It’s a blog. It doesn’t become even more self-centered when I reveal that I have self-Googled.

I generally agree with the commenters at the New York Times and Via Media about the benefits of anonymity. I feel that anonymous teacher blogs are often far more honest and useful, as far as getting a read on what it’s actually like in the classroom. Of course, the temptation towards “misery poker” is greater when you operate under the assumption that nobody can track down the actual students in your ninth period class who perpetrated the malfeasance du jour. (Actually, if a teacher’s going to complain about the day’s events, I guarantee it’s far more likely to involve an in-service).

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Great! So now I can tell the world how much I hate my boss” I’d think again.
I was tracked down by an enterprising student and semi-outed, although it wasn’t really a big deal. I didn’t put my name on my blog until I was out of the classroom (OR SO I THOUGHT) because I still didn’t want there to be any connection between the thoughts I’d blogged and the school I represented.

So, I’d advise anyone blogging anonymously to assume that your Most Easily Offended Bloggee could hire a cybersleuth at any time. It’s a great impetus to charity to write as though your name were on it even if it isn’t.

Of course, while putting your name out there may make it more likely you’ll adhere to the “is it true/is it kind/is it necessary” way of writerness, I find that it makes it difficult for me to say…well, 97% of what I’m thinking.

Your mileage may vary.
More on "No, really, this is my name here on my blog"

Time, time, time...see what's become of me?

The afternoon lies before me. So many things to sew. I'm going to get right to work, having warmed up with a little sketching.



For, you see, summer's here, and so is my need for semi-solitude.

It's funny - while we've been homeschooling, even though that hardly keeps the kids occupied for as long as a regular school day would, it's still enough structure to the day that I don't feel like they're going to need to be "entertained." Perhaps it's also because I feel like it's my job during those hours to be educating the kiddos and not working on my queue of projectry.

But, both when we took a Spring Break week, and now that summer's here, I've been feeling more like all the moms who start the countdown to August on the first day of June. A not inconsequential reason for this is the HEAT OF HOTNESS that has settled upon South Texas until mid-October, I'm guessing. So my usual "go outside and play for twelve hours" methodology can no longer be implemented. And I myself have to get my fresh air before 8 every day (translation: not at all) because I'm such a delicate little flower, prone to headaches at every turn. No, really: it's science.

Researchers compared environmental factors such as
temperature, air pollution and barometric pressure on the day of the patient's
visit with a day the week before and a day the week after. They found that the
risk of severe headache increases about 7.5 percent for each temperature
increment of 5 degrees Celsius (about 9 degrees Fahrenheit).

So, after a few weeks of my going stir-crazy, my husband has taken the two older children for the day, leaving me with my best bud, DestructoBot. I think we'll hit the mall, and then perhaps just a wee bit of Doctor Who and rotary cutting. More on "Time, time, time...see what's become of me?"

Job description

So, I need to either commit to stickers, or make a clean break.

Back when we started the allowance system, the kids and I got a little high on life and decided to pull out the rainbow-colored chore chart notepad that Mary Margaret had beeeegggggged for at the teacher store weeks before. Because it was rainbow and came with stickers, not because she wanted to adopt the Protestant work ethic.

Feeling collaborative, I let each child come up with the chores that (s)he felt most comfortable accomplishing each day, and gently nudged them towards expanded horizons of responsibility. We were giving them money. They were open to any and all ideas.

Mary Margaret wanted to fill up ALL the lines in EVERY category so that she could maximize sticker acquisition for the day, so I let her put things like "put on shoes" just because it was all going so pleasantly, just like in the books. My little voice hemmed and hawed about whether it was reasonable to expect myself to apply upwards of 25 stickers each day to track every waking accommplishment of each child, excluding the baby, who really has just as good a work ethic as the other two, so that's not really fair.

We don't need foreshadowing music to see this heading off the cliff of reality.



Now, I know that the primary reason this latest attempt at chore-chartery failed was the aforementioned excessive list-making, and I also recognize my own pathology of feverent commitment to labyrinthine systems followed by abject failure to follow through.

Thus, at this crossroads, I am looking again at the chore chart pad which I shoved into the very back of the cabinet so they'd forget all about how I stopped giving stickers on Day 2. I am wondering if I should just give her the 2,000 teeny tiny stickers that she'd love to have for "projects" and abandon the incentives. I am thinking that the current modus operandi of random fed-uppitude with the messy rooms and gnashing of teeth is not how I want things to be.

And, in the back of my head, I am grumbling, "Grrr. This is NOT MY JOB."

That's the thing, with a lot of the daily chores and my daily griping - it's NOT MY JOB.

Except, of course - it is.

That's not to say that I don't expect everyone to pitch in, or that my husband doesn't do chores. I just still have it in my head that my job is to Better The World Through Change And Manifestos and read lots of books, while the children rear themselves in the background. Somewhere in this equation is a launderess.

But I know that part of my problem is the avoidance behavior that comes from not accepting the mundane parts of what is, indeed, my job.

And, if you want to reference paper-grading-procrastination from a different stage of my life, you go right ahead. More on "Job description"