I Don't Get It

“Nothing could be as hard as middle school.” –Zooey Deschanel

There are many things I don’t understand about middle school—things no one really understands like why they smell the way they do, why some of them are haven’t started to grow yet and some are over six feet tall, and exactly why they react to things the way they do.  But there are two really strange things I don’t understand about my specific kids, and they are as a different from one another as the populations they represent.

The first is something that at first really annoyed me.   Many, almost all, of my minority students—my Hispanic students and my African American students—call me “Miss.”  Not Ms. Short, just Miss.  And often times it’s “Miss! Miss! Miss!” in rapid succession.  I thought at first that they didn’t know my name and that they were saying the first part of my name until they could locate my last name in their brain.  But after asking in what I’m sure was an annoyed voice—after all I was annoyed—what my name was, they could all say “Ms. Short” almost immediately.  So it wasn’t that they weren’t sure of my name.  It’s that they think that the appropriate and respectful way to address a teacher or an adult is to just say “Miss.” And if they really want my attention it’s “Miss! Miss! Miss!” because then they’ve asked three times for my attention.  They aren’t stuttering or struggling, they think they’ve called me to them thrice.  Which I suppose I’m learning to deal with, but still strikes me as odd and I really wish it weren’t uber-respectful in their minds.  At least I don’t have any of them who call me “Teacher” the way that some kids over the summer did to friends of mine.

The other issue is just weird and doesn’t have anything to do with being respectful to me; it’s just strange.  I have a few boys—not a ton, but definitely a consistent few--who wear a special kind of shorts almost every day.  Friday, one of them was wearing a light, pastel pink version of these shorts.  They’re called Chubbies and they are perhaps the most ridiculous fashion statement a man could make.  So on a middle school man-child, they are even more absurd than usual. 

If you aren’t familiar with the short-shorts known as Chubbies, they are intended to come to about mid-thigh on men and they have elastic waistbands and they also are generally made in noticeable colors or prints.  One of the most famous ones are the ‘Merica shorts that are an American flag (see them here http://www.chubbiesshorts.com/collections/the-originals/products/mericas).  The entire concept of them visually is strange, although I suppose if you’re an adult male and you want to spend a lot of money on these shorts, I suppose that’s your prerogative.  The really strange thing to me is that middle school boys own them. Which means their parents are purchasing them for them. 

Why do men wear these shorts?

The part that really sets me over the edge is looking at the website where one could purchase a pair of these shorts.  The culture they represent seems to be future, current, and former frat boys.  The worst stereotypes of frat boys.  If you look at the website you’ll find that these shorts are designed to help you get laid and it outright states that any sexual relations you have after purchasing a pair of Chubbies are directly related to said ownership.    So truthfully, harmless enough in general among stupid adult males who think they are being funny and embodying a certain culture that (hopefully) they will someday grow out of.  But why on earth are there several 13 year old boys who not only know about them, but own multiple pairs of these shorts?  They don’t actually even get the reference of why these are called chubbies, and when we told them to look it up on urban dictionary at home, rather than being scarred by it, they didn’t really seem to care all that much.  And even as it’s getting cold outside (it was in the 30s this morning) they are still wearing them.  Apparently on Fridays they wear Chubbies.

Kids are crazy.  They will always do things I just don’t understand.  They’ll do things that they look back on and think, “What was I thinking? That was stupid!” At least I hope they will.  

Forty Days of Yoga: ¼ of the Way Through!

I totally look like this during yoga. Always.

“Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements.” –Amit Ray

Day 10:

I hurt.  Everywhere pretty much, but especially in my arms.   I’ve taken nine Baptiste yoga classes in ten days and I feel stronger and cleansed in a I’m-drinking-a-gallon-of-water-a-day-sweating-a-lot kind of way.   And I love it.

I sort of fell in love with Dancing Mind Yoga, the only Baptiste yoga studio in the Metro area (okay, the only one I’ve ever heard of ever) a little over a year ago, but I couldn’t afford to do more than the Groupon deal for a month and they don’t let returning students take advantage of Groupons after that first time.   But I didn’t forget about the studio either.

Baptiste Yoga is regular yoga, in a pretty hot room (95 degrees or so), on speed.  It’s not the traditional hot Bikram yoga which is 104ish degrees and involves standing in the same (generally sort of crazy) positions for long breaths.  It’s a flow class that involves most of the popular yoga poses like Chair Pose, Warrior 1, and High-to-Low Plank.  Low Plank, also known as Chaturanga Dandasana, is the pose that’s causing my arms to become stronger, but also to hurt like crazy.  If you don’t believe me, you try hovering just off the floor in plank, with your elbows close to your side.   Just hang out there for awhile.  Do it two dozen or so times in the next hour.  You’ll be sore too.   But this sort of yoga doesn’t just encourage these normal poses, it also goes all crazy and has people doing headstands and side-crow and splits frequently.  And most of the class is done at an extremely rapid pace.   Until that moment when you’re in Chair pose, just squatting deeper and you realize everything has slowed down.  And at that moment I always want the rapid-fire instructions back.   It kicks my ass every time.  I totally love it. 

So it’s not that Dancing Mind has suddenly become more affordable to me.  It’s a treat I gave myself, sort of a I have a real job now and can take part in a special offer they’re running.  It’s 40 Days to Personal Revolution.  Honestly, I’m not sure how much of a revolution I need in my life right now, but 40 days of unlimited yoga was the selling point for me.  It’s a 40 day challenge I want to take, and I wanted to see if I would get stronger as a result of yoga every day.  No cardio or weights or P90X, just damn warm yoga. 

I love it enough that after every class I wonder if I can afford to continue to have a membership there.  At $99 a month for unlimited classes, it’s not a small financial commitment, certainly more than any other gym that offers a much wider variety of options for classes and equipment. (If anyone would like to privately fund my continued classes at Dancing Mind and end my internal after-class struggle, just let me know J.)  But it’s the best full body workout I’ve ever gotten, it’s so much fun, and I feel so accomplished when I leave, having almost done a headstand, or doing Bird of Paradise for the first time.  And so I go back and forth every time.

The other part of the personal revolution—the coaching on Wednesday nights is actually a lot harder for me to deal with than I thought.  Most of the time whenever we’ve done meditation or deep relaxation, it’s a time of prayer for me.  So even though I know some people who are anti-yoga because it is part of an eastern religious way of life (love you Ben!), I’ve never felt like there was anything wrong with it.  My sister called me a post-modernist recently, which I’ve never thought was true about me (and by most people’s standards, I’m not at all).  I believe in absolutes too much.  But I do think that the command to “Be still and know that I am God,” can be achieved, even in a sweaty studio, lying on a yoga mat. 

So I didn’t expect to struggle with the other parts of the 40 Days program.  But as we sat there on our mats in a studio that was slightly cooler than normal, our coach, the owner of the studio, was encouraging us to realize that though things “seem” difficult in your life, they only seem that way and all the power to fix those problems is already within us.  We can fix any problem by believing in ourselves. 

I’ve heard this sort of thinking before, but for some reason I really struggled with hearing it now.  Maybe it was because of all these people, who truly want something to change in their life putting their faith in themselves.  I know there are people who’ve had some sort of success with this way of thinking, but I am not one of those people.  If it was up to me, if I had everything within me for strength and understanding and power I would be more terrified than anything else.   It’s liberating to know that it’s not all up to me.  That I can just be the clay rather than being the potter.  It’s a freedom that takes some getting used to and there are a ton of days where I’m determined to be the potter.  But I’m not supposed to be and honestly, when I try, I fail.  Utterly. 

I knew I probably wouldn’t agree with everything that they said in this 40 Day journey.  I just didn’t really expect to want stand up and say, “With Jesus,” after almost everything that our leader said was possible for us.  I didn’t say it, but the fact that I wanted to, sort of intensely, was pretty weird for me.  And maybe that’s an unexpected road for me in this journey.  Which I suppose is sort of the point—trying new things, seeking stillness, and desiring God in that stillness.

 I think I’m going to go back to the coaching session tonight.  Not necessarily because I think I’ll get anything life changing out of it, but because I think it’s worth trying things more than just once.  Also, because I somehow made a friend last week and I want to try to honor that friendship and get to know her more.  But after tonight, we’ll see.  Between getting there, practicing yoga, a short break, the coaching session, and driving home, it’s a four hour weeknight commitment.  So it may not be a thing I do for the next five weeks, but as I remember my almost headstand, I realize there are a lot of things that have been unexpected in the first ten days of the forty, and there might be many more to come.

Composed upon Watching Penn State and Indiana

"Life is filled with adversity. The way you travel through life is how you handle adversity, and that is how you're defined as a man." –Bill O’Brien

I love basketball enough that I’ll watch it alone.  It’s not my all time favorite—given the choice I’ll watch it with people everyday of the week, but I haven’t managed to convince many roommates they want to watch it with me very often.  It might have something to do with the way I yell at the screen or spontaneously add more items of Carolina blue as some games progress.  (To be clear, I know they can’t really hear or see me, it’s just a habit that makes me feel better.  Also, despite some fears, I would never actually throw anything at the screen.  It had never even occurred to me.)  So the only times I really know I’m going to watch the game with someone is when I go home for the weekend and when the game is a late one since Dad usually works weekends through tax season, which corresponds with the best part of basketball season.   I don’t know how much Dad loves it when I come home to watch the game because I talk during sports.  Not incessantly.  Not about nothing.  And ever since 2009 it’s substantially less because I finally got a taste of my own medicine and hated it when Andrew and I were trying to watch the second round UNC/LSU game in March.  The guests over at my parents’ house to celebrate my dad’s birthday didn’t seem to even realize there was an important game on TV and I suddenly realized what I had been doing to Dad for years. 

But it’s not basketball season yet.  It’s still football season and even though it feels like summer outside today, it’s autumn and that means Penn State games.  Maybe it was because I was at home for the first game of the season this year and heard my mom trying to pronounce Stephen Obeng-Agyapong’s name and listen to her think aloud through who her favorite players are going to be this year for various reasons.   It might even go back to last season when I happened to be home for the last game of the season—the one where Sam Ficken redeemed himself as a kicker by winning the game in overtime with a field goal against Wisconsin after failing to successfully complete field goals against Virginia in a 17-16 loss for PSU.   Maybe it was seeing the raw emotion from Bill O’Brien—whose face on the sideline was the strangest part about last season---after the final game was over when during his interview he may have called his players “fighters” (or something far less PG… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/24/bill-obrien-curses-f-bomb-penn-state-wisconsin_n_2185860.html).  Whatever the reason, I’ve been trying to watch Penn State games whenever possible this season.  I’m really not a fan of watching football alone—I’m not as used to it and I don’t love Penn State like I love Carolina—I won’t plan my day around making sure I’m home for the game.  It makes me miss my dad when I watch it alone.  Partly because I don’t understand the subtleties of football quite as well since I’ve never played it.  Partly because I think sports are really meant to be watched communally—otherwise you end up doing things like writing blog posts about your philosophical views on watching sports. 

           But maybe the point is I’m willing to not only make an effort to watch Penn State again, but to admit that I’m a Penn State fan at all.  It wasn’t an easy thing to say for awhile.  To admit that I still have some love for the now-deceased Joe Paterno.  To say that I still have anger and frustration about most of the aspects of the Penn State scandal.  But that I’m still a fan of the Nittany Lions.

This year college football has a new rule about players targeting with their helmets and there are severe consequences, with the intention being to keep the players safe.  It’s a rule that seems to make a lot of sense—if you are doing something that could cause possible harm—you, the person who committed the foul—are penalized.  This should have the effect that it will happen less often and the college football game should then be safer as a result. 

This is not what happened in the sanctions delivered by the NCAA to Penn State.  There are so many ways I feel about the whole situation.  Sickened that people didn’t do enough, didn’t make absolutely, 100% sure that children were safe.  Angered that a clearly sick and disgusting man had the continued ability to interact with children who couldn’t protect themselves against him.  Annoyed that said sicko continues to try to appeal what seems to be a very just prison sentence.

There are only a few things I feel good about—that the victims have justice, finally.  That Sandusky can’t hurt any more children.  That the money Penn State is paying in a fine is going towards child victims of sex abuse.    

It also makes me sad that a legendary coach who taught so many young men good things about football, and hopefully about life, has died not a legend, but a tainted figure.  It makes me sad that he died at all.  It’s unscientific but a big part of me thinks this whole situation was really why he died.  It also makes me sad, as a person who also works with young people, that he didn’t understand his real job was to protect those who couldn’t do it themselves.  That he didn’t go further than just the minimum.  That he didn’t do any and everything that was necessary.   

If you look at the Penn State football team today, you see they are led by true freshman quarterback Christian Hackenberg.  He wasn’t even old enough to walk when the events of the scandal began and yet he won’t be able to play in a bowl game until his senior year of college.  If you look at the sidelines of the players, coaches, and people involved in Penn State football you won’t find anyone who was there when Sandusky was doing unspeakable crimes.  Those people have been fired, or jailed, or have died.   But you do see the players who are feeling the greatest impact of the NCAA sanctions—no bowl games which means they won’t be ranked.  Not as many scholarships, which means they aren’t playing with the highest caliber players like they could have been.    Dad and I have talked about—it doesn’t make sense to punish people who have absolutely nothing to do with crime.  It doesn’t make sense that a body like the NCAA which has no authority in criminal cases is punishing a football team for something that criminal that a former football coach did, even though that coach has finally been punished by the criminal system. 

I understand intellectually that this is just the way it works—the current team gets punished for mistakes those who have come before them have made.  It’s not the ideal situation, but it’s the only solution they’ve come up with the to the problem.  It reminds me a lot what I’ve said about standardized testing—it isn’t good, but it’s the only solution they’ve found so far to the answer of accountability.  If you don’t know me well enough to know this already, this is not a compliment. 

I’m glad the day has come where I can admit to watching Penn State again. I hope that soon there will be a day when I can watch a Penn State football game without thinking about all these things in the background.  I hope there will be a game where the announcers don’t mention Sandusky, the sanctions, or any of the whole mess.  I hope that day will come soon. 

Thoughts on Thirty

Thirty was so strange for me. I've reall

y had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. --C.S. Lewis

Today is my last day in my twenties.  Lots of people have had all sorts of helpful things to say about turning thirty lately.  I’ve heard everything from “Well, the alternative is being dead, so I’d be okay with turning thirty,” to “I bet Jesus wasn’t stressed about turning thirty” (to which I responded “So 33 is the year I need to worry about?”) to even just a simple question, “How are you feeling about it?”

Honestly, I feel pretty great.  Tomorrow I’m going to spend the day with people I love who I’ve chosen to be my family, and Sunday after I’m going to spend the day with the family I was blessed to be given from the very beginning.   Life looks pretty different than it did at twenty-five—and that’s a really good thing.

My twenty-fifth birthday was not a banner moment for me, for several reasons.   I’ve talked to several people who have a birthday like this—people don’t make a point of celebrating with you, and in general you don’t feel loved.  It’s not so much that people don’t love you, it’s that for some reason your birthday goes almost unnoticed by most people.  And let’s be honest, that kind of sucks, even though intellectually you know that people do in fact care about you, it seems like they might not.  I have a distinct memory of having only spent the day with my parents and some crying being involved.

But the more important part of what happened that year was that I made a list of things that I didn’t have in my life which I wanted to have.  Things like friends who weren’t teachers, to be more actively involved in my community, to feel good about my body, to have a Master’s Degree.   I found that list the other day in an old notebook and I realized that without actively looking at that list, I had accomplished almost all of the things I’d written down.

It’s funny when people ask me about how I feel leaving my twenties behind I have a sense that one thing they’re asking me is how I feel about still being single and turning 30. Getting married is one of those things that’s supposed to happen while you’re in your twenties.   Certainly when I was 22 and leaving Grove City and about 70% of the people I knew were already engaged to be married, I thought that by the time I was 30, I too would be married.  And I’m not.  And I feel pretty great about that part of turning 30 too.   Because the thing is, when I look back at my twenties, especially the last five years since that awful 25^th birthday, there isn’t a time that I would trade.  There isn’t a roommate I would trade in order to have lived with a husband instead.  I wouldn’t give back my tumultuous fourth year teaching where I understood exactly what I was made of and how weak others around me were.  I wouldn’t give back the classes I took for two years or the Master’s Degree I earned, or the friends I’ve made in northern Virginia.   

But there’s something more.  The story of my life, the story of anyone’s life, is not about how many things I’ve checked off of a to-do list.  It’s not about listing things out and saying that I’ve done enough to feel good about thirty.  It’s about moments and about people and about trying to live the life I’m called to live.   Deciding to commit the entire rest of my life to another person is a huge deal and I’m so grateful that I didn’t do that at 22 or even 27 because I’m not the same person I was then.  I’ve learned too much about myself, about the lies I was believing at 25 and even 27 to go back to the person I was at 22.  Or to think that the person who would’ve been right for me at 22 would be right for the almost 30 year old I am today.

And one last thing—I’ve also come to realize that if I wanted to be discontent with where my life was at 30, I could be.  Even if I was married.  If I was married I could be discontent about not having kids.  Or not having enough kids.  Or having too many kids.  Or not having a Master’s.  Or with having or not having a job.  There’s always something I could find to be discontent about if I wanted to, but instead deciding to be content and secure in the knowledge that I’m exactly where Jesus wants me to be right now is so much easier.  It’s a lot less stressful that I can stop worrying about life and just live it.  When I can focus on loving on the people I’ve been given and enjoying them loving on me. 

Are there things I want to do in my thirties—absolutely.  I might even make a list of thirty things I want to do.  But if they aren’t things that happen for any reason, I’m going to try to realize that it’s because God has something better for me that I never would’ve even dreamed of putting on my list.  And I’m good with God’s plan over mine at 29 or 30.  Hopefully even at 35 or 40.  

Got It. You're That One.

“All students can learn.” –Christopher Morley

You know that student.  You’ve had them in class beside you, you’ve been one, you’ve taught them.  They come in a many different forms—the student who sleeps through class, even though his eyes are open. The student who just can’t manage to not get suspended.  The one who refuses to try.  The one who just doesn’t care. 

This year mine is a girl, but some years that student is a boy.  Some years I’ve had more than one, but I’ve always had at least one.  That student who I want to succeed so badly, who I want to teach something meaningful to, and, who, for some reason, just won’t learn.  That student that you bring home with you in your heart, who makes you wonder, “What am I going to do?”

This year, she’s the student who so desperately needs attention of any kind, whose main goal is to distract, who is adamant I do not understand her.  

She is not totally wrong.  I don’t understand what it’s like to grow up in a single parent home.  I don’t know what it’s like to live with barely enough money to survive or to feel like you’re not smart enough to have anybody think you could possibly have the right answer. 

But she is not totally right either, because I know her well enough after two weeks to see beyond the behavior.  But the reason that I can’t leave her at school some days, why I can’t always just turn it off and worry about her tomorrow is because I don’t know how to treat the root cause of her behavior.  What’s even worse is that I doubt I’d be able to even if I tried.

I sit in my house, thinking about the situation with her, thinking about her ridiculousness, about her outbursts, her defiance, and her excuses, and I just don’t know.  I don’t know how to help her, I don’t know how to fix her, I don’t know how to make her learn. 

That’s what it comes down to in the end.  She is that student that I want to learn in my class almost more than all the other students, because I believe that learning, that education, that knowledge, could actually change her life.  And she is the one for whom I just can’t seem to figure out how to do that.

This isn’t a story of how by loving her and accepting her I’ve come to change her life.  I’ve known her for two weeks and mostly in the moment she drives me crazy.  I was sort of excited for the rest of my students today when I thought she was absent.  Instead she was just ten minutes tardy to my fifty-minute class.    This is the story of me and of so many teachers who have just looked at a kid and thought, “I just don’t know.”

What really makes me just shake my head is that I’m sure she has no idea how much I think about and wonder what I should do about this whole thing.  If you asked her, I’m sure she’d say either, “Ms. Short hates me,” or “I hate Ms. Short,” depending on her mood and how much of my frustration seeped into my voice during class.  Obviously I don’t hate her, and I doubt she actually hates me.  Honestly, it’s tough to come in and love someone who wants you to grow and change and stretch and expand your mind.  Especially when you’re 13.  In fact, as I remember it, most people sort of hate themselves and lots of other people at 13.  It’s kind of a terrible age. 

I want this to have an answer, a resolution, a neat hopeful ending about the power of a teacher to change a life.  And one thing I’ve learned is that resolutions are never as neat as they are in books.  Even good books.  Right now the answer is I don’t know.  The only resolution is that I’m going to teach her again tomorrow, and the hope is that she’ll remember something from what I taught her today.   

First Day Feelings

"Well, obviously, she's feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying.  Then I expect she's feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can't work out who she likes best. Then she'll be feeling guilty...and she'll be worrying about what everyone else might say...Oh, and she's afraid she's going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she's been flying so poorly." 

A slight stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, "One person can't feel all that at once, they'd explode." 

"Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have," said Hermione. --Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix, on Cho Chang and Ron's emotions. 

Teaching is all I’ve ever known as a real, adult-life job, so in some ways I’m ready for the school year to start.  The rhythms of the school year—summer break, beginning a new year, Thanksgiving, Winter, and Spring Breaks, projects and tests, planning and grading—all feel as normal to me as they did when I was in middle school myself.  But at the same time I feel nervous, underprepared, and in general overwhelmed by what’s starting tomorrow.

I don’t have quite as many intense emotions swirling around as Cho did, but there is an awful lot going on in the back of my mind as I make final preparations like seating charts, wall posters, and outfit choices.  I’m excited to actually meet my kids, I’m interested to see what it’s like teaching middle school, I’m ready to get back into the swing of things and to have the halls filled with kids (schools are strangely too big and empty when teachers are there but students are not). I’m also intimidated by the idea that I’m teaching for Fairfax County Public Schools which has Very Definite Expectations for student success, and I’m uncertain about teaching in a “barbell” school—one which has a substantial amount of upper class kids, and a substantial amount of lower class kids, but without many middle class kids at all—and how that dynamic will play into the year.  I’m seriously underwhelmed about the fact that my students will all have to take not only a reading SOL but also a writing SOL in the spring—something I’ve never had to deal with so directly. 

In the back of my mind—you could say all of the above is swirling around the middle—are two more intense things: 1. I believe I’ve been called into this profession, and that calling was not a way of being set up to fail, and 2. It’s feels like a very long time since I’ve done this.   Number 1 I need to just focus on, relax in.  But it’s number 2 that I can’t seem to fully shut out.  

In reality, it’s only been two years since I was teaching, but it was a vastly different situation.   By the time I left Shenandoah County I had been teaching ninth grade for five years and knew the curriculum and the type of population I would be getting—knew it like the back of my hand.  Eighth grade? I haven’t done that since I was in Big Spring Middle School in 1999.

One of the advantages to teaching for FCPS is the vast amount of resources and support available to teachers—my department already has an awful lot on the calendar for me, ready to go, to tell me what to teach.  There’s still a good amount of freedom—I get to choose what books/stories/poems I use to teach the concept, but I know that on Thursday, I’m going to teach author’s purpose (totally doable in like an hour, right?).  Part of this greatly relieves the anxiety I feel about not knowing this curriculum very well, but part of me wonders how I will feel about it next year.  When I came to ShenCo, I had some help from other teachers, but in some ways I felt (and we all felt in our own specific grade level I think) like I was re-inventing the wheel.  And that sucked for the first semester I taught (which is the only reason I taught the really awful book Summer of My German Soldier).  But then every semester after that, it was great.  Yeah, I had worked really hard to reinvent that wheel, but now the one that I was pushing uphill everyday? It was my wheel.  It was designed exactly the way I wanted it and while I was continuing to hone it and smooth it out and strength it, it was something I had really made.  Here, I’m being given the wheel, mostly formed, which right at the moment feels pretty helpful, but I can’t help but wonder what it will be like—if it will in fact feel like—I’m pushing someone else’s wheel up the hill each day. (I guess in truth, all of us are really just refining the wheel the state puts out anyway.  Also, I think I need to not use the word “wheel” in the post anymore.)

I hope going back to teaching is like riding a bike—I can handle it taking a few minutes before I feel really in the swing of things.  And I know that once I’m in that classroom and I’ve met my kids, I will probably realize the same thing that I realized last year in the elementary school:  Kids are just kids.  They come from different places, they have different challenges, and they are taught different things at different ages.  But all of those differences don’t take away the fact that kids are all basically the same. 

It just might be a long day from now until the end of school tomorrow for me, working through all the different things I feel before (hopefully!) coming to that sort of realization.   In the meantime, I’m remembering that I am a teacher.  It’s part of who I am, and tomorrow I will officially be one again—and that’s pretty exciting.  One more emotion to add to the list.  

Days on the Beach. Not Spent Sunbathing

“Venice Beach in a combination of the tacky, the mindless, the ironic, and the novel.”

Venice Beach day!

One of the benefits of unexpectedly making friends at CTY was having someone to go out on adventures with on our free days.   One of the things I didn’t even realize I wanted to do was to go down to Venice Beach.  It was my first Southern California beach and even without any comparison to the other beaches nearby I knew Venice was a beach with a distinct personality.   I took a bus with Elicia, Andi and Jennifer and then walked about a mile until we came upon the stretch of sand while annoying clouds rolled in across the early sunshine.  The boardwalk reminded me in some ways of the town where the cruise ships dock in St. Maarten.  There wasn’t anything really new and shiny and Americanized about it.  Instead, it was a stretch of blacktop with vendors in permanent looking fronts on one side and temporary tents along the other.  There was an array of options—jewelry, clothing, scarves, coffee, funnel cakes, and every five steps or so medical marijuana stores.  The Doctor is In signs read or The Green Doctor, Accepting New Patients with a telling green leaf across the awning and on the glass.  Along the side closer to the beach were sand castle sculptors, tarot card readers, henna artists, and street performers. 

Henna tattoo! 

People of every kind walked along on the chilly day and we spent hours perusing, and buying, the different wares.  I got my first ever henna tattoo at Jennifer’s encouragement and Elicia’s willingness to do it too. 

Manhattan Beach volleyball courts

            The next weekend we biked on the beach down part of the bike path that ran almost 25 miles from Santa Monica to Torrence Beach.  The trip confirmed what I already knew as we headed south from the middle part near the Marina del Ray to Dockweiler Beach—where RVs and campers seemed to flock-- and headed on to Manhattan Beach and its Pier.  Pre-set-up beach volleyball courts were everywhere and sports abounded on the beach.  A week after that day Mom and I visited Santa Monica Beach and Pier, north of Venice Beach, and saw the personality there—part carnival, part upper crust which was totally different from Venice.  At least until we half-snuck onto a classy rooftop bar with vertical fire stations and great (expensive) drinks and filled with dressed up people.  We looked like we had spent the day meandering on the windy breach.  Because we had. But somehow they let us onto the rooftop. We looked down the beach towards the lights and saw the Ferris Wheel of Santa Monica’s pier in the not-so-distant stretch down the beach.

Santa Monica Pier

            I was on Santa Monica’s pier two weeks later when a car purposely plowed into people crowding the Venice Beach Boardwalk, killing one and injuring dozens.  It’s not as though Venice is my hometown beach.  But I had just been there, and since we walked the entire boardwalk I had been in the exact spot where the driver had gone into the crowd.  In the exact spot just two weeks earlier.  The pier I was standing on on Saturday, August 3 was less than five miles away.  (In case you didn’t know anything about this, here’s the link about it: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/03/us/california-venice-beach-crash ).

            I loved that day walking along Venice and I wouldn’t trade it.  But I knew its personality a bit, and so it felt more like a classmate hurting instead of just some person you’ve vaguely heard of but never met.  Maybe I’m personifying the beach too much, but it was my first Southern California beach experience with newly forged friends, and one of my favorite days of the CTY summertime.  So it hurt just a little bit to read about the death of a person I’ve never met because it happened on a beach I had met.