The Nose Knows

My car, to put it delicately, smells like ass.

It's making me crazy. I have no idea why it smells so rotten. I'm worried that (oh, horror) a rodent has gotten in there somewhere and died. Or that something perishable fell out of a grocery bag and slipped into a crevice in the hatch. Or that Ainsley and I are just that stinky and our funk has built up over time.

I know there's probably a logical explanation. The smell is reminiscent of wet cardboard, and we have been carrying some boxes and leprechaun traps and such. But I have pretty much emptied out the entire vehicle, felt around under seats, and wiped down all the upholstery and the dash. I even opened it up and let it air out yesterday afternoon in the glorious sunshine, breezes, and warm temperatures we were graced with. And yet this morning, when I opened the door, the smell drifted out. Crap.

It might not be as bad as I think it is. I have a pretty sensitive sniffer, a gift from my mother who, as a kid, said, "What's that I smell?" at least once a day and would go around the house like a basset hound trying to figure out what had been soiled, spilled, or left out too long. My dad could never smell what she said she smelled and got aggravated at her "Roman" nose and its overly active synapses (especially when he was discovered somehow or other to be responsible for the odor.) The day Ainsley and I first noticed that the car smelled a little gassy, we were all three running errands in the car and Jason's nose didn't pick it up. We had the same conversation we've had on many occasions in our marriage, and the script goes like this:

Me: What's that smell?
Jason: What's it smell like?
Me: Like (insert some sort of foulness.)
Jason: I don't smell anything.
Me: You don't smell that?? How do you not smell that? Did you do it?

I have been known to tear the house apart, checking under furniture, flipping couch cushions, sniffing carpet and drapes and comforters to locate the source. Usually, the offending agent is a slice or two of month-old forgotten deli turkey growing penicillin in the back of the meat drawer; once it was a potato bin housing liquified tubers. With the car, I am baffled. And quite frankly disgusted.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring break for me. I am sure I will be scrubbing all surfaces of my car, Febreezing like mad, and running to Yankee Candle for a Car Jar. I hope that I find the offending agent so that I am not just covering up the odor of some decaying bit of dropped food; nothing smells worth than decay mixed with cucumber-honeydew.

And you just can't fool my sniffer. My nose knows.

Songs In the Key of Lame

Gosh, I feel old.

Last night on American Idol, the contestants had to choose a song from their birth year. Nothing will make you feel old like hearing someone sing Every Breath You Take, which I recorded off the local top 40 radio station when it was a hit and played in an endless loop for, like, a week. The contestant singing it last night was still a baby bump while I was memorizing every lyric. Sigh.

As always when I watch Idol, I found myself wondering what song I would choose if I had talent and charisma and was an Idol contender. Those kids get a lot of heat from the judges for their song choices, but during the "theme" weeks it can be tougher than it looks to meet the requirements and still pick a great song.

If I had been required to sing last night, this is the list of songs I would have had to choose from. 1974 was not a stellar year for music, it seems. That year supplied Dave Barry with quite a few of his "Bad Songs"; the choices pretty much boil down to disco or cheese.

It's really too bad none of the "classics" from 1974 are choices on my American Idol Encore game. Yes, I bought it. And it's really been an ego boost. Mostly. I am currently tackling the mode where your player can go through the entire 18 rounds of the real Idol show; each song you successfully complete gets you through that round, from the initial audition for the judges to Hollywood week to the final 12 and so on. I have one more round and then I'll (hopefully) be in the final 12. So far, Randy has told me my little digital character has given the best performance in the competition, and my crush Simon has said that I am what this competition is all about! Of course, that was before I butchered "Holiday" (who'd have thought an early Madonna song would be tough?) and was told I was "utterly forgettable." The next "week", though, I was back in form with "Lips of an Angel" (yes, I still hate that song, but it's in a great range for a girl) and Simon gave me kudos for putting my bad performance behind me and moving on. It's too fun. Sony is breaking my heart by not having the downloadable content up yet, so I may have to pick "Come Sail Away" the next time I try to advance. And if that's what I pick, chances are, I'm going to be tempted to sing it like Eric Cartman. I'm not sure if Simon will get that interpretation, but I bet it would earn me a seal clap from the digital Paula.

At any rate, it has to be better than my attempt at "Irreplaceable", which I sang in quickplay mode when we had some friends over to see the game. Beyonce I am not. To the left, to the left...Not a good song choice for me, dawg.

If you had to sing a song, any song, on an imaginary Idol stage, what would you pick? And would you rock Simon's world?

Ainsley's Tagline

Friday afternoon Ainsley very proudly handed me a piece of paper.

"Mommy, I wrote something," she said.

Here's what she wrote (with some spelling corrections):

To find out more about Ainsley go to K1.com

K1 is her classroom, by the way.

You know your kid has been watching too much TV when she comes up with her own tagline.

Friday Funnies--Express Yourself

My kid cracks me up.

She has started writing. Not just practicing her letters, which is what she had been doing until the last week or so, but actually constructing words and even (hooray!) her first sentence.

This is not school work, mind you. This is my little pumpkin writing for the fun of it, expressing her thoughts, just like her mama. Awwww.

Yesterday afternoon she grabbed a pen and said she wanted to write something important on a picture she had just drawn. When she finished, she showed me. She had written her first unprompted complete sentence. (Well, I'm counting it as a sentence since it started with a capital letter and ended with a period.) Since, as a former English teacher, I strongly believe that writing and thinking go together, I figured I was finally going to get some insight into how that little Ainsley mind works. I looked at the paper, and here's what it said (with her spelling):

No bedspred.

Whoa. Deep.

I have no idea where this child has even picked up the word "bedspread." We call that thing you put on top of your sheets a "comforter" in my family. I asked her to read me the sentence, and she said, "No bedspread," as if to say, "Duh, mom, can't you read?It's plain as day."


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On Monday, Ains had to tell a joke in front of her class. Friday afternoon I went online to try to find a simple kid joke she could easily tell; despite the crazy antics some of you have seen, she's pretty shy and speaking in front of others isn't her favorite thing to do. And if I let her choose, she would have picked her own, um, unique version of the classic banana-orange knock-knock joke. According to Ainsley, that joke goes like this:

Knock, knock
Who's there?
Orange!
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn't say banana! (At this point, her audience is completely confused, but she's giggling like mad.)

Sigh. The subtle nuances of the real version of that joke are completely lost on her.

We found a keeper with this little gem, which tickled Ainsley when she heard it and which she could repeat back to me immediately:

What's a cat's favorite color?
Purrrrrr-ple!

Ba-dum-dum.

Monday on the way home I asked her about her joke. She seemed sad. She said only two people laughed at her joke, and that someone in her class said it wasn't really a joke because it was a question. Seriously, some of the kids in her class need to get over themselves.

When I heard that, I regretted that she didn't tell the joke the way she told our friends Sunday night during a practice run. On that occasion, she asked the set-up question. After we all answered, "I don't know. What IS a cat's favorite color?", she got down on all fours, started meowing, and made a dramatic exit down the hall and to her bedroom. Since she was wearing purple pajamas at the time, it was kinda like performance art. Physical comedy is everyone's favorite.


_______________________________

If any of you have an XBox or PS3, you need to get the American Idol Encore game. I don't actually have it yet (I decided I would rather have it for PS3 than for the Wii, and you'll see why in a moment.) But if I was on the fence about purchasing it, all that changed when I saw the list of downloadable songs you can purchase in addition to the 40 songs that come with the game. Some of the choices are hi-larious when you imagine yourself or a group of your friends belting them out in your basement in front of a digitally created Simon, Randy, and (clap like a seal!) Paula. Click here to see the list. (You'll have to scroll through the other Karaoke Revolution games lists to get to the Encore list.)

Karen--Chattahoochee! OMG!

I will get to unleash my inner Britney Spears! I can duet with the hubby on "You're the One That I Want" and that roller-rink slow-skate classic, "Endless Love"! I will finally see the official lyrics for "It's the End of the World As We Know It"! And the Nickelback! Oh my God, the Nickelback!



Have a great Easter (which I originally typed as "Eater"--got Reese's peanut butter eggs on the brain) weekend, y'all.

An Introduction to Grief

I'm finding it really hard to write the last 2 days. I started something night before last, but I couldn't concentrate on anything long enough yesterday to edit and post. And in light of what happened at our school, it seemed trivial.

We lost a student at our school yesterday morning. I didn't know the kid by name, but once I saw his pictureI knew who he was and remembered that he'd been in the library quite a bit this year. In fact, on Tuesday afternoon I had sent him back to class after I had found him roaming down here without a note from his teacher. Even though I've learned this lesson many times before, I was a little shaken up by the fact that someone can be walking, talking, living, and breathing one afternoon, and be gone before the sunrise the next morning. It's not supposed to work that way for someone so young.

Our counselors and administrators used the library as a crisis center yesterday. From the first bell through around lunchtime, the library was a place where groups of students could gather to grieve and receive counseling. I've never heard anything like it; his whole first period class gathered here yesterday morning and those who didn't already know were given the news. The sobs I heard were heartwrenching; these kids, in many cases, were being given their first introduction to mortality and loss. I don't think I saw any students "faking it", at least not in the first hour of the day; these young people were genuinely hurting.

When his English teacher came in, visibly shaken and upset, it took me back to my first year teaching when I lost a 9th-grade student. On a beautiful Monday morning in May, I was met outside my room by one of my former school's counselors. She told me one of my freshmen had died Sunday morning in a senseless car accident. I was stunned. I was 23 years old, fresh out of college, and had never been faced with the death of a young person. The counselor patted my shoulder, told me to let the kids in her period talk about it, asked me to send anyone down who was visibily upset, and left. "Jessica didn't have a very big circle of friends," I remember her saying. "You should be fine if you just leave her desk empty for a while and let the kids talk about it if they need to."

Problem was, I wasn't so fine. The counselor hadn't briefed me on what to do if I fell apart. This student had been one of my struggling students, but unlike many I had that year, she admitted that she needed help and really wanted to pass. I had worked with her a little after school and had helped her go through draft after draft on her two major writing pieces that year. Helping her had been one of my biggest challenges that year. And then she was gone. At fifteen years old.

I had Jessica 5th period, so I had practically all day to prepare for her class. What the counselor told me, that she didn't travel in a large circle, didn't matter. Students in my other freshmen classes came in bleary-eyed, solemn, tearful. They had just lost one of their own. Whether they knew her or not, they were in shock. One of her good friends was in one of my morning classes, and when I stood in front of them and asked if anyone needed to talk, or say anything, this poor girl who had hardly said "Boo" all school year tearfully opened up with how much she was going to miss Jessica, and how unfair it was. I felt myself welling up. Oh, God, I thought. I'm not going to make it. I'm going to lose it in front of this class.

But then I was saved. "...and she hated your class," she said, at the end of her impromptu eulogy. And the whole class, myself included, busted out laughing. It felt so good to laugh at that moment. "No, no," the friend said, laughing in spite of herself, "I don't mean that she hated you. She just struggled so much with reading and writing, but she was working so hard and she was trying so hard to pass. She liked you. She just didn't like English. But she was excited because she thought she was going to pass." And then we all grew quiet again; we were talking about her in the past tense.

Later in the day I had to stand in front of her empty chair in the front row of my classroom. None of those normally chatty kids wanted to talk that day, about anything; not about Jessica, not about what we were half-heartedly studying, not to each other when they thought I wasn't looking. But they all kept glancing at her chair.

A few days later when I wanted to go to the funeral, my assistant principal said, "Oh, that's good. We need to be represented there." And then he told me I would have to find my own coverage and use half a personal day for it. Not another of Jessica's teachers came to the funeral.

The way my current school is handling this student's death is so much bettter. They've acknoweldged that more people need to grieve than those who were in the student's closest circle of friends. They've acknoweldged that his teachers are going to need to be checked on, too, and that it should be easy for those teachers to attend his service so that they can pay their respects and say goodbye. They've realized that the first time we lose someone we know who's our own age, it shocks us; there, but for the grace of God, go I. Kids think they're going to live forever, and it's a blow when they see that they're mortal and that their actions can have the worst of consequences.

It was a pretty rough day yesterday, being surrounded by grief. There were times, when a fresh wave of sobs came up, that it was more than I could take and I had to step into the office (which was a different kind of horrible, with parents calling to check on their kids and offer them some kind of comfort.) But today we as a school are teaching the most important lesson of all when it comes to loss: life must, and will, go on.

Sleepless in Kentucky

My favorite site to browse during my morning Coke break, Entertainment Weekly, has an interesting discussion going on on its Popwatch blog. One of the bloggers is discussing a book he's reading that has him so scared he's having trouble sleeping. You can check it out here. Apparently, this book he's reading has a bad guy who uses spiders as a murder weapon, among other things; that pretty much insures that I will never pick up that particular tome.



I've talked a couple of times about how I love me a good scary movie. But reading this blog and the readers' comments has me thinking about a few good scares I've had from literary sources.



The grand master of insomnia fiction will always be Stephen King. I started reading him way too young (thanks for introducing me to Cujo in 7th grade, DD!) That introduction, even though it featured a creature I'm a little afraid of (I'll confess, big dogs cause me great anxiety), didn't freak me out. My next trip to King World, Pet Sematary, did.



It's not so much that Pet Sematary caused me not to sleep. It's that it caused what is, to this day, one of the most real and horrible nightmares I've ever had. It pretty much messed me up for the entirety of my 8th grade year.



I read it in the summer before 8th grade. No, I take that back; I devoured it in the summer before 8th grade. I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading "just one more chapter." The night I finished I drifted off into the most vivid dream of my life. In the dream, I was walking across my side lawn in the dark toward my house. It seemed like it took me forever to get across the lawn, as if I had weights attached to my legs. I was wearing an itchy pink dress and in the dream I couldn't understand why I was wearing that. I lifted my hand to knock on my own door, and in the pale light, I could see that my skin was a funny color. (Yes, I remember all this. I'm telling you, this experience has stuck with my for a 2 decades.) When my mom answered the door, she didn't exactly look happy to see me there. I didn't get it. She said, "This isn't right. You're not supposed to be here." I realized I was dead, and the pink dress was what I had been buried in, and when I saw my own face in the mirror opposite our door, I could see that I had begun to decay.



I woke up in my own bed, drenched in sweat, not sure if I was awake or asleep or alive or dead. I started to sob. The next day after I had been moping around for hours, Mom asked me what was wrong. I started crying again and explained the dream and cried some more. Mom had heard my sister talk about Pet Sematary after she had read it, and knew the basic plot outline: people die, their loved ones bury them in a creepy Indian burial ground, the supernatural soil brings them back to life but not the way they were before. She told me if I was going to let what I read bother me so much, I shouldn't read scary books any more. Looking back, she had a point.



Instead of seeing that the book was messing with my subconsious and planting ideas into my fertile imagination, I started interpreting this dream to mean that I was going to die. I started telling my friends and family how much I cared about them and even wrote a little will and stuck it in my bedside table just in case (I was really concerned about who was going to get my stuffed animals and Guess overalls.) For the better part of a year, I stayed awake in bed at night thinking about death and our own mortality and wondered for the first time if there really was an afterlife or if this life is all we have. That book really screwed me up. Then I started reading It, and got worried that an evil clown was going to start talking to me through the bathroom drains, but that's whole different story.



Now that I'm a mom, I can't read things like Pet Sematary. If a kid dies in anything I read or watch, that's it; I bail out. Unfortunately, some scenes in Pet have lingered in my brain and re-surface from time to time in my parental consciousness like the skeletons in the pool in Poltergeist; there's a horrific scene in the book where the father goes to the cemetery to dig up his toddler son's body, and the gruesome details hit the maternal-love-bearing centers in my brain like a brick upside the head any time I hear a news story about a child's death. Those are the times that I grab Ainsley and hold her tight and pray that I go a long time before she does.



I didn't get scared in a life-altering way by a book again for a good fifteen years. Then, during radiation, when I was already a little vulnerable to scares because I was taking Vicodin syrup for the pain caused by a radiation-scorched throat, I picked up The Mothman Chronicles. I had seen the movie and was less than scared by that, so when a friend recommended the nonfiction book, I gave it a shot. The image of the red, glowing eyes of the Mothman haunted me during middle-of-the-night bathroom trips; I just knew if I looked out the bathroom window I was going to see those eyes. So I turned on my bedroom light every time I had to get up in the night, driving my husband crazy. I would then close my eyes once I got into our bathroom so that I didn't chance seeing anything out the window. Then I would spring into the bedroom, turn off the light, and bury my head in the covers until I fitfully drifted back to sleep. Vicodin + a scary nonfiction account of supernatural harbingers of death and men in black = paranoia. Remember that.



It didn't help when, shortly after reading the part of the book dealing with government conspiracy, aliens, and the MIB, I reached for the phone to give the friend who recommended it to me a call and heard silence instead of a dial tone. The hairs on my neck stood up because I could tell it wasn't a dead phone line; someone was on the other end. "Hello?" I said, hoping I was wrong. I heard my friend's voice saying, "Hello?" I just about jumped out of my skin. Apparently, she had decided to call me and had just dialed my number when I picked up our phone wanting to call her. Even with that logical explanation, we both got freaked out and were convinced that the little men in black knew we had been discussing Mothman and had tapped our phone lines. We're easily spooked that way.



Now it's your turn. What books have really done a number on you and your subconscious? Has there ever been a book that scared you into sleeplessness? Talk back!

I Feel Your Pain. No, Really. I Do.

Is anyone watching American Idol?

Of course you are. It's only, like, the top rated show. And we're still waiting for everything to reboot from the writers' strike. If you're not watching it, may I ask what you are watching? 'Cause sometimes I just can't handle the Idol.

See, I have this little problem. I get embarrassed for people who can't get embarrassed for themselves. So, during at least one performance every Idol, I get so embarrassed for somebody that I start counting the ridges in our textured ceiling.

I know everyone suffers from cringe-itis to some degree. (Well, maybe not the "reporters" on The Daily Show. Those people have a superhuman tolerance for awkwardness and humiliation.) But I suffer to such an extent that I've been known to tear up at karaoke bars for people who are just so God-awful but think they're terrific and have no idea that the audience is laughing at them. Seriously, my eyes started watering once when Jason and I went for a night out with his co-workers. One clueless girl that he used to work with (she was that person we all have in our workplace who annoys everybody) put her entire heart and soul into a rendition of "Wide Open Spaces" that was so off-key-but-earnest that I had to bury my head into my hands. I could not look at her. When I came up for air, I realized I was crying a little. I get that worked up and uncomfortable for people who are living train wrecks.

It really doesn't matter whether the cringe-worthy act is intentional or un-. I love The Office. And I know it's not real. But I watch about a quarter of each episode through parted fingers because I can't stand the awkwardness. Steve Carrell is truly the master of uncomfortable comedy. Too bad I miss half his work because I have to look away.

For a while there, I was a big fan of Crank Yankers and the Comedy Central British candid-camera import Trigger-Happy T.V. But I think it annoyed Jason when I had to put my fingers in my ears for most of it. I knew it was time to stop watching when I began to fast-forward through all the "good parts" of our TiVoed episodes. There's only so much of the "tricking the ignorant and unsuspecting" that I can take.

It's not just limited to arts and entertainment. As a teacher, I have to sit through a lot of faculty meetings and professional development workshops. There's always that one teacher who believes with all her heart that the only stupid question is the one not asked. So she asks questions throughout the meeting. A lot of questions. By about the third inane question that makes the teachers around me start exhanging knowing looks, I find myself suddenly becoming very interested in my shoes.

In any season of American Idol, I am going to find myself unable to watch several times. There's always the one really, awfully bad audition in the first weeks where the singer starts arguing with the judges' assessment of his awfulness instead of skulking out of the room in humiliation. I don't feel sorry for him because he thinks he's God's gift to the pop world and completely unaware of his lack of skill, but my nature compels me to get so embarrassed for him that I have to leave the room. Then there's at least one time after they've whittled it down to the 12 "best" singers when someone makes a song choice or tackles an arrangement that defies logic. If you watch, I bet you can guess the two performances last week that caused me to stick my fingers in my ears and go, "LA LA LA LA LA LA! I DON'T HEAR YOU!"

There must be an embarrassment gene. I don't know if I've ever seen Jason have to look away from an awkward situation, and I honestly don't think he has a "most embarrassing moment." He can laugh at himself and others easily. And then there's me, who turns red and flees when complete strangers make asses out of themselves.

So, for all of you who are incapable of feeling uncomfortable or humiliated: keep singing on national TV loudly and proudly, continue doing "fake" interviews with crazy people who apparently have no idea that you work for Jon Stewart or that you are getting paid to make of them, and keep making Dunder Mifflin's Michael Scott the bastion of awkwardly confident office incompetence that he is. When you can't get embarrassed for yourself, I will get embarrassed for you. Keep on entertaining us, even if we have to sometimes look away.