Happy Easter!

The mom of one of my students invited me to Easter dinner--which was particularly awesome since I had been despairing of being alone. Actually, at the instant when she called to invite me, I was making myself pokemon kraft macaroni and cheese and thinking, "man, for Easter dinner I'm gonna be eating leftover pokemon macaroni." I was soooo touched that she thought of me, though! :) lovemyjob, lovemykids it was so funny, when my student first saw me he had a huge smile on his face, and then in a split second it changed to this huge "wtf" face...hehehe. But we had a great meal, and I helped hide easter eggs, and then I helped my kiddo find easter eggs... :)

Today was such a beautiful day. It's even easier to be joyful on Easter sunday when it is so nice out! hehehe.

in other news, I didn't have time to clean joe jonesie's cage this morning, and it smells to high heaven. consequences. hahaha

Updatez

I had my first IEP meeting last week. It went really, really well.
What can I say, I love what I do! I love my kids, I love my coworkers, I love it all.

In other news, Jonesie hardcore-bit me because I tried to reclaim my chocolates from him. Jerk.

In other other news...*shrug.* My life is splendidly normal. I don't think I really got to live February last year; every moment I wasn't with him (because those were the effed-up moments) were spent catching up on homework.

Tomorrow I'm going pink for church. I'm so excited. Morning service, college lunch*/valentine's party (HOLLA), home for a couple hours, orch practice, I'll probably stick around for the service, and then chili and dessert cookoff, and i'm JUDGING DESSERTS, SO EXCITED OMG. hehehe

*I'm still in the college class because the next Sunday School class up is for "young marrieds"...

bob lawblaw

I'm pretty sure time is cyclical. The coincidences aren't coincidences; they're just history repeating itself. It's not even that I make the same mistakes, not even that things end up the same way, it's just...

If you catch me off guard, sometimes I don't know what season it is, let alone month or year.

I swear the nineties weren't that long ago. I mean, "1999" sounds fairly recent to me. But it's not. At all. I was twelve. God. Throughout my teenagerdom I regarded twelve, for some arbitrary reason, as the time I started thinking like an adult. That my consciousness was really "me." Maybe because I don't remember much before then? Maybe because I had no friends before then? Maybe because that's when sex ed was? haha.

Obviously my thinking and my experience is altogether different after a decade.

Time just seems so relative. Things that happened 36 hours ago barely remain in my consciousness, while I'm all, "holy shit, my student was born in 2003 and is six years old, no way, 2003 was way too recent for that." A guy from a year and a half ago is on my mind way more than any of the guys since then. Harry Potter still seems novel, while Star Wars feels like ancient history.

lol.

I know this doesn't make sense.

And then I wonder how something as permanent as marriage could even be in the cards for me at all? Because I have pretty successfully severed feelings and commitment from just plain lust. I don't know how to turn that back on. and right now I don't WANT to. Yet while out in public recently, I saw a cute little family and was hit with a wave of "oh my god I want a husband and kids NOW," hahaha.

Meanwhile it all repeats, repeats, repeats.

The same comments, the same compliments, the same awkwardness, it's all the same...

For a novelty, though, at this very moment my pet rat is stuck in my trash can!

Keeping track

So I read in the L-town paper while I was around last week that the senior class has two National Merit semifinalists (it's too early in the year for finalists). My reaction was, wait a minute. Their class has probably 200 more people in it than ours did, and we had five--shouldn't they have more than two, statistically speaking? That got me thinking about my four peers:

-One I had seen three days before
-I had seen another's sister-in-law that day
-One lives in the same town as me now, and I've seen her roommate occasionally in the last few months?
-And the other, with whom I was actually friends, I haven't seen or had any weird connection with, but his brother got married the following day, if that counts at all.

I just thought it was kinda weird that I actually had present-day connections with those people, still. haha. I mean, I had classes with them here and there in high school, of course, but I was only really friends with the one.

And in other news, I think Jonesie made out with me last night. What?

livin' la vida loca

Started in the new building this week. (We moved our entire autism program down the street.) Oh my gah, things are crazy. It's a lot easier to spread staff really thin in the larger environment. Like, this afternoon, for example...there are five of us who work with our eight kids. One person had run back to the old building for an errand. One person was on one-on-one potty duty with a student (we're trying to get him potty-trained; he's sitting on the potty ALL DAY). One person was setting up snack. That left two of us with the kids playing with shaving cream/cleaning that up/taking everyone potty before snack. So I took two kids and got them cleaned up and pottied and went to drop them off at snack, but the person wasn't finished setting it up yet, so I had to stay with them. Which left one person alone with four kids and a big shaving cream mess. eek! (And this craziness was with one child taking a nap!)

I'm so excited for my teaching position. I know this is what I want to do. My job is more important to me now than getting certified is...which screws me over if I ever want to work anywhere else, but I don't see what else I can do. This job is everything I never knew I always wanted. heh.

Had a really great week in L-town last week. Probably my last chance to just chill there for quite some time, what with training and then, well, teaching. Jonesie (my darling rat) loves my parents, which is hilar, between my dad being a rat-murderer and my mom not liking animals. I subbed some and was that much more grateful for my real job (middle-schoolers are annoying). I chilled with B, and I got to go to the Fall Festival parade for the first time in...six years? Spent some time with my brother (hadn't seen him since June!), and briefly saw my Carly (see previous post lol). Saw a couple preciously adorable baby cousins*--who love me!--and a few miscellaneous extended family members.

Read Love in the Time of Cholera. I found it extremely disappointing, for as much as I love One Hundred Years of Solitude. Oh well. Next (not counting keeping up with my New Yorkers) I'm reading My Life in Pictures by Temple Grandin, who has autism. sweet.

*One example of their supreme cute-itude: while I was praising Rachel, who's three and a half and was sitting across the room, for putting shapes in the shape sorter ("good job, Rachel!"), her baby sister Abigail, eighteen months, who was climbing on me, put her hands on her hips, stuck out her lip, and scolded me, "Ah-bi-gail" (thinking I'd called her her sister's name). LMAO