and other quarter-life crises.

Let's see. You have graduated from college, gotten engaged, entered a field and taken a position for which you are woefully unqualified, and gotten a big gnarly tattoo. Two actually. So what's next?

All type of things, as it turns out. I went out to Old Town Pasadena (the O.T.) this weekend and bought myself some crazy expensive new toys, in the form of a new macbook (the extra a-spensive black one, no less) and a printer/scanner dealie and a nano, the latter two of which were more or less free after my educator discount and the "we're unveiling a new model soon"-style promo. Technically this wasn't all that frivolous as my work machine, always imperiled, is down at the moment, and the Major has ripped several keys off my iron-age Dell, which weighed about seven stone to begin with. But yes, I do feel cooler, thank you for asking. It even has a built-in camera that does all kinds of nonsensical effects. Observe:















Then last week I did a phenomenally stupid thing and allowed a colleague to peer-pressure me into signing up to run the Disneyland half-marathon. No, unfortunately, your eyes do not deceive you. She's just so efficient; she asks you if you're into it and then while you're still on the mild high of being a great person, before the reality kicks in, she's whipping out the registration form and offering to fax it in for you and that's that. Anyway, my first action upon realizing what I'd done was to turn around and peer-pressure a bunch of other friends an colleagues into joining us, so that between her peer pressure and mine, our posse is seven deep. May and I have already begun sort of pre-training in the form of edging around the Silverlake Reservoir and realizing just how very out of shape we are. I have budding shin splints today, but as of tomorrow evening, I'm back out there, hopefully up at Griffith Park, where the ground is more forgiving. Anyway, I have until the beginning of September to get myself into some kind of working order, and raise $1,900 for AIDS research to boot. You hate AIDS, right? Right. So sign up and send me some moneys. You will be giving to a really worthy cause, and contributing to my running a long, hot stretch of asphalt in the OC in the late summer, too. What more could you want?

We're in the home stretch of this school year, with the new one starting up July 5th. I'm alternately excited and....excited. I love, love, love my kids, but I'm such a different teacher now that I was at the start, with such higher expectations, that every day kind of hurts me now, since these kids are operating by my much older, much lower academic and behavioral expectations and there's not a hell of a lot I can do about it at this point. It's really frustrating. I'm trying to plan tightly and harness my inner badass and still get this current group of kids through final writing projects at the same time. Not to mention that grades are due, and my credential is in jeopardy until I get one elusive piece of paper, and on and on and on. I have to switch rooms at the break, too, but I'm going to the coveted 530s, right next door to my friend Riley, unless I have jinxed it by typing it down before my stuff is actually being dragged across the threshold. We'll see.