Back on the Market

Boom! And there she landed. Back in the land of the unmarrieds. The world of dating.

She’s 51. Damaged goods in many ways, but the packaging isn’t altogether unpleasant. She comes with baggage, but it’s colorful and fairly easily carried.

A neon sign reading ‘available’ floats over her head. It’s invisible to most women but bright as the sun to testosterone-fueled men who don’t immediately notice the creases, nicks, and scrapes she’s accumulated over the years. Her eyes are bright and her smile is engaging.

She loves their attention and reflects it back, making her more attractive. They try to buy her with drinks and compliments, but her price might be higher than they are prepared to pay.

The twenty-somethings think she might be fun for a while but she knows they’d be unsatisfying and would use her and toss her carelessly away like so many of their toys.

The thirty-somethings are more engaging. They ply her with their burgeoning intellects, thinking she can’t see through them, but they’re wrong. Her vision is quite clear.

The forty-somethings are more appealing. She finds them attractive - the graying hair, the tiny lines worn into their faces from years of smiling...

But the fifty-somethings… they know her favorite songs. They know her taste in wine. Their cleverly crafted words make her laugh. One of them might have what it takes. Time will tell.

She won’t be gotten easily. Not this time.

But oh, how she loves the bidding.

Going once. Going twice.

She’s still going.

                   Visit me on Twitter (@CeceliaHalbert) 

Back to School is Worse than Christmas

Today I went to the local North Shore high school to register my daughter as a freshman. I paid for tech fees, bus transportation, books ($78 for her health textbook alone), orchestra fees, and God knows what else. I swear they must have a committee at that high school that makes up plausible names for new fees every year.

All this for a public high school in the United States of America, where every child is entitled to a free compulsory education. (Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

Somebody has to pay for all this mandated compulsiveness, I guess. A free public education is actually quite expensive. The $1018.86 I paid today covered not quite 10% of the cost to educate my child for a year. The balance is footed by homeowners and businesses in the form of taxes and by the way, I include myself in this group as well, so I’m actually paying a larger share than the check I wrote today indicates.

I’m a teacher.  While I don’t complain that I’m underpaid, because I don’t believe I am, I don’t get paid during the summer. I haven’t received a paycheck since June 15 and I won’t get another one until September 15 even though I’ve been working since August 12. I guess the payroll office has to wait until all the parents pay their fees.

I save money all year in order to make it through the summer, but I didn’t budget a thousand dollars for high school registration. I asked if I could post-date the check or  at least part of the check and the blond-bobbed Ralph Lauren model across the table yanked all my daughter’s locker combinations and schedules and forms out of my hand and told me I’d have to drive across town to the registrar’s office to file a form requesting a deferment and I should’ve done that months ago.

How the hell was I supposed to know that?

I said “Nevermind,” and I wrote the check, fearful that the people in line behind me would be judgmental because they had smartly budgeted for this event. I gathered up the papers that the bitchy lady reluctantly gave back to me and I half-listened to her condescending instructions about freshmen orientation. I cried in the car on the way home.

“It’s okay, Mom,” my daughter said. Even she was horrified at the amount of money I’d just shelled out.

“Well, no, it’s not really okay because we were supposed to go shopping for your birthday guitar this weekend and now we’ll have to wait ‘til Columbus Day before you get your August birthday present.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” she said because she's just a great kid.

She'll get her guitar and she'll get her education, but if today was any indication, this is going to be a long four years.

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On Being the Oldest

I’m the oldest child. I’m the responsible one. Supposedly.

I’ve spent this week in new teacher orientation with about forty other new teachers in this district - most of them new graduates.  I’m the oldest new teacher. I look at all the bright shining faces and try to absorb some of their excitement, but I’ve heard it all before.  I know how to behave. I look dutifully interested.

I’m not that old, but I feel my seniority. Particularly when all those eager young teachers weren’t even born when I started my teaching career in 1982.

As I nod and smile I’m thinking about starting over. Not just in a new job, but in life.

While I sit and feign interest, I’m not thinking so much about the new job as I am thinking about being single - a term that hasn’t applied to me in forty years. I’m no longer married or otherwise attached.

It’s very strange. I thought I’d be starting over with the love of my life, but it didn’t work out that way.  These new teachers are starting from the beginning and I’m starting over.  I’m thinking about where they are and where I am but maybe we’re not so different.

They’re thinking about their new careers and I’m counting down the years I have left until I can retire. But we’re all thinking about the students we’ll meet next week and how we’ll love and nurture them and help them become the future of America.

They’re thinking about how to spend their first paychecks and I’m thinking mine’s already spent.

They’re thinking about the grown-up lives they’re about to lead.

So am I.

I’m thinking about the work I have to do being a loving parent and a loving teacher and I’m thinking a lot about the future, which isn’t as long as theirs, but holds the same opportunities.

Like maybe finding love again. That will take time. I still have time. Being in love is something to look forward to.

I’m thinking about the really good bottle of pinot noir I’m going to drink tonight.

 

If there’s one thing I know that they might not, it’s that nothing is as important as love.

And a really good glass of wine.               

                   Visit me on Twitter (@CeceliaHalbert)

The Eye of the Beholder

You couldn’t drink her pretty.

Or maybe you could.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What if the beholder’s judgment is clouded by substances: legal, prescription, or otherwise?

Or… what if the beholder’s judgment is enhanced by them?

Yesterday the man I love and I agreed to split. Took a break. Broke up. Ended our relationship. At least for now. 

He told me that it’s possible that his judgment had been clouded, enhanced, or otherwise compromised by the pain medication he had been taking early in our relationship. He might as well have launched his fist into my gut because his words had the same effect. After nine months of non-medicated being together, he felt differently, and maybe it was the lack of meds?

That’s just what a girl wants to hear.

So last night I went out with a girlfriend. I’d had a few glasses of wine. The man on the barstool next to mine struck up a conversation - a very fun and friendly conversation. He’d had a few glasses of Zombie Dust.

He asked for my number.

I wonder if he remembers what I look like. I wonder if I remember what he looks like. I sort of do, but my judgment was clouded.

What will matter is, if and when we meet again, under less clouded conditions, we have the same fun interaction that we did last night. And if we do, then my guess is that the wine and the beer did more to facilitate the initial conversation and less to cloud our judgment and that the important thing is how the conversation progresses and how the relationship grows or doesn’t grow.

So, while the loss of love is still painful,  I’m letting that specific part of it go - the pain of thinking his love for me was a drug-induced delusion. It wasn’t the meds or lack of them. It was him. And me. And the combination thereof.

I’m pretty, whether you drink or not.


Addendum:
(because... yum.)

                   Visit me on Twitter (@CeceliaHalbert) 

Teacher Inservice or Why God Invented Wine

Disclaimer: I don’t hate administrators. I hate what they’re required and taught to do to teachers. 

As the calendar turns a page today and heads into August, teachers are faced with the blood-curdling realization that the beginning of the school year is nigh. It’s not the summer-tanned faces of yet unfamiliar students that we dread. No, nor even their accompanying parents. It’s not the smell of school glue nor glare of freshly waxed floors. No. We love our students and the sanctuary of our classrooms. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have become teachers.

That which we fear - the horrible reality for which no education methods class in college prepared us - the single reason that teachers loathe August: 

Mandatory days of teacher inservice.

Not even the promise of coffee and donuts eases the trepidation we feel when we anticipate the hours sitting on a hard folding chair in a gymnasium looking at Power Point presentations about topics that A) anyone with common sense could read or figure out on their own in a matter of minutes or B) we already know so well we could teach a class on it or C) is the same thing we heard last year but now has a new buzz-wordy name.

Sitting on those butt-numbing chairs is awful enough, but even worse are the activities that administrators plan to get us out of the chairs. If we walk into the gym and see posterboard taped to the walls around the gym we know we’re going to be handed post-it notes on which we will have to write anonymous ideas and stick to the various posters boasting headings like “biggest worries” and “best practice.” No one will ever read those ideas. They will not be discussed again until next year’s inservice when they will be called ‘new ideas.'

Worse than the post-it note round robin is the get-your-blood-moving exercise that is more commonly known as dancing. Witness the “Tooty Ta” - the most humiliating, demeaning, ridiculous thing forced upon grown-up professionals who have countless graduate degrees and years of experience:

Just let me keep sitting on the rock-hard folding chair in this freezing, over-air-conditioned (or sweltering hot un-air-conditioned) gym, please.

This year, the agenda for our inservice is written in Understanding By Design format which I find to be the most insidious, contrary-to-critical-thinking prescription for writing curriculum ever embraced by the education profession. I wanted to throw up when I read my welcome packet. This is a tactic administrators use to get us to accept them as one of us. They want to remind us that they, too, are teachers. See? They even still know how to write lesson plans. Yay for them.

Administrators, desperate to look busy enough to warrant their salaries, sit in their offices and plan ways to 1) keep us out of our classrooms on those inservice days and 2) make themselves look important and organized. They create acronyms for every single thing they can think of until we have no idea what they’re talking about anymore because if we have to ask what they’re talking about they’ll feel superior. This must be the reason for this practice because saying the words instead of the acronym really doesn't take more time or energy. For example: PLC = Professional Learning Community. Nanoseconds between ignorance and enlightenment.

If an acronym doesn't work (i.e.- when it's a single long word instead of a group of words), an abbreviation is used instead.

My least favorite but most commonly used abbreviation is “the cum folder.” Do administrators live such sheltered lives that they don’t know what cum is? I wouldn’t want to look in anyone’s cum folder, much less put something in or take something out of it. The effort to actually pronounce the word 'cumulative' would be greatly appreciated by all.

I could go on and on but I’ll still have to go to the inservice, which this year, since I work in two different districts, will require seven days of my life that I will never get back.

But I have a job and I’m getting paid, so I’ll go and nod and smile and then I’ll go home and put some alcohol on it.

And the next week I’ll get to teach!

                   Visit me on Twitter (@CeceliaHalbert) 

The Traffic Desk and an Emergency Wine-Buying Trip

When I worked in radio a million years ago, there was a thing called ‘the traffic desk.’ The lady who worked at the traffic desk spent her days trying to fit everything into the schedule: the three minute and fourteen second long top-forty songs, commercials, news, weather, sports, public service announcements, and time for spontaneous banter between on-air personalities. I imagine that all this is done by computer now, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe there’s still a traffic desk.

I need a traffic desk at my house.

The single largest stressor in my life is trying to fit everything in. Google calendar is helpful, but only to the extent that it provides a handy visual display of my life on any electronic device I happen to be holding.

This morning I left the house at 7:30 to go to work teaching orchestra camp. When I got home at 1:00 I noticed - much to my horror as you might imagine - that I was out of wine. Mostly. There is a bottle of Charles Shaw Pinot Grigio (otherwise known as 2 Buck Chuck) sitting forlornly in the bottom corner of my wine cabinet. It doesn’t count. It’s not really wine in my humble opinion.

That I have a wine cabinet at all is ridiculous. I drink wine as fast as I buy it. (It might  be important to note that I buy wine by the bottle, not the case.)

It was noted (accurately) on Twitter that the lack of wine in my house was not only sad, but grossly irresponsible. (Thanks, Tom, for pointing that out.)

As soon as I realized my incredible incompetence in planning and organizational skills (i.e., lack of adequate wine purchasing), my brain immediately went into scheduling mode to try and figure out how to fit in a trip to any place that sells wine. I had a piano student at 1:30, so no time to go before that. I had to pick up my daughter from songwriting class at 3, then take my son to Tae Kwon Do at 4, cramming in the only 40 minutes I have all day to write, fix dinner, then go out and teach three more students, after which I was hoping to have a glass of wine on the patio before the sun goes down.

Options:

1) Stop at the store on the way to pick up my daughter from camp.

2) Run to the store next door to the Tae Kwon Do dojo while my son is in class.

3) Pick up aforementioned wine on the way home from the last lessons of the day at 8 p.m.

Option 1 was the only viable choice.

Option 2 meant that the 40 minutes I could use for writing would be eaten up by a wine buying side trip.

Option 3 meant a significant delay in drinking wine at the end of my day. Unacceptable.

And now, having made an emergency wine stop, I'm dealing with a conflict tomorrow because I have to work and my daughter needs a ride home from class and my ex-husband is out of town, so I’m having to beg for help, which I hate because I will, of course, want to return the favor and I’ll have to schedule that in somewhere next week between working, teaching, meetings, dog vaccinations and grooming, etc., etc., etc.

Which is why making sure there was wine in the house for this evening was a priority at my traffic desk today. 

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I Know What I Like and I Like Pinot Noir

I haven’t written much about wine for a while, so here goes.

A couple of days ago I stopped at Trader Joe’s to get a couple of bottles of their Viñas Chilenas Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s $3.99 and that fits my I’m-a-teacher-and-don’t-get-paid-in-the-summer budget and I can drink it. It’s not bad.  In fact, in a blind taste test, I’d guess it was more like $9.99.  So I picked up a few bottles.

Of course, while I was there I had to see what else was on the shelves and lo and behold I found some Castle Rock Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. My heart did a little leap. $11.99. Sure, I could have 3 bottles of the cab for that, but I splurged on a bottle of the pinot because it’d just been a long time since I enjoyed a nice bottle of pinot noir and I wanted to really enjoy a bottle of wine instead of just drinking one. So I put back 3 bottles of the cab and hugged the pinot noir tight to my breast and headed for the checkout counter.

By the way - I have consulted several authorities on the capitalization of varietals, but there is not a consensus. Most agree that if the varietal is attached to a proper name (Castle Rock Pinot Noir), then it’s capitalized, but if it’s by itself, it’s not, so I’m going with that. I didn’t want the inconsistencies in the capitalization to distract you from the meat of this post. Oh, but now you’re thinking about meat.

Whatever.

Pinot noir (beginning of sentence capitalization) is a fussy grape, but I don’t have to tell you that. You’ve seen the movie or read the book that single-handedly caused the rise of pinot noir and the fall of merlot. The problem is that those fussy grapes don’t grow well just anywhere and not every wine maker is capable of turning them into the unbelievably yummy nectar that I love so much.

So - there are a lot of really bad pinots out there and even a bottle of Castle Rock Mendocino isn’t worth my money for two dollars less than the Willamette Valley bottle, but that 11.99 WV bottle rivals many over $20. It’s got that heavenly nose (note the fancy wine-speak) and the subtle complexities (I’m nauseating even myself at this point) that make a good pinot noir good.

A bad pinot noir (and there are many) has no complexity, tastes like diluted Nyquil, and smells like Kool-aid that’s been sitting in the sun too long. Most pinot noirs under about $16 fall into that category aren’t drinkable in my humble-certainly-not-a-wine-expert opinion.

I can find plenty of cabernet sauvignon under $10 that I can drink, but it’s not the same experience. It’s drinking wine - not the sipping, savoring, enjoying every last drop wine that a decent pinot noir is.

As an endnote, because I can - because it’s my blog…  I’ll tell you also that I picked up a bottle of $4 wine at Whole Foods last week. It was AWFUL. El Sancho Escudero Spanish Red Wine. I know. I should’ve known by the label and the price, but the display was enticing and for four bucks, I figured I’d give it a shot. Bad decision. Steer clear.  It’s wine-flavored water.

So ends todays wine-related blog post. Happy Friday. Enjoy something yummy.

Cheers!

                   Visit me on Twitter (@CeceliaHalbert)