If you believe(d) in Santa, what would you ask him? Here are a few excerpts (unedited) from high school students at Ridgemont High.
Dear Santa,
For Christmas, I would like to get all my piercings and tattoos done....I would like a huge trail of stars leading into a flower on my back and two doves on my chest. And with all of that I would also like some numbing cream so I don't feel the needles jabbing into me. That would be an amazing gift!
I've got a few questions fer "Mr. Claus." Why haven't you died yet? I mean hey, your like a bejilling years old now. How do you know if I've been a good girl or a naughty girl? Are you stalking me? Are you Jesus? Why are your elfs so small? Are they legal midgets? Why are you only white and not black or Mexican? Why do you give people naughty gifts when they are suppose to be good? Are you sure your not a poser?
--Amanda (signed with a heart)
Dear Santa,
If you are real, I have a few questions for you. If you have magic how come all the problems (such as war) aren't fixed? Do you even care? Why did you limit yourself to only nine reindeer? I would have at least 21 of them. Why don't you get stuck in the chimney? Magic isn't real so there has to be a logical reason. Do you ever get sad? If you don't, you're very weird....How did you find Mrs. Claus? Did the elves set you up? Why are elves so short? Do they have an issue? How does Global Warming affect you? You house has to be on fire or something!
If I may, I would like to tell you what I want for Christmas. all I want is for my family to all get along and be happy. I know that's pretty much impossible but that's all I truely want.
Your pal,
Marie
(but you probably already knew that)
Dear Santa,
Right now, I can't tell if you're actually reading this letter, skimming through it, or not even reading it at all. Last year, it seems as though you didn't read it at all, again. I don't think that it's the letters getting lost in the mail; I've been sending 28 copies of the letters in the mail for the last four years. I think you're intentionally ignoring my letters asking what I want and then give me what you see fit. I've been asking for an AK-47 for three years, and yet you think I should have a pair of socks with reindeers on them. I don't like reindeers, I just eat them. Knowing this, I've decided to ask for money so I can buy the gifts myself, and so you don't mess it up like last year.
Sincerely,
Tom
Dear Santa,
Hello, 'Santa'. Tell me, what is your secrete to immortality? Who old are you dude? Would my theory be correct? Are you a very old vampire? That would work because you only show up after dark for one night and you have live for a VERY long time....
...Talk to you later,
Macy
Dear Santa,
Now that you are real I have a few questions for you. I've been waiting my whole life for this moment so I hope you reply to this message. This is my 14th year on this planet and I believe its the year that my wishywishes are heard. This year I want world peace more than anything. That why I like Christmas so much . It feels like my stress level is reduced, I feel more peaceful, and best of all I'm spending the whole time with my family. I just want all of the violence, drama and fighting to end. Yes, I understand that I am on the "naughty list", but I promise if my wish comes true I will try my best to never, ever be on the naught list again! And if you can't do that this year then my second choice would be for me or my grandmother to win the lottery. She has pretty much dedicated her whole life to trying to win the lottery. We have both promised to donate some of it to St. Judes research hospital and the ASPCA center.
Thank you,
Julie
Dear Santa,
I have been great this year. I would really appreciate it if you would bring me something that I would really love to have. I heard that you can make anything happen with your magic make anything possibility for sad and kids in need. So I was wondering if you could make my family happier. Make them stop smoking make it so we become closer than that. If not that could you please let me be able to see my dad more than I do now? I miss him a lot. My mom says he is a lousy dad. But I really don't think so. I also heard you can see everybody all around the world young kid's teenagers and adults. So you probably would think that. I would also like for you to convince my mom to trust me more and let me have more freedome than I do now. But I don't think you can convince her to do that so you don't have to bother with that if you don't want to. And the finally thing I would like for you to do is for me to erase most of my past make everyone forget about a lot of stuff about me. Make me feel like a new kid, so I could make new friends. I would love for you to convince my mom to get my belly pierced. I would love you for that to.
Sincerely,
Courtney
Dear Santa,
I have many questions for you. For one, how is it possible for you to go around the world for everyone's Christmas in one night? How do you fit down the chimney? Many people think this is magic. But magic isn't real. How long have you been doing this? If you've been doing this for hundreds of years, how haven't you died of old age yet? If you're supposed to bring peace, why is there war? Shouldn't you be controlling and stopping this? Since you have special powers or "magic", why can't you stop all the worlds issues like global warming? Global warming kills tons of animals. Don't you love animals? Maybe you just love reindeers, since they're you're only transportation. That's not very nice, Santa. Since you live in the North Pole, what's your address. Maybe I can come visit you sometime.
Now for my Christmas, I only want....
Love,
Melissa
Well, Santa? Don't you love animals? Do ya or don'tcha?
Monday, December 27, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
today in self-pity
I've read a lot about narcissism lately.
As it turns out, narcissism is trendy:
Well, whatever. This post is going to be all about me and I'm going to skip flogging myself. If that makes you a little bilious already, better to head on over to etsy for some pouncing instead.
Christmas vacation started with our usual romp to visit our families of origin in the Clara City area. The holiday always begins this way for my sons, with a weekend trip to exchange gifts and enjoy visits with grandparents and aunts/uncles and cousins. It was a quiet, warm gathering with in-laws but all was not so well with my own family. Without sharing all the gritty details, I can share what everyone shares about these situations: it wasn't my fault.
The specifics don't matter. What matters is that Mom died, and with her was supposed to go all the drama and emotional butchery of decades of alcoholism. And then there was a stepmother and that was something new and dreadful to adjust to, and yet it worked out. This year was supposed to be the year that things would be good again. I missed Dad and anticipated my delightful nieces with feverish anticipation. And yet I found myself, half-jokingly and half-wishfully asking him, "Are you sure they are my brothers? All these years I've wanted that old joke about being adopted to be true but damn it, we all have to look so much alike." I was trying to joke my way into comforting him, but it sounded as sad as we both felt.
Tonight I listened to a podcast of NPR's Fresh Air and heard Terry Gross asking Carlos Eire about his experience as a Cuban-American refugee. Eire was a child and in one foster home he suffered from malnutrition that caused his back to grow askew. He discussed how he never saw himself in a mirror and didn't realize anything was really wrong with his physical form until long after, when his aunt arrived in the states and said almost immediately, "What happened to your back?" He later was shocked to see himself in a picture and only then understood the extent of his physical malformation. He still has the picture, Eire says, and looking at it still upsets him.
Visiting home last weekend and having this typically bellicose experience with my brother and finding myself defending my father and wondering to high heaven if I was doing the right thing and examining and re-examining my actions and motives--all of this left me looking at a picture of us for the first time and realizing (suddenly and too late) that with or without her, we are malformed. Horrified, I realize that we are significantly, at our core, irrevocably and without question, damaged. We will never walk normal. We will never be normal. We are broken, ;ike a back that is bent from malnutrition. It makes it difficult to look at one's self straight on without shuddering.
I'm so done with her. She's the most narcissistic person I know.
Narcissism will be no longer be a disorder as defined by the DSM-IV.
As it turns out, narcissism is trendy:
Well, whatever. This post is going to be all about me and I'm going to skip flogging myself. If that makes you a little bilious already, better to head on over to etsy for some pouncing instead.
Christmas vacation started with our usual romp to visit our families of origin in the Clara City area. The holiday always begins this way for my sons, with a weekend trip to exchange gifts and enjoy visits with grandparents and aunts/uncles and cousins. It was a quiet, warm gathering with in-laws but all was not so well with my own family. Without sharing all the gritty details, I can share what everyone shares about these situations: it wasn't my fault.
The specifics don't matter. What matters is that Mom died, and with her was supposed to go all the drama and emotional butchery of decades of alcoholism. And then there was a stepmother and that was something new and dreadful to adjust to, and yet it worked out. This year was supposed to be the year that things would be good again. I missed Dad and anticipated my delightful nieces with feverish anticipation. And yet I found myself, half-jokingly and half-wishfully asking him, "Are you sure they are my brothers? All these years I've wanted that old joke about being adopted to be true but damn it, we all have to look so much alike." I was trying to joke my way into comforting him, but it sounded as sad as we both felt.
Tonight I listened to a podcast of NPR's Fresh Air and heard Terry Gross asking Carlos Eire about his experience as a Cuban-American refugee. Eire was a child and in one foster home he suffered from malnutrition that caused his back to grow askew. He discussed how he never saw himself in a mirror and didn't realize anything was really wrong with his physical form until long after, when his aunt arrived in the states and said almost immediately, "What happened to your back?" He later was shocked to see himself in a picture and only then understood the extent of his physical malformation. He still has the picture, Eire says, and looking at it still upsets him.
Visiting home last weekend and having this typically bellicose experience with my brother and finding myself defending my father and wondering to high heaven if I was doing the right thing and examining and re-examining my actions and motives--all of this left me looking at a picture of us for the first time and realizing (suddenly and too late) that with or without her, we are malformed. Horrified, I realize that we are significantly, at our core, irrevocably and without question, damaged. We will never walk normal. We will never be normal. We are broken, ;ike a back that is bent from malnutrition. It makes it difficult to look at one's self straight on without shuddering.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
candy
Shligityshlog almost tricks you into thinking a swear word is on the horizon, no?
Pig Candy is a favorite holiday delight. For those of you who aren't familiar with this simple recipe, you're a mere twenty minutes from rapture--and a heart attack. Take a pound of bacon and lay it in a cake pan. Smash a bunch of brown sugar on it and bake at 350 for twenty minutes. There are many variations of Pig Candy, I have discovered, but none appeals to me so much as the original recipe. You can add pecans or use honey or maple syrup in place of brown sugar. But come on. Brown sugar. How come you do taste so good???
Every year I try to think of a way to thank my boss for putting up with me. I can be pretty challenging. So can he. We struggle as former friends and equals who have changed over to a boss/employee relationship in which he is a football coach and I am an academic, and in which we don't always see eye-to-eye about the priorities of a given situation in the school. We have a shared a lot of wonderful and heartbreaking moments, including the births of several of our children and personal tragedies such as the death of a parent and the development of autism in a child. We've developed from relatively inexperienced young toughs into tried professionals and we've shared a lot of happiness and sorrow over the same kids in our building. Because of the small size of the building, our entire staff shares in the victories and losses of our kids. There have been some funny moments, such as being scared witless and unthinkling punching him in the gut (when we were equals of course) and watching him stand up and bang his head into a locker so hard that little birds and stars flew around his head in a circle so that I stifled a laugh and he said through gritted teeth, "No, go ahead." (Never mind the funny moments involving my embarrassment.) There have been scary moments when a kid was threatening suicide, when a staff member was suffering and when someone was hurt in the building. The grossest moment of all was seeing him put on a plastic glove and peel the tip of a kid's finger from a door that had pinched it off and then drive away with it to match it up with the fingerless kid who was already at the emergency room. There are so many stories, but where was I? Oh yes, Pig Candy. This year we cemented our relationship with the whopperest whopper of a yelling match we've every had. Things were thrown and one of us, (though not until he left) actually crumpled to the floor. Still, it is only the heartiest of boss/employee relationships that bears one of those and is willing to meet for a mending session three days later, where both parties feel sorry and are quick to move on.
Let us depart from this homage to such a long and well-tested relationship here to speak of something much more shallow. That would be the two new teachers in the building this year. Both have taught officially less than a year and one has already been part of a rumor about my impending pregnancy (much exaggerated) and therefore not made a good impression with me. The other is a perfect gentleman of 24. If I were to guess, raised Catholic, with the manners any mother would be proud of (and these are pretty high standards right here) and meticulous work habits. Furthermore, work ethic is beyond reproach and his wardrobe is certainly more savvy than any coach in the building. I saw him walking out in a 3/4 length wool coat recently and was frankly, stunned, to witness such fashion sense in a gentleman this far north. It's been my role with this young man to think of him as rather a boy since he is so new to the profession and because he looks extraordinarily young, even for his age. Yet over the past months, he has really grown on me as so few men in the building actually have...grooming habits...and read regularly...and so on. It was just a couple of weeks ago that he showed up on a Friday with a bit of stubble and it occurred to me that if he took off his shirt and leaned into the shadow with his hand to his chin just so, he'd make a nice Abercrombie and Fitch model.
How can I ever appropriately thank my boss for placing such a nice man and coincidentally delicious piece of eye candy right across the hall from me?
Get out the bacon and brown sugar.
Pig Candy is a favorite holiday delight. For those of you who aren't familiar with this simple recipe, you're a mere twenty minutes from rapture--and a heart attack. Take a pound of bacon and lay it in a cake pan. Smash a bunch of brown sugar on it and bake at 350 for twenty minutes. There are many variations of Pig Candy, I have discovered, but none appeals to me so much as the original recipe. You can add pecans or use honey or maple syrup in place of brown sugar. But come on. Brown sugar. How come you do taste so good???
Every year I try to think of a way to thank my boss for putting up with me. I can be pretty challenging. So can he. We struggle as former friends and equals who have changed over to a boss/employee relationship in which he is a football coach and I am an academic, and in which we don't always see eye-to-eye about the priorities of a given situation in the school. We have a shared a lot of wonderful and heartbreaking moments, including the births of several of our children and personal tragedies such as the death of a parent and the development of autism in a child. We've developed from relatively inexperienced young toughs into tried professionals and we've shared a lot of happiness and sorrow over the same kids in our building. Because of the small size of the building, our entire staff shares in the victories and losses of our kids. There have been some funny moments, such as being scared witless and unthinkling punching him in the gut (when we were equals of course) and watching him stand up and bang his head into a locker so hard that little birds and stars flew around his head in a circle so that I stifled a laugh and he said through gritted teeth, "No, go ahead." (Never mind the funny moments involving my embarrassment.) There have been scary moments when a kid was threatening suicide, when a staff member was suffering and when someone was hurt in the building. The grossest moment of all was seeing him put on a plastic glove and peel the tip of a kid's finger from a door that had pinched it off and then drive away with it to match it up with the fingerless kid who was already at the emergency room. There are so many stories, but where was I? Oh yes, Pig Candy. This year we cemented our relationship with the whopperest whopper of a yelling match we've every had. Things were thrown and one of us, (though not until he left) actually crumpled to the floor. Still, it is only the heartiest of boss/employee relationships that bears one of those and is willing to meet for a mending session three days later, where both parties feel sorry and are quick to move on.
Let us depart from this homage to such a long and well-tested relationship here to speak of something much more shallow. That would be the two new teachers in the building this year. Both have taught officially less than a year and one has already been part of a rumor about my impending pregnancy (much exaggerated) and therefore not made a good impression with me. The other is a perfect gentleman of 24. If I were to guess, raised Catholic, with the manners any mother would be proud of (and these are pretty high standards right here) and meticulous work habits. Furthermore, work ethic is beyond reproach and his wardrobe is certainly more savvy than any coach in the building. I saw him walking out in a 3/4 length wool coat recently and was frankly, stunned, to witness such fashion sense in a gentleman this far north. It's been my role with this young man to think of him as rather a boy since he is so new to the profession and because he looks extraordinarily young, even for his age. Yet over the past months, he has really grown on me as so few men in the building actually have...grooming habits...and read regularly...and so on. It was just a couple of weeks ago that he showed up on a Friday with a bit of stubble and it occurred to me that if he took off his shirt and leaned into the shadow with his hand to his chin just so, he'd make a nice Abercrombie and Fitch model.
How can I ever appropriately thank my boss for placing such a nice man and coincidentally delicious piece of eye candy right across the hall from me?
Get out the bacon and brown sugar.
Monday, December 13, 2010
it's been a while
and so much has happened that I barely know where to start. I decided the color of the blog, though deep and rich, also too much brought to mind something rotten in Denmark. I kept thinking of Lady Macbeth and needing to go wash my hands. Further, I decided to lighten up with titles and airs and such, and while there is no version of "bloggetyblog.blogspot.com" remotely available (must not be an original thought), there certainly was http://www.shligityshlog.blogspot.com/ and that's where you'll find me from this point forth. Perhaps it will help me keep the tone a big lighter. I haven't felt a bit light these days, what with Minnesota winter bringing on my typical blues, weight gain, missing my mother, a teen pregnancy, staff spats, neighborhood house fires, and a pre-pubescent son apparently going full-blown pubescent. A week or two ago, he went from the child who had been born seemingly out of a storybook (excepting long and painful labor and delivery) who had transformed into a full-on jerk. Am I allowed to say that? I wasn't going to until he broke up with his perfectly sweet girlfriend by sending her a (private) message on facebook. Now, before I air any further dirty laundry, let me just say that the only person more protective of this boy than me is his father, who has lately been protecting him from me. The boy and I bonded early and deeply and yet, of late, he's done to me exactly what seventeen years worth of weeping mothers could not have prepared me for. He's tossed me away, emotionally speaking, with nary a word nor glance, and along with me, apparently any consideration for my professional environment since 53 minutes a day he is one of my students. Topping it all off, he decided to split his English homework with his best friend last week and then exchange answers. In his opinion, this was sharing the burden. In my opinion, this was cheating, and he was promptly sent off to Saturday school and poked with sharp stick until his gall bladder became visible. Skip the gall bladder part; I called his father from school, panicking. "You be the teacher this time; I'll be the parent." That night, I was torn when I heard his dad lighting into him. As angry as I was at my son, I also wanted to protect him from his father's anger. The classic Clash of the Titans has begun: a boy and his father in their power struggle as a boy asserts his independence toward becoming a man, a man struggles to mold his son into a safe and moral man with a standard-of-living better than his own. How predictable could we be? This was my first week of being forty, his last month of being twelve. If he were seventeen, I'd feel so much better about this.
My father thought the entire situation was hilarious. My father had been a policeman, but might as well have been a fundamentalist Baptist. He literally witnessed the worst outcome of everything that can go wrong with a teenager and was determined to keep his own children safe from it. This was not cool when he pulled over my own boyfriend, his future son-in-law, riding three-wheeled ATV's illegally in town; now Dad could laugh as his former nightmare received his just desserts. Yet my hairdresser also found my dilemma comical and I was laughing too as I described it to her. She then told me that she was caught cheating on her eighth grade math final and was horrified later that spring when she attended a party with her parents and her math teacher was there! Would the teacher tell? I nearly rose out of the chair and ran out of the salon with my hair half-colored. Who dares cheat on a final?! And why hadn't the math teacher ALREADY called home??? Because of a parent like me, perhaps? Sigh. It's time to dig out that old classic that got me through my most painful professional cheating scandal, Why Kids Lie. It will help me put my son's behavior in perspective. And then I need to get on with life, mine. Clearly he needs guidance, but maybe this umbrella parent needs to shelter herself for a little while.
My father thought the entire situation was hilarious. My father had been a policeman, but might as well have been a fundamentalist Baptist. He literally witnessed the worst outcome of everything that can go wrong with a teenager and was determined to keep his own children safe from it. This was not cool when he pulled over my own boyfriend, his future son-in-law, riding three-wheeled ATV's illegally in town; now Dad could laugh as his former nightmare received his just desserts. Yet my hairdresser also found my dilemma comical and I was laughing too as I described it to her. She then told me that she was caught cheating on her eighth grade math final and was horrified later that spring when she attended a party with her parents and her math teacher was there! Would the teacher tell? I nearly rose out of the chair and ran out of the salon with my hair half-colored. Who dares cheat on a final?! And why hadn't the math teacher ALREADY called home??? Because of a parent like me, perhaps? Sigh. It's time to dig out that old classic that got me through my most painful professional cheating scandal, Why Kids Lie. It will help me put my son's behavior in perspective. And then I need to get on with life, mine. Clearly he needs guidance, but maybe this umbrella parent needs to shelter herself for a little while.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)