Delight.

It’s been a minute since I wrote about my adventures in dating, and there’s a reason for that: I now officially hate dating. The last 7 years of stalkers and catfish and breadcrumbers and situationships and even perfectly decent men who simply lack any kind of nascent personality has got me shook, blog world. SHOOK.

Even the ones who are solid end up nuts or flaky eventually, it seems. I met this urgent care doctor on Match. Scratch that. We never met -- he was always unavailable, so we never got past texting. Oddly, he kept changing his name, I kid you not. First Jeff. Then Troy. Then Grant. "For security purposes, you understand?" But there were legit pictures of him all over his profile page, and if you're trying to conceal your online activities, camouflaging your pictures or occupation is probably more vital than covering up your name. 

This dude would text me at 3 a.m. and when I didn't reply because I was asleep, he'd apologize for obviously disturbing me and wasting my time and then delete his whole account in a fit of theatric angst. Then he'd reactivate the whole thing and send me nothing but lips emojis. When I noted that he seemed a bit erratic and said I didn't think we were a good fit, he responded by blocking me entirely. Then he super-liked my profile on a different app. Dramatic, much? 

I'd post his picture here so you could get a visual effect, but when I try to Google him, nothing comes up, so probably none of the names he gave me were legit.

Whatever. No real harm done. I abandoned Match for a different app. After many months of swiping left on camouflaged Midwesterners holding up dead deer by their antlers and gunning their crotch rockets, I recruited an older woman I work with at Persimmon, the boutique where I work part-time. Judy, it must be noted, took to Tinder like a duck to water. It went like this:

Judy: Ew, no.

Me: (swipes left)

Judy: No.

Me: (swipes left)

Judy: Cute dog, but no.

Me: (swipes left)

Judy: WAIT! Go back. What was wrong with "Carl"?

Me: He's married, see?

Judy: My God. Okay, keep going...No...No, ugly...No....No.

Me: What about this guy? He likes sailing and wineries.

Judy: Put him in our shopping cart.

Me: (swipes right)

After an hour or so of this, Judy and I had accumulated quite a "shopping cart" full of potentials. It was a slow day at Persimmon.

Judy: Now what happens?

Me: It depends. They have to also swipe right on us in order to start communication.

Judy: This is so exciting. I'M INVESTED NOW!!!!!

Judy may be invested but I rarely am. That's why it seemed like a boon to match with a guy -- let's call him Justin -- who seemed full of rare potential.

A tattoo-covered math professor who created a video game to teach kids about social justice issues and is familiar with attachment theory?? Yes, please. I will!

Justin sent me his phone number but then declined to FaceTime in lieu of sending me maddening texts like, "Hey, Elle :-)" and "Hope you have a good day today."

After 3 days of trying to wittily generate conversation out of thin air, I quipped, "Man, these conversations of ours are really flowing, eh?!" My hope was that he would take me up on the face-to-face offer.

Instead, I received the following message: "I find your texts uninteresting and frustrating. It pains me to say this, but I wish to halt our communication."

I'm sorry, what?

WHAT?!?!

He finds me uninteresting?

UNINTERESTING!?!?!?!?!?

I am a goddamn motherfucking DELIGHT. 

A DELIGHT!!!!!!

Ask my 3 1/2 friends. No one has ever been bored by interacting with me, are you even kidding me right now, Justin?

"To be fair," said my friend Natasha, who is also single and maddeningly logical, "probably lots of men have been bored by me, but just ghosted me rather than telling me outright."

I cannot decide which is worse.

Reflection at the End of the 14th Year

This year started out with a woman from Admin calling me to say that, if possible, I needed to return to school two weeks early.  They had decided that now was an ideal time to switch learning platforms from Google Classroom to Canvas and the entire curriculum would need to be reformatted and uploaded for the 18,000 students about to return to classrooms. Apparently, battling a raging pandemic and enforcing mask-wearing were not enough of a challenge for us.

I threw myself into manipulating html code, which was no small feat since I barely know how to convert a Word file to a Google Doc. With the clock ticking down and the administrative decision not to close buildings for face-to-face learners, I was placed on a virtual “team” -- this because my face and abdomen had started erupting in massive red welts of inexplicable origin. After many specialists, Urgent Care visits, and rounds of Prednisone, it was determined simply that I was suffering from “stress.” The constant steroids made me so angry and unpredictable that I once started punching my own face to avoid punching someone else’s. The pressure was unimaginable.

Teaching on the virtual team did not lessen my stress, as it was supposed to. It turns out that teaching virtually is only less stress-inducing if you have decent broadband and tech support. The first days of virtual class were a complete disaster -- first, the students couldn’t hear me; then I couldn’t hear them; then their screens froze. In the end, I had to screen share, then type out instructions on how to update their software because none of them could hear the explanations I was giving.

The first assignment I gave was likewise a disaster: 1st hour turned it in fine; 2nd hour had 2 or 3 students with glitches; only half of 4th hour could even see the assignment; the link posted for only a few students by 5th hour; and 6th hour just gave up and played Hangman. I drank a lot of wine that night.

To counteract the dearth of tech support, I began getting to school earlier and earlier to pre-record lessons, starting my days at 3:30 a.m.  I developed insomnia because of the stress. I counted 150 emails in my inbox one morning when I started responding to them at 4 from bed. By 6 a.m. I was at my desk. I left at 6 p.m. covered in more hives and carrying epi-pens in case I went into anaphylaxis. 

I had to completely overhaul the way I taught and evaluated: rather than giving a single grade on a whole week’s worth of class work, I now had to grade one mini-assignment per day (for example, a thesis statement) for accountability, and so that I could verify my virtual students were on the right track before they turned in an entire essay incorrectly. When the amount of late work stretched nearly all the way across my classroom, I had to set a 48-hour cut-off. This was met with great displeasure but it was necessary for my survival (and that of the other teachers on the virtual team). There was simply no way to stay on top of the daily classwork assignments if we also had hundreds of late mini-assignments to grade. Performance grades remained open indefinitely.

As if this weren’t challenging enough, my 6th hour virtual class was also Zoom-bombed. A student streamed p0rn and racial slurs, also giving the class code out to many people none of us knew. No one was ever held accountable or punished, causing the intolerance and harassment to continue throughout the school year. Poetic justice is real, I think, and sometimes kids take matters into their own hands. That’s all I can really say about that.

Thirty-one students failed my English class this year, the same number to fail science and social studies, too. I threatened 4th hour face-to-face students: none of them would leave Room 517 until they turned in an essay so I could pass them. They acquiesced, grudgingly. But there was no way to force virtual students to turn in work. There are students on my roster, this final day of school, whose faces I’ve never seen, who never logged in for class or turned in a single sentence. The Department of Family Services was completely overwhelmed and could not follow through on any but the direst cases of child neglect. Educational neglect was at the bottom of the list.

As the school year wore on, I started to find a flow. Monthly Xolair injections took the place of steroids and rage. Virtual lessons flowed more smoothly as the students and I settled into a routine. We never did get the tech support we needed in order for students and teachers to communicate adequately over Zoom. From the first day of school to the last day, the students had to type out all of their questions, comments, and concerns in the platform’s chat feature because I couldn’t hear them. I still don’t know what some of them sound like, much less look like. I got to know their personalities through Zoom-chat. JD was the smart-alek who showed up late every day and then typed out, “I have arrived.” ES was the sweetheart who always asked how our weekend was and if we did anything fun. JF was the genius whose fingers couldn’t type as fast as his thoughts, so he was always pantomiming and mouthing answers. LC liked to distract the class by typing the word “poop” 47 times in an hour, apropos of nothing. I couldn’t stop him, either, because that would stop the chat feature for everyone, and it was the only way they had to communicate with me.

In the end, it was a shitshow of a year, to quote one of my yoga instructors. But it was also a good opportunity to break up the monotony. I’ve been wanting to try something different forever.

This was my 14th year in 8th grade English. The learning standards are the same in every district, which means a lot of them use the same anchor texts. If I cannot find a job teaching high school English, if I am forced to continue along this path for the next 13 years until retirement, I will have taught The Diary of Anne Frank 135 times. That’s too many times to teach anything… it stops being interesting and starts being rote. Then you get frustrated and bored, and the kids suffer. That's not fair to them. They've never heard of the Holocaust when the enter 8th grade.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have been interviewed and passed over for a high school position 7 times now. I know I could do that job, and my bosses here know I could do it, too. But for some reason, I can’t get the appointment. I wish I had known, back when I first came here, how notoriously difficult it is to get a transfer and beat out external candidates. I loathe the thought of switching districts AGAIN, but I also know I can’t teach 8th grade English for the next 13 years...I'm not sure what to do.

Teachers believe in a human's capacity for growth and change. It's why we do what we do. It only stands to reason, then, that we ourselves need new vistas to explore and new mountains to tackle. This pandemic year provided a not-wholly-unwelcome challenge, but I know it's not a permanent fix for the ennui and curmudgeonliness that I'm starting to detect in strong doses.

Something's gotta' give.

Nothin’ ta See Here

When I was in college, I took a linguistics class where I learned -- to my shock -- that a southern drawl is often viewed as sign of stupidity, not class. I remember my professor being equally as dumbfounded when I told her that southerners see their dialect as signifying a gentility, not backwardness. We agreed to disagree.

I moved to St. Pete when I was 10, meaning that I spent my formative years in South Carolina. I think I carried a lot more of the South with me than my younger siblings. When I get nervous or eager to please, I sometimes switch back to talking like, as I’ve now come to realize, a hick.

The other day, I was driving back from the Bootheel and listening to the book, Nothing to See Here on audio. It was fantastic! Seriously, it was weird and meaningful and funny and deep. The premise was so bizarre, I kept waiting for it to make sense.  It never did, and then I decided that it was a metaphor for something, but I would not allow myself to think of what because I'm experimenting with not thinking too deeply sometimes, just enjoying things as they appear on the surface.

Anyway, a Tennessee senator has two children whom he basically hides from the world because they have an awkward condition: they spontaneously combust sometimes. Just burst into flames. No one can figure out the phenomenon, but they have to keep it under wraps, so Senator Roberts' wife Madison reaches out to her old boarding school roommate.

Lillian’s response: "This is weird, Madison. You want me to raise your husband's fire children." She’s a pothead who isn't really doing anything else with her life, so she eventually agrees to give raising the fire children a whirl.

And so she does. The narrator did a great job with all the southern accents, and you could really picture these fire children bursting into flames when they got good and mad!

The book was a little longer than my car ride, so I ended up finishing it on my way to an interview a day or two later. It ended on a bittersweet note and I was satisfied. I turned my car off and went into the building to meet two principals and the English department chair.

It took me several sentences to realize all my words came out in a drawl. I was mortified. Yet it was impossible -- impossible -- to stop!!! I had forgotten that I can revert back to how I was raised when I get nervous, and the narrator in that damn audiobook triggered me. I talked in a southern drawl throughout the entire interview because I could not, could not seem to get back to normal. Fortunately, I will never see those people again. I think we all realized it was not a good fit.

I don’t know what the moral of this story is because I’m not thinking about it too deeply. But you should totes check out this great book! (Maybe the hardback, though, instead of the audiobook? Unless you enjoy looking like a moron.)