Hold Your Breath, Coachella 2014

My Groundlings castmates had been talking about this newest season of SNL and I was ashamed I hadn't watched any of it yet so I made it a point to check it out. This season has 6 (!!!) new cast members, which makes it a little hard to swallow, except that they had so many good sketches, and made fun of themselves for all the new additions, including the on the first episode, which featured musical guest Arcade Fire (notorious for their large group) and sketch of a game show called "New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?" I was laughing and texting Kathleen through the whole thing, it was tooooo good!

So I finally put their song Reflektor (which was sent to me weeks ago by a friend, oops) on a mix and got to listening to it and am just in loveeeee! I was driving home and singing it in my head, wishing it was on the radio, and then it came on! Coinkidink? I think not! I was speeding down the Riverside freeway in the early afternoon with the windows down, the sun setting and just thinking how truly fantabulous it would be if Arcade Fire headlined Coachella 2014. I mean, I had plans to headline it myself with my friend, but I'm thinking since we haven't rehearsed our Blahna Del Taco songs in awhile we might not be ready, and the next best thing will be to see Arcade Fire! Here's hoping.

Oh, and I am not picky about coffee AT ALL, but these pumpkin flavored anything from the gas stations are so awful, the last one I got tasted like sweet cigarette ash tray spice coffee. Beware. Leave the pumpkin to the professionals.

Overheard At A Gas Station

One thing in schools today that brings the Trunchbull out in me (read Matilda) are these damn PHONES. I swear they should be illegal on school campuses. Students should have to check them in at the office in the mornings. Your parents need to get ahold of you? Guess what, SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME, the rest of us survived and stayed in touch with our parents JUST FINE. Everyone's "right" to their personal property in the shape of a phone is robbing everyone of their right to an education. It takes forever for everyone to put them away to start class. They are constantly distracted by the cameras, pictures, clock, calculator and information, to say nothing of the games on them. They constantly have earbuds hanging out of their shirts to listen to music inbetween classes. I hear music playing in the middle of class. Then there is the crying and accusations when someone loses a phone. And the parents are no better! Someone's phone rang because their parent was calling to say they would be coming to pick them up. Don't they realize their kid is in class, learning, with other kids in class?! Today I had to leave a class with a homework assignment and wrote out a detailed list of their project and what it should include. I reminded them to write that all down in case they would forget. Do you know what happened? I had a crowd of 30+ students at the board, pointing their iPhones at the whiteboard to take a picture, because apparently writing that down was just too much effort for them. This is the world today! I seriously, seriously hate phones in school. Wow, I sound cranky, but this is the next generation people, we're all the village raising the children.

On a better note, here's a story of what can happen if you leave your phone alone for a few minutes! I had to get gas on the way home, and since these crazy middle schoolers sometimes lead me to drink (coffee) I went in to get iced coffee from the gas station mart. There was a long line at the register and I didn't have my phone on me, which meant I had to stand in line undistracted and without even music for a full few minutes. A woman was loudly in a conversation on her phone behind me, so I started to listen, and this is what I got:

"...and then she said the cops were out and looking for her and I said, 'girl, get outta here, I don't need more of this drama at my house'"

I promise that was verbatim! Who does this woman hang out with? Are the cops still looking for her friend? Is she worried about aiding and abetting a fugitive? What was the other drama in her home? Would she consider herself a drama-free person otherwise? These were just a few of the questions I had, but I was happy I didn't have my phone in that line so that I was able to take in the natural scene and inhabitants of Riverside.

Lastly, one of my prized possessions, my Stephen Colbert bag, which I have turned into my subbing bag, was noticed by a student today:

He called from across the room: "Miss, is that John F. Kennedy on your bag?"

I started laughing. The class always gets really quiet when I laugh, I don't know why. They're fascinated that there are things that amuse the teacher, they feel that the world they're in is all for and about them, I guess.

I said, "No, it's not, but I'm very impressed you are aware of John F. Kennedy, and you're right that it does probably look like him from a distance."

"Oh. Is it just another old, boring dead guy?"

I laughed more. "No, it's actually a young, super funny alive guy."

And because it only seems right to end every conversation with a student this way, I finished with: "Now do your work."

The Color Run

I never did get a chance to talk about how awesome last weekend was when i went down to San Diego to partake in the Color Run. I was down Friday night, James flew in from the Bay Area, and we all had a loverly evening catching up and going to bed sadly early, to be up for the 7:45a call time down at Qualcomm. Priya ended up having an event for work, so Daniel came in her stead.

We had bought Gatorades the night before, so we did a few morning shots and then spiked our Gatorades and took them down for our walk. And when I say walk, I am not kidding. We all just strolled along leisurely, letting people pelt us with color and sippin' our dranks in the southern sunshine. It really could not get better than that!

We took the trolley back to downtown and got a delicious unlimited-mimosa brunch which so knocked us out, we missed our wine tasting appointment at the Wine Bank, but ordered in pizza that revived us enough to pick up a few cases of drinks to take to Kunal's apartment by Petco Park for some rounds of True American, which comes from the show The New Girl (which I do not watch) but is something like "half drinking game and half-Candyland, with a parkour element." Some of the questions a player could choose were trivia, so I started to love making the answers to ALL of my trivia "Riverside". It came down to a tagline of "I will also accept 'Riverside'". For instance, I posed the trivia "Name the capital of North Dakota." Everywhere went around and offered answers and I said "The correct answer is Bismarck. I would have also accepted... Riverside." It was funsies!

Okay well off to Groundlings with me. Hope everyone's having a nice weekend.

I Don't Even Go There

Recently I was reminded of what I already knew: I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. I AM NOT A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER.

The teacher was out sick unexpectedly so there were no lesson plans. The other teachers came to try to help throw some things together, but we didn't get very far. Should have been easy, right? Just read a story, go out and play, count to ten and call it a day. Um, NO. Kids at that age canNOT be taken out of their routine under any circumstances. I couldn't even get through a story. I had to stop after every page to tell them to be quiet so everyone could hear the story. We couldn't stay quiet to listen to directions for a project. And I had run out of ways to say be quiet. They were so cute at recess when they came to me to put on their jackets for them and tie their shoes, but ultimately, it was a verrrrrrrry long 3 1/2 hours.

Today, however, I was much more in my element. I got to do high school English for sophomores and theyyyyy wereeeeee awesome. We were reading an O. Henry short story and poem that dealt with themes of compassion, so they had a quick write to discuss an event where they felt compassion or saw someone else use compassion, the definition of which is "to feel sorry for the suffering of others". One asked me if he could write about Harry Potter, and I had to admit that while I understood the compassion evoked, we should write about real people. When he insisted Harry Potter was real, I had to remind him that as Muggles, we hadn't seen the Wizarding community to our knowledge, and these should be first-hand accounts.

Another class was having problems settling in, so I told them they all needed to be thinking or writing, so it should be quiet, and if anyone couldn't think of an example, they could easily write about feeling sorry for me, suffering through this class as a substitute, at which point, one girl yelled out "She doesn't even go here!" and another retorted "she just has a lot of feelings" and I. Almost. Died. It's a Mean Girls quote and it was so appropriately used, I couldn't even maintain a poker face and just started laughing everywhere, which they loved, and then immediately went to work.

They ended up being one of the best classes I ever had, ever. They listened when I explained the literary devices used in the O. Henry story, they wrote answers diligently, popcorn read (at their request) perfectly, and asked such deep, involved questions that we got to get some good discussions going. Why can't more of them quote Mean Girls in the middle of class?

Middle School Reality Show

What perfect little students I had today. That almost doesn't even seem right. I took over the second half of the day for a middle school social studies class, and the students were somehow great. They stayed in their seats, and were working, but weren't silently quiet, which is what makes them great to me. They were still talking, and asking questions, and making jokes, but not to a disruptive level, and that's what made them near perfection.

I still had to tell them that we only sing Miley Cyrus to ourselves in our head, and that we're not going to make friends by stealing pencils, but they also were collectively planning a reality show for their school, figuring out the US checks and balances system by themselves, explaining Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea in their own words, figuring out if the class was more Team Peeta or Team Gale, and then more Team Edward or Team Jacob, and then asking me to sing a Bruno Mars song for them (which I regrettably did not). Maybe it's because I've been going to this school pretty often now, so I'm getting a lot of the same students, and they're starting to recognize me and know me and therefore STFU and listen when I talk, so that's always nice.

This past weekend I had an SNL marathon (thank you, Netflix) and re-discovered so many classic sketches (like all of Tim Meadows' OJ depictions) and discovered so many new sketches (Roberta's Thanksgiving!) and characters (Penelope...!) so, plenty new material for life in general. 

It's definitely fall around here, which I forget even is a season in southern California, but it is noticeable. It's depicted by dryness that makes you want to put lotion directly on your eyeballs, and wind that makes you want to gel your hair down to the sides of your face. Welcome, seasonal changes.

United States of Yucaipa

This is going to be a great example of why I absolutely should not teach elementary school. Get ready for it.

My day starts with yesterday. I subbed for a high school math class and then drove up to Big Bear and back. Yes, you read that right. A friend of mine needed to go pick up her children from Big Bear but was terrified to drive up the mountain, so asked me to drive for her. We stopped for dinner in Redlands around 7, then went up the mountain to pick up her kids and come back immediately, and I was so exhausted coming back I knew there was no way I'd be able to sub with these 6:50a calls, so I figured I probably wouldn't be subbing at all. Somehow, there was an assignment for a 9:00a call time. It was 3rd grade, but that seemed negligible to the joy of starting so late.

Ohhh third grade. What a grade. Today I really put on my game face.

I had been talking to a friend about the joys of improv, and how much I loved it. I loved the spontaneity, the teamwork connection, and the challenge of having to really take seriously things that are not at all serious. When a scene escalates to the point that you are talk show hosts worrying over a Red Bull granola bar crisis, and you have to act like it's the most pressing issue of the day... or you're playing a tourist in a Rome featuring five Coliseum's and you have to pretend it's the most normal thing in the world... that's part of what I love about it. So, today I was going to pretend like I was patently concerned about their issues.

"Oh my goodness. Your paper got scribbled on while you were at lunch? I am so sorry to hear that, but thank you so much for letting me know."

It was new, and hard to do for 34 students. Still, I had a much better day because of it, they responded better. It also reminded me of the Neil Gaiman tip that he gave a friend nervous about an audition because she wasn't someone who could do this. 

He said: "pretend that you are someone that is good at auditions. Then, do what they would do."

I think about that a lot, and I love it. It's gotten me through a lot of things ever since hearing it. Think about it.

Now the moment you've all been waiting for: exactly why I would probably be fired as an elementary school teacher:

We had to review proper vs common nouns. We read the common noun, then had an example of a proper noun, then needed to think of our own proper noun. For the common noun "country" we had the example "Mexico" and needed to think of another country we could list. Tons of hands shot up. 

"California" was the first guess. Which was fair. That gets confusing. Then I got Texas. Well, way to think outside the box. But, no. Then, the over-eager baby-faced glasses-wearing boy falling over in his desk because he was waving his hand so hard offered the best answer. "Yucaipa." 

Oh, I wanted to start laughing right then. He was so earnest, and I really wanted it to be true. If there weren't curriculum to follow, I would have taken that and run. If I were a teacher, I would have said, absolutely yes. And we would start saying the pledge of allegiance to the United State of Yucaipa. And we would create the flag, write out the national anthem and all get dual citizenship passports. But I had a lesson plan to follow.

After school, I went on my weekly Mt Rubidoux hike with my old high school sista Marisa, then got drinks downtown with an old friend of mine. She is a photographer for a few different newspapers and magazines and had recently photographed the owner and his wife for a piece on their restaurant, so they ended up comping our entire bill! Yeesh, not a bad system, thanks Mission Martini!

Tomorrow I have a job interview for a job in LA and I'm still very conflicted about the idea of going to LA or staying in Riverside! Eek. But I figure I'll just keep my options open for now. I'm not sure yet what I even think about the job, but I'm willing to interview and try to move forward and see what happens. It's hard to be drawn to the city but also feel so content in little ol' Riverside for the time being. Definitely wondering when that's going to fade. But it's been great to be so busy lately, I can't even keep up with myself. Hence these way-too-long entries that don't catch up on half of it. Welp.