Émilie

That song needs to be my mantra.  Sondheim is such a genius.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of perhaps the most important moment in my life so far.  And I’m talking about a real zinger of a moment–not just one of those painfully trickled-out, life changing events like the months of process and paperwork it was to choose a college, start grad school, or work out the details of being hired to my first real job.

No, I’m talking about a year ago today when a tall, skinny, curly-haired figure resembling Tigger in demeaner bounced up to me after my first service at the Piedmont Unitarian Universalist Church in Charlotte.  I sat down to enjoy some good ol’ fashioned potluck with this man to whom I shall be forever grateful, and he invited me over to what I would later learn was called The Great House to join him and several other young Charlotte folks for dinner.  In that bizarre and wonderful moment, I decided to take a chance and try to establish a whole new group of friends in my new city of residence.  Thank you, Nathan.  Thank you for being the wonderful, friendly, open-armed, open-hearted man that you always are.  I owe you more thanks than I can possibly ever express.

“Thanks” of course because the next night at dinner he introduced me to the love of my life, whom I was able to rescue from an entirely different kind of moment.

“….Even now and then a bad one.  But if life were only moments, then you’d never know you had one.”

I’ve had several conversations with my dad lately about how weird it is for me trying to find my place between kid and adult.

I had a sort of out-of-body experience on June 9 when I was on my knees in the school cafeteria conducting my troup of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders in the graduation song for the 5th graders.  The parents were behind me in rows of folding chairs, and I had a flashback to my graduation where my music teacher was conducting us.  My dad said he would need a video of me teaching in order to believe it.  I’m not his little girl anymore.  I no longer need to sit on his lap nightly for him to untangle my long mane of curly hair.

Michael has teased me before for still calling my parents’ house “home.”  I don’t live there anymore, but I haven’t established stronger roots anywhere else.

I’ve heard the expression “home is where the heart is.”  I guess that means I have a lot of homes.  With my parents in Greensboro.  With my grandparents in Winston.  With the Yungebergs in Chapel Hill.  With my girlfriends.  With Robin.

I recently re-watched Garden State and Zach Braff has another idea about home in the way that it concerns the definition of family. “Maybe that’s all family really is–a group of people that miss the same imaginary place.”

In that sense, I also have lots of families.  Maybe Michael’s pretty smart for calling his cherished people “framily”–that is, friends + family.  My girlfriends and I miss Spencer.  Not necessarily the physical dorm, but rather the imaginary bond it created between us.

All of my wonderful imaginary places are still in the past for me.  Maybe you know you’re an adult when the imaginary place you and your framily miss is the place where you currently live.

Michael, Shun, and I went up to Chapel Thrill this weekend to go to Michelle’s baby shower and to visit as many lovely peoples as possible.  Last night Bert and Kate recommended Ted’s Montana Grill for dinner.  I was not optimistic as it seemed a little pricey and like it would be the type of place to have ginormous portions, but I was delightfully surprised.

The humongous bison head mounted on the wall seemed a bit ominous, but the marvelous mission of this restaurant soon became apparent.  We sat down to a table covered with a recycled paper table cloth, and were quickly served our drinks with thick paper drinking straws.  This place is entirely green friendly!  We then got to taste a sample of their bison pot roast and gravy, which I wasn’t sure I was cool about… until I tasted it!  Bison is apparently much like beef, yet far less fatty.  It was delicious.

I was almost unable to choose from the vast number of tempting entrees until Michael suggested that I pick the first one I’d seen and that we’d return soon to try the others.  So I enjoyed the bison pot roast and gravy with a side of  mashed potatoes and fresh sauteed green beans.  I also helped myself to a taste of Michael’s cedar plank salmon (the best salmon I’ve ever had) and Kate’s tuna.  I didn’t taste a thing that wasn’t divine!

Delicious food plus great service plus a green attitude equaled one of the most enjoyable meals I’ve had in a long time!

Then as if the night couldn’t get better, we decided to head out to Four Corners for a few drinks.  Michael grabbed us some trivia game consoles so that we could play along with the TV in the bar.  Normally (as Monica can attest after much experience), I am lousy at trivia.  However, armed with a happy attitude after dinner, I just seemed to be totally on the ball… and won the game out of all the players in the whole place!  It was quite a rush to not only discover that I wasn’t necessarily useless at trivia, but also to WIN!  This called for a celebratory drink!  Several in fact…

The company was great (TGM, Shun, Eric, Becca, Kaitlin, and AMT), the alcohol was on someone else’s tab, and I was giggly beyond all reason. 

…and week …and school year.  (If you don’t recognize the reference to a certain marvelous children’s book, I pity your lacking childhood.)

Alright, so as marvelous as it feels to slander my entire experience as a first-year teacher, I have to admit that the few golden moments should not be overshadowed by the fact that these last few days before spring break have been some of the most miserable in my life.  I hate my job.  For now at least.

We’ve had some rainy days this week which means indoor recess, and I’m not sure how you could possibly measure who hates this condition more: the students or the teachers.  The kids go nuts, and it’s bad for all involved.  However, I decided to pull a copy of The BFG by Roald Dahl out of the trunk of my car.  (Hey–you can’t deny that this is a handy thing for an elementary school teacher to have at all times.)  I drew on some of my long unused dramatic flair to bring the book to life, and I got several kids hooked, which pretty much made my day.

Similarly on Monday I was so miserably and deliriously tired by the last period of the day (3rd grade math), that while trying to do a brief review of addition and subtraction rules for large numbers,  I randomly pulled out this crazy old Transylvanian/Italian/witch lady accent.  (I am not suggesting that there are any elderly women of this mixed origin, but more that I went with the flow, and the kids thought it was hilarious.)  Suddenly, addition and subtraction became the most interesting and engaging lesson I’d taught in a long time.  I had the absolute attention of every child, and my weakest student became very helpful as old lady Mays insisted that she was “not-a so goood with-a beeg numbers” and could she please promise me that subtraction would not be too hard.  It wasn’t.

So I guess that even with no support, no materials or curriculum that it’s possible to have fun sometimes.

This recipe (which, btw, I owe entirely to Monica’s brilliance) has made me quite famous in quite a few households, so I’m posting it here in case you’d like to attempt the magic on your own:

Almost Vegan Cookies*

from the kitchen of Monica and Emily

1/3 cup crunchy peanut butter (if you don’t use Skippy, add extra oil for best texture)

2 Tbsp. oil

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup milk

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup flour

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

1 cup oats

½ bag chocolate chips

Cream together wet ingredients (peanut butter, oil, sugar, milk, vanilla) on medium speed until smooth. Add dry ingredients and combine.  Bake on greased cookie sheets at 425˚ for 6 minutes for perfect, melt-in-your-mouth cookies. (Tbsp. sized balls work best.)

*To make this recipe truly vegan, substitute soy milk for regular milk, and use dark chocolate chips or a substitute.

I have only skimmed the surface of this fantastic (so I hear–I’m on page 8 ) book of feminism, and I have already been distracted by some fun discussion of word etymology and the power of words. I’d like to share:

Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, incite, pacify, teach, romance, pervert, unite, divide. ~inga muscio, p.8

How will you use your words today?

Even as much as I’d like to be the perfect teacher like my aunt Mary C, I recognize that sometimes I am using words to demean and demand more so than teach and inspire, but I think that we could all stand to be more conscious about our choice of words, tone, and body language. At least if you incite/divide/hurt/etc., do it purposefully and with full knowledge. Don’t forget that words that you may mean to soothe may have a different power on the listener. I challenge you to be more aware of your receivers.

Think about it.

May I lift my glass and give three cheers to two old friends from Greensboro who drove up (from South Charlotte) to join me for dinner!! I hadn’t seen Leslie-Ann in two years! I’m very lucky to have Gary living in town, and also that he was kind enough to share LA this time…

We (mostly I) talked for several hours about our jobs, our lives, and a few things we remembered from high school. In some ways, I felt oddly like an adult entertaining friends the same way my parents used to: madly rushing around to make the living room look presentable, then serving wine and talking loudly about boring adult stuff. On the other hand, we were eating pepperoni pizza and chocolate chip cookies…

It’s strange (and now I believe glorious) to be straddling the line between adult and youth, but LA, Gary and I did a great job tonight of enjoying the best of both worlds.

I love you two!!

I got to sleep in 3 whole hours…so it is now a nice fat 8:00 am. I say “fat” because the expression in French meaning “to sleep in” is faire la grasse matinée, which translates literally to “to make/have a fat morning.” I like to think that that means you are making the morning “fat” by making it longer, but it makes me giggle to think that it could also mean that the person sleeping in is the “fat” part… you lazy cow! How glorious.

The sleeping in this morning is of course grâce à (thanks to) less than 1/2 an inch of snow and now some very scary drip-droppy rain. So as my yankee colleagues laugh their asses off at us, I’m going to go back to bed and make some more fat morning.

Sadly, the Union Jack was flying here instead of the royal standard, so the Queen was out to lunch at one of her other residences.

Nevertheless, it was a remarkable experience!

The following entry is pieced together from an email I sent on December 24th at 2:00 PM:

It was another cold, gray British day today, but I have a good coat and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves regardless. Today we visited Windsor Castle. It wasn’t as lovely as some of the French residences I’d seen, but seeing as how the Queen still lives in it on the weekends, I could definitely tell it felt more like a home. (A ridiculously lavish and ceremonial home, but a home nonetheless.)

We were lucky that there weren’t any state visitors in the country, so we were able to view the state apartments (where foreign nobles/royals/important people still sleep!). We also got to walk up the red-carpeted entryway where these same important people would enter. It was really wild just to be there.

Windsor is also home to the world’s most famous doll house complete with miniatures that I can scarcely describe. The house has working electricity, plumbing, and miniature works of art recreated by the artists themselves in some cases!

We also got to see the changing of the guard, and the band that led in the new guard was playing Christmas carols, so the crowd sang along, and it was delightfully corny!

It was a delightful trip, but we came home exhausted, so we spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in front of the telly and working on Robin’s new jigsaw puzzle.

So now my first conscious day in London is coming to a close (I slept for almost the entirety of yesterday minus an AMAZING meal in SOHO at a great vegetarian restaurant), and aside from being exhausted, I’m having a marvelous time.

This morning we took a tour of the Tower of London, and our tour guide was hilarious. He told a lot of specific stories about historical people that really made it possible to imagine yourself there hundreds of years ago. He took every possible opportunity to make fun of Americans, but it was enjoyable. It was so entertaining that I almost forgot about how dreadfully numb my toes were!

Inside the tower we got to see the crown jewels… and damn. That was just crazy! The tour guide told the women to look down at their left hands…. then at the jewels… then back at their hands. One of the scepters held a 530 carat diamond! (No pressure, Michael. )

We really haven’t seen anything that I would classify as beautiful, but I am loving how old everything is! We are tracing the footsteps of history! Robin told us that even one of the tube lines we rode was first used in 1906! I’d never been interested in the history of British royalty, but seeing the places where they’d lived, married, and beheaded one another (yeah, welcome to London) made it much more interesting.

We ate lunch in a classic English pub. The “chips” (=fries) were delicious. Then we popped over to briefly walk around a modern art museum, but we didn’t care for it much, so we left early to get our daily groceries and return home to make dinner in our nice, warm flat. It’s great to be out of the cold!

More soon! Cheerio, loves!