Dirty Bathroom

I was at a restaurant the other day when I encountered a terrible combination: A "pull" restroom exit and hand dryers instead of paper towls. So how am I supposed to get out of the freaking bathroom?

See, I'm not really a germophobe; it's just that I hate germs. The crux of the matter is that lots of people are just plain gross. I know this because there are many times when I'm in the bathroom doing my thing, hear the *flush* of a neighboring toilet, and then do NOT hear the sink. Those people who just touched their manhood are touching the door with their horrid hands. The door that I'll have to touch in a minute. Right before I go back to eating my food.

And it's even worse than that. If a person can't be bothered to wash their hands after something as gross as going to the bathroom, what else are they touching without washing their hands?

I can only imagine.

So this door handle is now worse than the loaf of moldy bread at the bottom of a disused dumpster in a pool of stagnant water housing a colony of mosquito larve. And I get to touch it and then finish eating my dinner! Yum!

Surely others have this problem, but I never hear anyone discussing it at any length. That forces me to consider that my friends do this, too, and so I may have to turn them in. In my mind, this is nothing less than bioterrorism, and the Department of Homeland Security should go after them. I'm happy to help.

This door is a "Red" on the Terror Alert Scale.
I've no doubt it could incapacitate a city block.

So back to the problem. Normally I'd grab a piece of paper towel, open the door, and throw out the towel. Not an option. Some bathrooms (too few) have this cool hook that allows you to open the door with your forearm. Not an option. I'm absolutely stuck.

My mind goes through a few possible scenarios, most of them completely impractical.

Not likely.

The one that seems more promising is to wait for someone else to open the door and pretend that I just happened to be leaving at the same time, but that's not easy to pull off. I mean, I can act at little bit, but not in a bathroom, where awkward eye contact may occur.

And what if no one comes? I could be there a long time.

So, if you ever walk into a bathroom and see a man with tattered clothes huddled in a corner, now you know why. Just be sure to say hello because I'm actually quite friendly.

Handwriting

My favorite subject in grade school was lunch. When I'd get home, my mom would say "So what'd you do today?" I would triumphantly respond "I ate lunch!"

My least favorite subject was handwriting. Handwriting would prevent me from ever teaching a regular elementary classroom because I simply can't do it. I got Cs in handwriting when I was *lucky*. We had these little booklets that we would use to learn how to write the "right" way. The books that taught us how to print weren't so bad I guess. The big problem was cursive.

Those lessons in cursive writing had one big lie behind them: "When you get older, you're going to have to write in cursive for everything. All the time. Forever and ever."

Lies. LIES.

If I was supposed to write everything in the meticulous cursive that the book wanted us to do, I'd still be on the word "if" in this sentence. We all stopped using cursive as soon as possible and no one ever called us on it.

As tedious as those classes could be, the worst were the days were when the magical handwriting lady would come in. This was a little old lady who looked like every other little old lady that you have ever met, and she could make every letter look just as perfect as it did in the book.

I remain convinced that demonic possession was involved in her penmanship, because mine didn't really work out quite as well.

So after all of this, they would take your handwriting samples to be graded by the book company. We were told how important those scores would be to our futures. As if my 8 year old hand wasn't jittery enough, now I find out that I won't get into college if I can't write in cursive.

Cursive led to a lot of confusion in my life. To me - both at that time and right now - "writing"
means, well, WRITING. Putting words on a page regardless of method. So imagine my confusion when this happened in third grade:

It turned out that "writing" meant "cursive." I had no idea; no one had bothered to tell me. And apparently, I must have been a monkey living among normal, thinking humans, because not one of my classmates seemed to be having the same difficulty. My teacher didn't even bother to explain the problem to me until my fourth attempt.

As I went on in life, I discovered, as we all do, that cursive wasn't required at any point in life. It also turned out that I could indeed go to college with crappy handwriting. If only I'd known then what I know now...

UPDATE:

Apparently, hello Reddit. Someone found me I guess?

Scary Stories

When I was in elementary school, we had these fantastic little booklets printed on the worst quality newsprint that would come every month or so. It was an order form that had all kinds of books that we could buy on them. All kinds of books!

I loved to read. When I was in kindergarten, I was one of the first kids in the class who could read. This meant avoiding every other kid in library class. They'd beg for me to read to them, and I couldn't have been less interested.

My friend Brian (also a reader) and I would hide under one of the tables with our books, and the teacher didn't seem to mind. I think he understood.

I was happy to get into somewhat thicker books, too. By second grade, our teacher had introduced us to The Boxcar Children books. He would read a chapter to the class here and there and we slowly worked our way through the series. Most of us started buying those books or checking them out of the library. I would still read one of those books for fun if I had one, but The Boxcar Children aren't a part of this one.

For some reason, in addition to reading, I thought that being scared was fun when I was at that age. I don't know why. Surely I'm not cool with it now short of a zombie movie. I downloaded a demo of "Amnesia: The Dark Descent," (a very scary game), walked maybe 16 steps, and decided "nope."

In any case, I was delighted to see a book series that I had only heard about appear on our order forms one month - "Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark," by one Alvin Schwartz. This sounded awesome. There were so many times that our little neighborhood posse would sit around on someone's porch and tell poorly conceived ghost stories. This would make me a scary story CHAMPION! No one would match me!

Mom approved, the form was sent, and the waiting began. Finally, a few weeks later, the books were in. "Scary Stories" was a fairly smallish with a black border and a pretty horrifying picture on the front. Awesome.

That night, armed with a flashlight, I began to go through this book.

Thinking that reading the book was a good call was my first mistake. See, it wasn't just a scary cover on this book. No, every illustration was horrific, grusome, and scary as anything my little mind had ever imagined. Here, I'll show you what I mean:

WARNING: THOSE WITH WEAK CONSTITUTIONS SHOULD NOT BY ANY MEANS LOOK AT THIS PICTURE, THINK ABOUT LOOKING AT THIS PICTURE, OR SPECULATE ABOUT THINKING ABOUT LOOKING AT THIS PICTURE.

OH GOD OH GOD KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

What on earth was that about?! This is a kids' book? Don't get me wrong, the stories themselves were tame (for the most part) and required a suspension of disbelief that even my young mind could scoff at. But the pictures, OH the pictures! I couldn't handle it. They were grusome, grotesque, grisly. They haunted my nightmares, my daymares, and other mares that I was previously unaware of.

A few months later, because I suffered the same manic behavior I've found that all small children possess, I ordered the sequel from the book orders. Mom was a little skeptical this time because she noticed my avoidance of the first book, but I convinced her that it was because I had finished it and that it was my favorite book and that I had to, please mom, I HAD TO have the next one!

What on earth was wrong with me?

Well, that book came. I opend it up. The pictures were even worse. Ready?

WARNING: DO NOT LOOK. NO ONE SHOULD EVER LOOK AT THIS.

NO! NOT AGAIN! WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF?!

Just for good measure, perhaps to prove my insanity, I did it again with the third book before I wised up. The three volumes sat in our game room in the basement untouched for years. And because those books were there, with those horrible pictures, I was scared of being in the basement for years, which was hard for me because that's where the Sega Genesis was hooked up.

This lasted until my dad told me we were going to donate books to a place, and wondered if I had any I would be willing to part with. I picked up those books the way you pick up a dead rotting animal, dropped them in the box, and ran away. They were gone. I was safe.

In order to ensure that I qualify for "fair use" of these pictures from this book series, I am going to rate the books as this post was obviously a review of my experience with them. On a scale of one to ten, I give all three volumes that I owned a negative eleventy seven for screwing me up as a kid.

I am a puppy kicker.

As a sometimes-teacher of small children, I've learned many helpful things. For example, it only took two days of student teaching an elementary music class before it was immediately apparent that each day was completely different from the last because all small children are manic in a way that I'll never quite understand.

Now, working on my own, I've quickly learned one very important lesson that trumps them all:

I should make that into a poster and put it in my classroom. It would be the most accurate teacher poster I've ever seen. Let's set the stage here for the events of this fateful day.

It's a day like any other in my music class with the four year old kindergarten. We're doing a circle activity about Valentine's Day using a very cutsey song about love and caring. One of my students who is usually incredibly well-behaved decides that it is vital at this very moment to ask her friend on the other side of the circle a question. We'll call this little girl "Allie," which may or may not be a result of my watching a rerun of "Everybody Loves Raymond" while writing this post.

Me: Allie, did you raise your hand?

Allie: No...

Me: Then was it your turn to talk?

Allie: No...

Me: Well, I know I can trust you to make the right choice and raise your hand next time.

Allie: *nods*

I was confident that I did this the right way. I still am. My tone was very gentle. I made sure to let the student reason out their behavior and decide on its appropriateness. I moved on from the situation with a compliment to her. I was right! Score one for my classroom management!

And yet, all that rightness didn't stop what was to come, for this is what I was met with about two seconds later from little Allie:

I was kind! I was nice! I didn't scold or chastise. I told her that I trust her to be good! And how does she repay me? With tears?

See, I'm convinced that one of the worst things you can do is make a four year old cry. Especially when this is one of the best behaved students in the entire grade, never one to make a scene. If you leave a legacy with your students, you want it to be a positive one, not one of psychological scarring.

This is the opposite of what you want.

So that's it. Today, I've killed a spirit. I'm as bad as someone who kicks puppys for fun. The lowest of the low.

I had to register on the Puppy Kickers "Benji's Law" website too.

Alright. Time to salvage the situation. I do my best to assure her that she isn't in any trouble! She doesn't even have a time out! Still, the tears are flowing and she's doing that thing where you're crying and you suck in air over your lower lip and hyperventilate. Wonderful. It's bad enough that she's crying, now I'm going to make her pass out.

Me: Allie, come here.

I'm sitting on the floor as a part of this circle, so I'm down on "their level." In college, we learned that it's a great way to avoid intimidating small children. Now before me is this sobbing mess of a four year old and I'm trying to figure out how to stop it.

Me: Allie, you arent in any trouble. At all. You're always so good in here and I know you'll make the ri-

Allie: *Throws arms forward and falls around my shoulders crying harder than ever while hugging me*

I'm flabbergasted. Not only did I make her cry, she's hugging me. Here's a kid who cares so much about being a good kid that she not only becomes hysterical when she realizes she's fallen short, she feels so bad about disappointing me that she's hugging me. In my head, I'm slipping BELOW puppy-kicker.

Ok. Enough is enough. I need to get her attention.

Me: Allie, look at- Look! - Allie! Allie? Look at me! At me! Look!

Finally she stands up, still red-faced and sniffling. I tell her again that she's not in any trouble, and that I'd love it if she'd go get a drink of water and come back to our circle and be a part of the activity. This time, the message somehow gets through and she sits down.

In hindsight, I'm absolutely positive that this was more scarring for me than it was for her. She'll grow up like a normal kid. In 20 years, I'll wake up in a cold sweat remembering the time that I was worse than a puppy kicker.

Blog.

So I have a blog.

Why do I have a blog? That part's a little bit more complex. See, life has been different since I've been on my own with a good job and a place to live. At first it was incredibly exciting to set my own schedule and play by my rules.

Work!

Relax!

Sleep!

It was exciting because even though it was the same stuff that I've been doing every day for the last few years, it was in a new surrounding. Slowly, the activities became far more familiar and far less lustrous.

Work!

Relax...!

Sleep?

That's when I realized that relaxation wasn't really all that relaxing anymore. Sure, it's nice to deflate after work, but the activities I'd come up with weren't all that stimulating:

Television's not so bad...

Video Games... yeah...

Movies! Wait, that's the same as television.

The variation in my life turned out to be whether or not there was a controller in my hand as I sat in front of the TV. It got boring - see, my movies don't play on the ceiling, that's exasperation in that picture there. I don't mean to imply that I felt lonely or anything, it's just that a new place meant new people and I hadn't gotten to know everyone all that well. It was more that everything had become monotonous. Routine. Hence the title of the blog.

Anyway, when relaxation turned out to be non-relaxing, I knew that I was doing something wrong. I read, but really that's more sitting. I write music, but my profession is also music. I require creativity that's as far away from my job as possible.

So I have a blog.

What will go here? I have no idea. I'm not always the best at making plans. I'm also notoriously bad at updating blogs. I know this is true because I've started no fewer than eight blogs, and every time I decide - nay, I vow - that I'll be accountable and update regularly. This works until a few weeks go by. It's sort of a viscous blog cycle.

So hopefully this will be different. I don't expect anyone will read this beyond some friends, but I'm not doing it for people to see it. I'm doing it for me. Hopefully it'll be a little witty to make the read worthwhile should someone else stumble upon it.