Freida Bee's Day Off

I don't really enjoy typing on this here iPad, but I'm too lazy to go buy a real keyboard for it and I bet those require some sort of currency I am more and more willing to let be ethereal.  Dammit, maybe I will get used to this.  At least my phone has swipey technology.  I am up at a redonculous 4 am, after being awake two hours already.  That's what happens when I go to bed early.  I think I actually got 10 hours of sleep yesterday or whenever that was.  It threw me all off. At least when I am barely getting my usual 6 hours a night, I sleep really well through it all and on up to about 5 alarm clock snoozefests.

I worked extra long yesterday to prepare to take a day off and have a sub tomorrow.  I almost feel guilty, but I have a whole lot of hours of personal leave and vacation I haven't used this year and once again got a perfect attendance email that offered some sports ticket I am not wholly interested or able to redeem anyway (weekend job).  If I could afford more than the diagnostics my newly found dental benefit, I might be using up my vacation time at dental visits, but it looks like that's all going to be stretched out over a longer time than I was hoping, with those dang kids getting their usual preferential treatment.  Dang, I am not here to talk about wishful dental visits.  

Not that what I am here to talk about is more interesting.  Not that I really know what it is that I am here to talk about.  I think Freida Bee was in large part documenting the demise and discontent of my marriage to the former Mr. Bee, and it might be apropos that it Is in actually considering having a date that this urge resurfaces.  This spectacle can't exist without making a spectacle of myself.  

There's that and it may well be that my first year of teaching actually is my hardest, and I'm just about done with that.  My school is going to have me back next year, but with revised duties.  In some ways I feel failurey that my assignment at one of the best schools around will be changing.  I won't be an exclusively a core teacher.  That will be what I do two class periods, with a gardening elective during another, but I am primarily being moved to run a "lab" of sorts that is for drop out prevention and curriculum enrichment.  It is not altogether busy at present, but "they" are interested in my making my own and building it up, which is an appealing prospect.  It feels like a demotion or sorts, but I think I will really like my new schedule and responsibilities a lot more.  The fact that I will be teaching two sections of the grade I am currently teaching means that I will not only get to reteach and refine what I have been doing this year, but I will also get to collaborate with with a really awesome teacher at my school who will be teaching the other sections of that grade level, something I really haven't been able to do this year.  I have just been in total survival mode all year on many fronts and it started with moving the second day of school.  What a cluster.  I dare say, things may lighten up.

So, the messager on a popular alternative dating site and I have moved a conversation to text and sometimes it's kinda hot.  After slutting it up a little couple years ago when Mr. Bee and I first split, he and I spent a good amount of time together last summer camping with the boys.  I was semi-purposely homeless camping and house sitting last summer, and he was situationally aimless himself, so we hanky pankied it up a little.  I haven't had the time or inclination to pursue such interests until now, though a few months ago it did become clear to me that our resorting to what was easy and accessible without much effort had other costs I am now unwilling to pay.  Namely, I really do want to move on to greener pastures.  I have been open to seeing ladies and do think it is somewhat the statistical challenges that have hampered that mostly, but I am really siding with the bi team more than with the gay team now that I've had some perspective.  Surely, getting into a relationship with someone of one gender or the other is the best way to push me in the other direction, but all that is to say that I forfeit a bit of my queer card to say it is a gentleman with whom I am exchanging titilating texts.   It all seems very prudish, really, but I am all over going slow and doing this well, because there is something pretty good about this one, his interest at the very least.  Not the least of which some very sweet and funny texts.

I'm sure some angst will ensue before too long.  I think I will be able to get back to sleep now.  Hopefully, I will only piss off a few hours of my precious day off sleeping in at this point.

(I'm switching from Bee Author to Freida Bee at least for today.)

Bee out.  

A Little Bit Defensive/ A Little Bit Rock and Roll

It was super easy for me to flippantly select Bee Author as a blog title, having been partly named Bee as a blogger previously, but I doth protesteth too much that it is not with any pretense of actually considering myself an "author"  that I have done so.  (I just didn't put that much thought into it.)

Sure, I would tell my own kids or students that anyone who writes anything is an author in a certain sense.  "You're talented.  You're worth it.  Follow your dreams."  Yada yada yada.  However, in lieu of actual written products, I will avoid insisting upon such regard until at some future date wherein I have completed my duties thusly.

Incidentally or no, entitling my blog as I have has, by necessity, caused me to think of Bea Arthur more in even just this one day than I have in my entire life, but surely this is a good thing.  While I will no doubt profane her near name many times over, I wish it to be known that I have the utmost regard for Bea Arthur, a feminist who joined many others in paving the way for me to be as crass as I want to be on this here blog that no one reads.  Thanks, Bea.

Of course, this doesn't mean that writing honestly about being a mother, a teacher, a bisexual woman and a (more occasional than I would prefer in my singledome) sex-haver couldn't get me fired from my teaching job.  Nor does it mean that my right to safe, affordable, accessible birth control and health care are guaranteed.  They just aren't.  Still, neither of these noble endeavors can be claimed as my purpose for writing here.  Why not let a graph say it for me...

Why I Blog

Oh my Jesus, after several tutorials with my math students on how to present information graphically, I just realized that I don't have to go around stealing other peoples' fake graphs.  I can make my own.  This does, indeed, make technology useful. 

As much fun as this is, I have a shit ton of work to prepare for the school week.  I am working 7 days a week until the summer (at a weekend job, where I am obviously working very hard as we proverbially speak).  Usually, Saturday is my paper grading day and Sunday is my planning day, though it often works out that I only spend a few hours doing those things with a whole bunch of stupid Facebook games and netflix movies added in.  I have just gotten to the point of trading numbers with a person who first contacted me on OKCupid last year about this time and then we both dropped the ball.  There might be something going on there, but that is literally after not having met anyone in such manner in over a year, so my enthusiasm is well contained.  It's an attractive feature, I know. 

Hot Pants

I could use a little more vanity, really.

Thanks, John Currin, for your sexy art that I am using without your permission.

Pic of John Currin's Bea Painting from here: http://bertrandetlabite.wordpress.com/category/john-currin/.

"Hot Pants" from here: http://vantageartprojects.com/jennifermawby.com/ma_journal/wordpress/?attachment_id=556.

Meatloaf for Breakfast

Though pumpkin pie for breakfast is my true favorite, meatloaf for breakfast is more honest on this perky Saturday morning that finds me melancholy, bloggy.  After that one blog that grew and skirted too close to home and ten others I neglected, here is another.  This one is not special.  Who knows why I would be satisfied to start from a humble beginning, baring it all with no pretense and then not be willing to do it again.  I need this, the writing, and despite my google doc-foldered ambitions to be a "real" author, except don't use that cheesy word, it simply doesn't happen otherwise.  Once I made the transition away from writing on paper, aside from my chronic split-my-page-into-four-parts-lists, my journaling was spoiled.  I must reclaim it here and now.  Such ambition.  It is false.  It is tempermental.  And, worstly, it is earnest.

I am truly overwhelmed, in my first year of public school teaching, after a couple years at a private school, with a very young adult daughter with some seemingly serious health issues that remain undiagnosable.  Another daughter is eminently going off to a relatively expensive college and two precocious boys are just starting my adolescent parenting all over again.  I am hungry, angry, lonely and tired, all, except for the hungry.  I actually meet that need just fine, if not with higher-than-usual-quality school lunches, then with a sporadic mix of pizza, quinoa-infused healthspurts and salted caramel anything.  I spend my money lousily and if teaching has taught me anything, it is how horridly non-routine I am.  I revel in honesty, self-deprecation, and mostly complaining, but only in writing.  It must balance out of the utter neverness of my real-life complaining aside from sproradic, ineffective outbursts I save to push the ones I love away just when they started to think I was nice.

There it is my writing voice, defiantly unwilling to go forth and do this successfully, but obnoxious enough to not be satisfied until too much is said.  Good friend, I've missed you.

PS. This is in no way a food blog.  The above meatloaf for breakfast pick looks 80.4 times better than what I ate this morning, which may have made a funnier picture, except I ate it.  (Stolen from here: http://www.blueapocalypse.com/.)

PPS.  This one will stick, because there is no finer bloggiversary than May the Fourth, especially for someone who almost detests Star Wars.  I would say I prefer Star Trek, but that is kinda apple to oranges.  More relevantly, I prefer Flash Gordon.  (Pic stolen from here: http://thiskevin.blogspot.com/2012/08/flash-gordon-and-me.html- I guess I do this picture credit thing, now.)

PPS.  I think what really got me blogging today was the feeling I had after I facebook stalked the pictures of the lady my ex (of two and a half years) got a retaliatory blow job from after I slept with a woman in the 10th and final withering year of our shacked up marriage.  He liked it.  The bastard, who I, in no way, shape or form, want to get back together with, but one of us has to go first in getting into something new and solid and it will probably be him.  Bastard.