not here to help, only to observe and pass judgment

In graduate school, you learn a great deal about being a teacher and about how kids work. If you ever wondered why a child acted the way it did, there is an answer somewhere for your question and in school we are digging up the answers to those questions.

My question that is never taken seriously deals with a behavior that I see in my classroom that I would like to get to the root of and stop. It is a serious problem that I have discussed before. Everyone picks their nose – or removes boogers from their nose – but it is the special child who does not wipe the booger on his jeans or tissue choosing instead to consume the booger.

I performed a Google search on the nutritional value of boogers but only came up with other writer’s pages and an auto mechanic’s forum – I trust my mechanic with unquestioned faith but only about cars, baseball, and how to get stains out of clothing – he is a genius but he is not a nutritionist. I can only assume that boogers – like Oreo cookies – have nothing that is ‘good’ for you and thus the basis for their appeal.

I am appalled that more research has not been done in the area of nose picking and eating, and how to stop it. I keep hoping the other children will notice and tease him. Shame is a great way to curb a behavior; you can always count on children to teach each other to conform – but not in this instance. No one besides myself and one of the fourth graders have noticed this boy picking his nose and eating it. The children will occasionally comment on my vomiting into the trashcan when I see it happen but they have attributed it more to the hot lunch than to someone having an afternoon snack.

Calls to the Home Office in Nebraska were not immediately returned – I think I had the wrong number anyway – but my debate coach and beloved mentor usually has the answer to any bizarre question I dream up. Although, she warned me of the dangers of teaching children when I was still an undergraduate; she painted a graphic picture of the children touching you, crawling all over you, and wiping what they pulled out of their noses and ears onto your skirt (the main reason I am a strictly slacks man). She looked visibly shaken after giving her warning – advice I promptly ignored to my own peril, dooming me to a life of watching children eat from their own noses.

At least he is not the one who also talks with his mouth full.

“Through the internet, things you will see, other places, the future, the past...old friends long gone…”

Yoda was right.

My sister has gotten me into using MySpace – something that I am in no way proud of – and I found two old friends using MySpace.com yesterday.

I was looking for a friend from Middle and High School and a friend from college. I had given up looking for Erin when she signed onto AOL Instant Stalker and I was looking for something on MySpace when I found Millicent.

Erin was always there to save me from doing my homework and yesterday was no different. I am not a wild person but some of my wilder college moments (read: kidnapping baby Jesus) were spent with Erin. She was a freshman my (first) senior year and was a part of a freshman retention project on our debate team. Erin was one of the few people I thought was acceptable to meet my family, and even fewer that came to my house.

I was always very worried about Erin because the people at our college in general and on our team specifically are vicious gossips and she disappeared after I graduated and fell off the face of the planet – which could simply mean ‘stopped using the internet’ in my world – so I heard a great deal of nasty things about Erin without hearing from Erin. I tend not to believe the gossip told me by my teammates or classmates: if you believed what you heard about me you would believe that I was more interesting than I actually am.

I also found my friend Millicent from Middle and High School while using the MySpace people search. Her surname is unique and so is her first name but neither of those pieces of information will be useful if you cannot spell them and if she got married – both of which happened.

I was concerned upon finding Millicent that she would go to my page at MySpace and think I was a dork and then it occurred to me: MySpace is by nature sinful and unclean, also wicked dorky. It also occurred to me that, after Peter, few people know me as long as Millicent without being related to me – if she does not know I am a dork then perhaps she will never know. Millicent was always more popular and smarter than I was and probably still is. She was also a better writer than I was, if she still is I will never stop hating her.

I was excited to find her because as an Army Brat, you do not keep in touch with many people and most of the people from your past that you run into are people you would like to run into with a car or bus.

Most of the people I run into from Middle or High School also look like they were hit by a bus, drug behind it for a couple blocks and then used as a soccer ball by street urchins before dragging themselves into Wal Mart for clean clothing. Millicent looks even more beautiful than she did in Middle and High School. Why, oh why, are all the pretty straight women my age married?

My birthday is next weekend, and that means I need to find my mother and father a present. They view the anniversary of my birth as their anniversary of their parenthood; they also get their parents and grand-parents presents on this occasion because a titled all these people - I was the first out of the gate on both sides of the family. I view this as just another trip around the sun – all I have done is not die for 365 days – but it is important to them so I play along.

Chaos and I trundled on down to IKEA (our mother ship) to find something inexpensive and clever for my parents. At the end of the story the receive bendy straws and a gift certificate to Mc Donald’s – a curious fetish for us off-the-boat people. We did not find anything they would need or want but we did find a few things for ourselves.

The genius of IKEA is selling things no one needs at an incredible price – today’s steal was champagne flutes for twenty-five cents and Astroturf bathmats for ninety-nine cents. The champagne flutes are a ridiculous waste because I do not drink (I am enjoying Black Cherry Vanilla Diet Coke in one right now) and why you would want an Astroturf bathmat is beyond me (my kids will play marbles on them on rainy days).

I do not shop often, but I have been to IKEA more times than I have been to Wal Mart. While we were checking out the cashier said, “you have to bag your own items,” I asked, a leading question, “how many bags do I use?” She said, “use as many as you need.” She said the same thing about the butcher paper used to wrap the unnecessary champagne flutes in and pointed us to an unattended wrapping station. Chaos said, “I would take the whole package of paper if I could lift it.” When I questioned the amount of butcher paper being used to wrap the quarter champagne flutes she said, “I did not pay a quarter for these to break on the way home.”

Sometimes I feel like I am on a reality television show because Chaos is so ridiculous so often that I just assume that it has a point that I am missing.

I should not make fun of her – I took about forty of their bags because it is against my morals to buy trash bags or can liners. You are literally throwing money away. I try to keep my garbage in the plastic sacks you get at the grocery – and I feel cheated when they do not double bag my purchases.

I really do not feel as if I stole because the woman clearly invited me to take as many as I needed. I am sure I needed more – but I did not want to seem like a glutton.

My sister/roommate enjoys the show American Idol. I am not going to waste column inches mocking that show – but you must know that I find no cultural or aesthetic value in the program – and find it alarming that (1) more people vote on that show than for our leaders (2) I have become drawn in myself.

I love a disaster. Nothing beats someone else’s public humiliation to brighten your day. Many people espouse the idea that helping someone else or doing something selfless will brighten your day but I do that professionally and after a while, you need to mix things up. Someone falling on the ice or being involved in an injury free car wreck does the trick for me. With American Idol, I can sit on my couch and not endure glares from other rubber-neckers for pointing and laughing.

However, I remain alarmed at the fact that more people vote on American Idol than vote for President; that more people pay attention to the show than to what is going on in our world. I have come up with a plan to improve this situation.

In 2008, we will run the Presidential Election like American Idol. We will gather a triad of self-appointed experts and have auditions for the Presidency. Sure, Senator Hillary Rodham-Clinton is smart as a whip, but can she sing and dance? What is Senator John McCain’s vocal range?

More important than their ability to entertain us, how Presidential are they, really? We kind of get this in the Presidential Debates but at that point the parties have already picked to people whose only qualification seems to be ‘nothing better to do with my time’ and ‘unqualified for gainful employment.’ I judged debate rounds in college for money and I saw some amazing debates – but the Presidential debates reminded me of Longview Community College verses ITT Technical School – the summation is that four people with Alzheimer’s could have had a more coherent conversation and come to a much more astute and reasonable conclusion. I know a good debate when I see one, and there has not been a good Presidential Debate in my lifetime. It is more than speaking pretty (Kerry) and more than staying on topic (Bush).

Then, the experts could boil the potential candidates down to two pools – twelve Republicans and twelve Democrats – and then we could whittle them down week by week until we had a President. Whoever came in second could be Vice-President. I am sure more young people would vote if they did not have to do arcane things like register and wait in lines. If you could just text in “HRC” or “JMC” you might be more interested in the process.

This could also bring up the benefit of drawing out other candidates. John Kerry was really just Bush-Lite but had we had real, entertaining exposure to the people who are Presidential Quality we could have realized that Russ Feingold not only voted against the war but was the only, ONLY, Democrat to read the prewar intelligence and is John McCain’s traditional bipartisan playmate. George W. Bush would never have won a nomination if he had to speak in public, unscripted around people like Christie Todd Whitman or George Pataki.

This process would draw out people who are not Rock Stars like Clinton, McCain, or Rice, and are just as qualified – if not more qualified.

If nothing else, this seems like it could work just as well as the process we use now. How could it be worse? We need to know that they are Presidential, unscripted and under pressure, and that they can sing, dance, and stand up to Simon’s taunting.

I have many bad habits, not the least of which is my ability to say really cruel things in a clever way. One of my super powers is the uncanny ability to link a person to something from popular culture that they resemble or to morph the phonemes in their name into something insulting.

I try my hardest to keep these gems of wit locked inside my tiny brain but every once in a while, I am struck with a bout of verbal diarrhea and it all comes rushing out and into the ears of someone I hope that I can trust. This gets me into trouble because I either: pick someone I cannot trust to share with or people who are aware of this weakness are at liberty to say, “you know what Chris said about you?” Anything they tell you will be widely believed because it is usually believable of me. My response is usually, “well, you thought it was funny when I said it about someone else: didn’t you?”

This became an issue this week because one of my friends has a roommate that they like, adore even, but on occasion gets on their nerves. I am in contact with both roommates on a weekly basis for one reason or the other so I knew enough to come up with a nickname for the one roommate and spilled it to the other because I was stupid and I thought the person would not repeat it.

I tend not to repeat the nasty things people say to me about others because I feel it is rude to everyone involved and demeaning to yourself as a person. I think that if the person is spreading confidentialities then you should definitely share that but if someone tells you in confidence, “I think Chris is fat,” there is really no reason to repeat it. Why skewer another person’s relationship and hurt people without cause?

I had a half a mind to repeat to that person everything the person who told on me had said about them, and anyone, because she can be exceedingly cruel herself. I realize that just makes things worse.

I know at this point that I really should not say that I think someone looks like an Oompa Loompa or that their life is too ridiculous for reality television but we all make mistakes. I think that in making mistakes we want people who are there for us when we make the mistake and are supportive of us, not people who will kick us when we are down.

Of course part of my feelings are Clintonian – I am embarssed to have been caught and called out – but there is also the genuine emotion of feeling sorry that I hurt someone’s feelings. Sometimes my cleverness is a curse and too often other people have to pay the price for my sharp tongue.

This week was a rollercoaster. Tuesday we had a field trip to the symphony. We are on the same state highway as several universities but when we go on a field trip to one of them we never take our road, we take another one. A five-minute trip in bad traffic turned into forty-five minutes.

During this sojourn in the school bus, my students decided that we had been kidnapped and that we were being taken to Canada. This posed a problem for them because they had not brought their passports – which they do not even have. I tried to assure them that if we crossed the border into Massachusetts that I would say something to the driver.

To American children, Canada is this amorphous municipality, which is only slightly less ridiculous than Bolivia. They decided to make passports in case I was unable to stop the bus driver from taking us there and out of nowhere produced construction paper, scissors, glue, markers, and white paper. I was alarmed by this in part because they never have their supplies on hand in class and because they never do such good work on creative projects in class or display such acuity in their penmanship. Apparently, bouncing around in the back of big yellow was exactly what they needed to do well on this assignment. I put a stop to the counterfeiting when they produced a stapler. By that point, I had about enough.

They decided this show of force on my part was ‘strange’ and that I must be a clone of myself. The real me had been kidnapped (apparently by the bus driver) and hidden in Canada to be later harvested for my organs. This is when I decided that the bus must be filled with fumes and started to open windows. They were not getting enough oxygen. They were eating too much candy. They were being deprived of some vitamin or mineral.

The principal, who was on this trip as well, decided that they had reached a saturation point of being in my care that had come to a head where perfectly reasonable situations – a school bus driver being alarmingly inept and getting lost – had turned into something blown out of proportion and into the ridiculous – cloned elementary school teachers filching their students and pocketing them in Canada.

We arrived at the symphony and as soon as I settled into my seat fell asleep. I would wake up, alarmed, and then fall back asleep, I fought a losing battle to stay awake. My problem is that as ridiculous as my students can be, they are well behaved; I knew I could sleep and did. They realize that our loosely educational trips to the movies, mini-golf, and Mc Donald’s would stop if they behaved like the (excuse me) children from other schools. While I was asleep, they explained to an alarmed teacher from another school that I was actually an android and had merely powered down during the performance. They also took pains to make sure she understood that I was an android and not a simple automaton or robot. I was designed and built in Canada, my purpose was to harvest the organs of people who asked too many questions, and perhaps she should mind her own business.

The teacher they were talking to told me that I was the worst teacher in the world for falling asleep in a warm, dark room with calming music playing – and perhaps I am – but it is not easy being a Canadian designed android sent to harvest the organs of nosey public school teachers.