Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts



The time change and then a holiday? Plus a day out for meetings? This week has totally thrown me for a loop. A day late and a dollar short, but whatchya gonna do?

I bought Sawyer his first The Magic School Bus book and he loves it. He's already super curious about the human body and it's many functions (today he asked where exactly he was born from... I explained and he was like "oh, I thought it was your mouth."). 

I started Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, and it is so good. The writing is beautiful, but there also these little surprises in there, like a sudden outbreak in a story you think is going to be strictly about relationships. Her memoir will definitely be on my wish list.

Our Thanksgiving plans suddenly changed for the better recently, and I couldn’t be happier.

I am a person who almost passes out several times a year, but never actually does. It’s who I am, and it’s fine. What’s not fine is that it almost happened in front of my students the other day! That lovely feeling of being super hot, sick to my stomach, and lightheaded started creeping in during second period as we were getting things organized for a test and I had to plop myself down regain composure (probably the result of a decongestant/coffee for breakfast combo). Luckily the kids didn’t notice, but it got me thinking- what would be worse, throwing up or passing out when kids are in the room? I think anything involving bodily fluids would be far grosser, although knowing my kids they’d call for a very unnecessary ambulance.

My mom was in town last weekend and it was so fun. We went to Downtown Disney for lunch one day and the beach the next. This weekend we have a Kid’s 1K at Universal Studios on Saturday and a playdate on Sunday morning, all subject to change if the ominous “there have been cases of vomiting” sign on my son’s school door comes to fruition (seriously, is there anything more terrifying than those health alert signs?). The kid next to Sawyer got sick and the teacher reassured me she had Lysoled everything down. My response? LYSOL my child, too. She doesn’t really get my humor though, so we had ourselves a slightly awkward moment.

Jonathan Safran Foer is on the Armchair Expert podcast- this is very exciting news. I’m slightly scared of his new book, about global warming, just because I think it might depress me even more about the current state of our planet. I’ve seen him speak before and I found him to be very witty and a little sardonic, so it will be interesting to see how Dax and Monica balance him out.


A student recently tried to bribe me with dozens of bags of Baked Flaming Hot Cheetos to give his class an easier version of the test they were taking. IT DIDN’T WORK.

2 comments:

  1. I read his climate change book and I think you should read it... don't be scared. It's actually a really interesting and philosophical take on it all. About why and how humans respond to serious situations. Climate change is unique because it's going to be catastrophic, but it doesn't FEEL that way (death by a thousands cuts), and his book is all about how odd people are in how we respond to slow burn disasters like that, psychologically.

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  2. You ponder whether it's worse to throw up or pass out in a classroom full of students. I am a teacher as well - actually, I teach at a university so my students might be a tad older than yours, chronologically speaking perhaps /jk/ - and last summer, I was teaching summer school and, having a bad reaction to some surgery recently undergone, ended up vomiting into a recycling bin right outside my classroom. So it wasn't *right* in front of my students, but I'm sure they could tell what was going on re: sound and the color of my face when I went back in immediately after it. Absolutely no one said anything until right at the end of class when one of the more honest little darlings said "Man. You look like shit" and left. Little darlings. :-)

    It was going to be a flip-up between passing out and vomiting, and vomiting won. If I had ended up passing out, I wonder if my students would have been like yours though: too quick to call an ambulance and make the whole situation even more theatrical! :-)

    I highly recommend you do neither of these though. ;-}

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