Prepoceros

After a week and a half of half-heartedly trying to dream up a main character or some semblance of a plot, I’ve decided that novels just aren’t my style. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up on NaNoWriMo entirely; I’m only changing the format slightly. Instead of pounding out a 50,000-word work of fiction, I’ll focus my thirty frenzied days on a more practical form: the essay.

If you’re anything like most of the high-schoolers I teach (not that you are, necessarily), you’re likely to feel nauseous at the mere mention of the word essay. I, on the other hand, am rather fond of this humble workhorse. […and now I’ve tried at least three times to finish this paragraph. I have fairly strong feelings on how best to teach essay writing, and it’ll take more effort than I have time for tonight to turn my thoughts into sensible, non-ranty sentences, so I’ll save it for some time later this month. There’s probably something ironic there, but I don’t much care.]

Anyway, *My*NoWriMo (the ‘No’ now stands for ‘Non-fiction’), as I’m envisioning it now, will be an essay-a-day sort of thing. There’s no reason I have to stick to the official word-count of 50,000, but I do want to make it reasonably challenging, so I’ve arbitrarily decided to go with 1000 words a day (for a total of 30,000 words in November). Whether this will be one 1000-word essay, two 500-word essays, or half a 2k-er every day, I won’t know until I get into it.

I’m more excited about this project than I ever thought I would be about anything with a required word-count. Nevertheless, given my horrible track record with deadline-driven essay-writing, I’m curious to see how long this feeling will last. Will I make it through the whole month? The first week? The first day? Time will tell. Wagers, anyone?

If I come up with anything worth reading, I might post some of them here, but I’m not promising anything.

Ok, seven minutes until November. I’ll start at midnight and knock out the first hundred words or so just to get into the swing of things, but then I need to do my China reading and get to bed. Class in eight hours, woo!

On my way home from the third lesson of the day at around nine, I passed a closed Party City. Odd, no? If I were managing that store, you bet your buns it’d be open now. I know it’s late on a Sunday, but it’s the night before Halloween, for gosh sakes. This has to be one of Party City’s biggest days. Puzzling.

Not that I needed anything else for my costume. My Halloween Eve shopping list included batteries, cookie dough, and a binky, all of which SuperTarget carries.

I’m getting rather attached to the binky, actually—I imagine they spray them with a fine mist of crack as they roll out of the binky factory*. I took it out of the package when I got home, and now I can’t really think of a good reason to take it out of my mouth. It hurts my teeth a little; I hope it’s not undoing all those years of orthodontics.

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* Wow, three ambiguous pronouns in one sentence. (I could rewrite it, but then this footnote would lose its raison d’etre.) Do as I say, kids, not as I do.

That’s about it, really. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a prettier person than I see most days.

Moreover, I’m unusually happy today. Yesterday was also a happy day. I don’t know why.* I’m not sure if I feel pretty because I’m happy, or if I’m happy because I feel pretty, or if both effects result from a tertiary cause, or if the correlation is merely coincidental. (See, I wasn’t kidding about teaching LSAT.)

Oh, and I can dance JUST like Christina Aguilera—I’m a fighter, baby. I can sing just like she can, too. My downstairs neighbors *love* me.

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* This is a lie. But it’s a white lie, so just go with me here.

The fall fundraising campaign at my local public radio station kicked off this morning. I’ve listened to NPR on and off as long as I can remember. My mom likes to put it on in the car, and even after I started driving my brother and myself to school, we would still listen to it every morning. John Lienhard’s “Engines of Our Ingenuity” came on right before we got to school (when we were on time, which was rare).

When I was at school last fall and (practically) living in the astro lab, I listened to NPR almost 24 hours a day. In LA there’s a station that doesn’t play music at all, just talk, and I’d leave it on all the time. Even when I went to sleep (on the couch), I would turn it down as low as it could go, so that it was just a murmur in the background.

Now that I spend an hour or two in my car most days, and especially since I got rid of my TV, NPR has become the soundtrack of my life, more or less. I still listen to commercial radio, but I can only listen to the same 20 songs on repeat so many times before I feel like jamming pencils into my ears. If I had an iPod, I’d put podcasts on it and listen to those, but I don’t yet (and I might not anytime soon, if the Nano screens are really as scratch-prone as some folks say they are. We’ll see.)

When I’m home, the radio is almost always on in the background. When I’m relaxing (playing Spider Solitaire or browsing blogs, basically), I usually tune it to commercial radio, but if I’m actually working on something I have to be listening to NPR—songs with lyrics make it impossible for me to concentrate. I wake up every day to Morning Edition; it’s much gentler and less jarring than an alarm, and I can lie there and learn things until I’m ready to roll out of bed.

Usually I stop listening during the membership drives, but this morning I realized that hey, I really do owe these guys something. I think my parents have been KUHF members for years, but this is the first time I’ve contributed on my own. It feels good. Public radio rocks my socks.

Did I mention that I’m an LSAT teacher? I don’t think I did. But I am—I’ve been teaching a class in Clear Lake for two weeks now. Our third lesson was tonight.

I heart the LSAT. Really I do. I love it even more than I love the SAT, I think, which is saying a lot. The LSAT, for those not-in-the-know, is the test people take to get into law school. It doesn’t test any specific subject matter, but rather general logic skills: reading comprehension, finding flaws in arguments, working out formal logic problems, things like that. Seriously, it’s a riot.

Officially, I don’t think I’m allowed to teach this class. When I auditioned to be a teacher/tutor last summer, I said I wanted to teach both SAT and LSAT, but they said I couldn’t teach LSAT until I’d finished my undergrad. But now we’re short an LSAT teacher, and all my SAT classes are finished, so…presto! And now I teach LSAT.

I was worried at first about how the students would react to being taught by someone younger than they are (or the same age, at best), but the adult students show me more respect than my SAT kids. They know that I’ve never been to law school, taken the real test, or even graduated college, but they also know that I am really good at taking the LSAT, and that I’m there to help them. It rocks.

The difference, I’m sure, is that everyone in the LSAT class is there because they want improve their scores and are willing to work to get there. Most of the SAT students are forced into taking the class by their parents. Some of them do pay attention and put in a good effort, but in every lesson I have to contend with the fact that half of the students would rather be somewhere else (if they are not, in fact, already somewhere else).

The older students do their homework, participate in class, ask good questions, and all the other things that make my job seem less like work and more like happyfun learningtime. I love it!

One thing they’re surprisingly *not* better at than high schoolers is showing up to class on time. At 6:00 this evening, when class was supposed to start, only one student (out of nine) was there. The rest trickled in between 6:02 and 6:30*. I guess lateness is something you don’t grow out of, then. Damn. Damn damn damn.**

The lessons themselves are going swimmingly—I honestly couldn’t be happier. I became a tad discouraged when the first one was a little rough and didn’t flow well. I kept losing my train of thought and having to look back at my book to remember the next point I was going to make. But the second and third lessons? Golden. I knew all their names, I drew diagrams on the board in an order that made sense, I could explain every problem in more than one way…all those things teachers are supposed to do. It was lovely.

After class on Monday I told Wendy how thrilled I was that it had gone well, and she was like, “You should really be a teacher. Seriously.”*** And dude, I should. I want to teach. I need to teach. I need to teach people who want to learn—that’s the hard part, maybe. Or maybe I can take people who don’t want to learn and *make* them want to learn and then I’ll feel all warm and fuzzy inside and then of course I’ll cry when they walk across the stage at graduation, looking forward to hearing of their myriad successes, especially that one kid whom the dark side of suburban life had trodden nearly into the ground who had come thisclose to dropping out in tenth grade but was now on his way to an Ivy League with a full ride and had promised me he’d be a teacher someday, too, as soon as he got out of the Peace Corps, as the music swells around the teary-but-exultant well-wishers crowded into the tiny gymnasium…and fade to black. Or maybe I’m being an idealistic twit.

The point is, I’m not a physicist, and I never will be. I could *teach* physics, but if I had to *do* physics for the rest of my life, I’d throw myself off a bridge. The same goes for math: for me, math is a hobby, not a career. There are more important things in life.

When I was younger (and by younger I mean anywhere from 8 to 15), I always thought I would be famous when I grew up. Famous like Einstein.**** After all, from every direction I heard people telling me I was sooooooo smart and sooooooo special and when I grew up I would of course be a brain surgeon, right? Or maybe a rocket scientist? Probably a rocket scientist, since I could solve those math problems so fast.

In high school I entered (and won) bunches of math competitions, and I had a blast doing it. Math competitions and Quiz Bowl were the highlights of those four years—I loved competing, and I loved a good challenge.

But when I got to college, the math got hard. And the physics got hard. And even the chemistry got hard. But I’m soooooo smart, right? This should be no problem. This is what I love. In reality…not so much. Maybe I could do the work, and maybe I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to. I still don’t. In an abstract, theoretical way, I do, and there are times when I catch just a glimpse of some striking mathematical idea, the pure, overwhelming beauty of which makes me think for a moment that it might all be worth it, but looking at those equations day after day after day is enough to make me want to tear my hair out.

I’ve felt guilty about this, as though I’m not fulfilling my purpose in life. If there are math problems to be solved, and I’m good at math, isn’t it then my *duty* to solve them? In my time off, though, I’ve learned a few things:

1. I need to get over myself. I’m not Einstein, or Fermat, or Euler, or who-the-hell-ever. The important problems will get solved whether I work on them or not.
2. I don’t owe the world anything. I’m reminded of what Dean Noda told me right before I left school: “Don’t be a slave to your talent.” I will do what makes me happy, and if I happen to be good at it, so much the better.
3. It doesn’t matter how famous I am after I’m dead; I won’t be around to enjoy it. Life is about the here and now. Period.

I don’t know what this means my life will look like, specifically, in the long term, but I do know that it’s getting mighty close to registration time for spring semester. Fuckin’ A. I’m almost positive I want to do an off-campus major, which’ll be a bitch to set up from 1500 miles away.

For now, though, life is good. It would be even better with more ice cream in it. Also, more avocados pleasethankyou.

———
* One thing I like about the LSAT classes is that we start every class period with a practice test section. That way, when students are late, they aren’t behind on the actual lesson.
** I know, I know, I shouldn’t be defeatist. I’ll keep fighting the lateness, I promise. I’ll punch it right in the nose.
*** Here I’m boiling down maybe an hour of conversation to its essence. I remember this being the jist of it.
**** Yes, I do have a rather overblown opinion of myself. You were expecting…?

I like words. Maybe you’ve noticed. Of the three “37 Things” lists I’ve posted so far, two of them are lists of words. And I’m only just getting started.

I promise the next list won’t be about words. Probably. My longest non-word list is at 28 right now, while my longest (unpublished) word list is only at 15, so I predict the former will see the light of day first.

Anyway, THIS list is about words that are funny because of their pronunciation.* This is by no means a complete list. I started it sometime last week, wrote down the first ten or so right away, then forgot about it until yesterday, so really, these are just the first 37 words off the top of my head that make me giggle when I say them.

Ticklish, apparently: words with many syllables (onomatopoeia), words with long strings of consonants (conflagration, monstrous), words with unexpectedly positioned emphasis (epistemological), words pronounced differently than their more common relatives (circuitous, capacious).

Bonus points for you if you can work one of these words into conversation today.

1. tintinnabulation
2. jonquil
3. onomatopoeia
4. obfuscate
5. mischievous
6. befuddled
7. conflagration
8. epistemological
9. tutelage
10. ordnance
11. behoove
12. suave
13. prescient
14. confabulate
15. monstrous
16. corpulent
17. litigious
18. ingrate
19. aghast
20. willy-nilly
21. albeit
22. nuisance
23. behemoth
24. epiphenomenon
25. lugubrious
26. rapscallion
27. tomfoolery
28. fisticuffs
29. circuitous
30. pusillanimous
31. mugwump
32. peripatetic
33. phlebotomize
34. capacious
35. polysyllabic
36. inanity
37. musculature

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* Another list of words with funny meanings is in the compiling. Approximately half of the items I’ve collected so far involve poop.

** Should the ’s’ in thirty-seven be capitalized (in a title)? I have a feeling that it ought to be, and I’m too lazy to look it up, though in the time it’s taken me to type this, I probably could have found the answer myself and fixed it already.

The night before last was the first night since April that it was cold enough for pajamas. Then a major cold front blew through yesterday and last night was already cold enough for…footie pajamas!

There are few things more comforting in cold weather, I think, than being bundled up from head to toe in soft flannel, feeling rather like a walking winter blanket. Yummy yummy. The only downside I’ve discovered so far is that footie pajamas make it a lot less fun to get an itch on your foot. To scratch it properly you have to take off the whole thing, and then you’re just cold.

Oh, and I also learned that footie pajamas are not acceptable dress in Muefferslegen. What? You’ve never been to Muefferslegen? That’s understandable, I guess, as it’s quite exclusive. Muefferslegen is a teeny-tiny country in central Europe, fully half of which is covered by an enormous mall/hotel/resort. It’s sometimes confused with Monaco. The northern region of the country is dark and snowy, with many caves and few streetlights, while the southern region is a tropical paradise, resplendent with palm trees and crystal-clear waterfalls.

The mall/hotel/resort runs east-west across the width of the country, separating the two regions. The accomodations there are dreadfully expensive, so the place is teeming with foreign celebrities and the occasional royal. I vaguely remember attending boarding school in this same building, but I was much younger and the building was much older and more run-down (dream-time runs in strange directions). And did I mention the bats? Clouds and clouds* of them, especially in the snowy northern parts.

Fortunately for me, Muefferslegen is just a short walk south from my parents’ house here in Houston. When I snuck across the border last night, however, I happened to be wearing my footie pajamas, and this was frowned upon, as I mentioned earlier. Someone with a funny accent had me deported only an hour after I got there, before I’d even made it to the jello bar. Le sigh.

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* One of the less interesting collective animal names. (And if you were thinking of leaving a comment to the effect that it should be a *colony* of bats, don’t bother. Bats *live* in colonies but *fly* in clouds, and I only saw these bats flying.)

…starts in ten days. I’ve been enchanted by the idea of joining the fun ever since I first heard about it two or three years ago. Up until now I’ve always had school to deal with, and while it’s not like I’m unbusy now, being on leave is as good an excuse as any to write a novel, right?

So I’m toying with the idea. I’ll start, at least, though with the head-pounding and the procrastination I went through to knock out that thousand-word Narnia blither-blather a few weeks ago, I doubt I’ll make it past the first day. I know that’s not an attitude that’s likely to get me through thirty 1667-word days, but at least I’m being realistic. That’s what I tell myself, anyway—maybe it’s just another excuse to fail.

When I was little I was sure I’d be a writer when I grew up. Then I was sure I’d be a lawyer, and then an aerospace engineer, and then a mathematician, and then a professor, and then an astrophysicist, and now I’m not sure of anything any more. One thing I do know is that my fiction-writing muscles have atrophied nearly into nonexistence. I can’t recall writing as much as a short story since seventh grade, and I’m not sure I remember how. (I still have a copy of the last story I wrote that year. It was about a hamster who falls asleep and wakes up in a sewer on another planet. His name was Squeaky.)

Over the next week and a half I’ll be idly attempting to dream up a premise, in case I decide to actually give this thing a solid effort. Maybe I’ll have to change the goal from a 50,000-word novel to…50,000 words of nonfiction? Thirty 1,667-word articles, maybe? Hmmm. Ponder ponder ponder.

Apparently something exciting happened in Missouri today. That’s what the people with the televisions keep telling me, anyway.

I won’t claim to be a fan because I don’t care much about baseball in general, but I’ll throw in a woo for the sake of Houston pride. Woo.

This afternoon I got to thinking about all the things I have, and how few of them I actually own. When I say “own,” I mean “bought with money I earned myself.”

What is the most expensive thing I own? It’s not my apartment, even though that’s where most of my money goes—that belongs to the rental company. It’s not my car, which belongs to my parents. It’s not my computer, which I got as a gift from my parents three years ago when I started college. The same goes for my cell phone. Most of my furniture and kitchen appliances (the only exceptions being my “coffee table” and (ex-)TV cabinet, neither of which cost more than thirty dollars) belong to either my parents or the apartment complex. I bought my four-hundred-dollar PDA myself, but that was Christmas money (which we got last year in lieu of a bunch of presents).

As far as I can tell, the only things of any non-trivial value that I actually own are about half of my clothes and some of my books. I estimate that if you threw all the clothes and books I’ve bought since I started earning my own money into a pile, it would be worth maybe two thousand dollars. I’ve combed my apartment looking for the single most valuable item I own. If you don’t count “my closet” or “my bookcase,” the most expensive things I’ve bought appear to be shoes. The most I’ve ever spent on a pair of shoes is around seventy bucks. Ok.

This surprises me a little, for some reason, though I’m not sure what I was expecting. I’m 21, and I’ve only held down a “real” job (i.e., one that pays a decent amount of money (and that I actually turn in timesheets for, instead of working “for the fun of it,” as I did during school when I just couldn’t be bothered to fill out the paperwork)) for about a year. I guess it feels strange because I spend much more money than that, but nearly all of it goes toward things which are immaterial or evanescent. My largest recurring expenses (in order) are rent, gas, groceries, cable, and electricity*.

Beyond those, I really don’t spend that much. I put nearly everything on my debit card. Here’s where my money has gone in the last month, in reverse chronological order:

credit card balance, electricity, psychiatrist**, gas, groceries, Starbucks, credit card balance, pharmacy, gas, groceries, rent, Office Depot, gas, groceries, cable, gas, footie pajamas, groceries, books, gas, cable, gas, hurricane groceries, psychiatrist, gas

That’s pretty much it; I’m not real spendy. (At the moment I’m not real earny, either, so it all balances out.) I do pay for a few things with cash, but I never have to withdraw cash from my account because one of my tutoring jobs pays in cash, and the twenty bucks a week I get from that is more than enough to keep me in frappucinos and waffle fries.

Oh, and that credit card balance that I keep having to make payments on? Yeah, that’s me being stupid. The only credit card I have is from Old Navy, and it’s been nothing but trouble since I opened the account two years ago. I would charge clothes to it, fully capable of paying for them and intending to do so, but then I’d forget. At 19.8% interest and $25/month late fees, things went downhill fast. I haven’t used the card since June, but I wasn’t able to pay off the whole balance until an hour ago when, in planning this post, I pulled up my account page, which reminded me that I’d been paid this morning. Since rent isn’t due for another two weeks, I threw half of my paycheck at this damn credit card bill to make it go away. And it did. Phew!

I charged, at most, three or four hundred dollars’ worth of clothes on that card, but I’ve paid nearly twice that much on the account. Clearly, I am not the sort of person who should have a credit card, or at least not until I grow up a little***.

But back to “owning” things. The only thing I’ve ever bought which has required “financing” is a small chunk of my education****. What will my first “big” purchase be, I wonder? Not a house, for sure, or even a car. My lil Tima has probably got two or three years left in her, and my parents have offered to buy me one car after that, which is lovely of them. I think the next item I’ll buy requiring more advance planning than reading the back cover will either be a keyboard or an iPod. Most likely the latter, unless I decide I can wait until Christmas. So it’s not a car, but going from a $70 purchase to a $200 one is progress. Look at me, buying things like a grown-up! (Planning to buy them, anyway.)

I’m ridiculously lucky to have the chance to experience the fun and stress of living on my own and barely making enough money to live on****** without having to worry about *actually* going broke. If I ever got in too tight a spot, my parents would cover my ass, and everything would be ok. I’m proud, though, that I (unlike my brother) have NEVER asked my parents for money, and I intend never to have to.

Someday when I’m all grown-up and responsible I imagine I will reread this and find it quite amusing. I’ll probably want to pinch my past (current) self’s cheeks and poke gentle fun at her innocent ignorance of mortgages, stock portfolios, and whatever-the-hell else I’ll be dealing with at the time. I can’t wait; I heart my blog.

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* Hopefully these last two will switch places now that I’ve cancelled my TV service.

** My parents reimburse me for my medical bills, but I pay them out of my account because my dad says I can get some sort of tax deduction.

***Or unless I can set it up to automatically be paid in full every time they send a bill, which would make it essentially a debit card. I can do debit cards.

****Speaking of which, the six-month grace period on my student loans should have expired at least a month ago, but I haven’t heard anything from Sallie Mae since February. If they want their money back, they’ll have to ask for it*****.

*****Oh, and to all the high school students out there: APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIPS. Scholarships are good. There are plenty of people out there who are just itching to give you free money. TAKE IT. Don’t just sit on your ass because you can’t be bothered to do the research and fill out the forms. All that Spider Solitaire might seem like fun now, but I promise you’ll regret it later; college is expensive.

******Technically, I’m probably not making *quite* enough money to live on, at least not at the standard-of-living I’ve got now. I pay MOST of my own bills, but my parents still cover my health insurance co-pays, my car insurance, and my cell phone bill (as part of our family plan).