Possibly Offensive Commentary: The “Why I Don’t Respect Skanks” Edition

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Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about the image I want to convey and the impression that I want to leave. This has led to an awful lot of pondering about what it means to be respectable. Sure, I could say that I don’t care what people think about me, but it seems that somewhere in there, nearly all self-respecting people care at least a little about how others see them.

I’m not a huge bar person, so when I’m out, I’m not there looking to impress anyone. I really don’t believe in finding quality relationships in bars. A wise friend (who is male) once told me that the guys I would meet in such establishments are not the kind of guys I would want to date, anyway. When I go out, I like to observe, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of sizing people up from afar. Is that judgmental? Maybe, but I don’t really think it is. And besides, perhaps we shouldn’t be so fast to say that judgment is a bad thing. Good judgment has kept me away from a lot of unfavorable situations and unsavory people. It’s also helped me to realize why self-respect is so important. Continue reading →

Back to the Book

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Last month, as I was feeling like a fraud for not seeing National Novel Writing Month beyond the confines of November, I wrote a post where I essentially questioned my validity as a writer. I was having a problem where I wanted to finish my novel, but I just couldn’t muster up the ambition to do it. I had built up quite the momentum in November, sometimes writing as many as four thousand words a day, and when I crossed the fifty thousand word mark days before the deadline, I crashed. I was burnt out and convinced that I had no more ideas and could give no more to this story right now. I kept saying that I would go back to it, but it’s hard to say how seriously I would have taken that promise.

This obviously begs the question, “Why do all of that work for nothing?”

Point taken. Continue reading →

The Invincibility Complex

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Like most teenagers, I had a mouth on me. I got myself into trouble by making sarcastic comments at my mother and other family members in evil tones (there’s a difference, see. Now I make sarcastic comments at her, but I say them in a joking tone and so she doesn’t want to smack me that way).  Also like most teenagers, I found myself grounded frequently with no use of the phone, computer, or television. In a shocking move, I was also pretty moody.

Where I differed from most teenagers was that instead of feeling like I was invincible, I always felt the exact opposite. I always felt like danger was lurking just around the corner and something really bad would happen to me if I didn’t work hard enough to keep it away. I think that perhaps the fact that my life as a teenager wasn’t quite as carefree as most of my peers’ had something to do with it. Then again, it also could have been a lot worse.  Continue reading →

Angels and Saints

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You know those dates that, for whatever reason, just seem to stick in your head, giving you pause for even just a second during the day? On June 6 each year, I always think about graduating from high school. On May 15, I always think about graduating from college. They’re like personal anniversaries. For the past four years, every February 7th, I have thought about my grandmother. Continue reading →

Addendum

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In the event that you find yourself offended by my most recent post (to which I gave very little thought before writing), my intent is not to say that other professions don’t work as hard or harder than teachers. It’s not to say that a lot of people don’t put a lot of time and effort into the behind-the-scenes action involved in public education, and much of that is very good. It’s come a long way. I think that perhaps the problem is that it’s just so easy to be jaded in the teaching profession, and maybe that’s what came out in my post. It was sort of a knee-jerk reaction.

The long and the short of it is this: basically, education needs some kind of reform because it’s really not fair for a teacher to have so many other things to do and then have to worry about losing his or her job if the students don’t hold up their end of it. Because in an ideal world, the kids would be ready to learn and they would love school and they would cooperate with the teacher and they would care about their futures. The teachers would always be able to motivate them.
But in reality… that doesn’t always happen.

Leaving NCLB Behind

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On my best days as a teacher, I’d be at work at 7:15 a.m., spending the next eight hours trying to find a volume level for my voice that didn’t make it hurt by the end of the day – a skill that took me nearly two months to perfect at the beginning of my career. I would deal with common problems like classes who couldn’t keep quiet to save their lives and students who made it a habit of never doing homework. During my “break” I was working on lesson plans and creating homework, tests, worksheets, and the like. I was updating my website and making sure that the homework was available to students on the web so that they could have no excuse for not having it. Left your homework at school? No problem. Just print one off! Once the kids were gone, I’d change my boards and grade some papers, answer some emails or make a phone calls to parents. I would have to make sure my grades were in the computer. I wouldn’t have finished everything anyway, and so eventually I would pack things up and go home and continue to work well into the evening on whatever remained.

On my more common days, I would do all of that and more. My students felt comfortable talking to me as a trusted adult. Most days after school, and often during my planning periods, I would find myself with students in my room who wanted to talk or who wanted advice. I’ve listened as students coped with death, depression, heartache, teen angst, and school problems. If those students weren’t in my room after school, then I was advising (which is code for “doing everything”) a community service club that I was encouraged to start up during my first year. When all that was over, I would have to go one of two places: either to my second job (because teaching doesn’t pay nearly enough for all the work that goes into it) or to a night class for grad school. Most people aren’t crazy enough to work two jobs and do grad school at the same time, but as it turns out…I am. Continue reading →

The Constant

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I am The Constant. I am the friend who is always there; the one you can always find. With my more distant friends, I check in periodically to say hello. I ask questions. With my closer friends, I’m checking in frequently. I like to send emails, IMs, Facebook messages to let you know that I’m thinking of you. When something is wrong in your life, I will be right there ready to help in any possible way. I will lend an ear and support you, and I will check back in to see how you’re doing. I am that friend who, even if we haven’t spoken in a few years, I will still help you if you need me. Regardless of how close we are, if you have questions, I will answer them. I frequently brag about how awesome my friends are and how proud I am of them. It doesn’t matter if I’m proud of them for getting a really great job, for doing an awesome job in school, for being good at something, for achieving something, or for being generally successful. Sometimes I’m proud of my friends just for being who they are: good people. I will tell other people how proud I am when someone close to me accomplishes something. I make sure other people know when someone could use a friend. I will find some way to communicate to my friends that I care. My name is Renee, and I am your champion.

A friend recently told me something that got me thinking. That something was that I’m too available. People always know where to find me: IM, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, cell phone. But the thing is that almost no one does. Because I’m always there, I guess it’s just taken for granted that I will always just … be there. I know that I’m a very sensitive person (and frequently to a fault), but I end up feeling under-appreciated and after so many of my texts or emails or Facebook messages are ignored, I start to feel like I care too much just for being a considerate person. Continue reading →

Body Image and the Heidi Montag Mentality

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Body image has been grinding the gears of my brain for the past few days now, and recent Hollywood happenings have me thinking about my own struggle. Maybe I hadn’t been paying incredibly close attention, but it seemed as though fame-whores Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt weren’t being quite as obnoxious with their Twitter accounts, used primarily to promote Heidi’s 650-times-downloaded album, themselves, and God. Then suddenly an altered Heidi-face was showing up all over the place and magazines and television “insider” shows were talking about her 10 plastic surgery procedures in one day. Her face barely moves. I saw a clip of a television interview where Heidi said that “real beauty comes from within.” She says it again in a video embedded in this article.

My point here isn’t to really discuss Heidi Montag, per se. I’ve been stewing over this and similar issues for the past few days. What kind of messed up message is this sending out to little girls (and all women, for that matter)? Here they have someone saying that real beauty comes from within, which would imply that it doesn’t matter what someone looks like. Sure, it’s best that you practice good hygiene and take care of yourself, but what makes someone beautiful is what’s on the inside. (Just ask Dove. Their Campaign for Real Beauty renews my faith in corporate America.) Then, the same person promoting this message has multiple plastic surgeries to make herself be the “best” she can be and to make herself feel better about how she looks. I can’t understand this because if you look back at older pictures of Heidi, she’s not bad-looking.

The entire time I was growing up, I always felt like the ugly duckling. For a while, I was a lot taller than the other girls in my grade, and then I was a lot shorter than them. Most importantly, I was the fat kid. I learned to hate the way I looked as early as first grade, which is when kids started calling me fat to my face (and behind my back). As a result, I was never very social or outgoing, and when boys started noticing girls, they weren’t noticing me (unless they wanted to make friends with me in order to get to one of my friends). I started to have a really hard time trusting people because I never knew who was just making fun of me and pretending to be nice. For a while, I really tried to wear the same clothes that the other girls were wearing, but eventually I just gave up and tried to hide behind really big clothes. It never mattered how smart I was (I was – and am – smart), what kind of diet I was on, what sports I played (softball was my sport of choice for 11 years, though I tried my hand at basketball in 5th grade and threw for the track team in 8th grade), what activities I was involved in (numerous – they got me a $25,000 scholarship in college) or what I was trying to do, all that mattered to those kids was that I was fat, so I wasn’t pretty, and I could never be one of them. Continue reading →

Haiti

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I was perusing some posts on Twitter earlier today when I saw this picture, which had been re-tweeted 100 times before I passed it along, too. It was labeled as the best picture to come out of Haiti so far, and I couldn’t agree more.

Prior to last week’s unimaginable earthquake, two things always came to my mind when I thought of Haiti. The first was Alicia Silverstone in the movie Clueless saying that “we could certainly party with the Hati-ans” – an accidental mispronunciation that was ultimately left in the movie. The second was of religion. Growing up as a Catholic, I’d grown accustomed to hearing the phrase “…and our sister parish in Haiti” during Mass. While I’ve grown quite far from my Catholic upbringing (at least, as much as anyone can ever do such a thing) for personal reasons, that church – that sister parish – was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news.

I have found it virtually impossible to watch coverage of the immediate aftermath and the relief efforts, for the most part. While I feel that the public has a right to know what’s happening when it affects them and should be aware of what’s going on in the world, I realized on April 20, 1999, as news of the Columbine massacre ripped through the country, that the media is comprised of sharks. I can’t understand why they feel it’s necessary to show us pictures of dead bodies lying in the streets. I’m sure this happened before Columbine, but in the years since then (9/11, Katrina, etc.) it seems as though they have little or no respect for the dead or for the survivors. Their attempts to “shock” us with these images have not only contributed to paranoia, fear, and, ironically, mass desensitization (and they wonder why the youth of America are the way they are), but the act of showing those pictures is, itself, insensitive. I get that, unless we can actually see what is happening there, we really can’t understand what it’s like for those people. At the same time, putting cameras in their faces to publicize their suffering isn’t going to make it any better. Continue reading →

Meta

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I used to be a writer.

I used to take it pretty seriously, too, and while I’ve never been absolutely phenomenal at it, I’ve always been a decent writer at the very least. My whole life (okay, since I was two or three years old, but before I was even in pre-school) I have wanted to teach. The only other occupation that I even considered was one in writing, and I knew that it couldn’t be my only occupation. In addition to my teaching career, I had big plans to write a novel. But as Phil Collins would say, something happened on the way to Heaven. Continue reading →