Rally to Restore Sanity

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Regarding London

Regarding London:
There is so much hopping around in my brain right now that blogging seems ridiculous. But then maybe that's the point - the idea that I can be relatable, appreciated, and, I admit, loved in a virtual world. Not that I'm not sincere - most of the time - but that the chaos of life (who I am in this life) can be ordered somehow in an 8x4 computer window is outright silly.


And now for the old college try... whatever that means:

1. Shaun of the Dead is real.
Rich and I were in London during several work days, and it looked just exactly like the movie when people were commuting to work in the morning - zombies and regular folk alike - and one would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the dead tired and the truly dead. The tube was full of silent carriages, the only movement an occasional yawn, and even that kept to a minimum because a yawn would be proof of a living being. I tried not to look around ( a dead giveaway that I was a tourist), but I couldn't help but laugh.. thankfully, silently, when I then remembered the slipping on the brains part of the film. To make matters worse, this advert decorated nearly every tube station:

For the record, the zombies in the picture are WAY more enthusiastic than the ones commuting to work. These must be the after 10 zombies.

2. My mother was right.
Cars are weapons and we only get one chance. That was the line she fed me when I was a teenager. At the time, I knew that probably she was right, that I didn't really want to find out, and that hopefully God was on my side, especially since I had gone on practically every youth group mission offered. It turns out, that all she had to do to teach me the validity of this lesson was put me in a car in England with my husband. (sigh)

I'm not saying (ahem) that Rich is a bad driver.. He's just a bad driver in England. In his defense, I practically badgered him into it, reminding him that it was my birthday and that it could be romantic to visit the countryside and picnic near the sheep. It might even be fun, I intimated, to get stung by the nettles and have to look for the leafy cure which, as we all learned years ago in England when I got stung on my backside during an ill-timed bathroom emergency at Hadrian's Wall, is always nearby. We compromised. We took a train out of London and into Oxford where we rented a car and drove through the Cotswolds. It was a gorgeous drive, minus the honking and the curb brushing, and we learned how to utilize round-abouts (kind of), we learned about how to fill a tank with gas (not so different), and we also learned that driving in England is a stress to our marriage and that probably we should stick to train riding. The kind folks in Stow-on-the Wold would agree.

3. I am possibly the most lazy blogger in the world.
Actually, the photo pasting is kind of a nightmare here and my patience is waning. So here's what I'll do: Speed blogging followed by a photo montage, hopefully in slide show format:


* We saw some excellent political/modern art at two fantastic galleries - The Saatchi Gallery in a posh part of London and at the ICA where we viewed a political Russian opera film called Dissent while reclining in beds.


*We took a day trip to Canterbury - made the Pilgrimage, Chaucer style, yo! (minus the donkey/horse riding, the lack of bathing, and the story-telling)- and had a moment of silence for Thomas Becket on the alter where he was murdered. We also witnessed a bell ceremony there in remembrance of all soldiers. I couldn't help but marvel at how American it seemed.. or possibly how British we still are.


* My friends, Mark and Ilham, took me out to lunch at a fantastic open-aired cafe for my birthday and then the next evening took me, a Texan, to a Mexican restaurant called La Mexicana, co-owned by a native Mexican and a Turk, who employed a blond haired, fantastically sarcastic Canadian. All three - the Turk, the Mexican, and the Canadian - wore sombreros and sang Happy Birthday to me in front of a mural depicting a cowboy screaming "Yee Ow!" See, this is why I love Mark and Ilham. They thought to take me to that awesomely surreal place, and it wasn't that weird to them.


*We watched ping pong matches in St. James Park. Had I known ping pong was a free-for-all sport there, I totally would've played. Next time..


* We visited various pubs, including the good-ole standby - the Black Friar- and ate all kinds of horrifically bad for you pub foods, including fried fish sandwiches and a plowman's lunch. Of course there was shepherd's pie (duh), but sadly no bangers and mash.We declined the invitation to "go out back" to the bar-be-cue at the local pub near our hotel where it was perfectly acceptable behavior to roll around in the floor with puppies. I can't begin to explain that - the puppy part - except to say that it happened, and we tried not to stare at the coin slots. Seriously. At the time I was worried about looking all touristy.. but in retrospect, it just grossed me out.

And now for the montage:

4. London is my favorite place on the planet.
We spent a huge amount of time walking around the city and then taking the tube back to our hotel. We ran across several fantastic sites, including the Victoria Rail Station and a car boot sale (where I bought a purse). Mark even took me on a tour of his school - yet another reminder of how same we all are.

Joel Burns tells gay teens "it gets better"

Overheard - In my Brain

So I'm going to London next week where they've raised the terror alert level to severe (a step below 'Bah!' but definitely above 'Meh..').

The two - me being in the UK and the terror level - are probably not related. Still, I feel a bit offended.

What's the Opposite of Huzzah?

I admit it. Sometimes my great ideas are not so great. Sometimes they're downright stupid. I'm not sure if this is the case in this instance, but it certainly will be logged as one of the most interesting moments in my life.. as interesting as an I Love Lucy sketch can be, anyway.

Christine had an ARD* meeting. That's the excuse I used for not making the usual coffee house stop for grading this afternoon, and for choosing instead to go to Houlihans for artichoke goat cheese poppers and a blueberry martini. OK, so it was more about the artichoke goat cheese poppers than anything else, but I rationalized that on a Thursday afternoon there would be a cozy corner in the bar for me to spread out and grade, plus a martini might take the edge off of what usually is a highly stressful process - marking first draft essays. And hey, wouldn't all of that - goat cheese poppers and a blueberry martini - actually benefit the students' grades?

So I went.

I was finished with my martini and was casually snacking on the poppers when the manager of the restaurant - a small, spunky blond woman - interrupted my careful analysis and asked if I'd "like another cocktail." I would be lying if I said I didn't think about it. The martini was especially lovely, and, after all, I was, as I've mentioned, grading first draft essays. Responsibly, though, I said, "No thank you," and added that I was about to leave. She smiled at me and returned to her duty of being chipper and accommodating. I returned to my task, too, decidedly less chipper and accommodating. A minute later she returned to my table and said, "Actually, you'll be getting another cocktail, after all. Someone bought you a drink. "

"Um. What?" I asked, conveying confusion via the apparent question mark tattooed on my expression.

"You don't have to drink it" she said, obviously amused.

"No. I mean, this has never happened to me before. A stranger has never bought me a drink before."

I could have hugged the manager as she, in her most sincere (but forced) imitation tried, "Really? Never?"

"Nope. Never.. Um. Okay. Thank you. I think."

The manager said something about the fact that this was sort of secret or that she couldn't point out who had bought the drink or something of that nature, but I was too focused on what the appropriate protocol was for receiving a drink from a random stranger in a bar.

The waitress placed the drink on my table and my brain went haywire. I immediately recalled all of the scenarios in movies where this sort of thing happens. The montage went like this:

*Girl receives drink.
*Girl looks around the room to see who sent it.
*Very attractive man - probably an Italian - acknowledges, via either a short nod or by raising his own glass, that he is the "guilty" party.
*Girl takes a bashful sip of the new drink and nods appreciatively in his direction.
*And then, depending on the film, the man approaches the girl and they A. Have a bashful flirtation, the beginning of a new romance B. Leave together for hot, eccentric stranger sex C. Have a confrontation ending in embarrassment on all sides, the man being told to back the hell off, the girl stomping out in stilettos and justification, both leaving their beer goggles on the bar.

That's all I had to work with. I knew my ending would, as my husband would like for me to acknowledge, be minus the last bullet. But in all seriousness I had to do something. So, I went for it. I arranged my face into a less panicked, more pleasant (I hope) expression and began scanning the room slowly from right to left. I was pretty sure it wasn't the couple across the room, but I couldn't rule out the two Chinese business men who, though not conversing, weren't looking in my direction. There were three closely shaved contractors sitting to the left of the business men who were grossly engaged in conversations beginning with "Here's what we're gonna do", and then another couple, and then two, as I had previously determined by their familiarity with the bartender, regulars - one man who was apparently enthralled with whatever sport was on the big screen and a black woman who had just ordered nachos "to go".

My eyes crawled across the room and as I neared the end of the sweep, I was both elated and distraught to find that no one nodded back. There was absolutely NO acknowledgement as to who had sent a drink my way.
"OK," I thought, "look again." Once again, no one even pretended to look my way. I scanned the bill for an extra martini, just in case there was a miscommunication between me, the waitress, and the manager. Nothing.

"Shit! What now?" I thought. And then I did the most obvious thing in the world: I called my husband.

I won't bore you with the details here. Suffice it to say that I explained my situation to him - my husband and soul mate; the man I married when we were both still children; the one who has been ever faithful and supportive of me in all of my decisions and experiences; the one I chose to have a family with and common dreams; the one who nonchalantly commented, "Probably someone saw you hunched over, grading papers and thought, ' Hey, I should buy that school marm a drink. She is friendless more-than-likely and destitute. Plus, who else would take care of such a troglodyte? Sad, isn't it? It's my duty as a compassionate member of the universe to attend to sad cases such as these.' And then that person sighed for you -the pathetic being in the corner - and shook his head, feeling a small twinge of pride for being such an angel to such a lost cause. "

"OR" I countered emphatically, "someone might actually think I'm attractive."

And I hung up and dialed Christine.

Christine suggested that I make a grandiose gesture - possibly I could raise one hand into the air and announce, "Thank you!" in a theatrical tone to no one in particular but also to every one. I asked if I should stand on a soap box of some kind as a make-shift stage, or if i should just project my voice from the diaphragm. She then acknowledged that she too was unclear about what to do in my circumstance. Because she's a great friend, she did acknowledge that my husband is a colossal doofus, and then, randomly, she asked what the opposite of "Huzzah" is. I didn't know the answer to that question, so we hung up.^

I was stuck, and it was coming close to the time I needed to leave. In the end I decided, as Ms. Manners would positively suggest, that I should leave a grammatically correct note on the table, a very polite and sincere one that would cover all possible scenarios - troglodyte sympathy to Italian flirtation. It went something like this:

Hi. Thank you to whoever sent the martini over. It certainly helped with essay marking. Plus, it was a nice thing to do. :) Thanks again, -G

And then I edged my way around the bar, my back glued to the wall in an attempt to be invisible, to the exit and, as it appeared to me, to sweet freedom!

*Admission, Review and Dismissal meeting for parents, teachers and administrators, regarding kids who may or may not need or who continue to need special academic or behavioral accommodations in the classroom.
^ Fie is the probable answer Christine later revealed.

Thanks for the heads up, Tushar!