We are watching The 100. It is a post-apocalyptic show about how humans survived a global radiation event by riding it out in a bunker underground, shipping people to a space station, and through evolution living in camps and foraging.
The people in the show cannot get along. They are constantly fighting. It makes me think about my experience with the lockdown last spring. In so many ways, I was super fortunate. I had job security, income security, a nice home to reside in, and I did not know anyone who was sick. All I had to do was stay home, make art, do a little work each day, attend a few zoom meetings, but for the most part, I could sleep in, take a nap, go for long walks...... In some ways, it was a time of productivity and relaxation....but in other ways it felt like a lonely, boring prison. I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I need to be around lots of groups of people. I learned that I am happier when I have a regular routine and a schedule. I got up every day and put on makeup. The news was stressful and annoying... But without the daily stressors of working, I was very bored. I found myself getting into fights on social media and through texting. Literally starting drama with complete strangers just for the entertainment of needing the strife and needing to be aggressive because I had so much in my brain, but my routine was so boring.....I attempted to find issues everywhere. It's no wonder that the computer A.I. in the 100 (and in the book Ready Player Two that I am currently reading) realized the problem with humans and decided to wipe us all out. We cannot live in peace and we cannot exist without stirring up trouble.
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At first, I did not miss our old house one bit.
I still don't really miss it, but there were some nice things about the house. For one thing, it was hardwood and tile throughout, so we were pretty lucky when it came to keeping it clean. The floors were very squeaky, and Leo's little claws would tap tap tap everywhere he went. Now we all pad around silently on the carpeting. I miss the white tile in the bathroom. We spent a long weekend ripping up the linoleum and installing the tile ourselves. We had also tiled the shower and it was nice. I also liked having a little closet in the bathroom, I had just put wall paper and shelf liner and we had recently built extra shelves, so it was more functional. One other good thing about the house was the basement. We always had a place to go for storms, and I felt safe. I liked the gas fireplace, it was handy to know we had it if the power went out, we would still have heat. Also, the basement was the entire size of the home, and we had maximized all of the areas for storage for all of our yard equipment, hobbies, art supplies/canvases and storage areas. The yard was small, but we had maximized the garden area and planted a lot of perennials. I will definitely miss the roses, peonies and lilies that returned every year. But let's face it, I will not is raking up the sweet gum balls, dealing with the flooding in the basement, putting the dog on a leash just to go into the yard, and living across the alley from a revolving door apartment of crackheads. There were great things about our old house, but it was time for a change, and I am so happy we did it! Our plan wasn't to buy a house.
We were just passing by and we saw an open house sign advertising for later that day. So we decided to swing back by the house and have a peek inside. Probably, in any other year, we would've found enough 'dealbreakers' with this house to pass, but this was not an ordinary year and we could just instantly see ourselves in this house. The house had sat empty for a while, and it was for-sale-by-owner for a while but never sold. It was significantly lowered in price because the investor who owned it was ready to get rid of it. At the open house, we were not blown away by the carpeting, or the kitchen, or the bathrooms....but, we fell in love with the attached garage, the amazing back yard space with all the privacy and the potential and the totally unique 'den'. When I first walked into the den, I instantly felt transported into a sanctuary of an old church. One large wall made completely of stone. A vaulted ceiling with exposed wooden beams, thick texture plaster remnant of an old cave, and dark wood paneling. No windows, just a giant gaudy gold chandelier and weird florescent lights along the edges of the walls. Upon inspection, we knew the house would need a new roof, and new windows. Expensive items that can't wait forever. We also saw lots of potential for 'fun' projects and upgrades. Neither of the two fireplaces were hooked up and the landscaping is a blank slate in a lot of ways---no trees, bare bones bushes and in need of some TLC. Looking around our old house, this one needed several things we had just fixed at the old place....and lots of things that we really didn't want to mess with or invest in. We were both ready for a new, fresh, change of scenery. The neighborhood is so cool. We used to drive through it, and pine for some of the houses in this area. We also had looked at one a few streets over two years ago, and it was really cool, but there were some 'deal breakers'. Now that we live here, I'm already so happy that we made the switch. No more laundry room in the basement. No more waiting for the car to warm up, as we can both park in the garage. No more totes full of winter clothes stored in the attic, as all of my wardrobe can fit in the closet. Three toilets---when we only had a single potty for 15 years---it is such a luxury!! We have only lived here since November, but we have already upgraded several things: induction stove, new vent hood, improved lighting above the kitchen sink, the garage and in the master bathroom, new faucet in kitchen, wood fireplace insert and an electric insert in both fireplaces. We have a big list of projects that we are planning to tackle next week when I am on spring break. And lots of little projects that we will have fun accomplishing in the future. For now, we are enjoying our proximity to the park, our fenced in back yard, and our big screen t.v. in the amazing den. We have spent the last few months watching a lot of T.V. Between quarantines, snowmageddon and rainy weekends, and the fact that nothing is going on (movies theaters are closed), there are no events, and no one is hosting fun stuff, it has felt like the only 'fun' option is putting on a movie. Also, we got a 70" t.v. so when we pop up some popcorn and click on the heated blanket, literally nothing sounds better.
We have reached a compromise on our shared interest in movies. I really don't like super hero movies, so we generally watch a comedy or an action movie, but there are only so many of those that we haven't seen. This year, we have gotten into selecting a director like Christopher Nolan, or an actor like Tom Cruise, and watching everything they have ever made and I have to tell you, it is a pretty enjoyable way to spend a weekend. Most recently, we have decided that we both like movies with some unexplainable, hard to conceive element like worm holes, time travel or multiverses. We also watch a lot of scary movies in October, so if there is a little bit of a thrill, we can get behind that. I've organized our recent watchlist below, in case you are looking for a binge and you like time travel or time loop movies too: Movies by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (directors) Syncronic The Endless Resolution After Midnight Movies with multiple realities/time travel: Coherence Time Trap Parallel Primer Movies about repeating the same day: (I just searched for more, and there are several that I have not seen yet. )These are the ones I have seen: Groundhog's Day Live Die Repeat--Edge of Tomorrow Palm Springs Movie All the Perfect Things Russian Doll--t.v. show Books about time travel: Time Traveller's Wife Ripples in Space Time Ripple in Time Solitude-Multitude-Amplitude (series of 3) Doing Time Flux Time Was Outlander Series (I haven't read it but I have watched the show) Movies by Christopher Nolan that fit into the time travel/alternate reality theme Inception Momento Tenet Interstellar Other movies by this director that we also watched: The Prestige Batman Begins Tom Cruise movies (these are over like a 2 year period) Mission impossible movies—all 6 Top Gun War of the Worlds American Made TropicThunder Minority Report Jerry McGuire Vanilla Sky Edge of Tomorrow Risky Business Knight and Day Oblivion The Mummy Cocktails Color of Money Jack Reacher x2 Collateral The Firm Far and Away Rainman Interview with a Vampire The Last Samurai Wow, looking at this list, it feels like we have watched a LOT of movies, considering we also binged all of the Fast and Furious movies! Anyway, I would recommend nearly all of them or at least spending some time making your own binge list! Glad to have organized these all in one place ;-) A buyer paid $69 million in cryptocurrency, with fees, for “Everydays,” a collage of digital images authenticated with a unique bit of code. Credit...Christie's Images Ltd.
I've spent a bit of time this week figuring out what an NFT is and how it relates to art. blah blah blah, establishing ownership of a digital asset, which is non-duplicable, blah blah blah, it's put together using an open source code, and then its published into a token, blah blah blah, as a block chain. I feel like all of a sudden, news about NFTs has been popping up everywhere. Perhaps that is just because I've been clicking on articles and googling stuff about NFTs, so it has altered my algorithm because that is how news works nowadays. Anyway, I think it would be pretty cool to own an NFT, but do I really need one? I dunno....online ownership is kind of a weird topic and a lot of the digital drawings and 'art' pieces are ugly pixelated images, they aren't really beautiful or interesting in a traditional way. It seems like there is a large emerging market for artists to make a lot of money by selling NFTs through different marketplaces online. It is an interesting new topic, that didn't even exist a few years ago. This week, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Harry and Meghan and the news of the interview was everywhere.
While we were watching it, I revealed that Oprah is one of those people on my list that I would love to have lunch with. But I would want her to be fascinated by my story and ask me all kinds of questions like she does in her interviews. I want her to be enthralled by my voice, like she is with other people when she gives a real interview. I imagine we would eat somewhere fabulous and beautiful, like the restaurant at the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Surrounded by huge plants under skylights, eating off real china, with a very fancy dessert. I've given this a lot of thought. I just looked up the list of the top ten famous people to have lunch with:
I agree with Lady Gaga, but I'm not really interested in having lunch with most of the others. Maybe Harry Styles..... My top ten list (dead or alive) would probably look like this:
This week marked the one year anniversary of when things really took a major turn in the pandemic. I remember telling my students: 'take home your portfolios and sketchbooks....I don't know if I will see you again this year'.....on Friday March 13th 2020. They didn't really take me seriously but I knew that it was going to be big, my trip to Jamaica had just been canceled and MSSU had cancelled classes for the rest of the semester.
Now we say 'when Covid hit' to describe that time in our lives when everything changed, got cancelled and shut down for weeks and weeks and weeks. I remember during the shut down, I rarely left my house. I would talk to friends on weekly facetime events, and I spent a lot of time alone. It made me appreciate my job and being around lots of people every day. Things don't feel normal yet. I still wear a mask everywhere I go, even though I have had one shot of the vaccine, and the mask mandate has been lifted. I really thought the words would come easier, but this has been a hard post to write because I don't want to think about this covid stuff anymore. I want to think about the future, I want to put energy and focus into new exciting things. The fall 2020 semester was difficult. I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about it, but it was not an experience I could verbalize while living through it. After avoiding crowds, friends, activities and canceling all of my summer trips I remember being panicked about how to ‘social distance’ in my art room. I remember telling my principal that it was like I had already figured how to do my job perfectly but now, I had to go against all of my training, planning and experience and attempt to do the same job in a completely different (and not fun) way. The very first class on the very first day, a student in the very front row tested positive for the coronavirus. It was the first class in which I was attempting to explain all of the new procedures and routines while wearing a mask and I was so suffocated that I know I took the mask off to project my voice. I was so frustrated to learn that I was exposed the very first hour of being back in classroom after being practically in isolation since March 13th. Then more students tested positive. And then teachers started getting sick. Watching the virus move down the hall like a Final Destination movie, I knew I would get sick and it wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ it was ‘when’. One of my students returned from quarantine after having the virus and she said, ‘I mean, what’s the point of surviving a pandemic if you don’t actually get the disease!?’ Lots of students were out for weeks at a time.
The stress of managing 30+ students who were gone for anywhere from 10-30 days, became completely unmanageable….and then they started to return to the building and we just kept going. I was planning projects that could be done if we closed, I spent so much energy preparing activities so that if school closed, students could do things virtually. I felt like I was providing projects that could be completed with a substitute in case I had to be gone, I didn’t want to leave ceramics or painting or anything fun that would require lots of instructions…so we did really boring drawing projects that took weeks and weeks to finish as students who were at home didn’t have their materials. Somewhere around Halloween, I came to the realization that we were never going to close, school would just be completely open, with masks not required while students are at their desks, and I stopped policing social distancing as closely as I had when school started. I got a little more relaxed with all the sanitizing because it was killing me and not realistic….Watching the teenagers jump into each other’s cars unmasked after school, and seeing them on social media clustered in large groups without their masks on, reminded me that students would never trace their own illness back to my classroom—they would probably get it from a sleepover or a sporting event or working in public as essential workers. I’m not saying I became completely complacent, as my desk is still surrounded with plexiglass and I rarely went anywhere but school and home for practically the entire semester. I should also mention that other things happened in the midst of this experience which would’ve been big news in my world in any other semester. The week after the election, I got sick. I lost my sense of smell, and tested positive for Covid-19, and then we picked up our U-Haul and had to pack up our home and move to the new house that we were so excited about—it was literally the only thing we were looking forward to this year…..I would not recommend trying to isolate while in between homes….I also do not recommend anyone ever move while really really sick….it was a horrible experience. For anyone inconvenienced by mask wearing for 30 minutes while grocery shopping, you just really cannot imagine trying to project your voice across a classroom to large groups of people for 7 hours, until you do it.
Living in the Show Me State, where mask ordinances are staunchly opposed by the masses, I feel that it is necessary to paint a picture of this experience because the virus is here to stay for a good long while, and most people are living mask-free and footloose in small towns where ordinances never existed or have expired. When you are teaching, you have to talk loudly and clearly. When you attempt to talk loudly, you have to take large, deep breaths and open your mouth wide. When you wear a mask, and you open your mouth wide to annunciate, the mask pulls on your ears and rubs the delicate skin on the top raw. (Still waiting for a callus to form, anyone know how long that takes?) When you take a big, deep breath, just before reciting a large bit of information, the cloth from the mask goes into your mouth, and your brain creates a delusion. For a split second, you envision that you are being suffocated with a pillow case in front of a room full of people and no one is coming to your rescue, and then when you exhale, the cloth goes out and you realize that you need to finish your sentence, everyone in the room is waiting on the edge of their seat with bated breath for the final syllables of that precious knowledge. And you try to keep going, but your heart rate is up, because your life just flashed before your eyes and no one realizes that you are on the verge of a panic attack. I was recently gifted one of those plastic face guards to wear in between my mask and my face, which has prevented the suffocation effect for a few days….but the plastic guard rests against your skin and gets very sweaty and very wet, very quickly in humid SWMO. Today, I was wrapping up a perfect performance, explaining how to add shading to a drawing and then how to submit the finished creation to our online platform, and mid-sentence, the entire show stopped. My mask+plastic guard popped off my face, like Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction in the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime show. Bam! My face was completely exposed, entirely unplanned. The plastic guard was so sweaty, that it pushed the ear strap right off one ear and there I was, sweaty chin, lipstick on my teeth (because it is picture day and that’s how I roll), face laid bare for all the class to see. Like any good performer, I kept going (thankfully, I was 6 ft. away from the nearest student). Nervously, I made a reference to Janet Jackson, and then realized that my students were probably not even alive to appreciate that incident and my reference to what happened because it is 2020. Then, I worried that if they decided to look into it, the results would be highly inappropriate for a classroom discussion….hehe….whoops. Sorry parents, I’m seriously doing my very best…and for the record: Missouri ranks #49 in teacher pay in the nation, Missouri has not increased the minimum pay requirements for teachers since 2005. Basically, my entire career. Janet’s malfunction has literally existed in our collective adult memories, longer than we’ve made public education a priority in this state. Please know that public teachers are worth a whole lot more than the current rate and if your kid goes to public school, LOVE THOSE TEACHERS BIG! Shortly after 9:35 a.m. on Friday December 14th 2012, a shooter armed with his mother's Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle and ten magazines with 30 rounds each shot his way through a glass panel next to the locked front entrance doors of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The story broke in bits and pieces throughout that day and over the weekend.
Authorities determined that Adam Lanza reloaded frequently during the shootings, sometimes firing only 15 rounds from a 30-round magazine. He shot all but two of his victims multiple times. Most of the shooting took place in two first-grade classrooms near the entrance of the school. The students among the victims totaled eight boys and twelve girls, all either six or seven years old, and the six adults were all women who worked at the school. A random act of violence with an assault rifle killed 26 people in one school. Walking into an elementary school on Monday December 17th 2012, was the most scared I have ever felt as a teacher. I served breakfast duty in a cafeteria with two entrances, light streaming through the two sets of double doors, surrounded by a wall of windows. I vividly remember standing amongst my little kindergarten angels, their cherub faces glowing in the early morning sun, opening their cartons of milk, tears filling my eyes. I watched them scooping up mouthfuls of sugary cereal, their smiles full of vibrance and health, not a care in the world. In a cafeteria full of 5-and 6-year-olds, the air is filled with laughing and singing. Meanwhile, an impossible scenario kept replaying in my head...At any moment a crazed gunman could bust into the building and we would be like sitting ducks...nowhere to hide...nothing bullet proof to provide shelter for the 100 students in my charge. The kids had no idea that I was afraid of an invisible enemy. They were just excited for chocolate milk. And recess. And Christmas. I've always taken intruder drills seriously, and in the confines of a classroom built of cement bricks, behind a locked door, keeping a couple dozen kids safe in the event of an emergency seems feasible. But what happened in Newtown was different...It made me more vigilant and fearful. Locked doors don't keep us safe. We aren't safe anywhere. And I am responsible for keeping everyone safe. I think about Sandy Hook often while supervising students. I replay various scenarios in my head. I ask myself, "how many can I save? Where can we hide?" School shootings have changed the way we operate....Now we train students on what to do if someone hears a gun shot, and we practice barricading ourselves in closets and talk about how we would fight off an intruder with staplers and chairs. We tolerate the drills because we know that we are statistically unlikely to encounter an intruder, an active shooter, a fire or a tornado...but we prepare for everything. Almost everything. On July 6th, 2020 educators were called to return to the classrooms and schools were ordered to open amidst a global pandemic, while case numbers are increasing and the percentage of positive cases are rising everywhere. Since July 6th, I've been struggling with the same panicky fear that I had in 2012....only this time, the culprit isn't a statistically unlikely, crazed lunatic with an assault rifle attempting to break into the building....it is the exact opposite of that....it is an invisible enemy that can't be seen or heard. It floats on air from the laughing and singing children. On August 25th, after mostly avoiding groups of 10 or more since March 13th... I will be packed into a room with several sets of 25 every day, where maintaining 6 ft. of proximity is impossible. My little genzies (generation z) are all grown up teenagers now...still scooping up mouthfuls of sugary cereal, but this year I will look into their mask-covered faces, and they will probably know that I am afraid of the invisible enemy...because my fears are their fears. They aren't sheltered from the news of our reality. Locked doors don't keep us safe. We aren't safe anywhere. And I am responsible for keeping everyone safe. I've spent the last few weeks researching how to update my will, when exactly I can retire, what my options are if I leave education for a while or forever....I've looked into relocating to Canada. I've tried to figure out how to get health insurance if I don't return to the classroom. But ultimately, when I think about my students none of that really matters. It all comes down to my commitment to serve. I've made a commitment to public service, and to the next generation of learners, to show up and do my best work no matter what else is going on. My life experience has hardened me to adversity and has uniquely prepared me to do whatever needs to be done to serve my students, even take a bullet. My students deserve an environment that is happy, calm, and safe. Something that many of them do not get unless they are at school. I've been working through plans for weeks on how to set up the safest possible environment in the classroom and how to pivot to online learning if my school is suddenly forced to close. As an essential worker, I am the only one equipped to provide these services to my community. I have been called to provide a safe space for these kids. It is my responsibility. I may not be able to save them all, but I have to try. And to all those coward commentors who social media who want to accuse teachers of being scared or lazy or whatever....we'll need lots of subs this year, so please think about being of service....but if you aren't willing to step up, then just shut up. |
Mrs. Mitchell
This is my 'slice of life' blog. Archives
March 2020
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