ps. I am totally going to do a rematch. The only countries I could come up with in this hour of desperation were "Shirtless Sawyer Land," "United Federation of Is Penny Dead or What?" and "Dharma Initiative and Tobago."
2.25.2009
2.23.2009
Why have there been no scientific studies done on this?orThank God for the heating pad that's currently soothing my aching back.
Remember how our little BB took her first step into womanhood a week ago? I swear to God her puppy-menses-ness completely effed up my cycle because for the past two weeks I have been PMS-ing like crazy and today got my Monthly Confirmation That I Am Indeed Without Child...more than an entire week early. And I am blaming it all on BB's puppy-strogen making my body want to line up our cycles or some weird crazy shiz like that. So bizarre.
Anyway, as miserable as I am having to deal with this monthly Backache of Doom (my body's version of woman cramps, which I thankfully do not get*) twice in the last 4 weeks (UGH), I am thankful that it at least finally arrived because, holy heavens, extended-release PMS-ing when you're not even supposed to deal with any of that for like 3 weeks is not fun for any of the parties involved. I mean, seriously, once I annihilated our supply of Doritos and Little Debbie smores cookies, it was every Schmoobs for himself.
ps. We saw three movies at the theatre this weekend: Taken, Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino. All good movies - although one should just watch Taken as a matinee since it's not really worth the full ticket price (What is it now? Ten bazillion dollars per ticket?), or just wait until it comes out on DVD. Also: movie watching = good girlfriend-has-been-PMSing-for-the-last-century activity since it involves no talking and lots of sugary, salty junk food-eating.
pps. Guh. Do I really have to go teach more lessons now? This heating pad feels so good. Blargh.
* Can I talk about my bodily functions any more on this blog? Sheesh.
2.21.2009
Well, damn.
Just woke up from a mid-afternoon nap in which I dreamt that The University of Hawaii called me up to offer me a job teaching music...
2.19.2009
2.18.2009
2.17.2009
She's not a giiiirl...not yet a womannnorHoly sh*t, I'm practically a grandma.
Um, BB got her first period yesterday.
I believe the more kosher term is "in heat," but whatever. Our little girl is all grown up! My heart is exploding - to the strains of "Sunrise, Sunset" playing softly in the background.
If I could find where my goddamn camera battery charger is (which I can't), I would post a picture of our dear little BB in her pantilined Spiderman underoos, paperclipped at the tuckus because even the smallest sized boy undies are too big for her!
Also: this series of text messages may or may not have been exchanged this afternoon:
Me: I think I look like a perv...holding up all these different design underoos and giggling to myself in Target.
Schmoobs: Hahaha!
Me: Marvel Superheroes or Mickey Mouse?
Schmoobs: I think either of those sound perfect.
Me: Marvel has glow-in-the-dark prints...we have a winner!
2.16.2009
Inevitability.
Hey, you know when you spend the last week reading and hearing all about how everybody is getting sick and catching the flu and you're all, "Wow, I can't believe I haven't gotten sick. How lucky of me!" and then you wake up the next day and immediately run to the toilet and spend the remainder of the morning alternating between emptying the contents of your intestines in the bathroom, curled up on a fetal position on the couch, and sipping precious hot ginger tea?
I hate when that happens.
In other news: I have more tests to grade before tomorrow than I care to count. BLAAAAARGH (that was either the flu talking or my distaste for test-grading).
2.15.2009
Read me, I'm worthwhile*
* unlike the other 99.99% of this blog.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Our Greatest National Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 14, 2009
So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women.
Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100 billion toward education.
That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus.
“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.
So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our future?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan describes the stimulus as a “staggering opportunity,” the kind that comes once in a lifetime. He argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s the only way long term to get there.”
That’s exactly right, and it’s partly why I shifted my views of the relative importance of education and health. One of last year’s smartest books was “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both Harvard professors. They offer a wealth of evidence to argue that America became the world’s leading nation largely because of its emphasis on mass education at a time when other countries educated only elites (often, only male elites).
They show that America’s educational edge created prosperity and equality alike — but that this edge was eclipsed in about the 1970s, and since then one country after another has surpassed us in education.
Perhaps we should have fought the “war on poverty” with schools — or, as we’ll see in a moment, with teachers.
Some education programs have done remarkably well in overcoming the pathologies of poverty. Children who went through the Perry Preschool program in Michigan, for example, were 25 percent less likely to drop out of high school years later than their peers in a control group, and committed half as many violent felonies. They were one-third less likely to become teenage parents or addicts, and half as likely to get abortions.
Likewise, the KIPP program, the subject of a fine book by Jay Mathews, has attracted rave reviews for schools that turn low-income students’ lives around.
There are legitimate questions about whether such programs are scalable and would succeed if introduced more broadly. But we do know that the existing national school system is broken, and that we’re not trying hard enough to fix it.
“We have a good sense from the data where there are big opportunities,” notes Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth College who studies education.
The hardest nut to crack is high schools — we don’t have a strong sense yet how to rescue them. But there’s a real excitement at what we are learning about K-8 education.
First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher. A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.
Second, our methods to screen potential teachers, or determine which ones are good, don’t work. The latest Department of Education study, published this month, showed again that there is no correlation between teacher certification and teacher effectiveness. Particularly in lower grades, it also doesn’t seem to matter if a teacher has a graduate degree or went to a better college or had higher SATs.
The implication is that throwing money at a broken system won’t fix it, but that resources are necessary as part of a package that involves scrapping certification, measuring better through testing which teachers are effective, and then paying them significantly more — with special bonuses to those who teach in “bad” schools.
One of the greatest injustices is that America’s best teachers overwhelmingly teach America’s most privileged students. In contrast, the most disadvantaged students invariably get the least effective teachers, year after year — until they drop out.
This stimulus package offers a new hope that we may begin to reform our greatest national shame, education.
Because, one day when I was twenty years old and still living in the magical, carefree world called "college", I blinked and, all of a sudden, found myself dealing with the real world and suffering the repercussions from the state of our national economic and employment situations and educational system.
ps. This post is dedicated to all the college Music Education majors I met here in Texas who insisted that electing Barack Obama would be the downfall of their future careers -- because they failed to acknowledge the key point that the tax raise proposed by President Obama would, in fact, not affect them (negatively, in any case)...unless they were expecting to earn a salary of $250,000 as a high school band director. But I digress.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Our Greatest National Shame
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 14, 2009
So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women.
Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100 billion toward education.
That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus.
“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.
So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our future?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan describes the stimulus as a “staggering opportunity,” the kind that comes once in a lifetime. He argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s the only way long term to get there.”
That’s exactly right, and it’s partly why I shifted my views of the relative importance of education and health. One of last year’s smartest books was “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both Harvard professors. They offer a wealth of evidence to argue that America became the world’s leading nation largely because of its emphasis on mass education at a time when other countries educated only elites (often, only male elites).
They show that America’s educational edge created prosperity and equality alike — but that this edge was eclipsed in about the 1970s, and since then one country after another has surpassed us in education.
Perhaps we should have fought the “war on poverty” with schools — or, as we’ll see in a moment, with teachers.
Some education programs have done remarkably well in overcoming the pathologies of poverty. Children who went through the Perry Preschool program in Michigan, for example, were 25 percent less likely to drop out of high school years later than their peers in a control group, and committed half as many violent felonies. They were one-third less likely to become teenage parents or addicts, and half as likely to get abortions.
Likewise, the KIPP program, the subject of a fine book by Jay Mathews, has attracted rave reviews for schools that turn low-income students’ lives around.
There are legitimate questions about whether such programs are scalable and would succeed if introduced more broadly. But we do know that the existing national school system is broken, and that we’re not trying hard enough to fix it.
“We have a good sense from the data where there are big opportunities,” notes Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth College who studies education.
The hardest nut to crack is high schools — we don’t have a strong sense yet how to rescue them. But there’s a real excitement at what we are learning about K-8 education.
First, good teachers matter more than anything; they are astonishingly important. It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher. A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.
Second, our methods to screen potential teachers, or determine which ones are good, don’t work. The latest Department of Education study, published this month, showed again that there is no correlation between teacher certification and teacher effectiveness. Particularly in lower grades, it also doesn’t seem to matter if a teacher has a graduate degree or went to a better college or had higher SATs.
The implication is that throwing money at a broken system won’t fix it, but that resources are necessary as part of a package that involves scrapping certification, measuring better through testing which teachers are effective, and then paying them significantly more — with special bonuses to those who teach in “bad” schools.
One of the greatest injustices is that America’s best teachers overwhelmingly teach America’s most privileged students. In contrast, the most disadvantaged students invariably get the least effective teachers, year after year — until they drop out.
This stimulus package offers a new hope that we may begin to reform our greatest national shame, education.
2.14.2009
Happy Valentine's Day!
or:
Happy Even Those Of Us In Relationships Will Be Inevitably Disappointed Due To The Ridiculous Standards Set By Hallmark And Hollywood That Nobody Can Live Up To Day!
In celebration, I have made a batch of traditional Valentine's Day Chicken Salad* and implore you to try my recipe because it - along with the Dvorak Cello Concerto and LOST - are officially The Greatest Things In The Universe.
Ysabel's Traditional Valentine's Day Chicken Salad
- 2 or 3-ish cups cooked chicken - chopped, shredded, whatever (I tend to use the meat from one whole rotisserie chicken...yum)
- 1/2 cup chopped white onion
- 1 cup red seedless grapes, halved
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries
- Mayonnaise - I don't know, 1/2 cup? 1 cup? Depends on how
healthydelicious you want it to be - Lemon juice - again, the amount depends on you. I'm a fanatic about lemon juice on chicken and seafood. If it were me, I'd put like a gallon...ok, not really, but a fair amount
- Curry powder - I don't know. Depends on how much you like curry. I'd suggest maybe 2 tablespoons?
- Tarragon leaves, chopped - I've never used fresh, only dried (from Target!), but I would imagine that fresh would be even better. I - thru the development of this recipe - have discovered that I am also a fanatic about tarragon. It's effing great. So I would use at least 2 tablespoons of this as well.
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Optional ingredients (all chopped): tomato, celery, walnuts or pecans
Mix all ingredients together. Stuff in a whole wheat pita along with some lettuce or other salad greens. Take big scrumptious bites whilst simultaneously fighting off BB who had been sitting anxiously at your feet with her tongue hanging out the entire time you were making the salad and who now wants her own pita sandwich. Important: I'm pretty sure onions and red grapes are poisonous to dogs, so...NO.
Notes:
1. When I made this last night, I decided to use the Magic Bullet** that my dear mother gave us for Christmas to expertly chop up the rotisserie chicken skin (full of flavor, but who wants to eat big soggy wads of chicken skin in a chicken salad sandwich?) ... and I KILLED MY MAGIC BULLET. Sad, sad day. That thing was so much fun to use. All I know is that I set it on automatic while I stood mesmerized and staring into the Bullet as it gradually turned the big pieces of chicken skin into chicken skin pate (hahaha...gross). And then all of a sudden it started spewing smoke and then finally just quit working. Ugh. Sorry Mom.
2. I've been meaning to brag about this in my blog for almost a month now, but this new negative-paying job of mine, as you know, has been taking over my life...anyway: I've totally been making meals at home and eating in like SO MUCH since the New Year (all credit goes to Barack Obama, of course). It's been great. Pros: much less money hemorrhaging out to various neighborhood restaurants, significant reduction in belly blotation, and I kind of enjoy watching the Food Network and then being creatively inspired to try and make my own recipes. Cons: Um, I kind of miss the Churrasco Tipico meal from Gloria's. That plate is effing heaven on a plate. Anyway, I came up with this because, in the middle of teaching lessons last week, I broke down from mid-day hunger and decided to buy a sandwich at Star*ucks. They called it a "Tarragon Chicken Sandwich." It was effing amazing. But also, it was about the size of the palm of my hand and cost nearly $6. So I metaphorically lashed myself for spending that much of my hard-earned Monopoly money on a miniscule sandwich, and then decided I'd figure out how to make my own.
3. I think that, since I came back to Texas after the Holidays, I have had maybe one fast food meal (?? I don't even remember. Maybe I haven't had any...) and less than one dinner out per week. Which, to some people, may still seem like a lot, but considering that Schmoobs and I were eating out for almost every dinner (Ugh. Stupid! Stupid!), this is a huge improvement so be happy for me.
*****
In other, quasi-related news: Schmoobs has been out of town for the past 3 days at the annual Insanely Ginormous Texas Band-Orchestra-Choir-Nerd Convention and is currently en route back here. Unfortunately, I think that by the time he gets back, it will be too late to do any official Showing To The General Public That We Are In A Relationship So Neener Neener Dinner. BUT there will definitely be time for more important things, such as his finally watching this week's episode of LOST on DVR, while I watch it for the third time whilst simultaneously trolling a variety of LOST blogs and eating perhaps another Traditional Valentine's Day Chicken Salad Sandwich. It'll be awesome.
Plus, we've decided to do a nice dinner tomorrow instead, so...hmmm, Churrasco Tipico and an ice cold dirty martini anyone? Yes please!
*****
Oh, and since it is VD: I was listening to NPR in my car the other day (again, in between teaching lessons, of course) and they were having this "Valentine's Day Love Slam." The first poem I heard (and my favorite) was the one by Olu Burrell. Gentlemen, if you really want to woo a lady, forget the flowers and chocolate (even though those are nice as well) and write something like this for her, okay?
It softens even my cold and blackened heart...at least a little bit.
* Clearly, no such thing. But I make an incredible chicken salad and wanted to share it with you.
** I loved this little contraption so much that, last week, I found myself waiting up an extra hour past 1:30am despite being extraordinarily tired, because the TV listings showed that the Magic Bullet infomercial was scheduled to air at 2:30. True story. It was totally worth it.
2.11.2009
* POP *
Ouch, my bubble just burst.
Hey, guess how much an adjunct professor earns? I believe the exact number is DIDDLY SQUAT. Or PURE SH*T, to be precise. Ugh. I haven't gotten paid yet or anything (I seriously think my tombstone will read "Still waiting for her paycheck.") but I did receive the official contract in the mail. At first I saw the salary figure printed and assumed it was the monthly amount. And then I did cartwheels and backflips. Ok, not really because I was in my car, opening the day's mail. But then later on that day, I went home - after the dust had settled and the paranoia and "too good to be true" feelings started gnawing - and did some researching on the average adjunct professorship salary and, yeah, that number was totally FOR THE WHOLE SEMESTER. Ugh, just typing the words out makes me want to vomit my cold blackened heart onto my clammy hands and chuck it out over the balcony.
Blaaaargh. What an effing c*ck t**s* (those asterisks save me from eternal damnation in hell!). I'm totally going to win the lottery this weekend and give a big F.U. to our education system for rewarding years and years of devotion to music and education with a trillion dollars in student loans and the opportunity to work your butt off only to earn Monopoly money. Hooray! See, I'm not bitter or anything!
In happier news: LOST!!! LOST LOST LOSTLOSTLOSTLOSTLOSTLOOOOOOOST!!! It needs to be next Wednesday like, NOW.
2.08.2009
A little Sunday morning identity crisis goes well with my coffee.
Did you know that, on more than one occasion in the last year, I have had Asian people tell me that I am not Asian? Like, what? For example, in Seattle, a friend of mine who happened to be Japanese, told me - after about 2 years of knowing each other - that she has never thought of me as Asian. Even though I am 100% Filipino. So weird.
In other news: there is no other news because the only other thing that I can think of to write about right now is work-related and I just can't bear to allow my precious weekend to be tainted with work-speak. *shudder* Ugh, except to say that I have a humongo pile of tests to grade today, which I am dreading. Suffice it to say that the state of our youth's essay-writing skills worries me to no end. Hey, you know what happens when you grow up before the advent of worldwide internet usage and text messaging and, instead, go to the library every Sunday after church with your family and, you know, get actual books to read? You learn how to write properly.
Ugh, I'm old.
No, but seriously. I mean, sometimes I just read Calvin and Hobbes or Garfield comic books.Or Peanuts. Or the Adventures of Tin Tin! (note to self: wow, I read lots of comics) Sometimes I read something really high-brow like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. But...MY GOD. I think perhaps my hypothetical future child(ren) will be allowed to use the internet only after given a random topic by me and writing three clear and thoughtful sentences on said topic. So that, you know, when college comes around and they are required to write a simple paragraph on the role of the church and its influence on music during the Medieval period, they don't hand in a string of three gibberish-laden sentences that have roughly the same intellectual value as a pile of BB's turds.
ETA: I say "BB's turds" because, clearly, Bela - being the acting president of The Finer Things Club - produces very sophisticated and intelligent turds that are more than capable of getting good grades in a college music history class.
2.06.2009
Sweet Jeebus, what a week.
1. I'm tired.
2. You know what's the absolute greatest way to end an incredibly busy and exhausting week?
Deciding to reward yourself with delicious BBQ wings for dinner and stopping at a wing place literally less than a mile away from your apartment...and locking your keys in your car. Yeah, there's nothing like prolonging the end of the day for an hour while waiting for AAA to show up.
3. LOST talk: JIN!!!!!!!!!!! HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!
4. I'm going to go turn on the television and eat my goddamn wings now. Happy weekend everybody!
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