Pity party

The first really nice weekend--seriously, storybook gorgeous, slight breeze, no clouds--and I'm running a fever. At last measure (about 45 minutes ago) my temperature is up to 102.2. My whole body aches like it's been used for batting practice. Muscles I haven't used in a year hurt like I had an intense workout. My toes ache.

This is how I feel
Originally uploaded by karijean

Yay, mastitis!

So basically not only am I homebound, alternately sweating or shaking with chills (I asked Andrew to turn the temperature up, he said it's 73), but my boob hurts like the alien is going to pop out of that insteaed of my stomach. And guess which boob it is? That's right, the one that didn't hurt!

This breastfeeding thing really chaps my ass. The politics of it (SIX MONTHS! you MUST GO SIX MONTHS!) and the looks you get when you use a bottle (so much that I feel compelled to mutter about pumping while giving it to him in public) to you should be ashamed if you DO nurse in public, and you should be ashamed if you DON'T nurse in public (I am of the latter, mostly because it's a very messy affair, what with the spraying and all). Why do we, women and mothers, do this to ourselves? Why are we so judgy, without knowing all the details? So much so that I am breastfeeding in electric-shock pain, and I still feel guilty about thinking of quitting. I have this mammoth supply that other mothers would kill for, I tell myself, don't let it go to waste.

So instead, I dread the feedings. Bonding? Ha. Aside from when he curls up on my chest as I burp him, I can't say I feel particularly bondful while breastfeeding. Probably because I am gritting my teeth until the pain recedes.

Feeding had just started getting better before this happens, so this is probably the fever talking. I'll get through this course of antibiotics (yay, emergency room on a weekend!) and reevaluate. But today? Today has just sucked.

Last Monday. Maybe.

I've been planning on starting my maternity leave at the end of this week. At first, it was just a little gift to myself, based on my friends lamentations wishing they'd been able to take more time off before.

Now, though, it's become necessity. A day of teaching immobilizes me for the rest of the day--my back and pelvis feel like they are being ripped with every move. Getting up to pee, lying down in bed, anything at all hurts. Wheee!

And of course, now that it's become a virtual necessity, bureaucracy is rearing its ugly head. The personnel department of my school district is requiring a note from my doctor's office in order for me to take that time as my sick leave. Because, you see, I can't take sick leave unless I"m actually sick. Being thirty bijillion weeks pregnant apparently isn't enough of a reason because, as the darling personnel woman told me, "some people just want to take that week off to goof off."

Dude, I'm not even going to be able to goof off.

My doctor's office refuses to write me a note to get me on maternity leave because there's nothing in my file that puts me on bed rest. And they can't fit me in before Friday, THE DAY I WANT TO GO ON MATERNITY LEAVE, for me to even try to convince them that I really really need this.

When the nurse from the doctor's office called me on my cell phone to tell me this, I was limping around the grocery store, trying to pick up some necessities for school tomorrow. "I can't write a note for you until your C section," she said.

"I'm 38 weeks pre-e-e-e-gnant," I said, starting to snuffle. "I can't wa-wa-walk. I ju-ju-ju-just want to go on mater-er-ernity leave!" There I am, staring at dog food, trying not to cry and failing miserably. So miserably that a kind elderly woman with severe osteoperosis stopped me with concern to check if I was okay. When the hunched over old lady who can't see above the third shelf is asking me if I'm okay, I'm in a bad bad way.

Upshot is, I can't figure out how to satisfy the paperwork needs of my asshole personnel department, where I can't use my sick leave unless I'm actually sick (and being hugely pregnant is apparently not enough), and my doctor's office where they won't write me a note to get me on maternity leave unless I'm actually sick enough to require bed rest. So I've been spending most of the afternoon and evening crying at the injustice, although it doesn't seem to be helping a whole lot.

I'm very confused about the whole paperwork for maternity leave. This whole thing just sucks. Andrew said, worse comes to worst, I just don't show up on Monday. Fuck, at this rate, I may just not show up tomorrow.

PS: Just to cap the shit sandwich that today is, I just found out from my Daycare Of Choice that we probably won't get in next fall. We are waitlisted everywhere but Kinderkennel, and we've been looking basically since I was four months pregnant. What the hell, karma!!!!! This is SO NOT FUCKING FAIR!

Crappity crap crap

I can't do it. I am letting everyone down. 150 students, other teachers, everyone. I can't do this. I spend every single day--EVERY SINGLE DAY--with too much to do and not enough time or energy to do it. Everything is clawing for my time and attention and I can't get it done. By the end of the day, I hurt--I HURT--and all I want is to go home and put on pajama pants and put my feet up to let my ankles drain and then not have to move until I go to bed and not think. And yet, there's still more that has to be done. I could work til six at school every day (that'd be an eleven hour day) and MAYBE get caught up, except I really truly can't physically work until six. That's imagining that mentally I could do it.

You know that pregnant brain thing they say happens? it does. I can't keep track of things, and so I let deadlines slip or forget to call video services to tell them that they can't interview my science students (and so they show up anyway, and oops! we can't do the interview, sorry!), or to copy my tests for Tuesday (so I have to find time to copy them on Monday and I JUST DON'T HAVE THE TIME) or arrange for a sub for Tuesday. And that's just shit I need to take care of tomorrow. Oh, I mean, over and above teaching. Which--I have no idea what I'm going to teach tomorrow.

And that's just in my work life. The other plates I'm juggling--friends, family, oh, that whole kitchen thing? I forget to make those calls too. And I just feel like more shit. I don't have wiggle room left for deadlines, personal or private, and I feel like I'm missing them all.

Teachering Indignation

Thursday: Last day for students to get help before finals. Thirty two students decide they need help THAT DAY. Twenty eight of them for the first time all semester. One of them stays to ask one question about something from chapter 2 (covered in October), and when I don't sit down with her one on one for a private tutoring session, gets up and leaves. Ten minutes later I get a call from her mom.

"Haley* said she tried to get help but couldn't get help."

"There are over two dozen other students in here right now, so I couldn't sit down with her, but she was welcome to stay."

"Well then, what should she do?"

Options running through my head: (a) invent a time machine and go back to Wake The Fuck Up Day (b) suck it up and actually do the homework that had been assigned back in the day, or, even, y'know, yesterday (c) find someone else to ask.

I went with option c. "Maybe she could ask her math teacher from last year? Or she could come back."

But seriously, dude.

Because not an hour later there was an all-user email from one of the counselors. "Math teachers--are any of you doing study sessions for finals? Because I've had a lot of students crying in my office."

First of all: did that REALLY need to be sent to all the teachers and staff at school? I guess those social studies teachers really needed to know that us math teachers were SLACKING. Second of all: um, YEAH. Because you know when I read that email? AT SIX-THIRTY, when I STILL hadn't left school because I'd been helping students until after four.

(Okay, many people from not-education maybe be saying, four? POOR BABY. Except that I'd been there, helping teenagers since before seven, with only twenty minutes where I was talking to adults during lunch. I was done. BEYOND done.)

And might I add? ONE of those students with a sudden need to talk exponents? Was the counselor's own daughter.

---
*Not her real name. Not to say that it couldn't be her name, but it wasn't. No, I swear! It wasn't!

The Fun Never Stops 'Round Here

You know what's fun?

I'll tell you what's fun!

Parent-teacher conferences! They're fun!

Dad in fatigues and combat boots getting down on his daughter for her test anxiety! That's fun!

Mother of difficult son explaining that said son "just doesn't learn well from women teachers" and that's why he's doing poorly, not because he sits in class with his book closed and his paper put away! That's funner!

Mother of stubborn son explaining that he's not doing well in class because he's "mad at" me and that's why he failed the test and then crumpled it up and threw it at me! Almost the funnest!

But the funnest is whizzing through forty parents in three hours--so, let's see, that is, hmmm, carry the one,... less that five minutes per conference and in the middle of that, being pulled aside by an administrator and told that someone asked her to tell me to move it a long a little faster! That's the absolute funnest!

Actually, I hadn't done the math at the time (there may be some irony in that statement) but now that I have, I'm dwelling on it and getting pisseder and pisseder at her. I saw 40 parents. I talked for three hours straight. They can't honestly expect me to have spoken LESS than five minutes with those parents. As it was I was ending conversations quickly. How much faster should I have gone?

"HiyourkidhasaCheneedstostudymorekthnxbieeee"??????

She can bite me.

I'm going to go to bed now, and dream sweet sweet dreams of staying very very quiet and not talking to anyone for three, maybe four days. Ahhhh...

Things I learned from watching The 300

• Women don't generally talk.
• Queens/wives/mothers don't get names.
• Shouting platitudes can apparently get people to do really desperate things.
• Dark skinned people are eeeeevil!
• Nose rings are eeeeeevil!
• Girls who sleep together are eeeeevil!
• Eeeeevil kings will wear girlie makeup!
• (and I can be totally jealous of whatever the hell was on his lips!)
• Dark skinned girls will sleep together.
• And be eeeeeevil!
• Any men who do not have sculpted (and perhaps, just perhaps, cgi'd) abs are pussy weakliartraitors.
• Hey also: blackmailing a woman into sex isn't rape!
• Ancient Greeks, especially Spartans, had really great dental plans.
• Persians, not so much.
• No, seriously, those Greeks? For the most part: really white, straight, clean teeth. With fillings.
• Any society that accepts imperfection: eeeeeevil!
• Facial piercings: eeeeeeevil!
• Also: when it comes to movies I might enjoy, a craptastic script rife with cliched dialogue, homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny cannot make up for visually stunning cinematography. Apparently I need some there there.

(For those who wondered: yes, there is only one woman who has any lines at all in this movie, and she doesn't get a name. Oh, wait, there's the adolescent "oracle" who gets to show some tit and whisper some ancient Greek, but she doesn't get a name either. Or, y'know, a personality. Just a tit and some cool cinematography.)

Rant rant rant rant rant rant rant rant rant

1. I hate it on TV or in the movies when people run a program that is clearly ridiculuous. Does it make funny noises when scrolling through a list, or a boop-boop-boop when it's running a program? Your computer is not a microwave, it doesn't beep as it counts down. And three-dimensional imaging, while fantastic, is not how businesses show the results of a search. CSI? I'm looking at you. Oh, and plus? One does not get one's DNA results by merely spinning a teeny test tube for forty-five minutes. That's not a one-day process.
2. You know what? Don't tell me teachers have it easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, summers off is a great bonus. But I get shit pay, shittier respect (along the lines of if-you-could-do-anything-else-wouldn't-you-be-doing-it???) and the hours suuuuuuck. I can honestly say that I never worked this hard when I was making twice as much. Today I left the house at 6:45 and got home at 5 and have been working on lesson planning since then. And while this isn't every day, it also isn't unusual. Why do it, you ask? Well, I did want to slit my wrists at my previous job, so--less suicidal is a step up. Don't get me wrong--I love teaching, in the cheesy I've-found-my-calling way (and, apparently, in a need-to-use-hypens-a-lot way). But I also work really really hard to be a good teacher. Back up off that "you've got it easy" shit right now.
3. Hey, students! It's called a typo. Sorry its there, yeah yeah I suck, now figure it the fuck out and move on. It's really not hard to figure out that I meant "te" to be "the". Don't be such dumbasses.
4. Right now I'm finding it very hard to talk to, look at, or even think of pregnant women. Seriously, hate every single one of you. And yeah, this includes people that normally I love dearly. Don't take it personal, but also, don't tell me to just get over it. I am, and at my own pace, but if in the meantime I want to black out the teeth and draw beards on every pregnant woman in a magazine, I will and fuck you. Naomi Watts, this means you, you glowing sack of beautiful shit. I am also contemplating running up to pregnant women on the street and tacking signs on their back that read, "Ask me about my hemorrhoids!" So I don't want to hear how happy-go-yay you are about your full and lustrious hair, how the pregnancy juice flowing through your veins just makes the very oxygen you breathe smell better, nor will I be in the least sympathetic about how rough it is to have to pee all the time. Suck it up and find someone else to be your Pregnant Goddess Sounding Board.
5. If I work with you but take some time off for some horrid personal shit and so miss a meeting we're supposed to have, that is really really not a good time to rant about my communication style to everyone else. Yes, I-dress-in-clothes-from-the-eighties-and-not-in-a-good-way, I'm talking to you, oh you who has the hair down your back and still curls your bangs. If I'm not there to either receive constructive criticism nor to defend myself, why the fuck are you ranting about me by name unless it's because you're a chicken shit cowardly cunt? PS: the ghost of Princess Di called. She wants her blazers with the puffy sleeves and skirts with the pleated waists back.
6. Oh, and 2007? You just took the father of a really dear friend of mine. He didn't smoke, he didn't play with radioactive material, whence his sudden cancer? Fuck you 2007. Just fuck you sideways.

Can someone wake me up when it's May? Because sometimes it hurts too much for it to still only be today.