Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Fine. Be That Way.

I Feel Dirrty, and Flirty, and Briiiiight

I have watched the same two Miller Light commercials over 20 times in the last 24 hours: the same two boyfriends imagining the same two models catfighting; the same rockclimbing guy about to fall off the side of a mountain and his same rockclimbing friend who ridicules his terror in a bar visited subsequently. And the same two minutes of music video coverage: Puffy Coombs and a bunch of bimbos in bikinis and mink coats, Janet Jackson and her entourage, Willa Ford and her skintight short-shorts, Christina Aguilera and her Dirrty red panties. My head swims with crotch shots, I found myself humming songs in the car on the way home I wouldn't be caught dead listening to on the radio, and I can't get the Dirrty backbeat out of my head. And I haven't enjoyed a moment of it.

I spent all day in the media center making copies of the video footage for tomorrow's All School Meeting on Gender and Media. Many, many copies, each different. So we can decide at the last minute which sequence and selection of media texts best serves the planned student panel discussion. Because my pedagogy includes the belief that we can't afford not to teach students how to be literate about their own culture without using the artifacts which they most recognize and identify as of that culture. While the school Chaplain...feels differently.

The challenges of teaching-as-vocation includes the bald fact that your own moral and ethical upbringing, necessarily a factor of your own acculturation and socialization, can never be that of your students. If you want to teach well, without students seeing you as out of touch with their own times and lives, you need to be willing to embrace your own discomfort with what they see as a norm. I think the vast majority of teachers never truly understand why, when they were students, they, too, never felt like their teachers really understood them.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

To get dirrty, dirrty Aguilera out of my head, I scoured the CD collection for something, anything, with banjo or mandolin, but ended up listening to Mano Chao instead. And to calm myself down, I'm actually going to take a page from a site I myself dissed before I found myself unable to do more than blather on and on blog-wise. You want the trivia of daily life? Here, this is what's happening within 18 inches of me right now:

I type on a two year old Compaq Armada E500, provided for me by the school; the screen is about to fall off as the hinges are faulty. The screen glass is quite dirty, as I am prone to eat when working; during the first half of today's entry I consumed a ham and cheese croissant from the local natural foods supermarket, about an inch of leftover egg drop soup, a Pepsi. Above and behind the screen at eye level on the wall beind the bookshelftop on which the laptop rests is a painting of a monkey on its back on a palette staring up at a photograph of an old lady's feet; the monkey's arms are pinned by his sides under his cerulean blanket, and at his waist is a jar of ink. Next to the laptop by my left pinkie finger is a slinky and a thumb piano; by my right hand the Fuji Finepix 601Z, the PalmIII cradle, and the Iomega Zip Drive wait their turn for the USB umbillical cord. I am chewing nicotene gum, and yes I know you're supposed to tuck it between your cheek and gum like chewing tobacco but that doesn't serve the oral fixation. There is a golf pencil which I snagged from the media center this afternoon hidden in my ponytailed redblond hair. I erased this sentence twice before writing it this way. I am wondering, now, what to write next, and squinching up my forehead; when I'm done, there will be a red mark between my eyes from where my flesh knits when I concentrate.

Blogging minutia, as recommended by The Pepys Dcomentation Project folks: It's kind of like having a song stuck in your head.