i'm definitely forgetting something here.

[cimorene]

• Tea This is the second box of Twinings "Passionfruit Mango & Orange" (lack of commas original to the product packaging) Tea I've bought that turned out to actually consist of lemon-flavored tea in P M & O-printed teabags. I'm bemused rather than upset by this, though. I've devoted a fair number of minutes to pondering exactly what happened in their factory to get this result.



• Soul-crushing/ shiny devices waxjism has been being forced to learn how to make the N8, our Messiah (since it's the phone that's meant to Save Nokia. Nokia made a huge loss last year, and this year is in the black and has been keeping up but not, as it were, making up for lost ground. And of course, Nokia is the single biggest piece of our GNP. Also the best publicized). She's not enjoying it. She wishes it were dead, I think. And on top of all that, it's another fucking Symbian phone.



• Teaching our elders about Internet memes and traditions When my parents were here, we made them watch Llamas With Hats and read Clean ALL the Things so that they would know what we were talking about (those are our Most Quoted Texts nowadays). We showed This Party Took a Turn for the Douche and The Man Your Man Could Smell Like to my bbsister, but failed to show them to my parents. You'd think everyone knew The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, but when interrogated, my dad revealed he didn't.



• Career thoughts Last spring I made that very irritated post about dippy hugbertism because I'd been stewing over the excess of same in my classroom assistant courses for a while. By the end of the semester, I was starting to entertain serious fears that I would die of dippyness poisoning before the end of the course.
  
  I hoped summer would be a long enough break to put that in perspective and perhaps make me look more tolerantly on dippy hugbertism, but it hasn't. No, my hate is just as intensely burning as before, and I'm still fearful of what I may say if I get handed another rhyming poem about how children are precious and unique flowers. On the other hand, my liking for children is as sincere and valuable, presumably, as a dippy hugbert's, and I don't like to think that they might gain a total monopoly on the young-children's-education sector simply by nauseating everybody else out of it (or more likely, a combination of inducing nausea and peer-pressuring non-hugberts in their midst to keep quiet about it and play along).

Comments

[zvi]

I had never before seen Llamas with hats, and you have made my entire day much more magnificent with its introduction.

Thanks.

[cimorene]

"What is WRONG WITH YOU?" "Well, I kill people and I eat hands - that's two things."

There are so many opportunities to say this.

[foursweatervests]

The dippy hugberts (I like this phrase. I am stealing it.) are exactly why I won't work with kids younger than middle school. I honestly do like people, and that includes children, but whenever they're (dh's) around, I feel like I have to start proclaiming that I hate niblets just to get them to stop talking about how precious and brilliant and perfect they all are.

[cimorene]

Exactly! A Xeroxed poem about precious children just makes me want to Xerox and hand out Edward Gorey's alphabet.

[foursweatervests]

That is what I shall do! Oh, that's perfect.

[cimorene]

My mom's a middle school teacher and has been horrifying me with tales of a co-worker who, whenever a colleague retires, composes a rhyming poem in their honor. Which she insists on reading out loud at their retirement parties.

[foursweatervests]

God, does she hate these coworkers? Like, a lot? Coincidentally, my mother's a middle school teacher, too. Her colleages, at least the majority of them, all wish the children would die, too. (Because no one knows how awful kids can be better than the people who work with them.) They're pretty wonderful people, all of them.

[cimorene]

I've got to wonder the same thing. The sort of people who torture everyone else by trying to make them light candles together and read rhyming poetry - it seems like the simplest explanation is that they're secretly sadists.

[foursweatervests]

Well, the most obvious explanation is usually the right one!

[cesare]

I don't like to think that they might gain a total monopoly on the young-children's-education sector simply by nauseating everybody else out of it

It is a far, far better thing you do...

Seriously. As a former kid who suffered a lot of unchallenged boredom under daffy children-are-precious-angels teachers, I'm glad some future kids are going to have you instead.

[cimorene]

LOLOL. I was lucky enough to have some teachers who had a slightly black sense of humor instead of being hugberts, but it didn't happen until middle school.