The Curious Incident of the Girl in the Bathroom

I spent a lot of time in the girls' bathroom today. Monitoring. Because we all know how much girls want to talk about the TAKS test questions when they're going wee-wee.*

Two incidents of note:

• Girl comes out of the stall, walks up to the mirror, and fixes her hair: tucks stray strands behind her ears, brushes her bangs from her eyes... and then proceeds to wash her hands. After touching her face ALL OVER.
• After lunch, girl with braces asks to go to the bathroom to brush her teeth. When we get to the bathroom, she says she has to go to the bathroom, too, so she walks into the stall. When she comes out of the stall, she grabs her toothbrush and toothpaste from the pocket in her hoodie and brushes her teeth. Completely neglects to wash her hands.

Am I being prudish?

I'm no germophobe (you know the 5-second rule? I like to extend it to 5 minutes. Or longer, if need be), but you have to draw the line somewhere! After you tinkle, you wash your hands, people! With soap! None of this sprinkling-your-fingers-with-water-and-you-think-you're-done carp.

Might I remind you, this is a public-school bathroom? Think of the quality of the toilet paper in public-school bathrooms. Do I still seem prudish?

The scary part is when you allow yourself to follow the train of thought... that girl is going to go back to the classroom and touch her test booklet and answer document, which I have to collect. With my bare hands. And that pencil she was gripping? I'm going to have to touch it, too, because she didn't bring her own pencil and she used one of ours (and the counselors will come after me if I don't return EVERY ONE of the pencils they LENT us).

Now you know how I built up my Immune System of Steel.


*PS: In case you want to know the details: when a student asks to go to the bathroom, one of the two proctors in the room walks the student to the bathroom. Students are only allowed in the bathroom one at a time, unless there is a teacher in there with them, making sure they don't talk. TONS OF FUN.

The Writer v. The Editor

These two posts from The Golden Pencil* made me realize how much NaNoWriMo has changed the way I write.

I used to agonize over every word. I used to not write, because I was forever waiting for The Perfect Opening. If I did write, every sentence took forever because I wanted The Perfect Word. Even for stuff that didn't matter, like school assignments.

Now, after five years of NaNo, I just write. I don't even read my blog posts before hitting the orange button -- which is bad, because I'm a terrible typist. (Seriously. It took me 17 keystrokes to type "typist." But that's also because I got my nails done yesterday, and it always takes me a while to get used to typing with my fingers instead of my claws.)

The good thing is I'm writing. The words are moving from my head onto the paper. I'm more confident about my writing; when I go back and re-read that stuff, I like what I've written (I used to HATE re-reading my stuff, which is why I never proofread my papers for school. Now I don't proofread my blogs because I'm lazy; I like what I've written, but my ADD-brain is just ready to move on to something else.)

The bad thing is... well, I can't say "I don't proofread" because I didn't do that before either. There is no bad thing! NANOWRIMO IS THE GREATEST WRITING EXERCISE EVER!!!

(Okay, there is one bad thing. My husband is not too fond of November.)

While watching the Oscars, I was thinking about what I would say in my acceptance speech.** (This was, coincidentally, right before Kate Winslet told us about her rehearsals with Shampoo-bottle Oscar.) In my speech, I decided I would have to thank Chris Baty and the rest of the NaNoWriMo/Office of Letters and Light team.

I have a half-finished novel that is still in the half-finished stage that I started my first year teaching (when my Guardian Angel had me stumble into the Borders Books on Westheimer in Houston, AT THE EXACT SAME MOMENT a critique group was meeting. The dude working the info desk took me to the deep, dark corner where they met, and those amazing, lovely people invited me to join them. And write with them. And SENIOR YEAR went from a long-forgotten file on a floppy disk to A NOVEL). This was 8 years ago, people. And it's still half-finished. It has not yet been NaNoed.

Since that first November of 2004, I have written three novels (one of them took two Novembers) and one stack of drivel (which might could perhaps someday be salvaged into something resembling A NOVEL. Actually, UNA NOVELA, since that was my NaNo-in-Spanish year). I don't think of myself as someone who wants to write, because I do write. I am a writer. Thanks to Chris Baty.

Now I just need to work on the other little carp that keeps getting in the way, and edit all those beautiful, completed novels into something worth submitting. So I can start earning my millions.

PS: November's a long way away, but April is just around the corner! Have you signed up for Script Frenzy yet???

*Who used to have her own blog, but now is part of this Bizzia thing? Don't ask me, the posts arrive in my Google Reader and I don't question from where. Until I have to link to them.

**which used to be for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress; now it'll be for Best Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay

WAG: The Sky Is The Limit

This is my first post for the Writing Adventure Group, created by Nixy Valentine and some other awesome writer ladies. Expect to see one of these posts about once a week...

Of course I would leave this to the last minute, which happens to be a day when the temperature is in the 30-40s.

I took a photo of the sky Thursday, at sunset, when the sky was all different colors and this one cloud looked like an oil painting. And when it was warm outside. But I didn't have time to sit down and write, so this photo doesn't count.


Today, it's cold. (I hate cold.) And windy. But at least it's sunny. The sky is a full blue, not a wimpy pale blue but a full, rich blue. And it's fully blue, without a single cloud in the way. You can see a sliver of the moon (not enough to photograph, though). Depending on the kind of person you are, it's either a clipped toenail God forgot to pick up after giving Himself a pedi, or, if you look a little more closely, you can see it's just the Moon, in profile, sneaking out in the daytime to see what we're up to. You can see its eye and nose. First I thought it was laughing, but now I think it has its lips pursed. We must be upsetting it.

Maybe it's annoyed by the dogs barking next door. They sound like yippy dogs. I'd be annoyed too.

So that's the sky.

The sky itself looks boring today, all plain and cloudless. It's a pretty shade (and if I knew more about shades, I'd tell you which shade of blue it is. I know enough to know it's not royal blue, and I really wouldn't call it cyan. And that's a printer-ink color anyway, not very nature-y. I'd like to say it's cerulean, because I like the way the word sounds and I want to use it, but I have no idea what color cerulean is. A shade of blue, but that's it. Maybe when I go back inside to my Internetz-ed laptop I'll Google it.)

(Sorry, had to scroll up to see where I'd been before I went off on that tangent.)

The sky itself is boring, but when it's the background to the greens and browns of the trees out here, it works nicely.


The sound of the water fountain helps, too. I'm not one of those who's into artificial ambient recordings, but when it's actual water trickling, yes, it's soothing. If you made me listen to a recording of this at work or elsewhere, I'd probably go batty after a while.
Then again, the ambient recording wouldn't have the yippy dogs in the background, would it?

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