If you were in my movie...

March has become an immensely horribly busy month for me.  I can't remember March ever being so distinctive before.  I have managed to pack (not by my own planning) two major school events and the MA course into a 3 week period, along with agreeing to sew 45 kimonos for my current students, 25 berets for my son and his classmates and teachers, traveling to São Paulo for a weekend training, not to mention taking a group of 23 students and almost as many parents to São Paulo at the end of the month for the DI Celebration which involves countless meetings with parents and students involved, and don't even get me started on the last minute additions to this trip.  Actually, I didn't pack any of this, it all seems to have packed itself.  I have been running on 4 hour sleep nights for the last three weeks, been sick twice (still recovering), and one of my bottom wisdom teeth has decided to break surface which has resulted in some of the worst tooth pain I have felt since I cracked my tooth two years ago and an extremely swollen face.  I'm hungry and I don't want to eat because even opening my mouth hurts, let alone chewing.  I have read almost all of our course text book in a matter of two weeks and only stopped reading because I found the first 60 pages of the last chapter are missing.  I'll have to chase those down tomorrow.  Today I took 5 quizzes online, wrote two papers, did 3 discussion questions and read two articles.  And I still have more to do.  Oh, and I cooked some soy chicken with carrots for our snack during the course tomorrow.  I'm not even going to go into what I have to do for the course this week, it's really not what I want to think about right now.  When I got home yesterday, I took a five hour nap and hid from all social contact for the entire day.  Then we watched a movie that was absolutely one of the worst movies I have watched in a long time.  It felt really good to not work for a bit.  Today was homework day as I neglected to do anything productive yesterday save dream of getting my PhD.



In the morning, I usually listen to my ipod in the van, rather than chat with my colleagues.  It's a good way to start the day, just watching the sun on the water on the way to school, and I can almost just feel optimistic about the possibilities for the day.  Sometimes I imagine I am in a movie and the music is the sound track, and what might be the next obstacle in the plot line.  Everyone's life seems a bit movie like I suppose.  Some more than others (my dear friend of the dourado mamão could sell her story for a novela, although unfortunately her experience is not far off the norm for new arrivals- come to think of it, I'm not sure when I got so passive about the things that really used to get to me).  I also think of very interesting things to write on this blog, although they seldom get written because I am in a van and no where near a computer with the necessary speed or time to write.  But I did remember the movie thing and I did take time out of my reading and writing to write about it, just so you all know I'm not dead. 

For your amusement.

Just a side note - I have become obsessed with this style of shoes. We have named them "chinel-botas" - sandal boots - for lack of a better name or proper term. I'm sure there is one, but I just haven't caught it in the right context. I now have them in brown (pictured), black (identical to pictured), and silver (in the back ground of the picture). I have seen and drooled over them in purple, but can't bring myself to pay a chunk of money for shoes that will go with 2% of my clothes. Red might be practical, or green. But I love purple. I haven't seen the like of them yet on sites based in the USA, so I hope I won't look too out of place as I tote them all over MI this summer when I visit.

Back in January (like 2 days after the new year, when I was still on the island, not taking the ferry back because we didn't want to wait in a line all day) I broke one of my molars on some churrasco salt. It was kind of a freak accident and actually I think it had been broken for a while, since it was sensitive to hot and cold for a couple of years, or had had a hairline crack or something, and the salt probably did it in. It took me a while to figure out that it was really BROKEN, so it was only about a week later that we called the dentist to figure out what to do. My dentist was booked up until after Carnaval, so I made a quick visit to one of my husband's student's offices and she put some putty in the hole and took out the broken piece so I could at least drink liquids without pain. About a week later, she squeezed me in between some appointments and put in a temporary fill with some semi-hard putty, and took an x-ray of the tooth.

Two weeks after that, still having pain, there was an opening for my dentist and I went with all the info from the previous dentist to see if I could have it fixed for real. She took another x-ray and decided it would be best to do a root canal and then a crown. But she doesn't do root canals. So off I went to a friend of her's office who does to make an appointment to do the root canal. This friend didn't have room for another two weeks. So two weeks later, I did half the root canal, but she didn't have time to finish before the next patient, so I had to come back again two weeks after that. Now that it was done, I could finally go to my dentist and do the crown. I made the appointment and was able to get in about a month after the root canal was finished. She took the mold of my teeth to send to the lab to make the crown and prepped the tooth, but I had to make an appointment for two weeks later so that she could request that my dental plan liberate this procedure. This was on Wednesday of this week.

Then yesterday I got an "emergency" call when I got home from my dentist's assistant telling me that there was something wrong with the mold for the top teeth and could I please come in and do it again right now because my dentist was going to travel for the holiday and the whole thing would be delayed by a week if it didn't get done. So I left directly from my water bike class (still wet, having no towel), amazingly got a bus that took me to Itaigara (a mall near her office) and rushed up to do the mold again.

I was in a hurry to get home and liberate my nanny (who has already stayed later three days this week because of all this mess), so when I missed one bus (Campo Grande R1) and the second one wouldn't let me on and I saw the state of the complete gridlock traffic of rush hour, I just decided to walk home. It's not that far of a walk (about 25 minutes) and there were plenty of people out and about. On the way I passed a guy dressed in rags and his shopping cart full of cardboard listening to an MP3 player, eyes shut, bobbing his head to the music. On another street I encountered a pair of shoes, one partially broken, left sitting neatly together near a wall for anyone who might want them. And as I was almost home, I was nearly run over by none other than the bus (Campo Grande R1) that I had missed back at the mall. So all in all, I didn't loose any time by walking, and in fact saved myself R$2.

I notice I write more often about Ju than anything else. I suppose that shows quite a bit about how I spend my time when I have free time to write - and that is with Ju at my feet or near by, being the descarado that he is. For a change of pace, here are some other random thoughts.


Lela has always been a picture licker. Recently my mom sent down some photos of the wedding and now I always have a calico fuzzy body next to my laptop, trying to lick them. I have no idea what is so attractive that she likes them so much. I hope she isn't slowly killing herself with this weird habit.


I realized I had always assumed that people kissing on television and in movies were faking it. Well, they are, of course, but I mean with no tongues and such. Not sure why I always assumed this, but it just seemed natural to me that since these people, despite being actors etc, had girlfriends/boyfriends/wives/husbands that they wouldn't possibly be really using tongue in that shot. I mean, I know it looked like a tongue, but wouldn't their significant other be upset? I have no idea when I lost this assumption, but I think it was quite recent.


This entire year has been one big adjustment in responsibility for me. I started really teaching, really planning, and really "being in charge" of other people who work in my classroom. I never see myself as a boss. I am not comfortable telling others what to do. I suppose it takes some getting used to. I ended up doing the same thing with the DI program. I have been working with my team for over a year, but to really get the program started, I wanted to get others trained and have other teams and get school support, and some how in all that I ended up coordinating this program for the entire school. Not that I don't love the program and want to see it succeed, but I didn't mean to sign up for this - I'm not good at managing people, teams, not letting emotions show or get involved in what I'm doing. It's not anything I ever trained to do. Some days I wish I could just quit, but then what would happen to the program? Maybe someone else will volunteer for this position next year. It's unpaid and stressful, so I doubt it.

It's fascinating how here the leaves all fall off the trees in the spring, instead of in the fall.

What am I hungry for? I just keep eating and nothing is satisfying. What is it?!