from the ashes

Hey! How ya been? Man, it's been a long time. You look awesome - have you lost weight? Really? Cuz man, I remember you being way fatter.

My sincere apologies to the mighty God of Blogging (You know Him as Blod) for not writing in months. I could lie and say that I felt guilty, but that would just be an affront to our already tenuous relationship.

 This year, for the first time in memory, winter has gotten to me. I've always loved winter, what with all the bundling up, hot-chocolating down, and of course... snotcicles. Winter is obviously the bad-ass of the seasons: I mean, could Spring be any more metro? But for some reason, this Winter I have found myself feeling the gloom that I have always heard so many others complain of. I look outside and just want to stay in bed. Friends invite me out and I choose to say in just to avoid the outside. Writing my name in the snow now only bring quiet giggles where it used to bring guffaws. This feeling, call it what you will, is very new to me and I've been trying to understand the 'why now?'

 My best guess is that it has to due with the fact that I’ve been traveling. I like to believe that most depression (I use that term generally, not clinically) originates from access to alternatives. That is to say, the very act of seeing the grass on the other side of the fence makes your grass look all brown and landmined. Having traveled to both Florida and San Francisco in January and February (respectively) has spoiled me. In the past, I just accepted the fact that I lived somewhere cold enough to freeze Emily Mortimer (She's hot, get it?) because I had never been somewhere warm in the winter. This doesn't mean I’ll be moving to Pensacola anytime soon, but I've seen how, or more accurately, where the other half lives and might have to crash on their couch sometime.

 Other than the winter bit, life is solid. Speech is going well this year and I am continuing to learn how to be a better teacher. The kids are lighting things on fire, which makes them happy, which makes me happy. Speaking of learning, I have a number of classes that I'm really loving this semester, with my Math For Teachers class leading the way. This is most likely interesting to you because we are learning addition and subtraction. Seriously. The class is all about going back and trying to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know math at all; someone to whom basic algebraic operations mean nothing. Sometime in the first couple weeks I realized just how really difficult it might be for a little kid to understand something like the decimal systems and how so much of what we had to learn was fundamentally counter-intuitive to the way we as little people processed the world. To be fair, even though we are learning things like addition, they are teaching us to do it in Sanskrit and Babylonian - so it's a little tougher. Stupid humans - you couldn't even invent a zero until only about 2500 years ago... and even then there were still a lot of you that though this newfangled "zero" was an omen of the devil. Tsk tsk.