Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

Bad Teacher

I cannot share anything about my actual life with my co-workers.

I am a teacher.

I am employed by a save-the-planet, hug-a-tree, don’t spank the kids, use your inside voices, walk gracefully, hands in your lap, grace and courtesy lesson plans, learn to pour water beautifully, watch our garden grow, teach 4 year olds to write in cursive, concrete not abstract learning, sing John Denver songs in a circle…Montessori School.

This is orientation week for all new students. After teaching for two hours, I was required to lunch (Thai) with all the other graceful, soft-spoken, passive, kind, lovely, caring, self-sacrificing teachers who teach at the same level.

For twenty minutes, we discussed how the first day went, gossiped about weird parents, and tried to impress one another over and over again by regaling everyone with tales of how in control we are of our, BY DESIGN, completely anarchic classrooms.

For the remainder of lunch, at least 2 hours, everyone around me talked of:

how long they had been married

how old their children are

how long they were in labor

what colleges their children attend

who the best OB-GYN’s are

how parking is too expensive at the office of the best OB-GYN

how they were alive when Johnson was president

at which hospital they gave birth

why it’s important to have midwives

how to keep your fetus from developing peanut allergies

peanut alternatives

how beautiful long marriages are…

I was absolutely out of my mode. It was the perfect cinematic moment, where, had it gone on for very much longer, I would’ve exploded with “LAST NIGHT I GOT THE BEST ORAL SEX EVER!!! AND THIS TIME HE TRIMMED HIS PUBES AND I WAS ABLE TO TAKE IN SOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH MORE!!! CAN YOU BELIEVE WE ONLY MET FOUR DAYS AGO!??!” (Hypothetically, of course.) And I would’ve lost my job.

As I’m probably going to do by having written this…somehow.

One more adult hob-knobbing function to attend and manage…the dessert party for old and new parents tomorrow night.

God keep me.

Because, you know, I forgot to change my toe nail polish Sunday night. They’re lime green. No one who teaches at my school has EVER had lime green toe nails. Or had oral sex. Or sex that wasn’t for procreation. Or killed a plant. Or ate two slices of pizza.

Yeah. I am so out of my mode.