Ode to an Oral Surgeon

Tomorrow you will slice my gums
And take from them what lies beneath.
How deeply do I loathe the thought
Of knives around my precious teeth.

‘Vestigial’ is the claim you make,
A tissue not worth keeping,
A curse upon my mouth in time,
A poison slowly seeping.

Now maybe I’m a skeptic, true.
Perhaps I’m just a little scared.
But could this be another racket
Your kind has prepared?

‘We’ll bleach your chompers by three shades,
And then you can regain your youth.
We’ll chain the crooked into shape,
Eschew the wicked wisdom tooth!’

My mouth and I have done quite well
Sans intervention from your trade,
But to your will I shall defer,
And bare my gums before the blade.

Though losing teeth still haunts my dreams,
Tomorrow you may pull it.
For lack of better metaphor,
I have to bite the bullet.

Piagetian vortex, aka, Anna shouldn't spend this many hours by herself

We construct our knowledge of the world based on our background information. From this information, we create systems of knowledge called schemata.

Basically, a schema is just a set of information, or how you view the world. When you receive new information, you assimilate it into your schema. If you can't assimilate it because it contradicts your schema, you have to accommodate the new information by changing your schema.

For example...

Ducks are yellow.

Wait a minute! That's a duck, but it is not yellow!

New schema: Some ducks are yellow, but some are not. They can also be brown, and maybe other colors too.

I've noticed this process at play lately when overhearing strangers' phone conversations.

CONVERSATION 1

I'm trying on clothes in a thrift store dressing room. A Black lady outside the dressing room talks on her cell phone.

lady 1: What? You're locked up? Oh. I'm at the thrift store on North Avenue. No, I can't. Call Willy. I said, just call Willy.
my thoughts: Man, this lady's pretty callous. Does she think they get unlimited calls in jail? Obviously this guy chose HER as his one call. There's nothing else he can do, and she's just ignoring him! Maybe he does this all the time, though. Maybe she's sick of bailing him out, and he should just depend on his good friend Willy, since he always lets Willy influence his decision-making anyway. She's had it with him! She just wants to find a pair of jeans in peace today, for goodness' sake!
lady 1, several minutes later: Yeah Aaron's locked out of the house. Could you go get him the key?
my thoughts: Oooooooh. I get it.

New information accommodated, schema changed. Bam.


CONVERSATION 2

I'm walking down Wyman Park Drive, right behind Hopkins' campus. A petite, perhaps Indian, lady walks past me with her dog. She's wearing a cardigan and capri pants, both brightly colored and somewhat worn, and speaks with a slight accent.

lady 2: She's gotten two UTI's already...
my thoughts: This lady must be a medical professional, and she's talking about a patient or something.
lady 2: ...because she keeps picking up dead mice and eating them.
my thoughts: Ew! Ah yes, the dog.



These are two fairly simple examples of accommodating new information by changing your schema, but even within these very short anecdotes, I'm drawing on a huge amount of background knowledge. Not only was I relying on these people's words, but the entire context, including ethnicity and perceived socioeconomic status based on the area I was in at the time. Both my assumptions could have been proven right, but they were both just as easily proven wrong.

The whole thing gets much more convoluted when you start actually interacting with people.

That person doesn't like me. Oh wait, they just started a conversation. Huh, now they shot me a weird look. I'm gonna go stand over here. Now all future interactions with this person will be viewed through the lens I am currently painting. Schemata constantly shifting! New information can be perceived in too many ways! This is much more complicated than seeing a brown duck! I have no idea what color this duck is! How do I even know that what YOU call brown is the same as what I call brown!?

Ahem...in conclusion:

• Everything we believe is constantly shifting, and it's all based on our perceptions anyway, which change with the direction of the wind. What begins as the recounting of two amusing anecdotes supposedly linked only by the common motif of cell phone usage quickly becomes an epistemological crisis.
  
  OR
  
  
• I over-Anna-lyze everything.
  

still the baby of the world

Three years ago, I wrote this for him. I don't think I can top it. However, now he's like, an actual person. So here's this at least:

Many things have changed,
But about you we're still crazy.
I love you, Johann Ezekiel.
Sincerely, your Aunt Azee

that minivan really does hold a lot of memories

I wrote this at the end of November and never posted it.

There was a time in my life that I had no earthly concept of what rejection felt like, which is good, because kids really shouldn't have to experience that. The first time I felt it was in ninth grade, when I tried out for the school play. I had done some plays before, beginning in preschool when I was (as a sheep) the only one who had any lines. I continued acting in school and at good old Drama Learning Center up through middle school. I had experience. I liked it. I wasn't good at nor did I care about sports. The play was what I wanted to do. And then I didn't make it.

The director/drama and art teacher personally spoke to me afterward to tell me that I had done such a great job, but they just didn't have enough parts for ninth graders. They had to give parts to older students. Why did she have to say that? Rejection speeches are the worst. Nobody wants to hear, "You're great, but." Especially since there was one ninth grader who DID make the cut, and she was not me. Obviously, age was not the only reason I didn't get a part. Rejection speeches are always only half the truth. I remember riding in the Chevy Astro that night, lying across the bumpy gray seat and crying quietly, pretending it wasn't a big deal but inwardly feeling the pain that comes from knowing this one chance will never ever come again. Sure, maybe another one will, in a few years, but this one is gone. And this is the only one I wanted.

Well, after that, I went back to a rejection-free life. I got my learner's permit and my driver's license each on my first try. I got the first job to which I ever applied. And the next. And they were both really good. I got into the only college to which I applied. And then my first professional job when I left college. And when I quit that job during a questionable time in our economic history, I got turned down from one county but ended up in a great job anyway. Smooth sailing yet again for Anna the Unbreakable.

And then there was this year. I have been rejected from teaching, substitute teaching, grocery stores, administrative positions, after school programs, and nannying jobs. I kept going and eventually got a decent part-time nannying job. To me, this became success. It is not ideal, but it is good. It is not challenging, but it is a stepping stone. I am not settling, but I am accepting for now. How has all this rejection affected me? Oddly, not that much. I am still confident in who I am and what I have to offer. I decide every day that I can enjoy where I am, though I am not content to stay there. I am not crying on the proverbial backseat of the Chevy Astro about my occupation.

Recently, the pendulum's been swinging the other way. I just got offered two jobs. The one I accepted is only a temporary thing, but it's a foot-in-the-door kind of a situation. I choose to see this as the beginning of a new season. This actually has been a really great year, but I'm ready for 2011. Early 'Peace out, 2010.' I'm done with ya.

I have since experienced more rejection and disappointment. The foot-in-the-door job was great, but it's over now, and it doesn't feel like it was a stepping stone to anywhere. I have felt stuck in a lot of areas of my life for almost a year now, and I am starting to wear thin. Anyway, these words offer a little perspective, and maybe the pendulum will keep swinging. I think that's what they do.

oh well, it's the spice of life

As my long-term subbing job, the best one I ever could have asked for, began winding down, I started to look forward to having a plan book filled with different things every day. I would miss the stability and the children and preschool, but it would be replaced with adventure and the unknown. The other day's adventure was subbing in a school I knew nothing about for what turned out to be third grade.

The room was pretty bare - no color, no student work displayed, instructional posters at all the wrong angles on the chalkboard. The plans left for me were minimal and grammatically repulsive. They also included 10 practice pages of math work for the students to do in an hour and fifteen minute period. You can guess how well that went over. I like to think I don't judge people I've never met, but I feel safe in saying that this woman is a bad teacher. She didn't even seem to have set up the most basic of routines. There was some sort of drastic pencil shortage going on. Every few minutes, another third grader would approach me with a broken pencil, their ONLY pencil, and ask me if they could sharpen it. Pencil sharpening is one of the most obnoxious distractions that can go on in a classroom.

The first most obnoxious distraction, I learned, is hand sanitizer use. The students used up the hand sanitizer within the first ten minutes of the day and pulled from a locker an industrial-sized bottle to replace it. Apparently the rule was that if you blow your nose, you must sanitize your hands, and another student has to squirt the bottle, so as not to contaminate its surface. This seemed to be the only rule this teacher strictly enforced. Every time I turned around, 5 children were gathered around the sanitizer, squirting gobs of it onto each other's hands. I couldn't stop them, because this was the rule, and they would sneak over to the tissues and fake blow their noses every 2 minutes. By the end of the day, 1/5th of the industrial sanitizer was gone.

Oh yeah, and at one point, 4 children at the same table were fake crying about their dead grandparents. Except that the tears were real. Their eyes were all red, and their noses were puffy, and they were sobbing legitimate tears all over their desks as their friends rubbed their backs and offered to walk them to the guidance counselor's office. No thank you.

Subbing is the worst.