a bridget jones moment

Reason #972 Why My Mom Is Cooler Than Me:

When my mom bakes a pie in a flimsy tinfoil pie pan, she puts the pie pan on a cookie sheet while it's in the oven.

When I bake a pie, I just stick the flimsy tinfoil pie pan directly in the oven, and then when I pull it out the pan collapses, the crust gives way, and there are suddenly steaming hot apples all over the door of the oven, and also sort of the floor, and one falls on my foot, and I have to hop around yelling and diving for spatulas.

When I grow up I want to be like my mom. I hope the damn pie still tastes good.

Me fail English? That's unpossible!

The text, in case you need to go over that humdinger again, via Ezra Klein, my blog crush:

"That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and getting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."

I think the first requirement for a vice president should be a grasp of the English language, don't you? THEN maybe we can get into economics.

Maybe she was speaking in the tongues so frequently spoken at the church she attends.

for all the ladies in the place with style and grace

I feel ok writing about girl things, in moderation at least, on this here blog because i'm pretty sure that 90% of my readers are girls, 5% are either gay or bi, and only 5% are straight guys (hi Jack!). Besides, it's my blog and I can write abou whatever the hell I want. So, two quick tales related to Being A Girl:

Tale #1

Last week I was looking for a gynecologist in LA. Yuck-- the sort of thing I would really rather avoid altogether, but enough girls I know have had issues relating to cervical cancer that I finally made myself go to the Kaiser site and pick one. I've been a Kaiser member since about February, and they sure don't make anything easy for you. You go online to pick a doctor, and they give you pretty much zero information on them, so you have to resort to creative methods of deciding who gets to weigh you and tell you you're fat every year. For example, I chose my regular physician, Dr. Annette Rittmann, because she had so many double letters in her name.

So anyway, I'm looking through the OB/GYN page and I find Dr. Kimberly Calligari.

....

As in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?!?! (FYI for non-film-junkies: Dr. Caligari is a crazy German Expressionist doctor who creates zombie people and has them do his bidding.) I was both terrified and tempted- terrified because, as Kara put it, "I wouldn't want Dr. Caligari poking around in my lady parts," and tempted because how frickin' cool would it be to be able to say you're going to see Dr. Caligari? It's the sort of joke only nerdy film kids would get, but most of my friends ARE nerdy film kids.

In the end, though, "going to see Dr. Caligari" will have to remain simply a euphemism, because mine is one cabinet he won't get his hands on (in?).


Tale #2 (not really much of a tale)

Remember Porn Star?
Apparently, Porn Star told Sean that I have nice boobs. Which, I mean, I do-- if you have somehow never noticed, my boobs are inconveniently large. I've been told this before, and thank goodness this time it wasn't to my face. What CAN you say to that?

"Thanks, I grew them myself"??

No. Tacky.

I was flattered in a weird way, though-- I mean, Porn Star has probably seen thousands and thousands of boobs in his life, and he thinks mine are nice without even properly seeing them! Way to go, boobs.



End Girly Post


P.S. Ten points if you can name the R&B song the title of this post is taken from!

"Brenda, your brother's totally dope"

Yes, I will admit it: I watched the first couple episodes of the new 90210. I would love to say that I watched it purely as a sort of media anthropologist, and this is partially true, but some deranged part of me also wanted to be in middle school again, when things were simple and Beverly Hills, 90210 was second only to The X-Files and Friends as the highlight of my week. Yeah, I watched a lot of tv in middle school. Weird how I watched more tv than at any other point in my life, and yet got the best grades I've ever gotten. But I digress...

So I watched the new show, hoping that I would love it as much as I loved the old one, or at least as much as I loved the first season of The OC when I watched it on dvd. No such luck. The new series is clunky and devoid of interesting character-- save, of course, for the ones who showed up from the original series. I find that I'm almost exclusively interested in the Kelly-Taylor-dating-fellow-teacher-and-has-4-year-old-with-unnamed-
former-cast-member plotline. To hell with Annie (who bothers the living crap out of me), or Naomi (who is trying to reinstate the perm as a fashion statement), or Ethan or whoever the fuck. Kelly Taylor and Brenda Walsh? Now THOSE are characters I care about. Those are characters I followed for ten seasons, or I suppose it was more like 7, because I wasn't allowed to watch the show when it began in 1990. In 1990 I was 7 years old, and in retrospect I wouldn't allow my 7 year old to watch it either, but man, at the time I was furious.

So I will continue to watch the new series, if only for a) the original characters' plotlines (I am holding out hope that the father of Kelly's baby turns out to be Dylan and that Luke Perry comes back, perhaps finally looking his age), and b) because Jessica Walters, she of Arrested Development, occasionally graces the show. In the meantime, though, I will relive past glory and watch the original series on veoh.com, starting with the pilot, which I watched tonight... and which was so hilariously 90's it was almost painful. Jason Priestly's mullet, Jennie Garth's clothes, the SOUNDTRACK, for the love of god, and of course, the guest appearance by Rex Manning, or to use his real name, Maxwell Caulfield. Yes, Maxwell Caulfield from Empire Records and Grease 2. Oh, I miss the 90's.

The best thing about rewatching the show though? The theme song. Easily one of the best theme songs ever written for a tv show. The "modern" remix for the new series can't hold a candle to the old, twangy one I hummed along with in 6th grade. It's interesting to see the first few episodes, which I've only ever seen in reruns (again, I wasn't allowed to watch the earlier seasons), and how they had a doofy, sitcom-esque opening credit sequence for the song. So not as classy as the slick, white-background opening sequence they had in the later seasons.

It's also funny to see the plot lines they clearly abandoned after the pilot, like the vice principal hitting on the Spanish teacher. What? And it's great to watch it now that I know my way around LA, and can name the beaches they film at, the streets they're on, etc. But anyway. I do have more interesting things to think about than 1990's tv shows. Really! I just can't think of them right now.

things i have wikipedia'd today

Lance Amstrong

Greenland

Minke whales

Donna Martin

Danger Mouse

The Beaumont Children


...just a snapshot of where my mind wanders when you let it.

meet Avery

I got to feed Baby Carrillo!


(also, ugh, my hair is officially ugly)

I didn't look nearly as awkward as Kevin feeding Baby Carrillo:



She is the prettiest newborn I've ever seen.

where "terrific" is spelled P-R-I-M-A-R-Y

I have often waxed nostalgic about Pacific Primary and the amazing community of people it houses, but indulge me: I'm going to do it again, and with good reason.

Last week, Pac Prim opened the Orange Sun School, a brand spankin' new building across the street from the original building. It's been a long time coming- I've worked at Pacific Primary, off and on, since I was 18, and expanding enrollment has been a dream of the director, Belann's, for that entire time. Probably longer. Pac Prim gets about 250 applications a year for what amounts to about 20 spots for new kids-- it would be about 35, but siblings are automatically granted admission, so they tend to take up a good chunk of the available spots. When I was Sunroom Coordinator part of my job was to file applications and keep them up to date when each part was sent in, and it was just heartbreaking to read about all these amazing families, families who value education via discovery more than anything, and to know that most of them would never get in. I was also responsible for greeting applicants (or their parents) when they came on a tour of the school, and meeting them made it even harder! I have no idea how Belann could decide on which 20 families to accept- if I were her I would have just put them all in a hat and taken the first 20 that were pulled out.

Original Building:


The year that I was Sunroom Coordinator was a big one- the school purchased the condemned church across the street and began a capital campaign to turn it into a second site. It was all up in the air for awhile, but things finally went through with the mortgage and everything, and plans were soon being drawn up. During my first year at AFI, the church was mostly used for storage of all the stuff we never had room for in the first building. Then last summer they knocked it down and broke ground on the new building. Even more applications, a new batch of teachers, and a ton of hard work later, and Pac Prim opened its Orange Sun School last week to 75 smiling new kids and their families.

New Building:


On Sunday, they had a block party to celebrate the opening. I was so bummed to have missed it! I know I missed a lot of my old favorites by doing so-- both kids I knew when I was in the Sunroom, and kids I knew way back when I was a Summer Assistant or a sub. Uncle Owen spoke (Uncle Owen and Aunt Kris were part of the 5 families that founded the school in the 70's) and they did a giant Pacific Primary circle and from the looks of THE PHOTOS ONLINE, it was one big happy San Francisco event. I know I'm a total hippie and it gets even worse when I talk about Pac Prim, but... I'm just so proud of all of them and so excited that more kids will get to experience this wonderful place.


(giant Pac Prim circle at graduation, August 2007)


Sonia, Anna, Raia, and Sam on the playground at the old building.


(Dalia on in the MLK Day Peace Parade, 2006)

When I was home a few weeks ago I went to visit everyone at school, and Belann gave me a tour of the new building. It's beautiful-- a little too new and shiny for my taste, but a couple years' worth of kids should fix that soon enough. It's almost completely green, energy-wise, and there are bathrooms in every class! The best part is that on the second floor- yes, there are two whole floors- there's a giant multipurpose room for Heidi, the music and movement specialist, and Elyse, the expressive arts teacher, to have their classes. Heidi and Elyse have never had enough room for all the wonderful things they do with the kids-- Elyse used to have her art classes in the Sunroom (which was actually lots of fun for me!), and while Heidi had the music room, it really wasn't very big. So hurray for increased artistic and musical expression!


multipurpose room


playground


Brian's new classroom-- for the Panda Bears, I think?

There was a moment on Sunday, when I first remembered that it was the day of the block party, that I turned off the radio in my car and quietly sang the school song to myself:

Our school is made for me and you
Every day finding out something new
See the sky with the smiling sun
Learning stuff sure is a whole lot of fun!

Because we're P-A-C-I-F-I-C Pacific...
P-R-I-M-A-R-Y terrific!

And then I felt like a dork and turned the radio back on.