Workplace Bathroom Etiquette

I’ve decided that there are just two groups of people in the world. There are those that are bold and brazen enough to poop at work and those who would rather die first. Anyone who knows me knows I among the latter group.

As an outside observer, I have a few suggestions for those who decide to “download” during work hours.

To say something or not to say something: When walking out of the restroom it is not necessary to look at the person waiting for the one -seater stall you have just evacuated and say, “Oooh, sorry…” in Ace Ventura Pet Detective style. That waiting person crossing her legs and doing the tinkle dance will figure it out soon enough and if you haven’t said anything it’s possible they might assume those noxious fumes are the work of the person before you. Unlikely, but possible.

To spray or not to spray: This is a toughie. While nobody wants to smell the full strength of your workplace transgression, I spend way too much money on Dolce and Gabanna “Light Blue” to leave the communal can smelling like your great granny’s cloud of White Shoulders perfume. And truthfully the spray is not so much eliminating the olfactory assault as it is adding an extra layer of sensory torture. Scientifically speaking, this just forges a link in the brain that tells us that when we smell air freshener the next smell we’ll encounter is eau de co-worker and whatever they ate most recently. Ewww…

To call the custodian or not to call the custodian: We’ve all had the gut-wrenching, gag-inducing experience of walking into the restroom for a just in case trip and being greeted with a swirling mass of disgustingness that just won’t flush and the smell of funk so thick in the air that a loss of consciousness is eminent. My work best friend (WBF) and I experienced this last week. After offending her with a look that said, “Was it you?” She and I happened upon our principal with his walkie-talkie and said in unison, “We didn’t do it, but the bathroom’s plugged up.” He graciously called the custodian after a brief bout of laughter. In the unlikely event that you plug up the toilet, bite the bullet and fess up. You did it. Admit it and call the custodian.

Finally, I know from years of research and experience that these things can be controlled. The key is: drink more coffee and drink it earlier – AT HOME!

Stuck

It recently came to my attention that I misnamed my youngest child. We painstakingly chose John Bryant because it fit our exacting specifications. John is a family name (my grandfather's) and Bryant caught Steve's fancy because it is Irish, or so he claims. It turns out we should have gone with Billy Graham or Chuck Swindoll or even Martin Luther.

The Sunday before school started I was frazzled from wrestling with the technology in my classroom and commandeered Steve to come work out the bugs in my Power Point crammed with riveting slides of the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, war protests, political uprisings and natural disasters set to Switchfoot singing "we were meant to live for so much more". A quick trip to WalMart for batteries was required, so Steve took off and left me to tinker with my last minute to do list and wrangle the boys.

Brendan and Bryant begged to run laps around the upper floor of our building and in desperate need of quiet I agreed. Brendan took off and left his brother in the dust. Bryant spotted a stranger and decided to forgo the run after all. You should know that no matter how many times I say, "Don't talk to strangers", he still does. He's already one of those schmoozy guys who can and does talk to a lamp post. To him, if they smile at you they are no longer a stranger, they are your new best friend. Evening news, here we come...

So he corners this sweet new math teacher in the copy room. New math teacher (NMT) is making copies and punching holes in them when my pint sized used car salesman says, "Hi. My mom's been telling me about how you can ask Jesus into your heart. And then you can pray to him and he'll help you all the time."

NMT says, "Oh, that's nice."

Now we did have this conversation, about two weeks prior, but as I recall he changed the subject to puppy dogs or Power Rangers, so I assumed he wasn't interested or listening. Wrong!!! But he doesn't stop there. "Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart right now?" he says to NMT. With an awkwardness I can literally hear through the wall, she says, "I'll have to talk to your mommy about that."

At that point the little evangelist comes running back into my classroom, but turns right back around and disappears again. I can hardly contain my laughter when he says to NMT, "Um actually, when you get Jesus into your heart I don't think you can get him out again. He's just stuck there."

NMT has never brought up that conversation, but has resumed making eye contact with me. I know there are lots of believers in our building, but who knew the first to share Christ with her would be my baby Billy Graham?

Not Just Another Day at the Pool

Regrettably, Sunday was the last day our neighborhood pool would be open for the summer. We eat, sleep and breathe the pool in the summer. I can't help it. It's how I was raised. Growing up, my mom would pack snacks and a lunch and haul all four of us and our garb up to the neighborhood swimming pool from the time it opened until we saw my dad's car pull back into the subdivision that evening. We napped there, read there, ate there and of course swam there. We were tan like nobody's business. In fact, I'm not even sure tan begins to cover it. Oh, and those were the days before moms chased down squealing piglets to grease them up in SPF 249 like they do today, so if I seem fanatical about my yearly mole check at the dermatologist, it is not without cause.

So with a wistful grin, I shimmy into my swimsuit one last time. I grab the beach bag and throw in only the essentials - towels, a few bottles of water and the digital camera since I have put off taking the yearly pool pictures of the boys and can no longer procrastinate or I'll be left with a glaring hole in the scrapbook where they should fall.

We troop up to the pool, drag some beach furniture around to "our spot", and giggle as the boys nearly pull off their ears in their haste to get shirts removed. I spotted my friend Becky's car in the parking lot, so I braved the water to get over to where she was calmly enjoying a novel. Unfortunately for her, I was accompanied by Bryant clinging for dear life to my neck like a spider monkey and squealing like only a four year old boy can. We chatted for a while about work and family and then she decided to pack up and head back home.

Bryant and I joined Steve and Brendan in the deep end where they were perfecting the breast stroke. Watch out Michael Phelps! Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a life guard jump into the water. I have only once EVER seen a life guard go into the water and that was when my friend Diane's brother broke his neck diving into the Harvest Bend pool, so I froze where I stood.

The teenage lifeguard went under the water once and came back up empty handed. He quickly went down again and came up with a woman who was limp and unresponsive. How long she had been down, I had no idea. The lilac tinge to her skin was frightening, but the part that chilled me to the bone was that she looked to be about my age and she might be dead. There were shouts of "Do CPR!" and "Call 911." As a mom, I was torn between the fact that I was holding my breath willing her to find hers and the decision of whether or not to shield my two kids from what was going on. After an eternal minute she came around, but her first sounds of consciousness were her daughter wailing "mommy, I want my mommy, what happened to my mommy". The little girls sobs were then joined by the sobs of her mother and nearly of mine.

She looked awake and alert as EMTs took her away, but I cannot get the video reel out of my head, nor the audio of sobs. I find the anxiety and panic with which I struggled in my early twenties threatening to choke my breath once again. I rationalize - this did not happen to you, it happened to her. But that doesn't help. This morning at work I had to say out loud,"Snap out of it!" I tried the only thing I knew to erase the thoughts and images from my mind, the word of God. I pulled a devotional book off of my classroom desk and read through every verse like a teenage girl frantically clawing through her closet. Romans 12:2 stopped me, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is..." I could go for a renewing of my mind.

We ended that day with sno-cones and another dip before giving the pool the last backward glance of summer, but I think I held the boys a little tighter in their night time hugs and I think they held on just a little longer too.

Developing What?

I am in my third consecutive week of what educators like to call “Staff Development”. Well I’m developing all right, but possibly not what they had in mind. I’m developing “flat butt syndrome” from the wooden chairs in our school library. Okay, so I come by some of that odd compaction of my derriere honestly – thanks a lot mom! But the quandary always remains in these eternal meetings, do I get up and roll a comfy padded computer chair to my table or do I just wait it out on my two by four for hours on end?

For most of us the idea of switching chairs is truly a no-brainer, but in staff development this automatically shines light from heaven on you and starts the angel singing soundtrack because then, you are different. Just by the simple act of getting a different chair you are dubbed a “leader” or an “out of the box thinker.” This might be fine in the business world where that kind of thing is rewarded with raises and respect, but education works a little differently. Those who display this kind of ingenuity are asked to do more work. They never call it more work. It comes with glamorous titles like point person or liaison or team leader, but that’s all just code for more work.

Let’s face it, more work makes you tired. I am so excited about this school year that I can hardly contain myself. I even purchased a model of the brain to use for demonstration. I have downloaded countless tunes onto my iPod for lessons. I have written killer lesson plans that will engage and enchant students. But alas, at the end of the day I am tired. Truthfully, at the beginning of the day I am tired. Today, I ate the stem off of a blueberry in my morning yogurt because I was simply too exhausted to pick it off.

So today, when my hiney begins to ache and I develop bedsores, I will not switch out my block of petrified wood for the cushy comfort of a computer chair. I will not need to because I will be sleeping upright with my eyes open.

MacGyver Cooking

Over the past 18 months I have developed a love of cooking, fueled mostly by countless hours of watching Food Network. When I hear Rachael Ray's monologue about one of her 30 Minute Meals in which she encourages measuring with your hands and "eyeballing" amounts, I have flashes of my mom in the kitchen while we were growing up. The kitchens changed over the years, but the methods remain the same. She never measures, never follows a recipe exactly as it is written, and she substitutes often - a result of never having all the "right" ingredients.

As kids we dubbed this improvisational cooking "MacGyver Meals", referring to the TV series where Richard Dean Anderson uses science and problem solving to get out of even the most impossible scrapes as a secret agent. Nothing MacGyver faced could have prepared him for the task my mom had every night - making dinner for 6.

My mom made barbecue sauce out of ketchup and a cabinet of spices. She fried chicken like no other. Her mashed potatoes were legendary, as were the quantities of food she put on the table. A tendency that led to "Must-go" nights. The night when everything in the refrigerator must go before it spoiled and developed all the necessary toxins to kill us all or at the very least give a fierce case of food poisoning.

I don't think I realized until recently how much of this improvisational cooking had seeped into my being. As I pondered what I needed at the grocery store yesterday, I began to poke around refrigerator, freezer and pantry shelves only to discover that if I did go to the store, I would be hard pressed to find anywhere to put the things I might buy. I resolved then and there to use what I had before I went back to the store.

I found a rice mix in the pantry, a flank steak in the freezer and some veggies and decided to see what I could do with them. I set the rock solid steak out and said a little prayer that it would thaw before dinner and it did (mostly). Steve grilled some corn to mix with the rice, while I made a quick pico de gallo and green chile sauce for the steak, seasoned up the steak and eventually set out the meal for my family.

As we sat down to eat, I was awaiting the usual chatter and food avoidance techniques my boys usually try, but all I heard was chewing and forks hitting plates. Nobody dissected food and speculated on whether dinosaurs would have eaten it. Nobody called it "interesting" or "a change of pace". Nobody assured me that his stuffed puppy said he didn't have to eat it. They loved it! Every once in a while you hit the jackpot with a MacGyver meal. Now, I wonder if they'll be so excited when I try to use up all that broccoli, cauliflower and butternut squash puree I have in the freezer next week?

Recipes:

Spice Rubbed Flank Steak

Sprinkle a flank steak with salt, pepper, garlic powder, coriander, cumin, crushed red pepper flakes and grill seasoning.

Grill 6-8 minutes on each side. Allow to rest 10 minutes and slice thinly against the grain. You can also put this under the broiler for 10 minutes on each side.

Quick Mild Pico de Gallo

Grape tomatoes (quartered)

Handful of cilantro (chopped)

Purple onion (finely diced)

Juice of 2 limes

Salt

Mix all ingredients and chill.

Green Chile Sauce

Fresh or canned tomatillos

Canned green chiles

Avocado

Cilantro

Lime Juice

Salt

Buzz together in blender until smooth.

Quick Yellow Rice

Grilled corn on the cob

1 pkg. Saffron Rice

Add grilled corn cut off the cob to prepared rice and stir.

Books, Books, Books...

As a kid, I always had my nose in a book. One of my earliest memories is as a five year old waiting up until my sisters and brother went to sleep so I could sneak out of my room and get the Cinderella book I checked out of the library earlier that day. My mom graciously indulged me a quick reading before sending me off to bed with a loving swat followed by, "...and stay in bed this time."

This slowly melted into my elementary summers with Nancy Drew and the gang in River Heights. I was sucked in by catchy titles like The Spider Sapphire Mystery and The Sign of the Twisted Candles. I struggled my way through unfamiliar vocabulary and along the way developed a knack for decoding word meaning that I still use today.

In Junior High, I begged to be allowed to read Gone with the Wind. Never mind that it weighed more than an anvil, was just about as thick and that I would miss much of the innuendo and implication hidden within. My mom never told me to put it back or that it was too difficult or deep or inappropriate for me. She just shooed my brother and sisters outside and let me read and then got the movie from the library for me when I was done. While I never openly employed the word "damn", after reading this book I had a good understanding of how it should be used to achieve maximum effect if I were ever to be so bold.

I still felt growing up that my desire to read was about on par with being a nose-picker. If you did it, you did it in private and you sure as heck never talked about it. It took awhile before I realized that I didn't care, books were then and always will be my drug of choice.

Now, being a reader is very much en vogue. There are book clubs for stay at home moms, third graders and anyone else who wants to be part of one. My neighbor and I have been known to knock on one another's door in a panic because one of us has nothing to read. A book launch is a celebrated occurrence. Last year at the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (the seventh and final book in the series), people stood in line for hours to get their hands on the book at midnight. Hotels offered special packages that included costume parties, Hogwarts-like buffets and copies of the book. Too much hoopla over a book? Heck no. In my way of thinking, it's about time books were cool.

I am thrilled that my son is growing up in an era where he can drag his very battered copies of Harry Potter to and from school and actually be given time during the school to feast on them. I get a little teary eyed when he slows down while we pass the book section at Wal Mart and he looks at me pleadingly to see if we will stop so he can pick up The Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan's latest addition to the Percy Jackson series. High school girls at my church have deep conversations on the virtues of Edward Cullen versus those of Jacob Black in Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse - even citing chapter and page and line to back them up. Personally, I'll take the vampire over the werewolf any day - no offense, Jacob. Facebook is littered with bumper stickers, buttons, and quizzes brimming with literary characters and references. I'm crossing my fingers that I'll be Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice when I take the "Which Jane Austen heroine are you most like?" quiz. Who doesn't love a girl that can tell a man, "From the first moment I met you, your arrogance and conceit, your selfish disdain for the feelings of others made me realize that you were the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry. "

So tonight, it is with great pleasure that I take Brendan along with me to the launch of the fourth installment in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, Breaking Dawn. When I wake him up at 11 p.m. and watch him groggily rub his eyes, I know that we will soon be among people just like us who unashamedly love books. Nurturing a reader is a gift my mother gave me and one I hope to pass on to my son.

Back in 7th Grade

Does anybody miss french braids, big bangs and braces?

It never really goes away does it? I mean the "feeling" of Junior High School. It was as if I was constantly questioning. Does anybody like me? Will they like me tomorrow? Will I still have a seat at the lunch table or have they voted me off the island because they traded up for a Student Council officer? (Does that give you any sense of how low I was on the social food chain?)

So, my little sister, Jill, is dragging me into the 21st Century by pestering me to set up a profile on Facebook. After dinner last night, I got on and started the process. It's relatively painless with the hardest part being wrenching a photo of Steve and I in Israel out of the scrapbook to scan and upload.

I began to be overwhelmed by this pervasive feeling of uneasiness. Trying to diagnose the source of this, I ran through my mental checklist. Stove turned off - check. Kids in bed, nobody vomiting yet - check. Steve on the couch and not halfway across the world as usual - check. Nothing I could think of would cause that amount of rising panic, until it hit me. Facebook is all about having friends, adding friends and communicating with friends. And at this point in my Facebook life I had NONE. Never mind that I just saved my profile 3 minutes ago. I really truly felt like I was back at Campbell Junior High School, the first one in my desk in math class because I had nobody to talk to in the halls. For a minute, I considered making my husband create a profile just so I could have one friend.

Lest you think I'm pathetic and more mentally unstable than usual, I did snap out of it pretty quickly. As a middle school teacher, I think it was a reminder of what my students go through every day. People ask me all the time why I teach Middle School and my stock answer is, "My sense of humor got stuck somewhere around the 7th grade, so I still think they're funny." While this is undeniably true (tell a fart joke if you'd like to test this theory), I think there's more to it than that. I think remembering middle school with more loathing than fondness gives me a fair amount of empathy for what goes on in the halls of Scott Johnson Middle School in McKinney, TX.

By the way, I woke up and found I already had ten friends on Facebook this morning. Never mind that Jill had sent them all messages suggesting they add me as a friend. At my age, a friend is a friend and you're lucky to have one, but blessed beyond words to have more.