Honeyvine

   Why do I adore Ugly Betty so much?  Well, first of all, it’s an American telenovela, based on a Colombian telenovela, Yo Soy Betty, La Fea.  Those unfamiliar with the genre of a telenovela are missing out on one of the world’s greatest cultural treats.  A telenovela is basically a soap opera with a beginning and ending-not like The Young and the Restless that has been on the air for something like thirty years, and we have watched Victor go from hunky to hunched over. 

The reason the telenovela genre is so attractive to me goes beyond its inherent marvelous features.  I have a nostalgic love for telenovelas since our family lived in Brazil from 1988-1989.  I remember that the first time we even turned on the TV in our new apartment in Brazil, we tuned into a telenovela.  I didn’t know much Portuguese at the time, but I remember that it was called Bebê a Bordo. The theme song was a Brazilian version of Def Leppard’s “Love Bites.”  (I can’t hear that song without thinking of telenovelas).  Later, when my Portuguese was much better, we decided that when the next telenovela started, we would watch it.  It was called O Salvador da Pátria.  I did a little Googling about that show and it brought back so many memories!  I remember having to get home at a certain time to learn new developments in the murder of Juca Pirama and the romance between Sassá Mutema and his professora Clotilde.  I even had the soundtrack on cassette, which I’m sure is now long gone.  Wait a minute-I think I gave all of my old cassette tapes to Greg.  Maybe Greg knows its whereabouts.  In any case, I’m going to see if I can somehow find those songs again.

Back to Ugly Betty…  On the show, Betty’s father Ignacio watches telenovelas in the living room, and often viewers get to see clips of the show that he is so engrossed in.  My favorite telenovela-within-a-telenovela on Ugly Betty explains it all:  The setting is a church.  A very pregnant woman goes in to talk to the priest (I think this same pregnant woman was a nun in a previous episode).  It becomes obvious that the priest is the supposed secret father of the baby.  Just then, out of the woman’s jacket and across the floor bounces a soccer ball.  She’s not pregnant after all!  The priest is furious and slaps her.  They fight, but as quickly as the fight has begun, it turns to passionate kissing, as the priest and the former nun realize that they cannot deny their forbidden love. 

I admit, telenovelas are melodramatic, campy and opposite of intellectual, but their over-the-top ridiculousness is what is so paradoxically attractive to me.  Telenovelas are by nature extremely addictive to watch.  They are full of drama, intrigue, mystery, mistaken identities, passionate romance, and scandal, and Ugly Betty fits the genre perfectly!

 Marriages for money, plots to usurp companies, gay men coming out to their intolerant mothers, deportations to Mexico,  immigration case workers with  crushes on their clients, affairs with bodyguards, swishy 12 year-old boys with jazz hands, convenience store hold-ups.  Drama? Check. 

Mousy, lousy dresser Betty with a mouth full of metal works among the urbane staff at Mode magazine and is BFFs with her uber cool, ladies’ man boss.  Intrigue?  Check.

Murdered former editor of Mode, Fey Sommers, had a secret love dungeon?  And a daughter?  Who was the father?  And how did Fey Sommers die? And is she really dead? Mystery?  Check.

Mysterious, masked women.  Transsexuals who get amnesia and don’t remember their sex change operations… Mistaken identities?  Check.

Betty loves nerdy Henry the accountant and Henry loves Betty, but Betty has a boyfriend and Henry has a girlfriend and the girlfriend gets pregnant, but the girlfriend cheated on Henry with Betty’s ortnodontist, but the DNA tests show that yes, the baby is Henry’s, but Henry still loves Betty and Betty still loves Henry.  Passionate, forbidden romance?  Check.

Alcoholic mothers, murder plots, prison breaks…  Scandal? Check. 

Aside from the charming characteristics of a telenovela, one of the things I love about Ugly Betty is that there are some really evil characters, but every once in a while we see their human sides.  Secretary Amanda makes fun of Betty constantly, but one day Amanda shows her vulnerable side when her heart is trampled on by Daniel and she confides in Betty in the bathroom.  Wilhelmina Slater, the evil woman who is plotting to take over Mode magazine, struggles to win the love of the daughter who hates her.  Marc St. James, Wilhelmina’s smarmy assistant, pretends not to be gay so that he doesn’t disappoint his mother, who indeed shuns him when she eventually finds out Marc’s secret.  The show won’t let us completely hate the bad guys!

Another reason I love Ugly Betty is the title character.  She says what she thinks, doesn’t care how she dresses or acts, is lovably clumsy, and is just a little girl at heart.  Betty is just so inherently good and moral, staying true to her upbringing and loyal to her family, yet in a moral dilemma, she realizes that occasionally there might be justifiable reasons to deceive.  The conflict seems to center around Betty learning that in order to protect those she loves, she must sometimes go against her innate sense of right and wrong. 

Thank you, Netflix, for introducing me to Ugly Betty and allowing me to catch up on an entire missed season in mere days, and thank you ABC for producing a fine show that I hope to watch for many more seasons to come.  I read that the Colombian Betty eventually became beautiful on the show.  I wonder if the American Betty will ever get a makeover, and would that ruin the show?  Discuss.

I’m a high school English teacher, so, (surprise!) I give writing assignments. Sometimes I like to do the assignments along with my students and then share mine with them, not because I’m trying to say that I’m a perfect example of a fantastic writer and they should write like me, but just to kind of model the process that I go through and show them that I enjoy writing just for its own sake and grapple with it in the same ways that they do. One time a student said, “I love it when teachers do the homework that they give us!” and I thought that was so cute. Other students have expressed the same kinds of sentiments. They’re always really interested in what I write, and I’m not sure if it’s because they are voyeuristic (I had strange curiosities about the personal lives of teachers when I was in high school) or if they are fascinated that someone would actually write something that’s not for a grade or if they just appreciate my effort to go through the same things that I ask them to do. This assignment started as an example writing piece for class, but then I decided it was way more about my life than I wanted to share with them, so here I am posting it on the internet instead! They’ll never find it… The assignment was to do a writing piece centered on a belief that they have arrived at through their life experiences, sort of in the manner of NPR’s “This I Believe.”

Here is mine:
The last couple of years, my job has consumed me. I mostly blame it on becoming the adviser of the school newspaper, but especially from February to April during high school musical season, there were days when I would arrive to school at 7:00 am and not leave until 9:00 pm or later. Then when I got home, I sometimes had to finish some grading and then I would start the cycle all over again the next day.

On the weekends I couldn’t even relax because I taught cello lessons bright and early on Saturday mornings. I didn’t have a single day in the week where I didn’t have something I had to be up and ready for first thing in the morning. No sleeping in, ever. No lounging around on Saturday mornings in my PJs.

Summer 2007 came and I realized that without school to consume the bulk of my time, there wasn’t really anything left over. Or anyone. I realized that I only had slight acquaintances, not true friends. During the school year, I didn’t really notice this void, or I had too many other concerns to care about it. But summer came, and I was alone-more alone than I have ever felt in my entire life. I can always find things to do to keep myself busy-projects around the house, books to read, and so forth, but what I didn’t have was genuine human interaction. I didn’t really have anyone I felt close enough to or comfortable enough with to call up spontaneously to meet for lunch or dinner or a yoga session, or anyone to just pop in on. I have had such friends, but many of them have moved away over the last few years. Since I spent every waking hour at school during the year, I hadn’t replenished my friendships, so when summer hit and school was out of the equation, I needed friends and was shocked that I didn’t have anyone in town to fill that role.

Without the long hours of school, I also realized that I had let some of my greatest interests drop. My piano that I was so excited to get rarely ever got played. My journal was sparse. I hadn’t read any good books in ages. The guitar that my parents had given me for Christmas sat in a corner in its case, and I hadn’t learned to play it. I was eating foods that were fast and easy to make instead of trying out new recipes. My life outside of school was boring and blah.

This new school year, I made a goal: to play more, work less. It’s not the usual resolution that I have going into a school year. I resolved that I would do more things to foster my creativity and sociality. I would make sure to have at least one social exchange outside of work per day, whether it was through real life interaction, a phone call, or electronic communication. I could not do what I did last year and go for entire weeks without seeing or communicating with a single person outside of work. I would do at least one activity per day to foster my creative side, be it creative writing, writing in my journal, reading a book, playing the piano, or teaching myself to play the guitar.

I have done well with my goal. I gave up teaching cello lessons. I wake up when I feel like it on Saturdays. I started taking classical guitar lessons. I started this blog to share my musings with family and friends. I am trying to go to activities at church, even though they are sometimes so agonizing. I am trying to socialize more, trying to leave work at work, and trying to take a more hands-off approach to advising the school newspaper, rather than the dictator approach.

I’m not doing as perfectly as I would like. I mean, I neglected this blog for over a month. But I am doing better.

I still sometimes say to myself, “I should be grading papers,” but the truth is that I could work on work for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still have work to do, so I need to carve out time for other interests. I won’t feel guilty for not spending all of my time working and being “productive” because I’ve learned that in order to be happy, building creativity and socializing are more important kinds of productive.

This morning in first period, I intercepted a note that someone started passing around the class.  I’m kind of embarassed that it got so far around the class without me noticing, but I’m pretty amused by it at the same time.  These guys are seniors, believe it or not.  I’ll just post it in its raw glory.

Write what your feeling: 

Poopy scoops

Loopoly loops

Dirty Sanchez

Emilio’s gay

poopstain

Dog Crap

GO WEST SIDE!!!

Emilio needs to calm down.

Some M & Ms

nothing

Lonely

Freakin Worthless

horny

crazy

Crispy Chicken

 I really don’t want to make my blog like a diary with a blow-by-blow account of what I do every day, but I think that today was unusually rife with extreme highs and lows.   Here is the breakdown:

The BAD

 1.  I overslept.  Ok, “overslept” might not be the right terminology.  “I couldn’t get my sorry butt out of the warm coziness of my bed and I pressed the snooze bar a dozen times” just sounds too lame and lazy.  This little ritual always gets my day off to a bad start and I just feel tired all day when I do it.

 2.  Faculty members at work are freaking out about the new microsite that the school newspaper I advise is participating in with our local newspaper.  There is a moderated public forum on the website and they think that it will turn into some kind of anarchy of students and parents posting complaints about teachers all day long.  Since I am the adviser of the school newspaper, the faculty members are directing their freaking out towards me, it seems, even though this whole microsite is something that the principal really committed us to do before I even knew anything about it.

 3.  I forgot to make copies of story idea proposal forms for the newspaper meeting, so I had to leave during the meeting to make them and missed a good opportunity to reprimand the students about something for which they really needed a good reprimand.   By the time I got back, the meeting was ending.

4.  I got a fax from Planned Parenthood because they want to advertise in the newspaper.  I don’t really see an inherent problem with it, but it’s just a can of worms that I’d rather not open.  We need the $$ for the newspaper, though.  I looked at our board-approved ad policy which doesn’t expressly forbid controversial advertising, but it’s something that I know people will freak out about, and I’ve had enough people freaking out at me about the newspaper lately.

 5.  I got an email from the Assistant Principal chiding me for doing something that the Principal told me to do in the first place.  The school I work for is so dysfunctional sometimes.

6.  I had to go to the dentist for a cleaning and checkup.  The inconvenient time, the scraping, and the awkward conversation with the hygeinist I can handle.  I thought it would be no big deal, but it seems like every time I go, they tell me some molar of mine needs an overhaul.  This time it’s tooth #18. 

 7.  The food I made last night for dinner was not great last night, but the leftovers were downright awful today.  Chewy tilapia is disgusting. 

8.  I spilled a black cherry Diet Rite all over my living room floor.

9.  I couldn’t finish the crossword today.

10.  My desk at work is an absolute mess because I never really finished moving classrooms before the school year started.  Once those classes started, being ready for them became top priority and filing papers and unpacking boxes became lowest on the list.

11.  The grading pile is never-ending.

THE GOOD, TO TEMPER THE BAD

 1.  I finally called and set up classical guitar lessons for myself.  I have been saying that I would do it for ages, but I never made the first move.  Today I finally just picked up the phone and got myself scheduled for lessons on Thursdays at 6:00.  Starting this week! 

2.  When I got home from work, not only was my BMG music order in the mailbox waiting for me, but I had a package on the front porch.  I looked at the label and realized that I had won a pair Ryka shoes from entering a contest on a whim, actually to try to help someone else win.  I really needed new workout shoes, so I’m glad to save a trip to the mall and 90 bucks. 

3.  I replaced my nasty dinner with an amazing one.  Great Harvest bread toasted and spread with mashed avocado and eggplant tapenade.  Plus, some home grown watermelon.  YUM.

4.  Planned Parenthood emailed later today and cancelled their advertising order for the next issue.  They want to advertise in the spring, but at least I have more time to figure out how to best deal with it now.

 5.  After abandoning the crossword, I sat down with it again just a few minutes ago, and clues that I couldn’t get before were so obvious this time and I was able to finish it quickly. 

It’s amazing what some time and perspective can bring to life’s little puzzles as well.  The bads of the day don’t seem as bad now that the day is over and I have written about them, and I’m sure they won’t seem as bad in the morning.  Also, it’s nice that good things happen to mix with the bad or else I’d just want to crawl in bed right now and never get out, pushing the snooze bar again and again for the rest of my life.  I think I might actually be able to face another day at work tomorrow. 

After being insanely jealous of the blogorific musings of friends and family such as sister-cousin Sarah, brother Mike, sister-in-law Rachel, Katie, Michelle, I decided to start my own blog.  I meant to start it over the summer, but now that I am back in school I’m feeling more of a need for a relaxing, creative channel.  I’m not sure why I was so jealous of those bloggers, but maybe it has to do with resentment towards my job which always seems to suck away every second of my time, just loving keeping up with what they were doing and being in awe of what amazing people I know and that I am related to who have such great outlooks on the world and on life and wanting to have a creative outlet of my own to share with others.  I have kept a journal for years, and there are times, especially when I write in it consistently, where it becomes almost magical.  I start to look for meaning in my everyday experiences and can’t wait to write them down in my journal.  Frustrations and disappointments gain perspective.  I’m not giving up my journal, mind you, but a blog will be a different type of creative outlet.  I’m curious about how my ruminations will play out with an actual audience, so we’ll just have to see what happens.

I didn’t wear any decked-out senior pants.  I never vandalized the Harrison High School barn.  I didn’t go to the prom.  I was overweight, dreadfully shy, invisible 99 percent of the time, and 100 percent absent from the senior class photo in the yearbook.

As far as I know, nobody ever noticed or cared that I wasn’t sitting on the steps that day when the camera shutter captured the West Lafayette High School class of 1993-I especially didn’t care.  I remember the day that the senior photo was taken.  Who would I even have sat next to?  I didn’t really have anyone in my own grade with whom I felt like I could smile for the camera  and act like I loved high school, just to look back at the photo with fondness and say, boy, those were good times.  Who knows where I went to avoid having to be in the senior photo?  I probably either took cover in the restroom or just walked the one block home for lunch. 

Even before senior year, something changed in me at the beginning of 9^th grade.  I had somehow gotten it into my mind that talking did nothing but work against me.  Talking always got me into trouble in class or with my friends in the complicated teenage girl beehive social system.  So I took a vow of silence, rationalizing that it’s impossible to say something stupid when you don’t say anything at all.  I would talk only when absolutely necessary-when my academic performance required vocalization.  That way, I wouldn’t get in trouble in class, I wouldn’t call negative attention to myself, and I wouldn’t say something that I’d regret.  Thus began a very quiet, lonely four years of high school. 

I did have friends from church that I would do stuff with, but I never really had a group of friends actually at school.  I did have one for a while, but she was a year ahead of me, so when she graduated, I was left drowning in friendlessness.  By the end of my senior year, I was so over it all anyway.  I was crashing on my bed at 9:30 without having done a lick of homework and not giving a damn.  I was walking home for lunch most days.  I didn’t ever talk to anyone in my graduating class.  Besides orchestra class, where I could always be myself, I was a mute for most of my senior year. 

At graduation, I remember the loneliness of sitting with my classmates, not really knowing most of them.  Graduation was not bittersweet to me as it probably was for the rest of my classmates.  It was only sweet.  Good riddance to high school, I thought.  I promised to never set foot into that building again. 

College was the antithesis of high school.  I made some of the best friends I’ve ever had; I thrived and emerged.  I loved living in the dorms, sharing an apartment with roommates, and enjoying my first dating experiences.  I quickly forgot about high school and left it behind as a distant memory of something that I never had to deal with again.  But enough about college.  Suffice it to say, college was awesome.  This is about my wounded high school experience. 

May 2003 came around and I had three years of teaching inner-city middle school under my belt; I was just wrapping up my master’s degree at Purdue and was looking for a teaching job in the area.  Looking back, it probably would have done me good to expand my search area a bit and applied to more places than just Tippecanoe and the surrounding counties, but at the time I was involved in a relationship which I really wanted to work out.  Moving away would have surely brought it to a close, and I had to cling to whatever tenuous thread was there.  

I was closely following the stories in the Journal and Courier about superintendent Stella Batagiannis and from those stories, I knew that Dr. Koivo, who had been princial of WLHS when I was there, had come out of retirement to serve as principal again and that she would be heading up the hiring of new teachers in the English department to replace two retirees.  I debated whether or not I should apply to West Lafayette School Corporation.  It would be so trippy to work at the school I had gone to and hated so much.  Rationally, I knew that it wasn’t the school itself that I hated, rather it was my own teenage angst.  I was still not sure whether I wanted to face the edifice that housed said angst.  I didn’t really think any teachers would remember the perennially quiet girl, and I just thought it would be weird all around.   I asked a family friend who had inside connections in the WLCSC corporation office if she thought I would have a chance, and she encouraged me to go ahead and apply, but told me that I had better do it pretty quickly.  I bucked up,  got my application materials together and sent them in.  I needed a job, after all.

            I got the job and surprisingly, teachers there DID remember me, even though it had been ten years.  My high school wounds truly healed when I started teaching at West Lafayette High School.  My new job became an area of my life where I could really be myself.  None of the students know that I was uncool in high school.  They see me as me, their teacher, and I have good rapport with everyone:  the jocks, the cheerleaders, the preps, the artsy folks, the nerds.  I’m now the young, hip teacher and I get a weird sense of satisfaction any time the “cool” kids say hi to me in the hallway, and why the hell couldn’t high school boys have had crushes on me when I was actually in high school instead of when I’m their teacher!  

When I say hi to Mrs. Helton or Mr. Stearns, when I walk through the scarlet and gray hallways, or when I wear my Red Devil Pride on Fridays, I’m proud to teach there and every day I marvel that the school is eternally the same West Lafayette High School that it had to have been when it was first built, that it was in 1993, and that it will be forever.  There are still the same social groups, and I like to play a game with myself where I match a student in 2007 with a class of 1993 counterpart.  I love to look around at the students and ask myself, who would I have been friends with?  Which boy would I have had a searing, unrequited crush on?  Which girls would I have wanted to be like?  Which student is the quiet girl in the corner brooding over the agony of high school-the “me” of this class? 

High school is long gone, but I think about it all the time.  I would venture to say that I think about it a great deal more than others of the class of 1993, since I now live and breathe West Lafayette High School.  I adore my job.  For someone who hated high school, I sure love that I am 32 years old and that I get to go to high school every day, sans torture.

It is this new mindset in which I received a surprise email from a classmate, trying to reunite the class of 1993.  There was not a question of whether I would respond or not.  Of course I would.  Why not?  Since I walk the halls of West Lafayette every day, surely I could go to a class reunion.  If the email had come before August of 2003, I have no doubt that I would have just clicked “delete.”  From what I hear, though, this guy was very persistent in his sleuthing.  If I hadn’t responded, I probably would have gotten daily emails, and when that didn’t work, he would have tracked down my parents who would certainly have blown my cover.  The next thing I knew, I would have been cornered with a phone call.  Things were different now that I was teaching at West Side, plus, I know that my looks have improved greatly since 1993, I know I’m funny and intelligent, I can make good conversation, and people would surely have grown up since then, so I committed to go.  Granted, I probably wouldn’t have traveled to go to this reunion, but since I live in town, I figured I might as well.

The time for the reunion came and I found myself nervously regressing back to my 17 year old self, wondering if anyone from the class of 1993 would even know who I am.  I imagined nothing but blank stares. 

I don’t know why I worried about it so much because even though it was weird to be reuniting with people that I had never even been friends with in the first place, I have confidence that I certainly didn’t have in high school.  In core essence, my 1993 self is the same as the 2007 self, but now I’m OK with me.  That is the only difference.  I don’t have or even need large networks of friends, and I will always find making friends difficult, but I am passionately loyal and intimately attached to my small collection of close friends.  I still don’t relish large groups of people and ironically, my loneliest moments are when I am surrounded by people.  In high school, I just thought I was cruelly cursed with social ineptitude, but my attitude now is that I’m an introvert and there’s no denying it, so I embrace my introversion and allow myself to just be.  

What I saw at the reunion is that everyone else is so over high school, just as I was fourteen years ago.  Life went on and everyone emerged into their true forms just as I did.  While I absorbed the surrealism of the weekend, I couldn’t help thinking, wow, the star quarterback of the football team is actually talking to me.  I think the student council president just put his hand on my ass.  Why couldn’t I have known in 1993 that I had so much in common with her?  Why didn’t I ever talk to this guy?  I never knew this other guy was so normal.  Hey, this dude actually knows my name.  This guy who I thought was so quiet is talking my ears off! 

You know, I would love to see some of these people again and who would have known in 1993 that I would have ever thought that?  The best part of the whole weekend is that we took another class photo, and this time I was 100 percent there and smiling.