No-Shave November

This is 28 days' worth of leg hair.  Seriously, the last time I shaved was Halloween.

All nice and smooth and power-tweezed.

    So this year, to be obnoxious, I decided to participate in No-Shave November.  Only my legs, not my armpits or lady bits or anything.  Originally, my brother had agreed to do No-Shave November, too, but he wimped out about 6 days in.  At first, it was a little weird to keep feeling hair when I put lotion on, but I eventually stopped noticing.  J made a face when I told him I was doing it, and I said that if it got weird to just tell me and I’d shave, but he never did.
    I decided that instead of shaving, I’m going to use the epilator I got a while ago.  It’s pretty much a bunch of electric tweezers.  So I did that today, hence the pictures.  At first it freaking hurt, but after a while I couldn’t feel it at all.  It took kind of a long time, and it’s not perfect, but I read somewhere that the first few times it’s a little weird, and after that your body sort of gets into the groove.  Which makes sense, because it was that way when I started laser treatments, too.  The first few times my body was like, “Woah, wait, I will not be hairless!”  And now it’s just sort of given up.
    If this epilating thing works, then I won’t need to shave anymore, and the longer I do it, the less frequently I’ll have to do it, which is nice.  I’m all about doing extra stuff now to save time later.  And I didn’t cut myself, which is nice, cuz I almost always shave the back of my ankle off.
    Tonight I’m going to the Zoo Lights at the Stone Zoo with my brother and one of my friends/co-workers, E.  We’re going to Kowloon afterward, which’ll be fun cuz it’s Kowloon, but it’ll also be fun cuz E’s never been there before.
    I’m trying not to think too much about work, but I’m not really having much success.  I’m just so bummed.  I don’t want to be there anymore, but I like all the people I work with.  I just hate feeling like I’m just a body to stick wherever it’s convenient, and I hate feeling like I’m being punished when I didn’t do anything wrong (at least nothing I can think of).

Trying to keep things positive...

Pretty sure this is going to happen in my interim classroom.  Also, I definitely did cry on Tuesday after I got told about this stupid new thing.

     So I’ll start with a list of things I’m thankful for, since it’s Thanksgiving and everything.
    - My dad, who spoils me, a lot, and doesn’t ever make me feel like a burden
    - My brother, who always has my back
    - My grad school friends, who “get” writing/reading/all that good stuff
    - My friends from before grad school, who were there for a lot of me growing into my nerdiness
    - My work friends, who get how it is to have the job we have, and keep making me feel like I’m good at it (you’re good at it, too, for the record)
    - My students, who make me feel loved
    - The twin girls and their sister, who treat me like one of them, in a good way
    - All the decisions I made, big or small, that led me to where I am today
    - Nerdy things <3
    - J, who is super chill and also caring, smart, funny, and nerdy

    Work on Tuesday was...bad.  We had our Q360, which is when corporate comes and checks everything out to make sure we’re doing everything we’re supposed to be doing.  Which we are.  That’s not the bad part.  In the afternoon, they had me switch with one of the toddler teachers, so that the director and our person who is basically a district manager for curriculum could talk to me and another toddler teacher.
    Turns out, they hired a second teacher for the younger preschool room.  She has some personal stuff she has to take care of before she can start.  So they’re moving one of the toddler teachers (my exercising co-worker) up to be with the current younger-preschool teacher.  Which means they need a certified teacher for her room, since her co-teacher is uncertified.  That, apparently, would be me.  Even though I don’t want to.  I want to be with my co-teacher, S.  I don’t want to be a float or a teacher in another age group.  I feel like it sounds bratty, but I want a turn to get what I want.  I had thrown it out there that maybe I wanted to be a permanent float, because if you’re going to throw me all over the place, you might as well make it my job and quit pretending you’re going to let me go back where I came from.  I didn’t mean make me a fucking toddler teacher.
    So, why don’t I want to be a toddler teacher?  Well, for starters, the kids are much more mobile, obviously, which makes them harder to corral and keep track of when you’re going outside and stuff.  It’s also a lot harder than you would think to have them all eating and sleeping at the same time.  It’s kind of a shit show to pass out all the lunches and try to get everyone to sleep around the same time.  They also make much bigger messes with the toys.  Not to mention, their curriculum is much more challenging, since they’re that much older and their skills are that much more developed.  There is also a child in the room who is potty training, which I’m not comfortable with, and another child who will only let you change them if they’re standing up, which I’m also not comfortable with.  AND there are three kids who have been known to...use their teeth on friends.  Which I do not feel equipped to handle on an all-day, every-day basis.
    But it doesn’t fucking matter what I want, because I’m just a body.  My director told me that she thinks I have good classroom management skills, but I think it’s a load of crap.  If my classroom management skills are so good, put my back in my age group.  One of the teachers currently in my age group was hired as a float, so why not have her be a float or an interim toddler teacher, and let me be with my kids and my co-teacher?  I can’t figure out what I did, because my evaluation went well, and my director is usually pretty up front about it when people do things she doesn’t like, but I must have done something, because it feels like she has it in for me.
    My interim co-teacher has been really nice, though.  She lives in my town, and I’m going to go over to her house at some point this weekend to talk about curriculum.  This should only be for a few weeks, but I don’t want it to happen at all.  I feel very overwhelmed and ill-equipped to do this.  I don’t really know what I’m doing, which is fine when I’m the caboose for going outside, or I’m playing with half the kids while one of the main teachers in the room does an activity with the other half, but it’s not fine for full-time.  I don’t want to be that co-teacher who just kind of flurps around and makes the other teacher do all the heavy lifting.
    I know this sounds so whiny, but I just...want things to be the way they were before we were short staffed.  I want to be in my room, with S, with our kids.  I feel like I’m being punished, and it’s really bumming me out.

Two months worth of shit to catch up on? I've got to update this thing more often

I'm a vampire.  I have fangs and everything.

Now I'm a witch, with my awesome wings and tights and shoes and Lolita-esque dress.

     That being said, I was a vampire for Halloween.  Kind of.  I went to Salem with J (I’ll just call him that, for now) the weekend before Halloween, so we could dress up and walk around and experience the Halloween vibe without dealing with the shit show that Salem is on actual Halloween.  I wore my red heels, and we walked around a ton, and there was this little carnival area that had a couple rides, and he held my bag while I went on them, because I love rides.  They had an Egyptian-themed pirate ship, a pirate-themed bus ride thing?  All the seats are in a row, and it moves in a big circle...some fairs have that type of thing and it’s a bus, ok?  They also had a knock-off Matterhorn, and a zero gravity ride, where you’re all strapped into the edge of a drum-like thing that moves in a circle and slowly transitions from flat to sideways.  And they had a merry-go-round, which I went on because, fun, and because it used up my tickets.  There was a girl there dressed as Maleficent, from the Angeline Jolie movie.  And she was young Maleficent, all brown with these brutal horns and huge wings.  It was awesome.  And we went in Harrison’s, this cool comic book store, and we got Butter Beer (Butterscotch cream soda) from a street vendor.  And we went to Beer Works and got these cute things that were four little beers on a paddle-shaped chalkboard.  It was super fun.  I’ve never been to Salem in October before this year, and I actually had gone with one of my co-workers earlier in the month.
    But I made a fatal mistake.  I wore my heels all day long.  My feet were on fire by the end of the day.  I brought other shoes, but of course I was a dingle and left them in the car.  I ended up with these horrible blisters, and both of my big toes hurt like hell and were really bruised.  It also turned out that I had a blister underneath my right big toe, which then separated my nail from the toe, a little bit.  This past Friday, I was able to pull most of it off, and there’s a really thin new nail growing in.  I was just so afraid it would catch on my sock or something and pull itself out unsafely, making a painful, bloody mess.
    On actual Halloween, J and I went to Dave and Buster’s.  I dressed up as a witch, with fun orange and black tights and witchy shoes and spiderweb wings.  And I was smart enough to bring different shoes in with me.  We had a ton of fun, and it was nice cuz it was a Saturday and there weren’t that many people there.  I stayed over at his apartment that night, and when we got home we ate junk food, which we had previously planned because neither of us really eats junk food anymore.  Well, I do here and there, but he seriously almost never does.  It was cool, and sleep cuddling was cool.
    Which brings me to...we are officially together!  I guess that was a big question mark I had in my last post.  It didn’t go as smoothly as I thought it would, but it obviously ended fine.  While we were having this decidedly less-than-romantic conversation, he mentioned that he still misses home and wants to go back, clearly worried about me not being from “home.”  I told him that if we were together and he wanted to go home, I would go with him.  Which is true.  If he loves me and thinks we have a future together, I will most certainly go with him.  Most of my social interaction takes place online, anyway, and it’s cheap enough to come back to MA for a weekend or something if I fly Spirit.  And it’ll put me a little closer to the West Coast and all my homies out there. :)
    Whether or not we get to that point, I’m happy with him.  He makes me feel good and smart and pretty, and we joke with each other a lot.  He’s into cuddling, and he’s introducing me to shows he likes.  He even let me help him make dinner when I went over there recently, which helps my confidence.  A lot of what he does for me helps my confidence.  I’m trying to do the same for him, and I hope I’m succeeding.
    Right now he’s home for Thanksgiving.  He left Friday afternoon and comes back on the 1st.  I saw him Thursday night, which was kind of sad, but I held it in.  I know he’s not doing it to hurt me or get away from me or anything like that.  I just wish I could have gone with him, because I want to get out of here for a little while, and I hate Thanksgiving.  I know that the holiday will happen no matter where I am, but it would be nice to not be forced to clean my entire house and spend all my free time this week cooking stuff I don’t know how to cook (which means teetering on a panic attack while my mom gives me looks for not knowing what I’m doing), and have all of those dishes be dishes I don’t like.  It would be nice to have people know virtually nothing about me, and maybe be interested in what I had to say.  Maybe someday.
    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about butterfly effect-type stuff.  Like how every decision we’ve ever made, no matter how insignificant we may think it is, has led us to this moment.  Like, what would be different if I had stayed blonde two years ago, instead of going back to red?  Stuff like that.  When people ask, “If you could do it all again, would you do it differently?” Only if I knew that certain things would stay the same.  We’re also assuming a level of memory skill that I don’t have, but saying you could remember exactly how things went, no, I wouldn’t change anything, unless I had a guarantee that some things would be the same.  I feel incredibly lucky to know the people I know, and to have J in my life.
    It’s kind of funny, I wouldn’t have met him at all if I hadn’t made an impulse decision.  My summer started with a J and ended with a J (same exact name).  I met a guy at the graduation party of a friend of mine from the theater, who actually ended up working where I work now, before she went to Europe to teach English for a year.  This guy, J#1, flirted with me and danced with me the whole night, but then wasn’t interested in me.  So, out of spite, I set up an Ok Cupid account.  And of course, there was the whole mess with the Drummer, after which, out of spite, I re-set up my Ok Cupid account.  So, if I had just done what I normally do when I get rejected, and retreated into my shell and sulked, I wouldn’t know J.  And I do find it funny that they have the same name.
    Work has been a little rough lately, but I’m getting into a groove, and other than that bump in the road, I’ve felt comparatively very good lately.  It’s very encouraging, and I hope it keeps up.
    Last, random note: I have an appointment tomorrow with the allergist.  I’ll be getting updated skin testing, along with a renewed prescription for my Epi Pen, and I’m going to ask about allergy shots.  I will likely be very itchy and tired tomorrow night, but hopefully it’ll be worth it.