Willomwist's Wanderings

So, I got a full-time job.

Actually, it’s kind of a funny story…

On a whim, I applied online for a teller job at Woodforest Bank in our new local Super Walmart.  Tom had had a bad day, between having to go to court for a some traffic violations and our bank withdrawing his last forty bucks without a word, we have sort of traversed across poor and into living hand-to-mouth and waiting for the other shoe to drop.  So, it was after midnight and I filled out an online application, attached my resume and went to bed.

They called me the next day, about eight hours after I had submitted my application.  I arranged a job interview yesterday afternoon and he hired me on the spot.  I have to do a drug test on Monday and I start as soon as the lab work clears.  Now Tom will tell you that this is proof of the power of a college degree.  While I’m sure that my degrees didn’t hurt my case any, I think my interest in the job and my willingness to take the position were, in themselves, my big selling points here.  I’m not going to be a teller exactly.  I am, officially, a retail banker.  My job, besides opening and maintaining customer accounts, includes standing around outside chatting with potential customers who are shopping at Walmart and wandering around the store in my logo’d shirt being helpful and approachable.  Whatever, I can do that in exchange for training in all aspects of banking and twelve bucks an hour.  The branch manager seems very pleasant and I’m actually pretty excited about the job so far.

Except..

I realize that some people don’t understand or appreciate my position as a stay-at-home mom.  My own mother said that a full-time job would give me some independence, a little of which she said would be good for me.  What does that mean?  There are some folks who do not see the difference between a housewife and a Stepford wife or, perhaps, June Cleaver.

I ‘m going to pause for a moment while my close friends regain their composure..

But, for all that I am a terrible mother and a lazy housewife and a selfish human being, I am truly conflicted about leaving Vaughan.  I mean, I’m not leaving him.  He’ll be in school most of the time and my wonderful, wonderful neighbour, Tabby, is going to be getting him off the schoolbus and taking care of him for the few hours before I get home.  I wouldn’t even consider this without Tabby.  I love her and I love her kids and I trust her to nurture mine when I’m not there.  But, I’ve always been home with Vaughan.  I’ve always wanted to be home with Vaughan.  I am loathe to miss any part of his childhood which is precious and fleeting enough without my missing parts of it.  Save your breath — I know that mothers go to work everyday.  That doesn’t make it right or good.  I’m not criticizing women who work outside their home.  Hell. I’m about to do it myself!  I’m just saying that I’m not entirely thrilled about it.

Feminism is supposed to be about giving women choices.  You can’t preach liberation at me and then condemn me for not embracing your personal ideals.

Happy August 17 everyone.

Gills.

I mean it.  Not so we can swim underwater, although, if you live along a coast when the ice caps melt, it might be a useful skill, but so we can breathe in the humidity that passes for air in Philadelphia.  When your glasses fog over every time you step outside, there is definitely more H2 then there should be in your O2.  Scientifically speaking.

So the humidity reached 100% sometime last night and we got a terrific storm.  I was jarred out of sleep around 4am by a couple of claps of thunder that literally made my heart jump in my chest.  I’ve become more aware of my own heart beating lately just because it isn’t always doing it properly.  My doc wants me to wear a funky little contraption called a Cardiac Event Monitor which, as the name suggests, monitors the strange palpitations of my heart that occur before these near-syncopic episodes that sneak up on me from time to time.  In the old days, a girl could faint dramatically several times a day and get a little tincture of opium to calm her down.  I was clearly born in the wrong time period.

But, I digress.

Dopey is afraid of thunder.  Actually, I think he’s progressed to being afraid of rain in general.  So, last night, I spent most of the wee hours of the morning making Dopey stay on the floor.  He wanted to shove himself into tiny corners where he wouldn’t fit and was making a big messy nuisance of himself.  He wanted to sleep in my lap and kept sitting up to pant hysterically in my face.   The thing is, he hasn’t always been afraid of thunder and I cannot figure out when it started or why, but it seems to be getting worse.   It’s  storming again right now and I think Dopey could literally kill himself if he doesn’t calm down.  Now you all know that Dopey is not my favourite dog in the world.  He’s dirty, he’s noisy, he’s destructive and he’s about as dumb as a box of rocks.  He’s a spotted menace.  But, I’ll admit that I feel safer in the house when Dopey’s there.  He’s loyal and desperate to please.  And, let’s face it, Vaughan adores him.   So, I’ve taken to giving him a small dose of Benedryl whenever there are storms in our area.  It didn’t help much last night.  The storm was pretty big and Dopey had already worked himself into hysterics.  I think I’ll keep him medicated all day today.  I’m so tired.

Happy July 23 everyone.

A palsy is a weakness and Bell was a Scottish neurologist who discovered how a virus could damage (thus weakening) the facial nerve causing temporary paralysis to one side of the face.  I know this, now, because Tom scared the daylights out of me this weekend and the emergency doc explained most of it to me while prescribing steroids and antivirals for my husband who has Bell’s Palsy.  Thank-you Mr. Bell.

 It usually takes a few weeks for the nerve to repair itself, although it can take several months and some unlucky folks never regain full control of their facial muscles.  The doc assures us that the damage to Tom’s facial nerve is not severe and, being young, strong and healthy, Tom should be fine in a few weeks.  In the meantime, he has to sleep with a pirate patch to protect his left eye from drying out or getting scratched because it doesn’t close.  Tom can make it close if he really, really works at it, but his normal blink is one-sided.  And, I don’t know if he has always rolled his eyes at me so frequently and I have just never noticed or if he is less patient and a bit crankier than usual, but his eye rolls are a little disconcerting now.  His smile only smiles on the right side of his mouth and liquid tends to sneak out the left when he is trying to eat or drink, but he isn’t in any pain and he, though he feels a bit conspicuous, he is fine otherwise.  If he speaks for an extended period of time, his words get a little slurry and that bothers him a lot.  I keep telling him it’ll just be a couple of weeks, but I don’t know how comforting that is under the circumstances.

 Now, can we discuss why men won’t go to the doctor?

I’m not kidding when I say that Tom scared me nearly to death this weekend.  He woke up Monday morning and was complaining that he didn’t feel like his left eye was working properly.  He said he couldn’t squeeze it shut.  I suggested, since it was Monday and he was off, we should make an appointment with the doctor.  He brushed me off.  When I noticed later that he wasn’t blinking his left eye properly, I became a little more insistent that we visit the doc.  He allowed me to call, but they weren’t able to fit him in that afternoon.  She suggested that he visit the emergency room since it isn’t a good idea to mess around with eye problems.  He brushed us both off.  So, we went to run some errands.  Over lunch he tells me that we should call the doc back and see about getting an appointment for Tuesday afterall because now he’s having some trouble with the left side of his mouth too.  I’m pretty sure my heart literally skipped a beat.  I was ready to pack up lunch and head to the hospital, but Tom wouldn’t have it.  So we finished lunch with me feeling dizzy and lightheaded and the left side of Tom’s face stopping.  I had to pull out the bitch card and bully Tom into going to the emergency room.  He griped and moaned about it the entire time — even after I literally fainted away on the hospital floor from the stress and relief of finding out what was wrong with him.  It’s silly, but I have never really thought of Tom as mortal.  He’s my rock.  He’s a big, stubborn mule, but I love him and I did not care for the idea that he could be taken away from me.

Did you know that a fainting spell is known as a syncope (that’s pronounced sin-kuh-pee) and, if you do it in the hospital, they’ll hook you up to machines, test your blood and urine and x-ray your chest before they’ll admit there’s nothing wrong with you and let you go home with your husband who has just found out that he has Bell’s Palsy.  I don’t recommend it.

Liberte.  Egalite.  Fraternite.

A teacher in the small town of Mount Vernon, Ohio, has been suspended and is under investigation for preaching creation in his middle school science class. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, he has also admitted to burning images of crosses on the forearms of several of his students — although he claims he was merely demonstrating an instrument and the symbol was an X. A small protest has evolved which consists of a handful of folks who called this teacher a, “courageous fighter for religious freedom.”

It’s clear to me that there are a number of people in the world, and at least a handful in Mount Vernon, Ohio, who do not understand the concept of religious freedom at all. I run into these people all the time and it makes me very sad.

Religious freedom means that you can believe in whomever or whatever or even nothing whatsoever to your little heart’s content. Go to church, light a candle, sacrifice a goat, cover your women, dress like a pirate and eat lots of spaghetti — whatever. You can build a mosque or an altar or a ring of posies and invite your friends, your ancestors or the ghost of Christmas past. Or you can sleep in on Sundays and go out to IHOP for breakfast while commenting on everyone else’s funny clothes and complaining about the long waiting line. Religious freedom only has one constraint: you can’t deprive others of it. And that seems to be where people run into trouble.

The very first article of the Constitution states that congress shall make no laws in regards to the establishment or the free exercise of religion. It means that the government can neither condemn nor defend any one religion. The government is religiously neutral — in theory anyway. Public school teachers are, for all intents and purposes, civil servants. They are paid through taxes. They must be religiously neutral. I’m not saying that they can’t build their ring of posies while praying to a hill of beans in a temple at dawn on the third Tuesday of every leap year. I’m saying that their students don’t need to know about it. There is no place for it in public education. If you want to dress in a loin cloth, give up all your worldly possessions and ride around on a donkey spreading your good news all day, fund your own damned school. Freedom of religion also means that you can do that.

So, the teacher in Ohio is not a crusader (if you’ll pardon the appropriateness of that term) for religious freedom. He’s a Christian tyrant who does not respect either the spirit or word of the law around which we have built our society. Nice guy or not, instead of taking advantage of the many outlets available to him, he chose to abuse his position of authority. Of course he deserves to be suspended. At least.

While I’m on the subject, can we please stop referring to this creation-thing as science? Science seeks to explain things. Creation deliberately seeks not to explain things. It throws up its arms and says, see how complicated it all is, we’re just not that bright and we’re all a little tired, let’s just chalk it all up to God and go home. How do you teach that for longer than five minutes anyway?

“Ok, students, it’s time for science, so take out your books and turn to chapter one. Today we’re going to look at how the earth was formed. Actually, we don’t know how the earth was formed. Obviously, God did it and we aren’t meant to understand how or why. So, moving on to chapter two….”

I don’t understand why some Christians are so offended by the theory of evolution. It doesn’t deny the existence of a god. Sure, it sort of blows the timeline for creation laid out by the Bible, but, since no one was really there to witness that, there’s no insult in assuming that the whole 7 days-thing is metaphorical like everyone else’s creation myths. I’m not even suggesting that there isn’t some truth to it. The pervasiveness of floods in creation myths from all over the world tends to lend creedence to the occurence of an actual flood at some point in time. Can’t we just say that God created science and all get along?

Happy July 8 everyone.

So starting in second grade, the U.S. has these statewide tests to make sure schools are actually teaching something to their students and prove that my tax dollars are being used wisely.  Seriously, I pay nearly $3000 in property tax for the fine, upstanding school to which I send my son.  I always expect the floors to be tiled in gold or something when I visit the school, but school floors haven’t changed much since I was a kid.  What do educators have against a little colour anyway?

The tests are called Terra Nova (which is latin for new world, thank you Mr Lynde!) and I just got Vaughan’s results in the mail.  Vaughan is under the impression (from which I have never disabused him just because it amused me so,) that all of the tests were sent to the president of the United States for marking.  Actually, I might have hinted at the truth by telling Vaughan that I didn’t think the president of the United States could write the second grade Terra Nova tests, much less grade them.  Nonetheless, Vaughan believes George W marked his tests.  He’s a bright kid.  He tends to ignore my sarcasm.

And now I can prove that he is a bright kid because the Terra Nova people say that he is smarter than roughly 91% of Pennsylvanian second graders.  His Cognitive Skills Index is 122 to the national average of 100 — better, even, then two-thirds of the all the seven-year-olds in the whole state who score between 84 - 116 on the CSI. 

Interestingly, his lowest scores were in analogies and contextual verbal reasoning.  Analogy, for those lacking in test-taking terminology, refers to the ability to transfer information from one subject to another.  You know, understanding relationships:  A is to B as C is to __.  Contextual verbal reasoning is the ability to draw conclusions based on ideas.   He still scored higher in both areas than about 65% of Pennsylvanian second graders but, let’s face it, the kid is just too darned literal.  What was his highest score?  Quantitative reasoning of course.  He scored in the 97th percentile.

Happy July 2 everyone.