The Nutcracker

was brilliant. We loved the Snowflakes, although we were rather disappointed by the Sugar Plum Fairy. In my humble opinion she should have had some more power and all she did was execute a number of highly skilful and admirable but still – poses. Oh well. It still was great.
What was not so great was the way out of there – it took us almost an hour just to get out of the car park! And there was this bastard who went through the ‘no exit’ lane and pushed his way into the queue right in front of us! Seriously, just because you have a landrover, it doesn’t mean you’re exempt from queuing like everybody else! And the British are supposed to be the masters of the art of queuing! And Naomi didn’t even use the horn on him, I suppose cause we were still in the car park. But she did use it on some other bastards trying to force their way through on Broad Street, which was fun. As was singing along to Tina while queuing. It could have been a fairly entertaining queuing if it hadn’t been for the bastard in the landrover (who gave a whole new meaning to ‘nutcracker’ I guess). Oh well. Sleep now!

Everybody happy

You can’t make everyone happy. It’s a sweet thing to try, but it just doesn’t work. Usually you make yourself unhappy in the process and most of the time someone else ends up upset or pissed off as well. I’ve learnt it the hard way, but I have. Now it looks that I’m going to have to deal with the problem from the other side.
There are a few really good Polish expressions that would sum up the situation perfectly, unfortunately none of them translate properly to English. Like ‘masz babo placek’. Or, even better, ‘widziały gały co brały’.
Oh well. I suppose I’ll just have to live with it.
Unfortunately living with it at this particular moment is not the easiest thing as high doses of antibiotics mess up my system, making me feel tired and sick all the time (as if dealing with the lack of sunlight wasn’t enough on its own).
Enough moaning though, am going to see the Nutcracker with Naomi tonight. Should take my mind off things.

Dream Number 3

As the days get shorter, I tend to get gloomy and grumpy and life seems generally blah. I suppose I could continue on that note, but there’s really no point – it’s all light depravation, nothing more, nothing less. So instead – here’s dream number 3.

I’m at my high school reunion. I see my schoolmates and, inevitably, the guy I was hopelessly in love with while at school. He has grown a beard and looks seriously silly, cause the beard is really just irregular tuffs of hair here and there. I go to the loo that the organisers’ have given me the key to. Then there is a break and we go back to the hotel before the evening conference. I realise that I need to go to the loo again, this time to change a tampon (sorry if this is too much information, but it’s just a dream). I go to hotel loos on different floors but they are all filthy. The conference centre is too far. I want to do what I have to do in my room, but I’m sharing it and there are other people there. I keep trying to find a clean toilet, but they are all horrid.

Again, this is not my first dream of filthy stalls. The difference is that until now I always needed them for a simple wee and ended up resolving to using the least filthy one. And it all took place back in high school.

Here’s what Dream Moods has to say on the subject:
“To see an overflowing or flooded toilet in your dream, denotes your desires to fully express your emotions.”
“dreams of needing to go to the bathroom, suggest [the] need to let go of some relationship that has ran its course” – but I manage that, so that’s done. I presume my subconscious is giving me a clap for killing prince charming by letting me wee in a clean loo. Finally: “To dream of menstruation, indicates that you are releasing your pent-up tension and worry. It signals an end to your difficult times and the beginning of relaxation. It may mean that some creative energy is being released or recognised.” - I certainly hope so!

Dream Number 2

This one is from around a month ago.
I am driving somewhere through a city. I’m enjoying the drive but in the same time I feel the need to get wherever I’m going on time. Suddenly, I realise that I do not have a driver’s license and that if I get stopped, I will go to jail. My driving is impeccable and there’s no reason why I should get stopped, nevertheless I pull over and stop the car. Then I get out and I ask a passer by to park it for me.

Again, from what I know, driving is the dreamer’s life journey and path in life. Losing your driver’s license is losing your identity or the autonomy to move towards your goals. But I have never had a driver’s license (and I know it perfectly well in the dream). So?

This dream is not a new one – I’ve had it several times already. The difference is that until now, when I realised I didn’t have a driver’s license, I kept on driving just being extra careful. This is the first time I actually stop the car.

‘Are they making little planes?’

The form I am covering now has a very specific schedule of activities. Thursday is presentation day, where they take turns presenting topics of interest to them. This morning one boy talked about aeroplanes. He explained the safety, he explained different bits and pieces on the wings and elsewhere and then he changed slides and said:
‘And now, the cockpit. … Don’t get any wrong ideas!’
There was a moment of silence and we all burst out laughing. Highly inappropriate, I know, but there was really nothing I could do about it… There was no way he was going to say anything substantial about the cockpit, so he moved on to tanking in flight. The slide accompanying that bit showed two planes one on top of the other. And the comment wasn’t long to be made. What didn’t help, was that the rear of the upper one really looked a lot like a bum.
Ah, the one tracked minds of 12 year olds…

Dream number 1

There are dreams that you forget as soon as you open your eyes, others stay with you after you wake up. Sometimes they’re clearly embedded in your current situation, sometimes they seem completely unrelated – or so it would seem. Personally, I believe that your dreams, especially the latter kind, are the way your subconscious is talking to you. The problem is to understand them.
Lately (within last couple of months or so) I’ve had three of such dreams. I think I know why – my life has changed a lot and my subconscious wants me to deal with it properly. The problem is that I’m not sure what it wants to tell me exactly. But enough introductions, here’s dream number one (dating around 2 months ago):
I am on my way home and I can’t wait to get there, cause I’m tired and I want my bed. Unfortunately, when I get there, I find that the person whom I left in charge (I don’t know who that is, an anonymous person) rented the rooms out to wrong people. The house is a mess and it is noisy. I go to the first floor (attic?) to talk to the said person in charge, then I come back downstairs and face the troublesome strangers. There is an argument, I shout a lot, but manage to kick them out.
Now, a house is the dreamer’s own soul and self. But what about the troublesome strangers?
Any thoughts?

to be continued…

Oh just save it!

For around a week now, I’ve been working at a school that didn’t want me back in May, covering a sick leave. They called me directly cause they had been soooo impressed with me back in May and hoped I was available and they were soooo lucky that I was and that I could come in and work with them and they were sooooo bummed that they couldn’t hire me back in May, and oh just shut up or I’ll smack you. You could have hired me back in May. You chose not to, and that’s that, cut the crap! Last week I was mostly swinging between anger and disappointment. Not a good place to be. By now however I’ve reached the point where it became all about the kids and I’m really enjoying working there (as I knew I would back in May) and to be honest nothing else matters. Well, if you don’t count the fact that I can’t stay there and I’ve already managed to get attached to some of them little buggers.

But good news is that as of January I’ll be on a two terms supply contract with one school, which means stability, two terms of induction out of the way and steady professional development, which seriously makes me happy. I was actually offered two such posts, one of which was in the school where vile children make me swear in the classroom, it goes without saying that I decided against that one. But the other offer was also better, so my decision wasn’t based solely on that though!

On being nice

I went for a drink with José the other night – it took some effort to pull him out of his NQT private hell, but then he was as happy to take a break from it all as I was to have a human being to speak to. And José being José, I didn’t have to wait long for yet another immortal quote. He was telling me about a wedding he went to the previous weekend, where he saw a few people from the programme. As they were exchanging information about how they were doing and how the absent others were doing, Naomi filled them in on my potential move to Milton Keynes. To which José said: ‘Good for her, maybe she’ll finally be nice!’. Which didn’t go down well at all. He tried to explain but worried that he did not manage to put what he meant through and hoped that if I had heard about it already, I wasn’t angry at him.
I wasn’t. I was laughing out laud, because I could just see the outraged looks and shocked expressions, and ‘how-can-you-say-that’-s he was describing.
Also because it’s so José to say something like that.
And because I didn’t need much explaining to know that ‘maybe she’ll finally be nice’ really meant ‘maybe life will finally be nice to her’.

And may his wish come true, cause lately life’s been more of a bitch. A shitty week was crowned by an even shittier Friday, culminating with me standing in the middle of New Street in a cold drizzle sobbing down the phone that I missed my train. But let’s not go there – a new week is starting, my batteries have been recharged over the weekend, so I shall brace myself and hope for the best.

Post-holiday mess

As much as I enjoyed having Monday off, on Tuesday I started to feel restless and ended up feeling pretty miserable by the evening. A nice portion of ice cream took care of that, this morning however I felt even worse. It didn’t matter all that much, I told myself, it was going to go away as soon as I got into a classroom. But that didn’t happen – my agent had forgotten to mention I needed to have my CRB (criminal record check) on me so they sent me back home.
By the time I got home, I had figured it all out: I was feeling lonely. I had just spent a week among people who know me and love me, and I’m back here now, reduced to stuffed animals looking at me sympathetically as I’m reading in bed while Paul gets to see his friends (which is good for him, really, it just doesn’t make me feel better). So I decided to do something about it. However, there is only so much you can do when all your local friends had moved away or are in their first year of teaching and overwhelmed by it.
By then it was crying it out or sweating it out, and as the latter seemed more productive I set off to the gym. Once there, I decided to hook my headphones to the news channel thinking that images of people celebrating Obama’s victory would help the process. Unfortunately I was rather emotionally challenged at that point so it only made me cry, and more it made me cry, more purposefully I marched on my treadmill, which did the trick: 10 bloody kilometres and buckets of sweat later, I was feeling much better.
Only it didn’t last.
So the only solution I had left at that point was to get myself a drink and dig out my long forgotten Tori Amos cds. And I find it both disturbing and comforting how I still know all the lyrics.

Final stage of Grinch-ism

I hate Christmas.
Or at least I used to.
Or maybe I not so much hated it as held a grudge against it.
It doesn’t matter really what you call it, suffice to say that the first wonderful whiffs of winter in the air always associated in my mind with the impending doom of omnipresent carols playing everywhere over and over again until you want to scream, fake Santas reeking of alcohol at every corner ho-ho-ing unconvincingly at children who aren’t even really interested cause they believe in the X-Box now, the general mostly failed effort to be merry and bright, pushing through swarms of people, hugging protectively your handbag to your chest while trying to find a decent Xmas gift for everyone on a limited budget and repressing tears as your feet are being stepped on, your ribs get elbowed and your bottom is being groped by perverts thriving in such crowds, and feeling generally insecure, lonely and generally blah. Which inevitably made me go into instant hibernation mode and dread the moment when the first Xmas offers would start jumping out at me from all sides and first Xmas decorations would start appearing around town in all their sparkly, shiny, nauseatingly merry glory.
I spotted first of those a few weeks ago and they made me cringe as usual.
But.
Yesterday, as we were driving through town, I spotted a particularly in-your-face Xmas advert and… it made me smile.
And this morning, as I was blessed with an extra day off and had nothing better to do, I started on my Xmas shopping while trying to remember where I hid those reindeer antlers I got at the Xmas do last year and wondering if I could get Xmas decorations anywhere yet.
Dear God.
I seem to have reached the final stage of Grinch-ism, the happy ending of the tale (which I used to claim spoilt the whole thing). And I must say that I find it slightly disturbing. Cause that means that this year at least my green fur is staying in the closet and it is a very cosy green fur, even if it is rather ugly...

English weather in the South of France

I’m back to Brum after a week of what was supposed to be sunshine, wine and cheese, and well, sunshine didn’t happen. Apparently the first weekend was glorious, but I missed it completely as I spent it dying in bed, cause as usual in the beginning of a holiday my body said ‘No more work? Letting go!’ and put me through all colds, migraines and stomach troubles it had bravely resisted through school time. Uh, oh.
I was going to put updates up regularly, but I found myself cut from the internet as my adoptive grandma’s computer died on her the day before our arrival. And now I’m at a loss, cause recounting everything would take pages and pages and so I should probably try to sum it up somehow, which is not easy at all.
It was blissful. In spite of the weather. Just seeing all those faces after having missed them so much!
Two huge emotional moments, first when spotting Sainte Victoire from the plane, then one evening at the dinner table, when I just wanted my life there back, but of course that is not possible and, of course, if I had not moved away, then… etc.
My still growing hair was a big hit, apparently it looks like a lion’s mane and I hide rainbows in it (as one can see on little Guillaume’s portrait of me, which he unfortunately refused to part with, cause wanted to remember me by).
Everyone was excited about meeting Paul, I was excited about everybody meeting Paul, Papi loved Paul absolutely which, if you know Papi, you know is not to be taken for granted.
And well, it was all smiling, hugging, making merry, talking, eating and drinking (uh, oh, body needs tea-totalling for a while now!).
All to be done all over again at Easter (cause it got somehow decided that we would be back at Easter and well, we did not protest too much) but hopefully in a better weather and in less of a hurry!