A Chilling Return to Carbondale.

When I got back home from my trip to New York, your father was at class. But that doesn't mean there was nobody to welcome me when I walked in the door. I was greeted by a friend I have had since I was five years old.


Ta-da! Kringle Bear! And look, I said to myself upon my reentry, Kringle has a note for me!


How sweet, thought I: he's as happy to have me back as I am to be here.


But then I turned the note over.


(In case you cannot read Kringle's writing, the note says: "John touched me when you were away. Just thought you ought to know. Shaken, Kringle.")

Chilling.

Meanwhile, in Carbondale...

So what did you father do while I was gone, you ask?


Not much.


Not much at all.

Different Ways to Raise Your Hand.

One game we invented during our trip to the city was "Different Ways to Raise Your Hand." It is pretty self-explanatory, but the important thing to do is explain what kind of student raises her hand in the style you demonstrate.

This, for example, is the "Is he really asking us this, because who won't know the answer?" hand raise, demonstrated here by Janine and Alex.


Here, Alex shows us the "I've known the answer since before you gave all those extra hints and also I'm in fourth grade and have dunkaroos in my lunch, the thought of which is literally making me salivate right now."

Here's Janine's "Um. I know this one?"

And Lucia demonstrating the ever-popular "Yeaaahh. That'd be Dostoyevsky."

Everyday Lifer in the Big City (Part 2).

After a long day of intellectualism* in the garden**, my friends and I retired to an apartment, where we nourished our bodies with wheatgrass pellets and purified water.



We then engaged in a pastime that was all the rage just then (2012): gazing into devices for hours.




Except me. The whole thing mostly just confused me, actually. But I'm not from the big city.



*drinking
**beer garden

Everyday Lifer in the Big City (Part 1).

Children, I missed a day of informing you about my life. But with good reason: I spent the last four days in New York City, which was known as "The Big Apple" to people who had never been there until it was washed into the sea by global warming.

The first stop on my grand visit was a day of work, because life is not all fun and games, children. Here I am doing my freelance writing while a cat befriends me despite my clear dislike for her. (Her name is Mister Schweems, which caused me a great deal of confusion, but she is, in fact, female.)

This is your Auntie Lucia, grading her students' papers. How studious are we!


But once the work had been dispensed with, the (real) fun began.


My friends and I visited a rooftop beer garden so fancy I had no choice but to wear a feathered fascinator to fit in!


And of course, fit in I did. For this was no ordinary beer garden. It was an intellectual beer garden. As you can see.

If You Haven't Already Heard...

I assume this is all over the history books and so will not read as "news" to you, children. But I thought I ought to document it anyway.

Tonight, your father broke the lid of our popcorn pot.


How he expects me to continue producing fluffy, oily, salty, delicious popcorn when I cannot grip the lid to vent the bursting kernels, I have no idea. I just know that this is by far the most traumatic kitchen incident I have ever lived through.

Let's all have a moment of silence to remember the good times, when the handle was all in one piece and corn was so easy to pop I rarely gave it a second thought.


Memories.

Why Music Can Be Dangerous.

Children, you may think of music as a magical, otherworldly gift brought to us by the gods of wind and rhythm. And that's mostly true. But it's important for you to know that music also has a darker side.


For example, if a person put on some South African jazz while she was folding the laundry of a Saturday morning and found herself so energized by the melody that she couldn't help but dance along, that would be all right.



But if that melody then inspired her to twirl around and around, she would become queasy, a feeling that could linger all day, thus minimizing her ability to comparison-shop for produce and dairy-free condiments and prolonging the period of time in which she sauntered around in her striped pajamas.

So just keep your eyes out for these situations, children. Forewarned is forearmed.