EleCivil
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Posts posted by EleCivil
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Greek tragedy, episode of Dallas...yeah, pretty much the same.
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I am working on it, I swear! I just added another three pages today.
I'm just spitballing plot ideas. I don't plan on writing another one for a while - haha, it takes me forever to write ONE story, let alone juggling two.
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The one, the only James Hetfield. Guitarist and voice of Metallica.
Meh. I'll take Kanye. Even if his last album was pretty weak, and he seems to think he's Jesus. Haha.
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Ooh, let me get in on this:
Two twins: One straight, one gay. The gay twin is in a committed, long-term relationship with another dude. The gay twin is hit by a truck carrying a load of plot devices and dies. Throughout the grieving process, the straight twin and the gay twin's lover turn to each other for comfort, having lost someone very close to both of them. The lover starts falling for the straight twin, and is conflicted because it's like he's just replacing his deceased lover with a physical copy. The straight twin is conflicted because he feels a closeness and a connection with the lover, but doesn't share the romantic/sexual feelings. Plot, plot, plot, everyone grows to understand themselves a little better, and they come to accept the tragedy and move on, either with or without one another.
Haha, this is fun. (Well, maybe not all the tears and vehicular manslaughter, but other than that...)
But to answer the main question, yes, go ahead and download any of my stories for personal use.
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Okay, guys, don't make fun of me too much, but...
I recognize Kanye West, but who's the other guy?
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And how the hell with all those clubs and rings in the air did none of them ever bump into each other?
First thing you learn as a juggler: How to keep your balls in the air, without having them slap against one another (or against anyone else's). It's all in the rhythm.
And yes, every rule of juggling boils down to a double-entendre involving the word "balls":
Never leave home without your balls.
Never grab someone else's balls without permission.
Keep your balls under control and out of others' personal space.
Everyone's balls eventually drop. Don't let it discourage you.
You might get hit with someone else's balls. Presume that it was an accident and move on.
They're generally good rules for non-jugglers, as well.
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http://digg.com/video/these-kids-are-entirely-too-good-at-juggling
As a practitioner of the anti-gravitational art, I had to share this. Some students from Gustavus Adolphus College pulling off some throws that had me shouting at my screen in disbelief.
Edit: Just had to mention - check out that strut/club swing at 2:40! Hahaha, perfect.
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I'm snowed in. I have to go get ready to get gas and snow blow the driveway so my husband can actually make it to the front door - all while managing our son's desire to help.
Learning opportunity! Put him to work.
"Without using the snowblower or a shovel (since that's too obvious), how can you clear a path from the door to the car?"
See what he comes up with. I did this with some student volunteers after school, just to see what they would piece together as kind of a real-world engineering puzzle.
Note that I had to stop a student mid-run and say "Don't do anything that will get you or me arrested," to which he replied "...Okay, on to plan B." So make sure you add that caveat.
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Back on topic - what a great news story! I could see this turning into a short story or even a serial. (Not by me, though. I've barely got enough time to write one thing, let alone juggle multiple projects.)
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I think everyone becomes desensitized to their particular brand of severe weather. I work in a hotel and every spring, I can tell who is from Oklahoma and who isn't because when the local TV stations come on with their nightly tornado warnings, Okies casually glance at the radar, check where the tornado is,yawn, and go on with their cross-burnings, while the out-of-staters are gathered in panic before the TV's in the lobby.
You're in Tulsa, FT?
The series of zany adventures that is my life has taken me through Tulsa plenty of times. I may have stayed at your hotel at some point.
And yes, my first time in OK, I spent the whole night freaked out by the warning sirens and the flickering lights, paranoid that at any minute, the roof was going to lift right off of my hotel room and I'd be off to see the wizard.
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Made me turn it off. All I can here is distorted noise.
I must be getting old.
Nah, you're not getting old. It's punk rock - it's SUPPOSED to sound like distorted noise.
EleCivil, have you played that track in class yet?
Colin
Haha, no. But I do wear a pink Against Me! pin on my tie, sometimes.
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A while back, Tom Gabel, the lead singer of the punk band Against Me! came out as transgender, changing his name to Laura Jane Grace and living as a woman.
I really, really love Against Me!. "Baby, I'm an Anarchist" is one of my all-time favorite punk songs. And Tom Gabel's rough, aggressive vocals are part of that. When I heard this announcement, I was curious as to whether Laura Jane Grace would change her voice to sound more feminine.
Nope! Against Me!'s new album is just as aggressive as their classics, and maybe even a little more connected to their punk roots than some of their more recent releases. And its opening track is the most badass song about wearing a dress I've ever heard.
Your tells are so obvious:
Shoulders too broad for a girl
Keeps you reminded
Helps you to remember where
You come from
You want them to notice
The ragged ends of your summer dress
You want them to see you
Like they see any other girl
They just see a faggot
They hold their breath not to catch the sick
Rough surf on the coast,
Wish I could have spent the
Whole day alone with you
You've got no cunt in your strut
You've got no hips to shake
And you know it's obvious
But we can't choose how we're made
You want them to notice
The ragged ends of your summer dress
You want them to see you
Like they see any other girl
They just see a faggot
They hold their breath not to catch the sick
Rough surf on the coast,
Wish I could have spent the
Whole day alone with you -
Found a headline about this.
2 inches of snow paralyzes Georgia. Meanwhile, Michigan gets 1ft+, -15deg, shrugs and goes shopping.
Haha.
I've driven through crazy blizzards in Michigan and I've driven through one-inch snow in the South. I'll take Michigan. As a former Ohioan, I've been known to share a laugh at the expense of "those crazy Michigan drivers"...but they know how to handle the ice and snow, I've got to give them that.
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Yeah...this is stupid.
I understand that there are a lot of state and national laws governing the free lunch program. If a school gets caught giving a free lunch to a kid who doesn't qualify for the program, the State Secretary of Fiscal Bullshit's "poor people are mildly comfortable" alarm goes off and the school gets fined a billion dollars. But this isn't how you handle that.
About 90% of my kids qualify for free lunches, so collecting money doesn't come up all that often. When it does...we find a way around it, because we don't want our students going hungry.
Officially, we're supposed to give kids who are behind on their meal accounts an "alternative lunch" - plain balogna on white bread with a cup of water. We've had some kids behind on their accounts. We've never actually given them prison food. Because that's stupid. It makes the kids feel bad for something they didn't do wrong, and puts more work on the cafeteria staff who now have to prep alt. meals and keep track of who gets them.
You feed the kid and mail home a bill. This should all be taken care of in the office, between admins and parents. No reason to involve the kid at all. Not singling them out or taking food out of their hands or "punishing" them.
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Aye, but our golden being is certifiably quirky which probably helps with the parents and paperwork.
When you begin as an Education major, the first thing you learn is public speaking.
They give you ten marbles, which you put in your mouth. You hold those marbles in your mouth while you deliver a lesson. If you can avoid choking, swallowing a marble, or mumbling incoherantly, you take out one marble and repeat the process. If you can manage with nine marbles, you go down to eight, then seven, and so on.
Once you've lost all your marbles, you're ready to be a teacher.
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Ah, in America, the Double Tap means something different -- particularly with Zombies
Well played. Every time I wrote "double-tap", that clip briefly played through my head.
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Why are you all laughing?
Just wait until Biggus Dickus hear about this!
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You can change, you can change, you can change!
I wrote most of L&L in Microsoft Notepad on a Windows '98 PC. This was back when you couldn't choose your font, and it was monospaced, so I was still doing the old typewriter double-tap. When I got a job and was able to buy MS Word, I had to drop the double-space habit. This was also when I started college, and professors would check for paper-lengthening tricks like double-spacing after periods, setting your font size to 12.5, upping your margins, etc.
I no longer double-tap, but I still feel that kinship Cole mentioned to those that do. Haha.
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The thing is, I learned to type way, way, way before word processors were even someone's dream. I learned to insert two spaces after a period, and it's automatic. It's ingrained in my very DNA at this point.
I learned to type on a typewriter, so I also learned to double-space after a period. It took me YEARS to break that habit.
It's just so satisfying to double-tap that space bar after a sentence. It feels like...closure. "That thought is complete. So sayeth the thumb. POW POW."
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/jan/10/uganda-homophobic-googling-gay-porn
These figures also demonstrate a high degree of correlation between places of conservative religious practice and internet searches for gay porn.
Remember when Colorado decided that it was in their best interest to legalize marijuana rather than waste time and money enforcing a law that does nothing to change people's desires or deter their behaviors? Like, twenty days ago?
Remember when America made booze illegal, then quickly realized that doing so created an underground economy that funneled mountains of money into organized crime? Like, ninety or so years ago?
Remember when Lao-Tzu said something along the lines of "The more laws are created, the more criminals there will be"? Like, thousands of years ago?
As a species, we seem incapable of learning that particular lesson. Maybe all the legal booze and pot is bad for our memory. Perhaps we should pass a law...
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Just don't use the dreaded semi-colon. I had a creative writing teacher once tell me, "the road to hell is paved with semi-colons."
Haha. I tell my kids the opposite - if you can use a semi-colon correctly in a paper, you instantly get bonus points (though I have had to specifiy that the correct use of a semicolon is not the first half of a sideways winking face).
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Yep. You've got the knack. However, in the real world, you have to understand, it isn't that big a deal to outsmart of a 12-year-old.
Heh heh heh.
C
Haha, touché. Doesn't make it less fun, though.
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You must be teaching in the South if they max out at $48K. Come to California. Yeah, you'd start over, but you've only got a year seniority where you are. That's nothing. And with a master's degree, the licensing probably wouldn't be an issue. Teaching salaries here are much higher than where you are.
And of course CA kids are much brighter, too.
C
Cali has enough good teachers. Haha.
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Man, I paid for that clipboard, I'm not breaking that! Haha.
And I left my cap-bustin' days behind when I left the inner-city for the rural farmland. Now it's shotguns, not 9mms.
Besides, I'm not one for the in-your-face style. I prefer quiet, intense, and apparently insane.
EC: "Hey, (student). Good to see you. Mind picking up that paper you just dropped?"
Student: "Hey, you're not my teacher! You can't make me do shit!"
EC: (Slowly grinning, wider and wider. Speaking in soft, calm voice.) "Aww. That was a poor choice. Now I have to do something. Oh...but, try not to worry too much about it until then. See you later. Have a nice day."
(That kid later returned, clearly shaken, begging to sweep my floor, clean my windows, and wipe down all my lab tables.)
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The average teacher's salary (nationwide) is $50,000.
Haha.
The idea of an average teacher getting 50k is hillarious to me. Like...under my current (cushy, socialist, nation-destroying) union contract, you can get 50k...if you work in the same district for 30 years AND have a Doctorate. With a Masters you top out at about 48 after 30 years, and with a Bachelors you top out around 45. But that's for your 30th consecutive in-district year. Your AVERAGE teacher doesn't teach for more than five years before burning out and leaving the profession (often citing a lack of money and lack of professional respect/dignity as a reason), and even the ones that stick usually change districts at least once or twice, re-setting their pay scale. The ones that actually want to get paid become administrators, or...well, I've known some who left teaching to become Taco Bell managers, baristas, restaurant servers, etc. I know a brilliant history teacher who quit to work at a sporting goods store - he couldn't support his family by educating America's youth, but he can support his family by ringing up athletic supporters.
And I should note that I'm in a pretty decently paying school. My former school was non-union (charter), so teachers just never get raises. If you keep working there, it's 28k/year until you retire. Even if you've got a Masters. Even if you've got a Doctorate. Didn't make it easy to recruit and retain talent.
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Gay Ex-Mormon Documentary: Latter-Day Glory
in News & Views
Posted
Hi, Cole!
I've been...well, it's a long story. But this thread is for a different long story!
I knew most of this story before Cynus posted it, but seeing it all spelled out and in order like this was still powerful. I haven't been exactly quiet about my own criticisms of the way religion can dominate lives and inflict lasting emotional damage. A lot of the big issues addressed here (self-hatred, self-destructive behavior, denial, etc.) fit a narrative I've heard from a lot of recovering survivors of religious indoctrination, and I think having stories like this available for others to read is important. If my 12 year old self had known that there were other people who were going through the same internal struggle, it may have made a big difference.
Thanks for posting this!
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