Friday, October 29, 2010

When ostriches, ducks, and deer attack... ME!

In theory, I agree that we should be working as a society to keep animals from becoming extinct. That commercial with the polar bear on the little tiny piece of ice makes me incredibly sad and makes me want to give all my money to save them. And those Sarah McLaughlin Humane Society ads literally make me cry.

Until they show the cats.

Because I REALLY hate cats.

I can see where, on paper, cats look like great pets. You don’t have to take them out like you do with dogs, and if you’re going away for a few days, as long as you leave out extra food and water, the cat will be fine.

On paper, they’re the perfect pets.

But that doesn’t take into account the fact that they are completely and utterly evil and disgusting. And even though I love pictures of the cats that look like Hitler, I feel like in real life, I would still hate them. 

In fact, I have to admit that except for schnauzers (which are the cutest dogs on the planet. I don’t care how cute you think your pet dog/cat/iguana/dung beetle is, Rosie is cuter and you’re just in denial), I’m not an animal person.

I don’t HATE animals. (Except for cats and bugs, which I do believe should be forced to go the way of the dinosaurs.) I’m just very wary of them. Because they hate me.

Need proof?

Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty.

Contrary to popular belief, my first sentence was not, “I want to go shoe shopping,” or “I love you, Bruce Springsteen.” Although I do think those were my second and third complete sentences.) It was, “Duck bite hand.”  (Clearly, I wasn’t yet the grammar Nazi as I hadn’t mastered past tense, but in the subject-verb-object sense, it was a complete sentence.)


And it was true. When I was about a year and a half, my parents took me to “Old McDonald’s Farm” in Wheaton Regional Park. Which I think means I got off lucky that the duck only bit me. Because apparently even the ducks go hard in Wheaton. The ducks there today are armed.  I’m telling you, watch out for those Wheaton ducks. They may LOOK sweet and innocent, but they’re vicious.

But despite being the victim of a duck attack, I still liked animals. Until a year later. When I developed my lifelong fear of ostriches.

And I know I explained earlier this week that some things in my blog are exaggerated, this one isn’t. It actually happened. And is one of my earliest memories (although my very earliest was of going to see Snow White in the theater and freaking out when the dwarves came on. In all fairness, singing dwarves with pickaxes ARE pretty creepy. I think more people SHOULD have worried about a Snow White being all alone with seven creepy little men).

When I was two and a half, an ostrich STOLE MY LUNCH.

We were at the gated lunch area at a petting zoo, but apparently someone left the gate open. I was sitting next to my mom and across the picnic table from my dad. My mom pulled out my peanut butter and jelly sandwich—here’s how vividly I remember this: it was crunchy peanut butter with strawberry jelly on that awesome Pepperidge Farm cinnamon-raisin swirl bread, cut into four squares. She put three of the squares on top of the ziplock baggie for me to eat. I was about to pick up the first of the squares when this massive, eight-foot tall, evil, THING comes over to our table and, inches in front of me, swoops down and in three quick pecks, eats my sandwich!

Ostriches are serious jerks. I mean, you don’t take someone’s peanut butter and jelly on cinnamon-raisin swirl bread sandwich. You just don’t. But you also don’t mess with a bird that’s five feet taller than you. Even if they’re not from Wheaton.

Birds aren’t the only creatures that come after me (although one did give me a not-so-nice new-car present the day I bought my car. When I had the top down. Most birds crap ON a new car. This bird crapped IN mine).

I’m pretty sure I’m the only one on the planet who has had a deer run into them, not while driving, but while jogging.
(Although apparently I'm not alone because I DID find this picture.)

Normally, deer avoid people like I now avoid ostriches. They see one and take off running in the opposite direction. But no. A deer sees me out running with headphones on and thinks I’m an easy target. Then again, that happened in College Park, so I’m pretty sure the deer was actually trying to rob me. And it barely clipped me, because I used my cat-like reflexes to trip and flail wildly while falling into the ditch next to the path when I noticed the deer coming at me.

My run-ins with the animal world have made me super cautious. For example, I’m terrified of sharks and alligators. Which might sound odd, because I’m NOT particularly scared of lions, tigers, or bears (oh my).

But there’s a good reason for that. I stay out of the woods at all costs, and the odds of me being on an African savannah where a lion or tiger would find and eat me are pretty slim. The odds of me being in the ocean (where sharks live), however, are pretty high. And the odds of me being Florida (where alligators live), are even higher. Why? Because I love Disney World AND beaches.

And if anyone is going to die in a freak alligator or shark attack, it’s probably going to be me.

At least I now know that there are no alligators in my toilet, thanks to Snopes.com. However, the website doesn’t say anything about ostriches hiding in my closet, man-eating ducks under my bed, or alligators ringing my doorbell.

And according to old school Saturday Night Live, sharks are crafty and will impersonate delivery men.


So just to be safe, I always look for ostriches before eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You can’t be too cautious. Because an ostrich will fight you for peanut butter and jelly. And trust me, you do NOT want to fight an ostrich.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Does the flu shot make you sick? Was Mr. Ed a zebra? Snopes knows the answers!

Yesterday, I ventured into the CVS Minute Clinic to get a flu shot. While I won’t bore you with the specifics (like how it never actually takes a minute and I always feel like the other people sitting there waiting are riddled with diseases that they’re just dying to spread to me), it was overall a relatively painless procedure.

What wasn’t painless, however, was TELLING people that I was going to get a flu shot after school.

Because it seems that 99.9999 percent of the population still thinks that you get the flu when you get a flu shot. And trying to tell the flu shot disparagers that that’s an urban legend is pointless. Because they all either think it happened to them or they think it happened to someone they know.

It didn’t.

That theory doesn’t even make sense. By that logic, when you get the smallpox vaccine, you’d get smallpox. And smallpox has been eradicated. (For the vocabulary-challenged people out there, that means smallpox has gone bye-bye. Forever.)

But telling people that the flu shot doesn’t give you the flu is an utterly lost cause. So instead, I direct them to one of my two favorite websites in the world: http://www.snopes.com/.

Snopes is the urban legend website, and it is truly one of the best things that the internet has brought us (primarily because I firmly believe that Facebook and Twitter are ruining the world, but I’ll talk about that another day).

I could literally spend days on Snopes. It has everything under the sun on there and is WAY more reliable than Wikipedia (because I can’t edit it to say that I’m married to Bruce Springsteen like I can on Wikipedia… which I do once a year to show my journalism kids that you can’t trust Wikipedia. Sorry, Patti. I DO always change it back immediately though. And I only vandalize Wikipedia for educational purposes!)

Get a sappy email about a kid with cancer who needs your help? Look it up on Snopes. It’s fake. Get one warning you about gang members killing people who flash their brights on the highway? Fake. Snopes says so. Alligators in the sewers? Nope. Never happened. Find a picture of a ridiculously giant catfish that you KNOW is photoshopped?

Guess what? It’s REAL! It just wasn’t found where the email says it was. But literally. That fish IS that big. Scary stuff! (Although after seeing that picture, no one is ever going to doubt that guy’s penis size. Just saying…)

I use Snopes constantly to prove people wrong. Mostly because I have a horrible habit of not letting something go when I know I’m right. (What can I say? I hate ignorance. It’s probably why I’m a teacher.) It’s how I tried to prove to my brother that Walt Disney is NOT actually cryogenically frozen (although he still doesn’t believe me. Apparently there’s no amount of proof on the planet that will convince him that Walt Disney’s head isn’t in a freezer somewhere).

But I think my favorite thing about Snopes isn’t the fact that it lets me show off my superior knowledge and research skills every time my grandma sends me an email warning me about something that happened to a friend of a friend of a friend of hers that I desperately NEED to watch out for.

My favorite thing is the “Lost Legends” section. If you haven’t played on this site, go check that part out before you read further. I’ll wait.

Seriously. Go look at the Mr. Ed one. Did you know he was actually a zebra?

I know, it sounds nuts. But Snopes has the inside scoop.  It had something to do with the early black and white filming process.

Don’t read further until you’ve looked at that.









Spoilers are coming.








You’ve been warned.








No, Mr. Ed wasn’t a zebra! How dumb do you feel if you believed that? I mean, come on, a zebra? REALLY?

But Sara, Snopes said it and you said they know everything! That’s not fair.

That’s the whole reason I love Snopes. All of the “Lost Legends” are fake. There’s a full explanation here, but the basic gist of it is that the creators of Snopes are trying to make the point that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet. Did you learn your lesson? I mean, Snopes is legit, but did you REALLY, even for a MINUTE, think that Mr. Ed was a zebra? Gullible much?

There is, however, one website that is better than Snopes. There are some that are ALMOST as good (like www.venganza.org/, which is the official website for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Love it!), but only ONE website is actually better.

Yes.

I’m talking about http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/.

BEST. WEBSITE. EVER. EVER! (Yes, that one had to go in a bigger font. Just to make sure you understand the awesomeness of Cats That Look Like Hitler.)

First of all, the fact that anyone even came up with this site is genius. Second, look at the cats! They actually LOOK LIKE HITLER! Which helps to prove my theory that cats are evil, anti-Semitic, and out to destroy the world. But really, I could look at this site over and over and over again.

But this site actually proves something that even Snopes couldn’t disprove (because it turns out to be true). Cats are wrong. Hitler is wrong. But when you combine those two particular wrongs, they create something SO right.

Because no matter how much I hate cats, I just can’t hate them when they look like Hitler. And they do. A lot.

Catsthatlooklikehitler.com = genius. Pure and simple. If you’re the person who created it, call me. I think we should be friends. Partially because I have a dog that looks like Einstein. But mostly because your site is my favorite thing on the internet.

Well, okay, that's not ENTIRELY true. It’s my favorite website.

My favorite thing on the internet is this video.


Cats That Look Like Hitler come in a close second though. And Snopes is third.

Monday, October 25, 2010

If I made you laugh, I was serious. If I offended you, I was just kidding!

Blogging is still a fairly new experience for me, and I’m learning a lot about it as I go.

When I started, I assumed I’d basically be writing humorous columns, like the ones that I teach my journalism kids to write. Ten years ago, I really couldn’t have done that, because I sucked at writing columns when I was in high school. News? I was your girl. Features? Not my favorite, but I was good at it. Sports? Oh, you’re funny. Columns? No way.

It’s not that I wasn’t funny. It’s just that I hadn’t grown into my writing voice yet. News was easy because it was more like a puzzle. You had to squeeze as much information into as few words as possible and keep it in order of importance. Compared to the New York Times crossword, that puzzle is a piece of cake.

Columns involved writing in first person and being able to make fun of myself, and I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. When I started teaching them and helping OTHER people write THEIRS, that’s when I grew into my writing voice. And while I do look forward to the day when I can stop teaching and write full time, I’m not sure I would have been able to write as well if I hadn’t had the experience of teaching other people to write.

Students learning to write columns in my class have several style elements that must be included in their work. I give them a long list of methods of development and they’re required to use at least ten of them in each column they write. The list includes things like hyperbole (extreme exaggeration), self-deprecation, made-up facts and statistics, personification (giving a non-human human characteristics), etc. The basic point being that a column is NOT supposed to be 100 percent true.

Which brings me to the main point of this particular column. Apparently a lot of my nearest and dearest who read my work think that every word of it is true.


To those of you who believe this: you’re idiots.

No offense.

Just stating a fact.

(A non-made-up fact.)

But the biggest thing that I’ve learned about blogging is that if I’m going to be funny, I’m going to piss someone I know off with every blog post. That means that three times a week, I get at least one angry phone call/email/text message/person coming up to me and telling me how mad they are. And the other four days of the week, I get angry people asking me why I’m not blogging that day.
I can’t win.

Here’s the thing to remember though, if everything that I said was true, wouldn’t I be in jail by now? I’m pretty sure I outlined a plan to launch what basically equates to a terrorist plot on the states of Delaware and Texas, confessed to breaking several laws (including telling people how to commit assault at a concert), and have threatened murder numerous times. If you believe that all of that was completely serious, then I’d also like to warn you that if you don’t give me a million dollars RIGHT NOW, the world is going to end.



Although the plans for Texas and Delaware WERE actually serious. I DO plan to get rid of both states when I take over the world. And I DO think my dog is an evil super genius. And my grandmother DOES suck with technology.

Okay, maybe there IS some truth in what I write. Let’s try this again.

If I say something that pisses you off and it’s NOT about Delaware or Texas, I was kidding.

But the complete truth isn’t usually as funny as the embellished truth. With the exception of the story about when the girl threw up in my class. That, unfortunately, was the God’s honest truth. Every word. It sucked. A lot.

And there are some totally true stories that I feel like I can’t tell because I KNOW the people involved will hate me. I was a bridesmaid in a wedding that had some hilarious (now that it's over) aspects to it. But if I write it as it happened, the bride will come after me with a vengeance that would rival a biblical plague. Literally. I think she’d start bringing frogs and locusts and cattle disease on me. (And if she’s reading this, I LOVE YOU! Please don’t smite my first born!)

So if you’re offended, please remember that that wasn’t my goal. I’m just trying to entertain. And if you can’t handle that, there’s no one holding a gun to your head to read my blog. You can stop reading any time. (Although that WOULD be pretty cool if someone was holding a gun to people’s heads and making them read MY blog. I’d LOVE to have such dedicated fans!)

And if you’re so offended by my work that you feel the need to have someone else call me to tell me how mad you are at me (yeah, it happened), then fine, I’ll try to not mention you in my blog.

But when I eventually get to write full time and am living in a Unabomber-style shack in the woods to write without people harassing me all the time, all bets are off.
Consider yourself warned.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Confessions of a self-published drama queen

Self-publishing a book has been an interesting experience for me all around.

And by interesting, I mean a nerve-wracking, panic-attack inducing, keeping-me-up-at-night-in-fear-of-it-failing ordeal.
To be fair, I’m not exactly a person whom anyone who knows me would call calm. I’ve been known to be a drama queen and I’ve never needed an excuse to freak out about things.
But the book situation is scarier than I expected it to be.

I decided to self-publish Beyond the Palace because nothing was happening with it and friends and family were nagging me to do it. I’d written literally hundreds of query letters to agents and never even got an agent to read it. I’d heard that for every twelve letters you send out, you’ll usually get one hit. By that logic, I should have dozens of agents beating down my door. Maybe I suck at query letters. Or maybe the publishing industry is a front for a massive drug ring and I’m the only one who didn’t get the memo that agents don’t actually read books. I’m not sure which it is.

So after a couple years of nothing happening, I did my research and decided on amazon.com’s self-publishing options.

And call me naïve if you will, but I secretly thought it would be an overnight sensation.

Not because I believe in myself, but because I actually thought people I knew would rush to buy the book.

Hah.

I learned the hard way that that just wasn’t going to happen.

That’s right. If you’re reading this and haven’t bought my book yet, you’re a terrible friend/coworker/student/total stranger, etc. In fact, if you're a frequent reader and you're not supporting me by getting my book, you’re practically stealing from me.


I thought that my coworkers would want to read it. Well, okay, not all of them, but I figured that English teachers at least must LOVE to read.

Apparently that’s not the case.
Or else they all secretly hate me. I’m not sure which it is.

And I was positive that every student I’d ever taught would buy it.

Not because I instilled them all with a deep love of reading, but because I figured they would all want to see if I wrote a sex scene.

Nope.

Several of them flipped through it LOOKING for a sex scene. But when they realized that there were no pictures and that my writing style wouldn’t double for a letter to Penthouse (are those actually real?), they lost interest quickly. Although if I drew a pair of boobs in the margin, I’d probably have had a much wider teenage audience.

And I figured that my friends who had read it in a rough draft in a binder would all buy it, because that was the deal I made with them when I let them read it in a binder.

Didn’t happen.

The first day, I sold eight copies. I have over four hundred Facebook friends, not even counting family, school friends, etc. who AREN’T on my Facebook page. Eight copies.

To say I was devastated would be like saying I’m a LITTLE excited when I’m at a Bruce show. Or that Lady Gaga is slightly odd.

MASSIVE understatement.

My parents tried to comfort me by saying that if I sold eight copies a day for the rest of my life, I’d be a millionaire.

Good thing they’re not math teachers. Eight copies sold gives me about $25.  At that rate, they're right.  I WOULD be a millionaire.  It would just take approximately 110 years.  Of course, I'd still only be in my late twenties in 110 years, because I will NEVER be turning 30.  But that's an awful long time to wait.

So I began nagging everyone to buy it. Which annoyed the crap out of everyone who knows me, but helped sales somewhat. And I ventured into the world of Facebook advertising.

Sales are better now, but I’m still spending more money on ads than I’m making off the book. But I’ve started to pick up fans on Facebook who I don’t know, meaning that people other than the people who I’m forcing to buy the book are reading it.

The problem is that because I self-published it, I can check my sales in real time online. Which means that I no longer have a life, I just sit in front of my computer waiting for the next copy to sell. And when I absolutely HAVE to leave the house, like to walk Rosie or go to work, I check the sales from my phone. I’m driving myself, and everyone else I know, completely insane.

I figured out why it’s so scary though: before I self-published it, I wasn’t succeeding because the book wasn’t out there yet. Now, if I fail, it’s because I’m just not good enough. And when I might not be good enough at the one thing that I want to spend the rest of my life doing, that’s a REALLY scary concept.

Luckily, people seem to be loving the book. My lowest review on amazon.com is three stars, and all of the others are four and five star reviews (at least half of which were written by people I don’t know and didn’t force to write reviews, which is encouraging).

So if you haven’t bought my book yet, check it out. You’ll probably like it and it’ll keep my future therapy bills lower. And if you HAVE already bought it, you’re awesome. Thank you. Now go tell all your friends to buy it too.

And whatever you do, don’t leave me a negative review. Because I plan to take a cue from Jay and Silent Bob and go after anyone who does that.
(NSFW)


Literally. I have the song that played during that part on my iPod, ready to go. It’s called “Kick Some Ass” by Stroke 9. I’m not kidding.

Ooh, someone just bought a copy! Yay! Thank you, whoever you are.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The word gullible isn't in the dictionary. Don't believe me? Look it up!

I think the best part of being a teacher is that I get to take kids who were never that into writing as an art form and show them how exciting language can be.

Yes, I’m a nerd.

But as a writer, it’s really cool when I get to show kids the power that their words can have. Unfortunately, running the school newspaper, more often than not, they see that their words are powerful when we get in trouble over something asinine that someone has complained to the administration about. And while I hate that part of my job with a passion that rivals my hatred for the Cowboys, it’s still an opportunity for the kids to learn about the importance of writing.
One of my favorite moments every year is when the students who are new to the newspaper staff get to see their first byline in print. I still remember my first byline (an article in the December 1995 issue of the Rockville High School Rampage about the school band taking a trip to Florida), and I truly enjoy getting to share that moment with my students when they first see their work in the newspaper.

This year, I’ve had new opportunities to share writing with my students through the publication of my novel (Beyond the Palace, if you've been living under a rock and therefore STILL haven’t checked it out yet). I’ve talked about my writing for years, but getting to actually show them a hard copy of the book has had a significantly more impressive effect. And I’ve actually had several students tell me they have started writing books because they were inspired by the fact that I did it.

The other new opportunity has been in the form of this blog, which, if I’m being completely honest, is really just written in the same format of the columns that I teach my journalism students how to write. Of course, they whine about writing six or seven a year. I’m doing at least three a WEEK. Amateurs. But one of my students started his own blog this year too. But he gets like a couple of blog hits a day, and I'm getting around a hundred a day.  So he asked me to give him a shout-out in my blog to get him some more hits. And here it is. Go check out his blog.

And while we’re on the subject of Taylor, I should admit that I lied. Instilling students with a love of writing is the SECOND best part of my job. The best part is actually messing with the kids’ heads.

Which I do on a daily basis.

Don’t judge. I need SOMETHING to keep me sane until summer vacation.

And sometimes it’s just SO easy to mess with their heads. Because they’re gullible enough to believe everything I tell them.

In fact, they’re even gullible about the WORD gullible. One of my favorite tricks is to tell a kid (with a completely straight face, of course), that gullible isn’t in the dictionary. If they don’t believe me, I tell them to look it up. Which they do. Because they’re that gullible. And the worst part is that after they’ve fallen for that, I can STILL get them by telling them that someone wrote gullible on the ceiling—they ALL look up. Every time.

 By then, they no longer believe me, which means I have to get them again. I tell them that gullible is spelled with three l’s. They argue that they’re not that stupid and they’re not falling for my tricks again. And then I explain to them that it actually IS spelled with three l’s.

I have other favorite tricks too. For example, whenever anyone asks me if we have a test that day, I ALWAYS say yes. Unless we DO have a test, in which case I say no. And when they freak out about the unexpected test, I act irritated and ask why they hadn’t spent all week studying for it. Anything they ask me for, the answer is always no. Which I usually say before they even finish asking the question, just to see how hard they’ll argue.

“Can I go to the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Do you have a bandaid?”

“No.”






“Can I get a drink of water?”

“No.”

“I accidentally cut my arm off, can I go to the nurse?”

“No.”

 “A lion is attacking me! Help!”

“No.”

And so on.

My favorite thing to do, however, has to be personalized on an individual basis, depending on what the individual kids will get riled up about. Which is where Taylor comes in.

I was working on the newspaper at lunch with my editors one day, when another student made a comment saying that golf shouldn’t be in the sports section because it wasn’t a real sport. Now I normally defend everything in the sports section fairly emphatically (because I don’t want cheerleaders or poms having a grudge against me, and if it’s athletic, I think it belongs in the sports section), but Taylor started arguing that golf was, in fact, a sport. And he got kind of heated about it.

Which meant that I had to disagree with him. Not because I have a strong stance on golf (which I don't. As one of the least athletic people on the planet, I don't have any room to judge), but just because it amused me to see him try to argue that golf is a sport.
So for the last month, every time ANYONE has mentioned golf OR sports with Taylor in the room, I’ve turned to him and told him that if my 85-year-old grandfather plays it, it’s a game, not a sport.

But even though I know I’m driving him nuts, and even though golf isn’t a sport, TAYLOR is a good sport. So check out his blog. It’s about football, and it’s actually very well written. But do me a favor when you DO look at it: leave him a comment about how football may be a sport, but golf isn’t. The look on his face when he sees comments about that will be a great way to pay me back for all the entertainment I’ve given you with my blog.
It shouldn’t be hard to do. It’s not like leaving a comment is a sport or anything. Just like golf.

And right now, Taylor is reading this and saying, “Oh my God, golf IS a sport! Why is she doing this to me?”

The answer? Because I’m easily amused and you react. But if you don’t believe me, I hear they put your picture in the dictionary. Right next to the word gullible. Go ahead. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
Sometimes I DO love my job.