Etiquette

I may not be Emily Post and I may not be a Real Housewife of NYC, but I do know a few things about office etiquette.

1.  If you call a meeting for 3:30, do not start the meeting at 3:20 so that when I walk in at 3:28 I've already missed the beginning of the meeting.

2.  If you walk by my office and see that I'm hard at work, with headphones in my ears, and you check the schedule conveniently posted on my door, seeing that I'm not currently holding office hours, please do not barge in, sit down, and start asking questions - the answer to which can all be found on your syllabus.

3.  If you are a former student and you email me for guidance.  If I don't back to you immediately there's no need to call me and ask the same questions.  If the answer to your questions were easy I'd have answered you immediately.  Chances are you asked unanswerable questions or you asked questions that are so broad there's no way for me to answer them succinctly.

4.  Do not mistake my silence for misunderstanding.  Chances are I'm trying to hold back a string of unpleasant language I want to spew at you.

5.  While I may work all the time, I'm not in a constant state of office hours.  I have a windowless cave of an office....therefore I leave my door open so I can avoid claustrophobia.  That is not an invitation for you to come in and start a stream of thought conversation about last week's class.  If you want to talk, make an appointment.  Otherwise, move along.

On skinny jeans

I was really hoping that skinny jeans and leggings would be working their way out of Fall fashion this year, but alas, I'm left disappointed.  It looks as if skinny jeans and leggings, paired with riding boots, oversized shirts, and bulky scarves are as prominent as ever in the Fall fashion forecasts.  I must admit that I do own a pair of skinny jeans but I'm just not a fan of them.  I don't think they look that great on the normal sized girl, I don't like them without boots over them, and I think reinforce this whole skinny is beautiful battle we've been fighting forever.  Leggings are a whole other thing - I think leggings should be outlawed for anyone over age twelve, and to top it all off, there are way too many people who mistake tights for leggings and walk around in see through bottoms.  Not cute.  So I will continue to wear my normal pants and hope that they eventually come back into fashion.  *Sigh*

My thoughts on Spanish

It's been three weeks of Spanish class and although I like it, there's definitely no chance that I picked the wrong language - Italian is just better (sorry Spanish speakers).  However, there are some things I've discovered this week.

1.  Spanish feels like a "lazy" language.  It's not a bad thing of course, but it feels like a beach language.  Now, you must keep in mind that this is coming from someone who spends months on end in Southern Italy and Sicily, but I feel like I should be reclined on a beach chair with a cocktail in my hand when I speak Spanish a la the Corona ads on TV.

2.  Spanish is like Italian light.  Yes the rules are the same, but there's less of everything (easier for most people harder for me).  Why are there only four definite articles?  Why don't you combine prepositions with definite articles?  Why aren't there changes in prepositions when used with definite articles?  Why are there only two forms of the partitive article?  Weird.

3.  Italian is all about learning the 1000 rules and the 100,000 exceptions to those rules to pronunciation.  Spanish just throws an accent in and you never have to really memorize any rules.

4.  If you don't pronounce a 'v' like a 'v' why do you have 'v'?!  If it sounds like 'b', then just use the 'b'. Annoying.

5.  Spanish sounds twangy to me.  I don't like all those 'q's and 'n's with tildas.  I feel like I have some weird midwestern accent.

6.  My teacher is teaching Mexican Spanish.  She often includes information on how one might use the grammar in Central and South America.  Well....I want to get the hang of Spain Spanish.....but if we use the particulars to Spain we get marked wrong on our work.  I don't like that.

So the moral of the story is that everyone should learn to speak Italian.  It's just better all the way around - and that's coming from someone who's not biased at all.

Lava Girl

This summer in Italy I had a fabulous TA with me.  We made all sorts of wonderful discoveries together - like the terminal velocity of a baby, that Poppy homemade popcorn is heaven in a bowl, and that my affinity for languages stops just short of understanding Japanese.  We also devised superhero personas for ourselves (actually Vincenzo did and I just supported him by feeding him pasta and asking to watch movies on his laptop), but I'm very happy with mine: LAVA GIRL!!!!!

I'm not really sure about the whole superhero thing - I've just recently started to get on the superhero bandwagon and to be honest I'm just sort of lukewarm about it (haha, pun intended) but here are my thoughts.  Lava girl is a tall fire-haired superheroine who wears only the best clothing and very fashionable boots.  I assume she wears red outfits and can ignite a fire by giving the death glare to anyone in her path.  Therefore, should someone forget that class starts on the hour rather than fifteen minutes later, she can burn their desk before they get to it so they're forced to stand awkwardly in the corner and take notes while trying to balance their notebook on their hand.  She can also affect the weather in her personal bubble so she never has to suffer through another winter or be frozen to death by the ridiculous Texas over-airconditioning - it's alway a lovely 81 degrees in a two foot bubble around her.

That's as far as I've gotten.  I feel like she should probably have more superpowers, but like I said, I'm just learning about the superhero movement so her mythology and all that will have to wait until I can come up with something good.  Any suggestions?

P.S.  Anyone who wants to draw lava girl in a nice PG version and sell a comic book about her (giving me a cut, of course) is encouraged to contact me at your earliest convenience.

Back in the classroom

Today was another first day of class . . . and my first day of class.  Spanish class!  It's been a while since I was a student in a classroom, so I was pretty excited.  It's always a little nerve wracking going into the first day of a language class (and even more nerve wracking when you walk in and then greet the teacher in Italian - whoopsie) but when you're out of the student rhythm it's even more crazy.  Granted I only learned a few phrases here are my observations of the day:

1.  The students are right, the desks suck.  They're not big enough, they're too close together, and they make a terrible noise when you try to move them around.

2.  I'm pretty sure everyone but me was dressed in either their pjs or their gym clothes.  Nothing like sticking out even more when you walk in in heels and a suit.

3.  Powerpoint puts me to sleep....even when there are great pictures and important information.  Even though what I was supposed to be reading was on the powerpoint, I found my eyes wandering.  I think it's an emotional reaction to the worst science class I ever took in college.

4.  Spanish is weird.  Where did they get the idea for upside down punctuation?

5.  The Spanish accent sounds garbled to me.  Apparently my crisp, clean (and not even very crisp or clean seeing as I have a southern accent) is doing me no favors.

So tonight I shall try to memorize those weird looking phrases that I learned today and teach myself how to tell time.  I can't very well let the pajama-wearing- twelve-year-old show me up, now can I?

You know school is about to start when....

This is the week that it all begins again.  The public school kids started back today (I almost got hit by a big a** school bus who crossed three lanes of traffic with no signal and no looking - and as a former bus driver myself I find that horrific) and the college kids start on Wednesday.  This past weekend was freshman move in weekend (u-hauls were parked on every spare curb on campus and every student parking lots has cars double and triple parked) and the seniors are starting to enforce their senior-ness.  But for me, I always know school is about to start when these things happen (and they always happen).

1.  I run into students in the coffee shop.  I'm up early and they're just ending their night last night.

2.  I run into students in the gym - you know, when I look my best.

3.  My inbox is full of emails asking if the books in the bookstore "are really necessary."  Um.....yes.

4.  My blackboard sites, MyItalianLab, and Supersite platforms are malfunctioning and I can't get ahold of anyone to help me fix it.

5.  Deadlines for my article, book, promotion packet, and syllabi are all coming up within five minutes of each other.

And so it begins.  Freshmen are wandering scared around campus while sophomores are trying to shrug their parents away and seniors are trying to figure out how to demonstrate their senior-ness.  Ahh, yes....the dance begins.

Pay it forward

My apartment is quite unique in it's trash collection.  You know you live in a city's premier apartment community when they provide valet trash service.  Yup, that's right.  You leave your trash at the curb and it magically disappears for you.  BUT they only pick it up on MWF before 9am.  So on Sunday night I left a bag of trash outside of my door to be taken downstairs when I left for work Monday morning.  When I emerged this morning someone nice had already taken it down for me!  And it was filled with glass jars, a watermelon, three year old TV dinners that were blocks of melted ice . . . in other words it was not the world's nicest bag of trash.  I assume its' the people across the hall from me (the ones that slam their door so hard that they rattle the pictures on my walls every time they enter and exit their apartment) but now I have to figure out how to pay it forward.  Ideas?