Sunday for Billie

From this window, I spy a woman in white heels, a team of little leaguers playing ball and a candy store I’ve been curious about. As my co- workers dance to the latest in world beat music, I tell my rude customers there no public restrooms here.

The way I usually start these letters is with a hi, how are you, followed by a list of questions that center around the state of your affairs.

I end the questioning with a hope you’re doing well (which is sincere) and break into a list of current happenings in my life.
I rant about work/school in such a way that one would think I despised them, when really the opposite was true.
I love my work and academia with all it’s flaws I just wonder how much of my identity it really is anymore. I’ve been having trouble connecting and feeling disconnected at the same time. Do you know what I mean?

Anyhow, I explain how difficult/easy everything is and at the end throw in some random information that will seem important to me but you and your efficiency will find it unnecessary.

Therefore, I have chosen to spare you. I’ll spare you the delicate details of my new life in the land of ice and snow, as you once called it. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow descriptions of my sister high school like work turmoil.
I’ll keep the perils of her work embarrassment (Oh my god, he tried to sleep with you!) and drama (WTF! He’s sleeping with her!) to myself.

I will not bore you with the personal tales of a young woman who wanders the streets looking meaning, warmth and a little bit of perfection in a place where the most important things are frozen all year round.

Perfect is what you are willing to put up with and the real word for it is compromise. This young woman fears that with all her imperfections, she has made herself unsuitable for anyone or anything. A poisonous orchid almost.
Perfect is lying in bed on a rainy day. Perfect is getting to the last page of a novel and realizing the ride isn’t over. Perfect is sitting on the subway at 2am, writing a long love letter to no one in particular. Then mailing it.

Don’t think too deeply about what I’ve written. This is all stuff you already know.

Why Don't I Just Take Over the Class?

If there's really not enough venom and cursing here to qualify for a true Cunt Face post, it's because it is cross-posted from my own blog, so I'm cheating. It is full of sarcasm and bitterness though!

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Few things in life irritate me more than dealing with my son's school. My son is autistic and spends most of each day in a special ed classroom, where he (theoretically) receives instruction that is tailored to his individual needs. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will recall that I was seriously pissed off at the end of the last school year. I was fed up and livid and cursing in all caps (oh, and there will be just a little more of that today), because I spent all of last year fighting with the school district to get them to bring in additional (legally mandated) resources to address a problem that was interfering with my son's learning. They did nothing but stall, accuse me of being difficult and tell me that, in spite of my son's declining performance, the best people to address the problem were the classroom teachers under whom his performance was declining. Oh, no wait. How silly of me! I forgot. They actually did propose adding one additional resource to the classroom: me, as a free aide.

After a summer filled with down time, and work with one of the world's great amateur behaviorists and OTs (yes, me), my son and I worked out a solution to his problem. He started the school year and has made rapid progress in his former problem area, to the point where he no longer requires assistance. Thanks for nothing, school district.

Of course, a new problem has cropped up in a different subject. I received a note last week from his teacher stating that she was sending his classroom work home for me to finish with him, as he had not been doing his work but had been "fooling around" and "wasting time." I (very calmly) wrote back and said I'd be happy to help him at home, but shouldn't we, oh, I don't know, find out why he wasn't doing his work in class and figure out how to address it? She wrote back and very tersely said that any suggestions would be appreciated.

What?! Um, unless I'm mistaken, she's the teacher. She's the one with the degree. She's the one with the actual training in working with kids with special needs. She's the one whose job it is to figure out how to engage kids in learning and how to ensure that they behave themselves in class. Oh, and lest you say she's overworked and underpaid (which she is). She's also the one who was such a big expert, so perfectly capable of handling my son's needs herself, that she adamantly and repeatedly stated that she didn't need or want to bring in an outside specialist to help her with my son last year. But my unpaid, inexpert labor, under her direction, is, of course, always welcome.

So, I sat down with my son for 10 minutes, quickly determined what particular obsessions were preventing him from doing the work, thought up several ways in which we could break the task down into more manageable components for him and got him to finish the work. I wrote the teacher a note with my suggestions on getting him to complete the work in the classroom, put the completed work in his backpack and haven't heard back from her since. And to top it all off, that important classroom work we did hasn't been removed from his backpack all week; each day, it comes back home to me a little more crumpled and worse for wear, because nobody has bothered to take it out and look at it.

This year, I am going to try something new. I am done with threatening to sue. I am done with going into debt to pay for representation to force the school district to bring in someone with even more "expertise" to help in the classroom. From now on, I'm going to be a bitch in a new way. I'm going to tell the teachers how to do their jobs. I'm going to teach them all the amateur OT and behavioral techniques I've painstakingly learned through the last six years. I'm going to share the knowledge and share the wealth and maybe, just maybe, one day they'll be able to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS! If not, I'll at least have saved some money, stayed out of blood pressure raising IEP meetings and ended up no worse off in terms of the education my son is receiving.

Dickhead From Hell.

You know, if there was ink on that bedspread, I mean, since you love to criticize me and point out all the ways I fuck up, I mean, I just thought you'd have shown me before or something, so, I guess I don't believe that there is paint on it or whatever cause, you know, you would definitely have pointed it out...

FUCK YOU.

All I asked was that if he and his silly-ass friends were going to be doing art upstairs that they could move the carpet back (the new rug I bought to hide the stains) and remove the blanket. I put the nice blanket on the bed to hide the ink stains that I sometimes love and sometimes find mortifying. I asked that these things be removed so that the things that are already ruined with nasty ass paint can be further ruined, as they already have to be replaced, instead of ruining new things and pissing me off further.

And this jackass has the audacity to start giving me this little speech about how I'm unfair and I criticize and bullshit like that at 7:30 in the morning when I've just driven him 20 miles in the opposite direction from work so he can putterfuck around with his mom to try to earn some money. So yes, it's cute that he might earn some little bitchmade money, but I'm losing money on the deal driving his dumbass back and forth, back and forth, from his mom's house.

And I'm willing to do it because I love his stupid ass and want him to feel good about himself and like he made some little fucking sillyshit money that ain't good for nothing and won't pay a single goddamned bill. And then, after he blows up at me like a dumbass because I asked him to move my shit instead of just ruining it like he always does, he says, "Well can I use your phone today?" and my dumbass puts my phone in his hand so I can't even text Vowels to bitch about it.

God, I'm an ass. He's a bigger ass. He's an asshat fucktard dickhead good for nothin' piece of shit dumbass.

It's like he was offended that I was asking him to take care of my stuff. And really, I'm offended that I HAVE to ask him to take care of my stuff. I'm offended that he doesn't just fucking take care of my stuff. I'm offended that, although it's slowly, painfully getting better, I still don't trust him worth a fuck even not to rob me...I certainly don't trust him to think for himself about how he can not FUCK UP OUR HOME.

God I LOVEHATE him.

(So sexy...)