American Beauty

I hit my snooze button six times this morning, for a total of 48 sweet minutes of stolen rest. Upon bitterly prying myself out of bed, I took a nice hot shower. Six inches of water quickly accumulated around my ankles. Our shower drain is clogged, but I keep forgetting to buy drain opener. I went through my usual routine, but in a more hurried fashion than usual, in an attempt to compensate for my 48-minute rebellion. But I can’t skip breakfast, or I get short-tempered- which is pretty disastrous for all parties involved since my school has enough sass without my hungry ass contributing to it. So I poured a very small bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats and milk. I sat at my desk, opened the gmail page, and took a big bite of what I thought was going to be fibery bliss. Sour milk. Son-of-a! It was too late for the lightly sweetened mini wheat biscuits. I had no choice but to throw them out now that they were soiled with the expired milk. Blast.

Onward. I must go shape young minds. (ha!) I turned The Postal Service up on my ipod to soothe me with their melodic sounds. Due to my late start, there were more pedestrians out and about on my walk to work. I had mixed feelings on this. I do enjoy people watching, and it was nice to see some life on the streets, as a change from the desolate 6:15am streets I am used to. But the people also distracted me. From the dog poo. I don’t know what it is about Spanish Harlem, but I have never seen so much dog shit per square foot in my life. It’s really remarkable. Usually when I walk to work, I keep my eyes on the ground, making sure to dodge heap after heap. But with all the people around distracting me, I had a couple of veeery close calls in my comfy but clunky clogs. (which my kids have mockingly coined “Ms. K’s Tims.”) But I made it.

Nothing really worth mentioning happened at school.

But on my way home, I noticed that there were an inordinate number of plastic bags on the street. I don’t know why, and I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I had to laugh because, for a split second, one was delicately floating in the air, dancing with the chilly December breeze, and I had a very American Beauty moment… Then suddenly that breeze turned into a strong gust, and the Duane Read bag flew directly at my face. I probably would have suffocated and died if it weren’t for my cat-like reflexes. hehehe