Primal With A Side Of FABULOUS page 75

[phreebie]

I had the same problem a couple weeks ago. My stomach would growl with hunger, it was a pure, physical, hunger. I added a little more rice and sweet potatoes and spoonfuls of coconut oil and it helped. I don't know that I was particularly stressed at the time, but it was right after my sugar-binge vacation, so maybe I was just re-adjusting? My appetite seems to have returned to normal and I've lost another couple pounds.

Also, you might try re-reading this paragraph, because you had my stomach turning and the bowl of soup I was about to heat up for breakfast now has no appeal:

So kudos for the vivid writing, and curse you for grossing me out so early in the morning!

Turned my stomach too lol.

[Gay Panda]

Hello, SleepyRoots! I like this well-read Scorpio contingent. Today the hunger wasn't as bad. I wish my body would just give me a print-out once a day of what it needs, rather than leaving me to guesswork.

lucyh and phreebie, I had to LIVE with these two! At least you will only ever meet them in print. I was shocked when one got a girlfriend, but after I met her, I understood why. She was just as much of a slob as he was. One day they sat on his bed while she trimmed his hair, letting it fall all over the blanket and sheets. Did they wash these items afterwards? No. Did they vacuum up the hair? No. He slept on it for the next two months. UGH.

[Sigi]

Hello, SleepyRoots! I like this well-read Scorpio contingent.

Oooh, it's confession time I guess. I'm another Scorpio who's read your entire journal*. It resonates rather deeply with my little germ-phobic, OCD, magic-underpants-possessing, painfully slowly reducing self.

I hope your food/satiety issues are gradually improving. Sending good wishes.

(* Hmm, how many Panda points does one require before scoring a keychain from the gift shop again?)

[Gay Panda]

Part One: Almost everyone has had an Angry Teacher. Gay Panda had one in third grade, a man teaching art with a hair-trigger temper, who carried a yardstick ready to smash it down on the table if he thought someone was screwing off. A math teacher was a human Vesuvius in seventh grade; another in ninth made nasty fun of a blind kid. I thought that these people were nuts, and then I became a teacher. In five years, I quit. I knew that I would become an Angry Teacher myself.

Every Angry Teacher is angry for different reasons. My art teacher was unprepared for classroom management. My math teacher was going through a divorce. The one in ninth was just rotten, and I wish that I’d complained to the administration about what he did to the blind kid. I went into the profession wanting to do a good job, and confronted a bureaucracy that ensured I did a bad one.

My classroom was for children with disabilities. They needed help in the most basic matters, and many were violent. Because of cuts, our class size grew and grew. The kids’ problems grew bigger along with us. Our budget was slashed, and we had hungry students who didn’t qualify for the subsidized cafeteria Pop-Tart. I made their meals out of my lunch, and pleaded with parents already working two jobs for donations. Most were very generous; one sent expired laxative granola bars.

I broke in my fifth year. I couldn’t even educate with so many kids, and the principal was on the phone wanting to enroll more. Looking over the chaos of the room, autistic kids screaming and setting off more who could not cope with noise, three fighting and an aide could not stop them, another hitting the speech therapist and a boy was tugging my sleeve, saying, “Tee-tur, no bekfas!” . . . our room was spinning out of control, and here was the principal happy about shiny new faces! I broke into her natter to snap, “You are throwing gasoline on the FIRE!”

Gay Panda has been bitten and kicked and slugged and choked and spat upon, and took it. After all, the kids are three to six years old and disabled; I’m an adult who missed Asperger’s by four points. I can control myself. But at that snap, which is very uncharacteristic of me, I realized that I was getting angry. I didn’t have enough aides, and the ones I had were new to the work. I didn’t have money. I didn’t have the power to stop the principal from sending over new kids to a situation that was, frankly, on the edge of becoming dangerous. Our class was being treated like a trashcan.

[Gay Panda]

Part Two: I wanted to yell at the boy without breakfast that he knew he wasn’t supposed to be in the teachers’ area, and to stop tugging on my sleeve and ask someone else to get him a f*%$ing cup of Goldfish Crackers because couldn’t he SEE that I was busy on the phone? I felt so helpless before him. A horrid speech impediment, horrid home, and he was a wrathful, scared preschooler who needed so much that I didn’t have. I was angry to stand there with empty hands. I was angry with him for making me feel so disempowered. I was just angry.

But I swallowed it. I gave him part of my lunch and scavenged through our dwindling donations, though I tossed the laxative bars. His speech was so abysmal that I laminated a card with WALK on it, and stickers of trees, and gave it to him. Every day, I said, you can use this one time. Hand it to me and we’ll go. He did, every day. And Valhalla forgive me, but I left my aides to battle the frenzy just so he could have a lousy ten-minute nature walk with an adult who wasn’t going to abuse him, and one who he didn’t have to share. He made little discoveries: a penny, a busted hula-hoop, and I listened to the sloshing of his words and held his callused monkey-bars hand, and knew it was the end. I would not be able to swallow this for forty years, not when every year was worse than the one before.

Primal is about connection to your food, your life, your health. Education was about disconnection. The cafeteria food was trash poured into their bodies. We treated their minds like trash when we packed them overflowing into a class and couldn’t meet their needs. Kids from good homes, I didn’t worry about as much. Kids also treated like trash at home don’t stand a chance. Our connections or disconnections are who we become as adults. I didn’t want to be anyone’s Angry Teacher, and I knew that I was headed there. Being that disconnected infuriated me, and if I didn’t quit, eventually that fury would have found an outlet on the unlucky kid who spat on my last nerve.

That boy deteriorated over the year as his family grew more chaotic. He’s undoubtedly in a gang by now. One day, I expect to see his name in the news with a crime attached, and a scary picture of a grizzled thug, and I’ll remember how he liked animals, and told me stories in sloshing words that I pretended to understand. You’ll never read this, buddy, but Tee-tur is sorry for being another pair of empty hands in your disconnected life, and hopes you remember that you were never trash to me.

[hornbarbara42]

Have something worth visiting.

[Gay Panda]

Oooh, it's confession time I guess. I'm another Scorpio who's read your entire journal*. It resonates rather deeply with my little germ-phobic, OCD, magic-underpants-possessing, painfully slowly reducing self.

(* Hmm, how many Panda points does one require before scoring a keychain from the gift shop again?)

Welcome to the Gay Panda Scorpio Squad!

Was it one or two points for the keychain? I can't remember. I'll just send you one since it's easier than hunting through my journal. When I really should be Primal Laundry Sorting instead, having completed Primal Vacuuming and vanquishing an Army of Dust Bunnies behind the television.

[Gay Panda]

Have something worth visiting.

Is this a critique of the writing in my journal? My book did receive lovely reviews with the exception of one, in which the critic loved the first half but not the second half. But no writer can please everyone, and every piece of writing has flaws. My writing is no exception. In truth, I can't even pick up that book because I wrote it from ages 14-22, and when I read it, it sounds juvenile. Sweet Valhalla, I still had braces when I was writing it.

Or perhaps you do not mean my writing at all, but the magical bamboo forest in which I live. It's a shame that you might not consider it worth visiting, especially after I have vacuumed and will hurry to put my laundry away in case you knock. You can meet Avada Kedavra and pet Primal Coach Kitty, and get in a good healthy jog with Sauron's assistance. I live by a wonderful Himalayan restaurant and we can pretend naan is primal just for tonight.

Or perhaps you do not mean my writing or my magical bamboo forest, in which case I am baffled. Are you a troll? I've always looked forward to having a troll, because I don't understand the point of trolling, and only a troll can explain his/her/its worldview to me. But your intent seems to be creating confusion, not upsetting anyone. Shall I dub you Benign Troll? No, we don't want to raise the ire of jealous Benign Poltergeist. And there isn't a sense of mystery in Benign Troll, and right now you have circled the mysterious face on my feelings chart. I don't think I've been this confused since I watched Unsolved Mysteries as a cub and was glued to the screen on the Bermuda Triangle segment.

Dude. You Bermuda Triangled my journal! Well, I leave your naming to someone else because I have socks to pair and jammies to fold and shirts to hang, and then I need to make Donner Party Meatballs and edit my writing that does not please everyone, but pleases some people. Actually, I am wrong. The book that I am currently editing is an adult science fiction that has had a grand audience of two readers in Lady Friend and Best Friend From Junior High, and both of them (with complete objectivity of course) celebrated the work. So I have a 100% Guaranteed Crowd Pleaser at this time, and I am such a perfectionist that maybe I will never submit it anywhere just to maintain my perfect score.

So I bid you good day and a fabulous weekend, and I wish you well on future Bermuda Triangling!

[ItinerantChild]

I would like to think that Hornbarbara42 is celebrating the fact that, at last, she has a thread that is worth visiting. (There are so many that aren't). Methinks that HornBarbara is yet another fan of the esteemed Gay Panda. And why not indeed?

[SleepyRoots]

Panda, you brought a tear to my eye.

Education, along with healthcare (that's another rant), is one of those great victims of society i feel.
Everyone agrees how essential it is (and certainly no one would say that it superfluous) yet it is treated with so much negligence. Money can be found for so many things, yet some basics are constantly neglected. I've fallen through the net due to being the quiet one. Not even when I was constantly writing Fs was I much noticed in the cliquey chaos that was our classroom. No use blaming the teachers, as so often happens. If one person can't keep itself safe from bullying, then how are they supposed to control an entire classroom?