Cowboys and Magic Cards

lj idol four: the axe forgets; the tree remembers

lyssa027 — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 22:35:03 GMT

Trigger warning for mentions of rape, sexual situations, abuse, and death of a family member. Nothing really detailed or anything. The story has a happy ending. It's about a friend of mine from college and the abusive relationships she was in.

My best friend in college and for several years after graduation was May. We had met on the first day of classes of our first year of college in English Composition. May had a tough home life, and she was not mature enough to cope with it. For starters, her parents were very strict and religious. She never had freedom before college. We had that in common. She came from a well-off family by northeastern Pennsylvania standards and was not responsible with money. However, she was deeply in love with her boyfriend Brad, who she had started dating freshman year of high school. She would ask me to drive her to the nearby Walmart in Reading almost every week, so she could buy cheap thongs for him. She would spoil him and buy him expensive chocolates and presents for every anniversary she could think of. Those anniversaries included their first kiss, the first time she gave him a blow job, the first time he said, “hello to her.” May was convinced that Brad was her soulmate even though it was apparent to everyone else that he was only with her to mooch money. Brad was the first of her awful boyfriends though he wasn’t the worst one.

After our senior year of college, May’s father died. It wasn’t unexpected. He had stage iv prostate cancer. May and her brother Steve inherited a lot of money in his will. As soon as May became wealthier, Brad proposed to her with the ugliest engagement ring I had ever seen. He wanted to rush the wedding, claiming that it was what May’s father would have wanted, but it was what Brad wanted, so he could use her for her money. I mentioned that May was very religious. She was saving her virginity for marriage. Brad thought that if he had sex with her, she would feel discarded and dirty and want to get married as soon as possible. So, he raped her at the party she had a few weeks after her father’s death. Luckily, it had the opposite effect on May, and she returned the ring and broke up with him.

However, May was brainwashed by her upbringing and thought she needed somebody to take care of her like her father did. This led to a string of highly toxic relationships. Ryan used her for sex and gaslighted her. Jon thought she was an easy lay. But they were nothing compared to Jimmy.

May met Jimmy at a dance class. She loved dancing. Jimmy seemed like the perfect boyfriend. He was a singer. He performed at fancy dinners and local theater productions. He would whisk May away on fairy-tale vacations. They flew to Paris, spent a few weeks in Italy, and took cruises to destinations like Alaska and Hawaii. Jimmy paid for everything; he was the opposite of Brad. But Jimmy also had a dark side that May didn’t see. He was controlling. He treated May like a doll and bought her expensive dresses and lingerie and expected her to only wear the things he wanted her to. He was controlling, emotionally abusive, and manipulative. He only wanted her to hang out with his friends. He didn’t want her to spend time near her family or friends because he was worried they would convince her to break up with him. He would cry and buy her expensive gifts after any fight they had. It wasn’t a healthy relationship. We all saw it, but May didn’t see it. Jimmy especially hated me because I was May’s best friend and knew she listened to me. So he saw me as an obstacle that he had to get rid of.

Before my twenty-seventh birthday, Jimmy and May broke up. I was really excited about my birthday. Jefferson, who was May’s cousin and best male friend, and he was also my ex-boyfriend turned best male friend, May, and I planned to go camping and wine-tasting in the finger lakes. Jefferson and I spent hours texting back and forth and talking on the phone, planning my birthday party. We found a cute cabin to rent. We couldn’t wait to sit around a campfire, drink hard cider, and pretend we could identify constellations in the sky. May was excited about refurbishing her wine supply and being single and having freedom for the first time in almost two years.

My twenty-seventh birthday was the last time May, and I spoke. U2 was touring that year, and May loved U2. I was meh about U2 and more excited about Muse, the opening band. But U2 seemed to be one of those bands you had to see at least once in concert, so we bought tickets to the NJ show.

Since U2 was so famous, the tickets were expensive. They were over a hundred dollars. I bought them both, and May told me she would pay me back. The concert was the first week of October, after my twenty-seventh birthday celebration. May was going to drive down to NJ and spend the weekend with me. But then U2 changed the date for some reason last minute, and the concert was suddenly on a Wednesday. May couldn’t go to the show anymore because she couldn’t take off from her job in the middle of the week without letting them know in advance. I told her it was fine, and I’d find somebody else to go with me.

My friend Marie ended up going with me. We tailgated in the parking lot and drank pomegranate margaritas. Muse was amazing. To this day, the bootleg video I took of them performing “Uprising” has the most views on my YouTube page. U2 was great too. Bruce Springsteen was in the audience, and Bono called him onstage to perform a cover of “She’s the One.”

After May canceled on me for the concert, she stopped talking to me. I tried calling her, texting her, and even emailing her but got nothing but radio silence. I asked Jefferson why she wasn’t talking to me. I didn’t understand. We had been best friends for so many years, and she blocked me from her life without an explanation. He told me that May wasn’t really telling him anything either. He said she was pissed because I owed her money for the U2 ticket since she hadn’t gone, but that was bullshit since I had paid for both tickets on my credit card.

But the axe forgets; the tree remembers. So this is what really happened.

About a day before my birthday party, Jimmy called May. He repeatedly apologized for their breakup and blamed it on himself. He said he wanted her to give him another chance because they had something magical and irreplaceable. He wanted to make it up to her and promised he would change. May, who never knew how to be alone and needed somebody to take care of her, agreed.

Suddenly the plans for my birthday party changed. May was no longer going to stay with Jefferson and me in the cabin. Jimmy reserved a room for them in a fancy bed and breakfast. She wouldn’t be riding with us to the finger lakes. Instead, he would drive them up. This meant my plans for car karaoke were ruined. May and I loved listening to Broadway show tunes, classic rock, 90s pop, rock, and alternative. We put on a two-person concert the entire four-hour drive to Ithaca. Also, May and Jimmy would be joining us on Saturday instead of Friday because he made plans for them at a fancy restaurant in Scranton.

I tried to talk May out of getting back with Jimmy. I reminded her about how he belittled her and gaslighted her constantly. Finally, she just said she was sure he had changed. I even tried playing the birthday card and told how I just wanted it to be Jefferson, her, and me. She said Jimmy would be on good behavior, and my birthday would still be amazing. But unfortunately, she was so blinded by his wealth and status that she couldn’t see what was evident to everyone else, that her relationship was unhealthy. Even Jefferson told her what an asshole he was, but she wouldn’t listen to him. She insisted that we didn’t know him like she did, and he was a great guy.

Jefferson and I were determined to still have a fantastic weekend together. We left Friday night like we originally planned and checked into our cabin. We lit a fire outside, toasted marshmallows, and drank cider under the starlit sky. We didn’t stay up too late because we wanted to be at the first winery right as it opened. The following day, we woke up, shared s’more pop tarts, and were about to leave for the first winery when my cell phone rang. It was May. She and Jimmy had gotten a late start because he cooked her a romantic breakfast in bed and seduced her. She apologized and said they were two hours away. She encouraged us to start without her, and once they got closer to the wineries, she would touch base, and we could meet up.

I was upset, but Jefferson didn’t want me to let them ruin my birthday. So we decided to start on the east side of the lake. We always had a good time together. Although our relationship didn’t work out because he was a player, we were good friends. We spent a lot of time with each other. Jimmy dominated any free time that she had. May was prone to making plans with me, but then canceling last-minute because of a so-called romantic surprise Jimmy had planned for her after I had already driven almost four hours to see her. So instead of spending time with May, I spent my weekends with Jefferson. I crashed in his old waterbed. We watched a lot of lousy Vh1 and MTV reality shows like Viva La Bam and Rock of Love. He would make me burgers and steak, we’d drink wine together, and sit in front of his fireplace talking. I spent more time with Jefferson than May.

Since it was my birthday weekend, Jefferson made sure we had a good time. He paid for all my wine tastings, and we were both very happy drunks. After a while, I even forgot that May and Jimmy were supposed to be joining us. Around noon, she finally called me. She said they would meet us at this fancy restaurant called The Castle for lunch.

The Castle wasn’t a place that Jefferson or I would usually venture to. It had expensive appetizers like foie grass, oyster shooters, crab legs, and seafood towers. The main entrees were lobster, other market price seafood, and expensive cuts of steak. The cheapest entrée was thirty dollars, and the most costly was seventy. It was not a place I would’ve picked for myself, let alone for my birthday celebration. My idea of a fancy meal was taco bell, followed by Coldstone creamery ice cream. May and Jimmy were already seated at a table outside when we got there. He had ordered a bottle of expensive wine for them and several appetizers.

It was a beautiful fall day, and the staff was busy setting up for a wedding that night. I ordered a bowl of French onion soup because it was the cheapest thing on the menu. After about forty-five minutes of awkward and forced conversations, our food still hadn’t come. Finally, Jefferson and I decided to tell the waiter that we had to go because we were wasting valuable drinking time. The Castle was too rich for our tastes. We weren’t mad about it at all. They were extremely busy with the wedding setup, and it was fine. Jefferson and I figured we could stop by our favorite sports bar in town later.

However, Jimmy didn’t have it. He found a waiter and demanded to speak to a manager. The manager came to our table, and Jimmy just let him have it. He told the manager how it was my birthday party, and I was his girlfriend’s best friend, and how dare they ruin this lovely occasion with their negligence. May looked at him with hearts in her eyes, as if he was her hero. The May I was friends with before Jimmy waltzed into the picture would’ve been happy with a curly fries and a milkshake at Arby’s.

I was so embarrassed. Everyone seated in the restaurant area could hear him. Furthermore, it was a crock of shit. I never would’ve picked The Castle had I been given a choice, and he could care less about ruining my birthday. Instead, he used his so-called heroic behavior to manipulate May. The manager comped us with our entire meal and gave us free dessert. I’m not going to lie and say the chocolate peanut butter mousse pie wasn’t delicious. Still, the whole time we were eating there, I just wanted to crawl under the table and hide. From Jefferson’s eyes, I could tell he felt the same way.

By the time we left The Castle, it was almost four. Most of the wineries closed at five. The Castle wasn’t near any of the wineries. It was on the north side of the lake, surrounded by expensive houses, overpriced hotels, and bed and breakfasts. It would take anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes to get to the wineries that we usually went to, which meant we could only fit one more in.

May hadn’t gotten to any of the wineries yet, and she wanted to go to a specific one. It wasn’t one of my preferred wineries. In fact, it sold champagne, not wine. However, neither Jefferson nor I wanted to deny her request since it was the only one she would get to go to today, so we agreed. We had driven in separate cars since we arrived separately, and we said we would meet them in the winery’s parking lot.

We beat them there. We thought about going in without them since there was so little time left to drink. Still, We felt guilty about starting without them, mainly because May hadn’t been to a single tasting today. Finally, after about twenty minutes, Jimmy’s Mercedes pulled up next to Jefferson’s jeep. Jefferson and I got out of the car, but they didn’t. A quick glance in the windows showed us that they were arguing.

After a few minutes, May came out of the car. She looked down at the ground awkwardly and seemed very uncomfortable. She told me that Jimmy was mad at me, and I embarrassed them with how I acted in the restaurant. He thought I was immature and held May back from success and adulthood. Excuse me? I wasn’t the one who threw a temper tantrum because the food was taking too long. She said that Jimmy tried so hard to make my birthday lunch special, and he thought I didn’t appreciate it. She said she wouldn’t go into the winery with us because she agreed with him. Jefferson and I were dumbfounded.

That was the last time I spoke to May in years. It was obvious what happened. Jimmy made her choose between him and me. She chose him. She chose a gaslighting abuser over her best friend. After my birthday, she dropped me from her life. She didn’t answer my phone calls, text messages, or emails. She even blocked me on social media.

Luckily, her story has a happy ending. Sometime between my 27th birthday and 2012, she reached out to me. She was in a long-distance relationship and knew I had been in one for years. It seemed she had kept tabs on my life even after she stopped talking to me. Our friendship was never the same before she met Jimmy, but we grew close again. She was even a bridesmaid at my wedding, and that’s where I met Drew for the first time. May and Drew got married in 2018, on my birthday, ironically. I went to her wedding and was thrilled to see her looking so radiant. She had her first child in 2019, a girl named Evelyn, who they called Evie. Last summer, she gave birthday twins Emily and Finn. Drew seems like a good guy, and May deserves one after all the shitty relationships she went through.

We still haven’t talked about why we stopped being friends after my twenty-seventh birthday. It doesn’t matter anymore. But the axe forgets; the tree remembers.

lj survivor friendzy

lyssa027 — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 16:00:37 GMT

Lj Idol Two: What really matters

lyssa027 — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 00:00:04 GMT

Thank you to everyone, who commented on my last entry. I'm sorry I didn't comment back, this year has been very overwhelming with teaching, covid, demanding and crazy parents at school, and a lot of work in graduate school. But please know I appreciated everyone of your comments.

This is a dark story. I tried to list all the triggers in the cut, but in case I missed one, please know that this could be triggering. I went on a dark path with this entry because that's where the prompt brought me, but it does have a happy ending.

Once upon a time, there was a princess. For the most part, she has a good childhood. She had a lot of friends at school. They would draw pictures for the lunch ladies and do each other’s hair during recess. She also enjoyed school, even though her ADHD and dyscalculia made it hard to learn math and stay organized. She also got along with her family. She would watch her brother, the prince, play Final Fantasy and Dragon Warriors on Nintendo while she wrote long musicals on her typewriter for her My Little Pony dolls.
Every winter, the princess’ grandparents would take her to visit Florida, where their castle was located. The princess loved going to see them. Every morning, her grandfather and her would visit the swimming pool at their estate and race each other across the room. The princess always won the swim races, but she didn’t realize that he was letting her win since she was so young. During the day, they would take the princess to Disney World, and she would ride Space Mountain with her grandpa while her grandma watched. After they came home from Disney World, grandma always let her eat Neapolitan ice cream. The strawberry was her favorite.

The royal family would take a weeklong trip to their lake castle every summer. The prince and princess would go swimming in the lake and eat lots of delicious food like fudge, ice cream sundaes, pasta, and pancakes. There were two amusement parks near the castle. At night, the royal family would walk up and down the main street of the lake town and play games. The queen and the princess spend hours in arcades trying to win tickets to get even more stuffed animals for the princess’ bedroom, while the king and prince preferred playing miniature golf.

Suddenly tragedy struck the royal family. The queen was in a horrible accident. She slipped on ice in the winter, plummeted down the stairs, and injured her knees. To help the queen, a doctor prescribed her blue pills. At the same time, the king lost his kingdom. The king and queen decided to move the princess and the prince to a nearby country called Flytena, where nobody knew them. The problem with Flytena was that the citizens of it were wealthy. They wore fancy clothes, they drove expensive cars, and they looked down on people who weren’t as rich as they were.

The former king struggled to find a new job. He was over-qualified for most jobs because he was had been a king, and nobody wanted to hire a new monarch. The queen lived in a blue pill-induced haze. The former royal family had to go on food stamps, and sometimes there would be weeks when all the princess had to eat was ramen noodles.
The former queen knew that the only way to rise up to the lifestyle that she had grown accustomed to was for the princess to marry rich. So, she started attending all the public events. At one of the events, she met a lord named Michael. Lord Michael was a successful actor, and he ran a prestigious art academy within Flytena. He also had a son that was the princess’ age named Jason. The former queen started kissing up to Lord Michael. She took the little money her family had and gave it to Lord Michael to invest in his art academy. She volunteered to be on the board of admissions at the art academy, which helped the princess be accepted at the school on scholarship. The former queen ensured all of the princess’ classes were with Jason.

The princess didn’t really like the art academy. She couldn’t sing very well, nor could she dance because she was klutzy and absentminded. She wasn’t an outstanding actress either. She got parts in all the shows and musicals because of her mother, but she didn’t enjoy it. At the same time, the former queen started inviting Lord Michael and Jason over to the house. The princess did not like Jason. He would behave perfectly when other adults were watching, but his true nature came out as soon as they went away. He was sneaky, manipulative, cunning, and a liar. He knew that he had power over the princess because of his fortune, and it wasn’t a secret that the former queen wanted her to have a future with Jason, especially when she kept finding reasons to leave the two alone together. But one day, Jason crossed the line.

The former queen and Lord Michael had gone to a board meeting for the art academy. The former king drank too much mead and had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the bedroom. The prince was making the right connections at a classmate’s birthday party. It was a late night. Jason was flipping through the cable channels when he found an adult movie. The movie had a man forcing a woman to strip while touching her in private places. Jason said he wanted to act out the film with the princess. The princess tried to say no, but Jason promised her that if she didn’t do what he wanted her to do that he would ruin her future. The princess was nine years old. Jason held her around her neck tightly with his massive forearms while he ran his other hand all over her body. He promised that he would kill her if she ever said anything.
The princess was scared. When the former queen came home from her meeting, she told her mother what had happened. Her mother called her a fucking liar and said she was just trying to get attention. The princess figured that if her own mother didn’t believe what was happening to her, nobody else would. This continued until the princess was 12.

When the princess was 12, she thought she had a small group of good friends. Unfortunately, the art academy was a small school, and everybody knew everyone. Also, in Flytena, money was the actual language of communication. During an overnight retreat for a choir tour, the princess roomed with some of her friends. Her friends thought it would be fun to play “Truth or Dare.” One girl, named Allison, asked the princess, “Truth or Dare?” The princess was afraid of choosing dare because the girls, who had already chosen dare, had been forced to do crazy things like prank call strangers flash each other body parts. One girl had even been dared to climb out of the hotel window and walk on the window ledge to visit the boy’s hotel room. Jason was staying in that hotel room. So, the princess said, “Truth.” Allison asked her about the scariest experience she had ever had.
Jason kept on touching her when they were alone together. But now that she was older and her body was more developed, he was making more demands. Now he wanted her to touch him. He also tried to penetrate her in different places with his fingers. He was also much bigger than her. When he grabbed her to hold her in place, his fingers left a huge, bruised handprint on her fair skin, and he promised to do much worse if she said anything to anyone. The princess was sick of being scared and having no support. The former queen was useless because she was strung out on too many blue pills. The former king was in a deep depression and often found himself tucking in bottles of mead instead of his own children.

On the other hand, the prince was living the perfect life. He had the correct friends, was invited to the right parties, and made the proper social connections. The princess thought that maybe if she told her friends what was happening to her, they could help her, so she told them all about being molested.

Unfortunately, her plan backfired. The girls immediately confronted Jason about what he had done to the princess. Jason denied everything she said. He said she was a loser who just wanted attention and longed to be popular. He called a slut. He told everyone she let him do things to her because she was easy. He said that her family was poor, and they didn’t care what happened to the princess if it brought them a better life. The princess ran away from the room, crying. Maybe it was her fault. Her mother thought she wanted attention, and perhaps she brought this upon herself.

As the princess got older, her life didn’t get any better. Her grades were horrible in upper school because she couldn’t focus on her classes. The affluent students who attended the academy would make fun of her in every class. They called her things like a lesbian, and boys offered her money to suck their dicks. They made fun of her clothes and her strange accent from her former life as a princess. She was a social pariah. The instructors looked the other way when these incidents happened in class because her family had no money, and without money, nothing mattered.

As soon as the former princess graduated from the art academy and went to a university, bad things started happening again. The former queen was taking more and more of her blue pills and becoming violent and angry towards her daughter. She hit, punched, and threw things at her daughter because she claimed that everything was the daughter’s fault, and that’s why the reputation was as bad as it was.

The former princess struggled through university. Her grades were horrible, and she had no drive or ambition to better herself. She tried meeting friends, but since she had no positive social role models from her childhood and adolescence, she didn’t know what a good person was and gravitated towards the first group of people that accepted her. They introduced her to drugs. She really liked drugs. She loved how they turned off her brain and made her forget how awful her life was. She enjoyed the taste of mead like her father had. It was so easy for her to just drink some mead or do some drugs and forget about life whenever something went wrong.
She had too much to drink and smoked too many things one night. She woke up naked in her dorm room surrounded by empty kegs of mead and weed remnants to the sound of cops raiding her room. All of her former friends blamed her. They said she was a druggie and a slut and would wind up living on the streets and selling her body for drug money. There were so many derogatory stories about her reputation that it didn’t matter what she said to defend herself. Finally, her father and mother had to come to the university to talk to the police. After they spoke to the police, her mother beat her and further emphasized that she was a fuck up.

The rest of university was not much better. The princess met her first boyfriend, but he didn’t come from the right “type” of family. He wasn’t much better than Jason. He was neurotic and violent. He needed to know where she was twenty-four seven. If she did something that he didn’t like, he would cut himself with razor blades, force her to look at the bleeding cuts, and tell her that she made him do that. He wasn’t violent with her, but he was violent and threw dishes at her. He also wasn’t committed to her despite his neuroticism. He cheated on her four times. She wanted to break up with him. She knew he wasn’t a good person, but at the time, he was the only person that showed her any positive affection and affirmation. She was relieved when he broke up with her for the final time for a barely legal teenager, as sad she was because they had been together for a long time.

Knowing that her family was never going to support her, she got a job working at a daycare for special needs children. One day, her mother called her and started yelling at her at work. She accused her daughter of stealing her blue pills and taking them herself. She called her daughter many things, a drug addict, a disappointment, and the worst mistake of her life. She had such a bad panic and anxiety attack that the school had to call 911.

A few days later, she returned to her job. Her coworkers showed empathy and understanding instead of telling her what a horrible person she was. They told the former princess that she deserved better. They told her how the blue pills messed with her mother’s head and sense of reality. They told her that she was intelligent and creative. They told her how amazing she was when she worked with the students. They encouraged her to go back to school. She confided in them about everything she had gone through growing up, and instead of judging her, they supported her. The princess had never heard such positive things said about her, and that’s when she realized what really mattered. In her case, it was validation.

Fifteen years later, the princess was finally living the life she had always deserved. She went back to school, got a special education degree, along with several other degrees, and graduated Magna cum laude. She moved far from her family to be a special education preschool and met a lord on her own. His name was Justin. Lord Justin encouraged Princess Lyssa to be her own person. He supported her interests, like playing video games and reading books. He was willing to try new activities to make her happy, like taking road trips and visiting foreign kingdoms. He didn’t force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. If she had a bad day, he didn’t tell her it was her fault or blame her. He listened to her. He showed empathy. The two of them got married and adopted five cats. Princess Lyssa realized that money and reputation don’t matter for the first time in her life. It’s finding the right people who give you validation and acceptance and do not treat you like shit. It took her a long time to realize what really matters.

With her family far behind her, Princess Lyssa lived life with gusto. She started going to a therapist, who made her realize that the former queen had a narcissistic personality disorder. He explained that every bad thing in life was not Princess Lyssa’s fault. She made lots of friends at her school. Some of her coworkers even unofficially adopted her into their families. They treated her like the sister they never had, but they always needed in their family. They remembered her birthday. They listened to her and respected her. She even got made it to the finals two years in a row for the teacher of the year. She gained self-confidence, and even decided to go back to graduate school after Lord Justin, her friends, and her coworkers encouraged her.

And Princess Lyssa lived happily ever after.

Lj Idol One: Black Rainbow

lyssa027 — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 16:54:18 GMT

Trigger warning: cancer, needles, death, ivf, pregnancy

The worst part about getting uterine cancer was that I wouldn’t be able to have kids. When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than to be a mom. I wanted to be a better mom than my mother, who suffers from narcissistic personality disorder was. I was convinced I would have twin girls since there are twins in the family, and it had skipped a few generations.

I was the type of child who always had a list of baby names for my future daughters. When I was younger, my favorite names were Kansas like the state (I think I had misheard Candice when I was little) and Isis, like the Egyptian goddess since I was obsessed with mythology when I was younger. Then, I wanted to name at least one of my daughters, Ashleigh, for a while. But my boyfriend at the time said if we ever got married that we were not naming any child Ashleigh because his cat was named Ashley. There was also Jane because I loved Jane’s Addiction at the time, and Serah because Final Fantasy XIII was my favorite game, yet to this day, I haven’t beaten it because I wouldn’t say I like it when things end.

When Justin and I first started dating. He didn’t want kids. He had an abusive dad and a very emotionally distant mother and didn’t think he could be a good father. But somehow, I convinced him that we would be great parents. We decided if we ever had a daughter, we would name her Zoe. We were constantly debating about the name of a second girl.

I got diagnosed with uterine cancer in February 2014. Justin and I had just gotten engaged last May. I had been experiencing heavy vaginal bleeding and clots the size of my hand since August. I lost so much blood that I was anemic, and there were days when I would be teaching at school, and I would have to call the office and get coverage for my class because I couldn’t leave a bathroom. My gynecologist tried several birth control pills, but nothing helped with the breakthrough bleeding. In February was when they finally decided to do a hysteroscopy. Two days later, when my gynecologist called me during school hours and told me we needed to make an appointment, I knew something was wrong. They had found a polyp in my uterus, and they biopsied it. It was cancerous.

My gynecologist told me that they had found it early. It was barely even stage one. So she told me I wouldn’t need chemotherapy or radiation or another kind of cancer treatment. But unfortunately, I needed to get a complete hysterectomy. After she told me the news, I went to my car and started crying. The first person I told was my dad. I didn’t know how to break it to him that he might never have a grandchild from me. And I had no idea how to tell Justin. He was so against having children when we first started dating, and I had finally gotten him excited about being a dad, and now he might never even have the chance to be one.

Since I was so young, I was barely even 30; my gynecologist told me that I could go through IVF. Some foundations paid for all the medication needed for IVF for young cancer patients who had never had chemotherapy or radiation before. She warned me that IVF was highly unpleasant, but she was confident that my prognosis was good because we were such a young couple.

IVF was very painful. I am awful with needles, so Justin had to do every injection.
The medicine, combined with the plethora of hormones from uterine cancer, made me feel like I had PMS for over a month. I ended up going on FMLA early because I was too temperamental from all the hormones floating through my body. The first cycle of IVF failed because of a giant ovarian cyst. The second cycle succeeded. They got ten embryos.

Waiting by my phone for day-to-day updates from the embryologist was nerve-wracking. Of the ten embryos, only four got fertilized. Only one made it to the blastocyst stage, but they ensured that it was a healthy embryo. The problem wasn’t me; it was Justin. His sperm was missing parts of its body, and he had an extremely low sperm count. The IVF doctor told us that we could do one more cycle but recommended using a sperm donor for a higher success rate. Hysterically, I begged Justin to ask his brother and every one of his name friends if they were willing to donate sperm. None of them were. The one embryo we had became our rainbow baby.

The hysterectomy was painful. Not only was my uterus enlarged from cancer, but I also had a severe case of endometriosis that no doctor had ever found. In addition, I gained about forty pounds after the surgery because my body was confused from all the hormone issues, and my boobs went from a size D to a size G. Not only couldn’t I have any children, I felt like a stranger in my own body. To this day, I still can’t look in the mirror because I hate everything staring back at me. But at the time, I was okay with this because eventually, we would have a baby, and it wouldn’t matter what I went through as long as I could have my child.

About a year later, we were ready to hatch our child. I had a former parent of a student willing to be our surrogate. We planned to do the implantation in the summer. We went to the IVF clinic, and they recommended genetic testing of our embryo, which they had not done at the time because it was not required, and they hadn’t seen a need to do it. They didn’t seem worried, so we weren’t either.

We talked about how excited we were to be parents and what the baby’s room would look like. Justin was excited to teach the baby everything about video games, how to build his first computer and math. I couldn’t wait to introduce the baby to my favorite books from when I was younger. I wanted the baby to take swim classes and play soccer. Justin wanted to baby to do UIL and academic decathlon. If the baby were a girl, her name would be Zoe Snow. Zoe means “life” and Snow because she had been frozen. “Snow” was going to be for my great-grandfather Stanley, who passed away in 2016. In Jewish culture, we name children after deceased relatives. If the baby were a boy, he would be Jace Holden. His name wasn’t as meaningful compared to Zoe. Jace was for a planeswalker in Magic the Gathering, which is Justin’s favorite card game, and it was one of the few boy’s names we both didn’t hate. Holden was from Catcher in The Rye, my favorite book in elementary school (I was a very gifted reader). The H in Holden was for my Papa Herbert, who had passed away while I was in Israel on birthright in 2010. We decided we wouldn’t tell anyone about the baby until it was close to its due date, except a few close friends and family members. We were ecstatic.

A few days later, we heard back from them. Our embryo was a boy. He had been missing chromosome pairs. We could still implant him, but there wasn’t a very good chance of him being successfully implanted. Even if he had implanted, he wouldn’t have made it full-term. If he had somehow made it to full-term, he might have died shortly afterward. If he had grown into a child, he would have had many problems. He was missing chromosome pair 8. The issues that result from that include growth deficiencies, mental retardation, and malformations of the skull and face, including microcephaly. They could also be cardiac abnormalities and genital defects, especially in males.

They asked us what we wanted to do. We decided to destroy the embryo. I couldn’t imagine trying to bring a child into this world when they might never even be able to enjoy the world they live in. Also, IVF and surrogate implantation were expensive, and Texas doesn’t cover any of the costs for a gestational carrier. So our rainbow baby turned into a black rainbow, and we would probably never be able to have a baby of our own.

I’ve had friends offer to be a gestational carrier, and while the thought is appreciated, what we need is somebody willing to donate their eggs, so we can try to make more embryos. There are some people who I think are enough like me personality-wise that if they donated their eggs, the embryo would be like it was mine even though I wouldn’t be genetically related to it. But how do you even ask somebody to do that? I couldn’t ask somebody to go through painful medical treatments to give me some of their eggs so that we could be parents. So as much as I want to have a baby of my own that’s at least somewhat genetically related to us, it seems like an impossible dream. And I don’t want to put my hope into another rainbow.

No promises, but just in case...

lyssa027 — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 16:57:23 GMT

New season of LJ idol, not sure if I'll have time to participate, but I'm signing up just in case I can work it in with my schedule

The real lj idol, week 26: Open-topic

lyssa027 — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 17:19:13 GMT

This is for week 26 of therealljidol. The topic is an "open topic" I've got something different for you all this week. This is the start of what could [and may still be] a longer fiction story based on a conversation I had with BFFL Hillary xlovebecomesher recently. It's not the usual creative nonfiction autobiographical stuff I usually write, but I hope everyone enjoys it and considers voting for me. We've reached The Top 14!

It all started at a Starbucks.

Every Monday, Rose would bring her laptop to Starbucks. She would sit at the same booth in the corner with her rose gold MacBook. She would order a skinny vanilla latte. Then she would log onto Facebook. She was a proud independent fashion retailer, and she held her virtual parties like clockwork every Monday.

She took out her bedazzled compact and double-checked to make sure her makeup and hair were perfect. She reached into the large beach bag that she kept by her side and started lining up her inventory in the empty space next to the wall. The summer collection was amazing… red leggings with white stars, blue and yellow camo print with the American flag, black leggings with flag-printed peace signs… red, white, and blue tie-dyed tee-shirts, red and white striped tank tops, a navy dress with white yachts and red anchors… Her followers were going to love it.

She opened the Zoom app and picked out the perfect background. It was a gorgeous room with a chandelier with tear-shaped crystal hanging down, a white couch with colorful accent pictures, and a glass coffee table covered with a vase of orchids and glossy art books. She checked her Hermès watch that she had bought on the streets during a sponsored trip to New York City. She was satisfied her façade was complete, as her customers would accept nothing less. Only five minutes to go, she thought… And that’s when she spotted him.

He wasn’t the greatest looking man she had ever seen. That would be Brad Pitt, especially in Legends of the Fall. But there was something about him. He sat with a small group of both men and women. A few of them had laptops and some of them had notebooks. He seemed to be leading them in some sort of conversation. She wondered what they were talking about. She wondered who they were. However, before she could contemplate more about him, her phone started beeping. It was meeting time.

She opened her app, and started admitting people into her chat.

“Hey everyone, this is Rose, and I can’t wait to show you the gorgeous clothes that I have for you this month. Remember guys, this is limited qualities, so you have to be fast if you want to claim the amazing bargains, I have for you today.”

Her meeting ended after about two hours. She had sold a decent amount of her inventory, but not enough to make a dent in the fees she still owed to her credit card company. He was gone. She was curious about him. She walked over to the counter and flagged over a pierced barista with purple hair. She had seen him working here almost every week for a month. Maybe he could give her a clue as to who that was. The sunlight from outside the windows caught her cubic zirconia ring and made little rainbows on the ceiling.

“Can I help you?” the barista asked.

“Who was that man? Who were those people who were over there?” She shook her left hand in the direction as she pointed, the chunky bangles on her wrist made noise.

“I think they’re some sort of writing group,” the barista said, “They meet here every week. They usually come on Tuesdays, but they came on Monday this week.”

“What kind of writing group?”

“Have you ever heard of Camp NanoWriMo?”

“No, but I can google it,” Rose said, and with that, she walked back to her booth, gathered up her things, and walked outside to her car.

Rose drove back to her apartment. She lived in a small studio apartment in Bedford, Massachusetts. She unlocked her door. The apartment smelled like smoke and kitty litter. Right on cue, her runty black cat came over and rubbed against her legs. “You don’t love me,” Rose muttered, “You just want treats.” She walked over to the card table that doubled as her kitchen table and picked up the bag of catnip scented treats. She threw a few on the ground, and her eager cat started to munch on them. Then she threw herself down on the stained mattress that doubled as her bed on the floor. She grabbed a cigarette from a candy bowl she kept next to her bed and lit it. She blew smoke rings, but it only came out as a solid puff of smoke. She started googling things on her cracked cellphone.

“Hmm. NanoWriMo?” She found a bunch of pointless websites. It looked like some stupid writing contest. She tried to make her search more specific by entering NanoWriMo plus Bedford,” and that when she found him.

He went by CallMeIshmael14 on the NanoWriMo website. He was the liaison for the Bedford area. They had a Facebook page. It was dedicated to aspiring writers and authors, who wanted feedback on novels they were trying to write. His real name was Greg Benjamin. [Rose Benjamin had a nice ring to it, she thought] Unfortunately, other than that, she couldn’t see anything else about him.

She didn’t know what it was about him, but she felt drawn to him, and God knows she could use a man. Maybe a man could help get her out of the debt she was in, she thought as she glanced around at her tiny apartment. She decided to sign up for this writing contest… at least that’s what she thought it was. But she didn’t want to be her. She wanted to reinvent herself. She would make herself become whatever it is that she thought Greg would like.

She logged out of her own personal Facebook page, and decided to make a new email address… She couldn’t be Rose here, she needed to be someone else. She decided to use her middle name: Linda. She remembered all the old jokes from high school, where your middle name and the street you grew up on would be your “pornstar name.” Therefore, she could be Linda Alcott. She registered the email address and started a new Facebook account. She tried to join Greg’s group immediately but saw it was a private group. She skimmed all the rules… stuff about respecting others, not being racist, trigger warnings, and bullshit like that. Then she clicked “join the group.”

She went back to CallMeIshmael14’s NanoWriMo profile and saw she couldn’t read that either. She decided to sign up for that website too. She tried to think of an “artsy” name to match his, but aside from Harlequin romance novels that she found at Walmart, she didn’t read very much. The last “real” book she had read was Twilight. They had made a movie about that, right? It must be a good book. She named herself BellaSwan14 and then went back to his profile.

He lived in Bedford. His birthday was at the beginning of November, which made him Scorpio. [Capricorns and Scorpios were compatible, right?]. He liked to listen to classic rock like Bon Jovi and Billy Joel while he wrote. He worked as an international stockbroker according to his profile. Rose’s eyes lit up as she read that. His favorite books were Frankenstein, Dracula, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and anything by Hemingway. Surely a well-known author like Hemingway had movies of his books, right?

Rose could not wait to meet him. She would just have to pretend she liked to write. Writing couldn’t be too hard. Poems just needed to rhyme. She could always just pretend to be an aspiring poet. Or maybe she could just write some sort of romance story. Everyone liked 5o Shades of Gray, right? She could write the next great romance novel.

She couldn’t do anything until she heard back from the Facebook group. Until then, she could just pray she ran into him. Wait… Didn’t the barista say they came on Tuesdays? Maybe she should go back to Starbucks tomorrow. Or every day until she saw him.

She put her phone away and laid back on the pile of leggings that served as her pillow. She couldn’t wait to become Mrs. Rose Benjamin.

Lj Idol: Week 25 [I think?] The Catbird's Seat

lyssa027 — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 15:49:26 GMT

This was written for week 25 of therealljidol. The Theme is the Catbird's Seat. I hope you enjoy reading this and please consider voting for me and any of the other talented writers who are participating in therealljidol. Voting info shall follow once I get it.

I have track blood in my family. My Great Uncle Irvine won the 1944 Olympic Trials for the decathlon and would have represented the United States in the Olympics weren’t canceled due to World War II. He competed in the 1948 Olympics and came in eighth place. He eventually became the coach at the University of Pennsylvania and coached the 1988 Olympics. Everybody knew who Moon Mondschein was in the track world.

My Grandpa Stanley was also a track star. He attended NYU and was an All-American in the shot put and discus. He competed for the United States in the Maccabiah Games, where he was a double gold medal winner for both of those events. In 1954, he also set a world record in the shotput. At one point, he was one of the top 5 shotput throwers in the world. He would have competed in the 1954 Olympics if it wasn’t for a knee injury.

My dad was also a track star. He ran the 200- and 400-meter races and set several records at his high school. He was also an anchor in the mile relay. He was an all-state runner by his senior year and went on to run in college. Because of his last name, everybody who was anyone in the track circles knew who he was. One of his favorite stories is that when he was in college, running the mile relay in the Penn Relays, there was some sort of mess up with the timing and they were unable to record his split. But since he was related to Moon Mondschein and Grandpa Stanley, the coaches in the stands all had timed him instead.

Therefore, when I got to high school, it was expected of me that I join the track team too because of my track blood.

I guess that’s why it’s sort of twisted that I hated track. Freshman year was the worst. I was never allowed NOT to run track. My dad did not give me a choice. I couldn’t just come straight home after school, but I never wanted to be at track practice either, so I got very creative. I would feign make-up labs with my physical science teacher, but instead, I would sit in the auditorium of my high school and watch rehearsals for our spring musical. Sometimes, I would go home with my friends, who were lucky enough not to have to participate in a sport and be back at school, in track clothes just before my dad picked me up. Other times I would feign injuries such as twisted ankles and sprained ankles. I’d go to the trainer. The track team was considered to be not nearly as important as our baseball or softball teams, so by the time the trainer was done attending to their injuries, and finally wrapped my ankle, the practice was pretty much over.

Why did I hate track you ask? Well, it was because the pressure from my dad made it miserable. My dad was reliving his track career through me. I never felt like I was ever going to be as good as him at running. He would constantly critique my running form. He’d compare his times to my time. He’d make a big deal about what I ate at meals. And all I ever heard from him was that I needed to prove I inherited the track blood that coursed through the veins of our family.

I couldn’t completely get away with skipping track altogether. My high school had a strict policy where all students were allowed to participate in sports teams with no exceptions. I would probably attend 2-3 practices a week, out of 6. I still participated in all the track meets especially because there were freshman heats. My dad came to all of my meets. He charted my race times. I ran the 100 -meter and 200-meter relay because those were the races that they basically stuck anyone, who wanted to run track, in. I wasn’t the worst runner. In fact, I was one of the better freshman runners, especially at my school. But at the same time, I didn’t really care. All I heard from my dad was how I had so much potential and needed to work harder so I could be as good as he was when he was in high school.

After the season ended, the track captain told me I needed to stop by Coach Wallace’s office to return my uniform and get an award. What award?

After school, I stopped by his office and gave him my uniform. I asked him where my award was. What award? He screamed at me and lectured me about my piss poor attitude and told me that I didn’t even deserve the freshman letter in track that he was required to give him and if he could hold it back, he would.

During my sophomore year, I decided that I wanted to hurdle. I was always a really good jumper, and I thought it looked fun. Also, my dad had never hurdled, so it was finally an event that he couldn’t compare himself to me in.

I loved running the hurdles. There were so few of us that were crazy enough to attempt them and it became my event. My attitude in track completely changed. I started to look forward to 6 days a week practice. In winter track, I ran the 55-meter hurdle dash. I wasn’t the best and I was far from the worst, and I enjoyed it.

There are two hurdle events in Spring track. There were the 400-meter low hurdles and the 100-meter-high hurdles. I hated the 400 hurdles. I ran them in the first meet of the season, and after one race, I literally thought I was going to die. I walked up to Coach Wallace and told him I was never running the 40o hurdles again. He looked at me and told me that he thought I finally changed, but he was wrong.

Junior year was when I decided to quit soccer. My dad thought that I need to play a sport for all three seasons in high school. Therefore, he decided I needed to sign up for cross country since he loved cross country.

Needless to say, I HATED cross country. I hated running distances. I had a horrible sense of direction, and when we went on street runs, not only did I get lost, but I was dead last. I reverted back to my old tactics, feigning ankle, and foot pain. Football was so much higher on the sport scale than cross country, so I was really late to practice. I would also miss meets. I’d be waiting to get my ankle wrapped, and the bus for meets left before I had even gotten my ankle taped.

The final meet of the season was on a Saturday. Coach Wallace told me I had better be there, or else. I joined the team on the bus to the meet, feeling like a complete stranger since I had skipped so many practices and other meets. The course was at a local place named Darlington Park. I lined up for the race. I don’t know if it was my horrible sense of direction or just general lack of geography, but I got lost during the race. The other runners were so much better than me and so much more conditioned than me, so they were so far ahead of me and I had nobody to follow.

I finished dead last. By the time I found my way to the finish line. Everyone had left. The only one waiting there was my dad. Coach Wallace hadn’t even bothered to wait for me to finish the race. He had even left on the bus with the team knowing that my dad could drive me home himself. My dad handed me my participation medal, and we walked back to his car together.

That was when I decided that I needed to stop being a brat.

Junior year winter track my entire attitude changed. I showed up early for every practice. I befriended the underclassmen, who had joined the team that year. I did my 55 hurdles and ran the 300-meter race. I made it all the way to the county meet for the hurdles. I earned my first varsity letter.

During spring track, the team was short a 400-hurdle racer to qualify for the 400-hurdle relay. Coach Wallace looked at me and told me that he needed me to run the race. He didn’t care if I came in dead last, as long I ran the race. I agreed. Our 400-hurdle team came in first place in the league and eventually in the county. I still hated that race and felt like I was going to die at the end of it, but it was nothing that a bottle of orange Powerade couldn’t fix. I anchored the mile relay team and we also placed in the league championship, where I ran my best split ever at 67 seconds. I placed in almost every high hurdle event. I never quite mastered three-stepping between hurdles, but I was still good enough to qualify for state. I became the “go-to” runner. Whenever we were short in a sprinting event, I was the person they called on. I started to love track and finally appreciate my track blood.

But nothing matched the feelings I felt at the varsity letter ceremony in the spring when Coach Wallace gave me the sportsmanship award for the season. And that was my own personal catbird’s seat.

Lj Idol: Week 24/intersection, take 2

lyssa027 — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 14:19:36 GMT

This was written for week 24 of therealljidol. This is an intersection piece that was written with the very talented viagra. The topic was the same as last week, only this week my piece is based on the quote "I'm the Usain Bolt of Running From My Problems." I hope you enjoy reading this and please read viagra 's amazing half as well here: https://viagra.livejournal.com/133027.html

My entire life, I’ve been known to try things, give up on them, and then quit them altogether. I know what you’re thinking… you need to keep trying something to get better at it, but I’ve never been the type to listen to other people… Oh and I hate failure, there’s that too.

When I was about four years old, my parents enrolled me in dance class. That’s when it all started. I’m not sure why my parents chose to enroll me in ballet. I guess they loved how I looked in my pink tutu with my blond curls. People would say I look “like an angel, but I was never graceful enough to dance “like an angel.” With a few weeks, when it was apparent that my two left feet were never meant to be a ballerina, the teacher told me parents that I should quit. She told me that they were wasting their money, and I didn’t have any potential as a dancer. Perhaps they should enroll me in art class?

When I was nine, my Aunt Shari took me to see my first Broadway musical in New York City. We saw “A Secret Garden.” I loved it. After we saw it, I spent many hours in my room recording myself singing the songs loudly on my tape recorder. When a local theater group posted a sign for auditions for “Annie,” I told my parents that I wanted to try out. I spent hours in my room, listening to the soundtrack over and over again. When I auditioned, I wanted to sing the best rendition of “Tomorrow” that they ever heard.

The audition finally came around. I sat in the waiting room with hundreds of girls my age. Some of them were even wearing the signature red wig. They called my name. I went in, and thought I was awesome. I even got a callback. A few days later, I found out that I got the role of “nameless orphan number 5.” I mean it wasn’t the lead, but it was a start. I was sure after I got a musical or two under my belt, I would be the next big thing… Maybe I could even audition to be young Cosette in Les Misérables. This was the start of something big, I just knew it.

When I was fourteen, I finally gave up on acting. My career just wasn’t going anywhere. My theater friends had graduated from “nameless ensemble member number 2” to real lead roles such as Peter Pan in “Peter Pan” or Snoopy in “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown,” and I was still nameless, and my two left feet weren’t helping. Oh well, time to move on to something else, like sports.

When I was in ninth grade, I played soccer. My soccer phase lasted for about two years. It wasn’t that I minded being on the bench so much, it gave me a lot of time to appreciate nature and the changing trees. The coach was probably just giving everyone playing time. But then in the fall of my junior year, when all the underclassmen were supposed to be promoted from JV to Varsity, he left me on JV and promoted a bunch of sophomores instead. Oh well, track and field sounded more interesting anyway.

In eleventh grade, my best friends Cat and Juliet wanted me to take choir as my fine arts elective. The choir was going on a cruise over the spring break. They were both super excited about it, it was going to Bermuda and Nassau, but it was only open to choir and band members. Instruments were never really my thing, especially after a failed attempt to learn clarinet during fifth grade, but I could sort of sing…. I mean I did play numerous “name ensemble members” throughout several musicals. Choir would be the same thing, so I signed up for it.

During the first week of choir practice, the teacher had each of us audition so she could figure out what our range was. After my audition, she looked at me and told me I had a very unusual voice that had a lot of potential, but I would need several private lessons to reach that potential. Well, I had no time for that in-between cross-country practice and track practice, so I decided to quit choir and transfer to woodworking. Besides, my Spanish IV class that year was planning a trip to Madrid that summer, and drinking sangria in the Plaza Mayor cave bars sounded a lot better than singing weird songs in foreign languages to older people on a boat. And there were no “private lessons” that I needed to join that trip instead.

During my senior year, I had to go to my college orientation in May. I decided to enroll in Kutztown University with the intent to be a special education and elementary education major. During the orientation, we had to meet with our advisors to help pick the courses that we would take during freshman year of college. My advisor sat down with me and looked over my student file and noticed that I had a documented learning disability. He told me that most people, who have any sort of disability, whether it be dyslexia or dyscalculia probably weren’t going to be successful as an education major because it was very demanding. Well okay, I decided right then and there to change my major. Clinical Psychology sounded more like my jam anyway.

I decided to join the university’s track team. I was good enough to make state for hurdles during my senior year, and I was sure I’d fit right into Kutztown’s team. After about two weeks of practice, I decided it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t that I was the slowest runner, it was just too demanding of my time. Not only did I have a practice every day from 4 to 6, but I also had to go to study hall, two days a week from 7 pm to 10 pm. That interfered with my college experience. How the hell could I attend parties with my friends if I was always in practice or at study hall? So, I quit that too and spent my nights learning how to play “Circle of Death” and “Asshole” at various parties on Main Street. That was a much better use of my free time.

For the most part, life was pretty much that. I would start new hobbies. They included but were not limited to making beaded bracelets, making friendship bracelets out of floss, learning to play magic the gathering, digital photography editing, and collage making, but I would get bored of those after awhile, and quit. Then I would just move on to something else that seemed less challenging.

In 2014, I was diagnosed with uterine cancer. It was detected very early. It was at stage zero, but even stage zero had serious consequences. To get rid of cancer, I would have to get a complete hysterectomy. If I got a complete hysterectomy, I could never have biological children. I had just gotten engaged to my boyfriend at the end of the previous year, and now our future was completely changing, for once it was out of my control. For once, something quit on me, instead of me quitting on it.

My life changed after that. I didn’t like not being in control, and I didn’t like the idea of something else making my important decisions for me. It was time to stop being a quitter.

One of the first big steps I made was when Justin and I went to Utah to visit the national parks in winter. Our third park on the trip was Bryce Canyon. We really wanted to experience the national park, but none of the hikes were beginner-friendly. I spent the entire night reading the internet, obsessing over the hike and wondering if we could even do it. Or would we die of hypothermia at the bottom of a canyon? I googled hike reviews, hiking blogs, and read all the information about the hike we were thinking of doing. The hike to Queen’s garden had a descent of 357 feet and to get from the bottom of the canyon, we would have to ascend 550 feet on narrow switchbacks. We were pretty close to saying “fuck it” and just visiting the gift store, getting our passports stamped, and calling it a day. But no, we were determined. I mean, if we could kick cancer’s ass, we could do a hike, right?

It was one of the hardest hikes we’ve ever done. I tried to ignore the pessimistic voice in my head by blasting prog rock as we started the hike. When we got to the switchbacks, I was determined. I took them slowly, as in, I complained the entire way up a switchback, rested for like ten minutes before I attempted another, but I did it. For the first time, in basically my entire life, I didn’t quit something because it was too challenging or out of boredom.

My new hobby is painting. I’ve really been enjoying virtual “paint and sips.” I’ve spent so much money on canvas and acrylic paint that I could own my own art store. I tried to follow along and paint a picture of the Northern Lights last night. I’m really not sure what it looked like by the end. It looked like very colorful abstract art. I’ll never post it on Instagram because I don’t want anyone to see how bad it is. But do you know what? That’s okay, I’ll just pick another painting tomorrow. Maybe that one will turn out decent. I’m done being a quitter.

Lj Idol: Week 23/intersection

lyssa027 — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 18:52:25 GMT

This is my part of an intersection piece with xlovebecomesher [Unknown LJ tag]based on the prompt "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." You can read her part here: https://xlovebecomesher.livejournal.com/447942.html . These were written for week 23 of therealljidol please consider supporting us and the other talented writers who post there

I’ve always known I had a lisp. In elementary school, I went to speech therapy for it. I don’t remember much about the therapy. The therapist would always give me some sort of candy afterward, usually, a mini Hershey’s bar or a Dum Dum lollipop, and whenever I went back to class, I would be the envy of my classmates. I didn’t really stay in therapy for very long, perhaps a year or two. The therapists and my parents decided that since my speech impediment didn’t bother me or heed my progress in class, they would let me be. Also, in elementary school, nobody really cares what you sound like. I had my friends and my sports, and nobody ever told me I talked funny.

It all changed in middle school. My parents moved us to a different town after sixth grade. These were the days before the internet and cell phones, and it was like starting over. I left my friends and everything else behind. The teasing started during sixth-grade language arts class. We had to write about ourselves and read it to the class as a bonding activity. When it was my turn, I started to read my piece aloud and the snickering started as soon as I started saying “I liked to play soccer.” The teasing never stopped. People started making fun of the way I talked and would bully me for no reason. That’s when I decided I was never going to participate in a class ever again.

I did manage to scrape by middle school and high school with this strategy. I wouldn’t say I was an outstanding student or anything. I was an excellent note-taker and a visual learner, so I passed my classes. I was a decent writer, so my essays and reports were good. I was able to read at a sixth-grade level when I was three, so I would just read my textbooks from beginning to end, if there was something I didn’t understand in a lecture, as opposed to just asking a teacher a question. My grades were not stellar or anything. There was no way I was ever getting into an ivy league school with my grades or SAT scores, but I managed to graduate high school. I even got accepted into a college without participation. I decided to be a psychology major.

The summer before college, my mother made me work at my brother’s sleepaway camp because she thought I needed to learn to be more independent. I was relatively young, I didn’t turn 18 until September of my freshman year at college, and was not old enough to be a counselor so I worked in the office. For the most part, I enjoyed my office job. I had a lot of downtime so I had Tetris tournaments with the head counselor, wrote letters to my friends, and read books. However, part of the job included using a walkie-talking to contact other counselors and staff throughout the day and making daily announcements over the PA system. I cringed whenever I had to call somebody on the walkie or announce something to the camp. I could hear myself echo back, and my speech impediment seemed magnified one thousand times with every word. However, nobody ever said anything or made fun of me for how I sounded, so for the first time in a long time, I was accepting of my voice.

That all changed during Color War.

For those of you unfamiliar with camp traditions, a Color War is when the camp is divided into two different teams, usually gray or white and a blue. For several days after Color War breaks, the two teams compete against one another in various activities from sporting events to art projects to sing-alongs to dramatizations. The team with the highest total points at the end of three days is the winner. Color War is a BIG DEAL at all the camps I’ve attended and worked at. Campers and counselors look forward to the event the entire summer.

During Color War, I was a judge. I helped umpire the swim meets. All that meant was I stood at the end of the dock, where the race finished, and watching for the first-place swimmer and told the referee so it could be recorded. On the first morning of Color War, I was walking down to the waterfront. There was a group of older campers standing in front of the office, my brother included. They were doing the daily skit that got judged. Two of my brother’s cabinmates were talking. I stopped to watch, mostly out of curiosity.

“Counselor Shane come to the office,” the boy said. He exaggerated every syllable, spit purposely afterword, and made the s noises sound like th noises… That’s when I realized he was making fun of me in the skit. I couldn’t help it, I started crying, it didn’t matter that this was a fourteen-year-old camper, and I was about to be a college freshman. It hurt. I ran into the office, locked myself in the sports ball supply closet, and refused to come out. Even when Austin, the boy’s counselor came to apologize and tell me that he had punished his camper, I stayed put. That’s when I decided I was done talking again and refused to make any more announcements for the rest of the summer.

When I got to college, it was easy to disappear and be invisible during class. Most of my classes were in lecture halls with anywhere from 20 to 60 students. The professors never really demanded participation. There were a few students, who were more than happy to partake in class discussions, but there was also a good amount, who just took notes and attended lectures, and never said a word. I was one of them.

However, passing college was not as easy as passing middle and high school. I struggled with a lot of the material I was taught, mostly in math classes and humanities classes like art history. I didn’t want to ask questions in class because I was pretty sure that everyone would judge how I sounded and laugh at the way I talked and said my “s” and “z” sounds, and it would be just like middle school, high school, and sleepaway camp all-over-again. I did graduate college in four years, but by graduating, I mean I barely squeaked by with a 2.3 GPA.

I spent the next two years after graduation trying to figure out what I could do with my life. My undergraduate GPA and GRE scores weren’t impressive enough to get into a graduate program to continue my study of psychology. I didn’t want to apply for jobs at places where I would have to talk to customers like Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. I eventually got a job as a TA in an autism class.

I excelled at my job. I loved working with the students, and for the first time, I actually worked with mature adults. My coworkers became my best friends. They never said anything about my speech impediment, and when I brought it up to one of them, several years in the future, she said she didn’t even notice it. I finally felt accepted. My coworkers encouraged me to go back to school. They said getting into a graduate program didn’t matter, and I should try undergraduate again, and study special education because of how much I loved the students and how they reacted to me. With their support, I applied to college, again. The university I applied to accepted me as a second undergraduate degree student. At the end of the school year, I said a teary-filled goodbye to my co-workers and prepared to go to college again. But this time, I was more motivated.

The first day of my second attempt at a college, I decided things were going to be different this time. I was determined to not suck at school like I had all the years before. But I was still afraid to talk. It seemed every time I finally gained some confidence, something happened that made it all vanish.

My first class was an Introduction to Critical Writing. As soon as I walked into the classroom, I knew this was going to be a different sort of class. The desks were arranged in a circle, not rows. The professor, Dr. Marshall, sat at one of the desks, along with the students, who had already gotten there. I sat down and we waited for the rest of the students to show up. When they call got there, Dr. Marshall stood up and told us that “this wasn’t a regular class.” He went on to say that he didn’t give lectures, he didn’t give notes, and he didn’t give tests. We were the ones, who taught the class. Every class was taught by a student, who would research the article assigned, and they would be the ones prepping the lectures. We HAD to participate or we were not going to pass his class. There would be no exceptions. That was when I knew I had to finally speak and for the first time ever, since elementary school, I raised my hand to participate in a classroom discussion.

I ended up excelling in Dr. Marshall’s class. Once I started talking, I never stopped. My classmates appreciated my ideas and thoughts. I led the lectures I was assigned with glee. There were certain times throughout the semester when Dr. Marshall would ask me NOT to talk because he wanted to give other students a chance to express their ideas and thoughts, and I along with other outspoken classmates dominated the class.

One day, I was exhausted because I had been out babysitting until three am the night before and I was too tired to talk. Dr. Marshall ordered me to go to the cafeteria, get coffee or caffeinated tea and not return to class until I was awake enough to talk because my words mattered.

I graduated magna cum laude. I excelled in all of my classes. Everyone in the English department and the Special Elementary department knew me. I led study groups. I was the person that everyone went to when they needed help with a presentation or assignment. I was smart, my words mattered, and nobody cared what I sounded like.

To this day, I still keep in touch with Dr. Marshall. We exchange Christmas cards every year and send the occasional email. When I visit my family in NJ, I will sometimes drive to my old university to visit him. I hold him accountable for helping me believe in myself. He helped me realize that I was smarter than I had ever given myself credit for, and gave me back the self-confidence that had been lost then found only to be lost again so many times.

Week 22, lj idol: hiraeth

lyssa027 — Fri, 15 May 2020 02:12:59 GMT

This was written for week 22 of therealljidol if you like my story, please consider voting for me, and any of the other talented writers

I’ll never forget the day that my dad brought it home. It was the first night of Hanukah, and the four of us were lighting the menorah. After a dinner of microwaves latkes, which resulted in them being soggy, and Nana’s applesauce, it was time for presents. First, we got our individual presents. My brother got some Ghostbusters action figures, including a green Slimer one. I got some books. I was really into The Babysitter’s Club. Then my dad led us downstairs into the family room.

One thing I will always remember about the house that I grew up in was the family room. My brother and I probably spent ninety percent of our waking hours in that room. When my parents had bought the house, the family room had had a wet bar in it. Behind the wet bar were mirrored shelves that were meant to keep liquor on it. Instead, my dad had stacked his collection of science-fiction and fantasy novels on the shelves. On the bar itself, was my dad’s alphabetized record collection even though we didn’t have a working record player in the house. To the right of the room was a couch that turned into a bed. Just above the bed was a very wide and flat wooden windowsill. My favorite thing to do was to sit on the couch and play with my barbie and my little pony dolls on that windowsill. Across from the sleeper sofa was a brown leather sofa. This brown leather sofa had traveled with my dad since he had been a student at Penn. Next to the sofa, on the left, was a huge cabinet that was jammed with different toys, art supplies, and books. On the right, was another bookshelf that was built into the wall, also jammed with more of my dad’s book collection. The carpet of the family room was a shaggy lime green carpet that had come with the house.

My brother and I looked at each other, we had no idea why dad had brought us down here. Dad walked to the TV and turned it on. A weird musical tune came on, and the screen was bright blue. Words in white appeared on the screen, my dad and I read them aloud together as they appeared, “The world is veiled in darkness. The wind stops, the sea is wild, and the earth begins to rot. The people wait, there only hope is a prophecy…. ‘When the world is in darkness Four Warriors will come….’ After a long journey, four young warriors arrive, each holding an ORB.”

“What is it?” asked my brother, obviously as confused as I was.
“It’s a Nintendo, we got a Nintendo,” Dad said. I think he was more excited than we were.
“Where’s Mario?” my brother asked. The only things my brother and I knew about Nintendo was based on the cartoon shows we watched. Every Saturday, one of us would wake up around five am, usually me, and we were in charge of waking the other for a show based off of the game Dragon Warriors. I would sit through religious broadcasting in the morning until the show started at seven am. After school, we would come home and watch The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, The Legend of Zelda, and Captain N: The Game Master.
“We have it,” my dad said, “This game is called Final Fantasy. My secretary Beth got it for me. She saw the sword and shield on the box and I thought I would like it.”
“I want Mario,” my brother said.
“You and Jamie can play Mario tomorrow. Do you want to watch me play?”
“No,” said my brother, and he went upstairs.
“Do you want to watch me play?”
“Sure,” I said.

My dad sat down on the couch, and I sat next to him. He pressed a few buttons on the controller and entered the new game screen. He made himself a fighter called Dad. “Do you and Randy want to be in my game?”
“I do,” I said.
“What do you want to be? You can be a fighter, a white wizard, a black wizard, a red wizard, a thief, or a blackbelt.”
“The white wizard, I think it looks the most like a girl.” Dad chose the white wizard and named it ‘Jami’ since there was a four-character text limit.
“I’ll put your brother in too since he’ll get mad if he’s not in the game. He can be a black wizard.” Dad chose the black wizard and named it ‘Rand’ for Randy. For the fourth character on the party, he chose a blackbelt and named it “BLEE” after Bruce Lee. My dad was a huge kung fu movie fan. And from there on our, Bruce Lee was forever known as ‘BLEE’ in our household.
For the next few hours, I watched my dad play the game until it was bedtime.

Final Fantasy sort of became our thing. Every night, after I did my homework, I would go downstairs and watch my dad play his game. I would build Lego robots or make up full-length Broadway musicals starring my dolls while he played, but I would be there. When my dad finished the game, he just started it over with a different team. I once did the calculations, and there were about 126 different team combinations that you could make within the game.

As gaming systems advanced, my dad would buy the new final fantasy games that came out for every system. He played them up until about Final Fantasy X, when the games because “too weird” for him. But even though there were a few others he enjoyed, particularly, Final Fantasy IX, they just didn’t hold the same magic that the original had for him, but our NES had long-stopped working.

I play my own video-games now. I’ve beaten most of the Final Fantasy games, and I’ve moved on the different games such as Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing, and Stardew Valley. But now that I’m older, beating games just doesn’t have the same magic, as it did that first time, I watched my dad beat Final Fantasy from start to finish.

Several years ago, before I moved to Texas, I wanted to give my dad a going-away present. Being the huge video-game nerd, I am thanks to my dad, I had a Gameboy SP that I had bought to beat a Pokémon game. The Gameboy SP had been discontinued, and I didn’t really need it anymore. I left my dad with my Gameboy SP and the Gameboy Advance remake of Final Fantasy that I had found on eBay.

Every so often, my dad calls me and tells me about the latest in his “Final Fantasy” world, perhaps more now than before thanks to COVID. He loves to tell me all about how strong his team is, what bad guy he beat, and all the dungeons he dominated. And yes, the blackbelt is still named BLEE.

the topic for this week is hiraeth, which means nostalgia, and I can't think of anything more nostalgic than childhood

Open Topic: Mother's Day

lyssa027 — Sun, 10 May 2020 03:32:59 GMT

This was written for a sudden death tie-breaker open topic entry for therealljidol

In honor of Mother's Day being tomorrow, I decided to write about my Nana. The pic below is actually a picture I scanned from an old photo album she gave me recently from one of our Disney World trips like the one mentioned in this story

Also, my birth first name is Jamie, I just go by Lyssa, which is my middle name

My nana called me today. She usually doesn’t call me very much, so whenever I see her name on the caller ID, I mentally panic. The same goes for anytime a member of my family calls me. We aren’t the most social family. My dad recently discovered text messaging, but it’s hard to interpret his messages when he invents his own acronyms and emojis, and every so often I’ll get a text from him, but that’s really it. The extent of our communication is the weekly phone calls I make to them. To be honest, I tend to avoid my family, they are the main reason I decided to move to Texas, and usually, when they call me, it’s because there’s some sort of bad news.

Nana is ninety-eight years old. She can’t really see anymore. Earlier this year I convinced my parents to get her an “Alexa.” Her eyesight is too bad to see the numbers on a phone anymore. Now whenever she wants to call somebody, she just asks Alexa to call whoever. She doesn’t really understand technology either. Whenever the internet stops working, she complains that Alexa is mad at her. She takes it personally too.
“Hi, Nana?” I say.
“Jamie, this is Nana Rebeca,” she always says. I tried to explain to her once that my cell phone automatically tells me that she’s calling me, and she doesn’t need to tell me it’s her, but she doesn’t listen. “I got your Mother’s Day card in the mail.”
“I’m glad it got there,” I said, “You never know with Texas mail.”
“It’s a beautiful card,” she says.

I can picture her in my mind. She was probably sitting at her kitchen table. I can hear mumbled Spanish in the background, and I’m pretty sure she was watching her Spanish soap operas. My grandmother grew up in Mexico. She was born in Russia, but during World War Two, she immigrated to Mexico and was raised there. When I was little, she tried to teach me how to speak Spanish. She often tells me about how she used to teach me to sing songs in Spanish when I would go over there to visit. I took Spanish in high school and college, but I never really used it outside of class and lost most of the language. Sometimes on the phone, she’ll talk to me in Spanish, and I understand her, but I answer in English. I’ve been trying to get my Spanish language skills back with duo lingo, but phrases like “soy un mujer” and “como pan” aren’t exactly her idea of conversing in Spanish. She was probably drinking green tea as she watched her soap opera. “How are my grand kitties?”
“They’re good,” I answer, “They’re sleeping.”
“Do you remember when you were little?” Do you remember our trips to Disney World?”
“I remember when we went to Disney,” I say, “I remember riding the Dumbo ride with Papa.” I don’t mention how I remember the Dumbo ride breaking as Papa and I rode on it, and we were stranded what seemed like very high up when I was five, but was probably maybe only ten or twelve feet in the air, in reality. I haven’t ridden the Dumbo ride since. “I also remember riding Peter Pan and Space Mountain.”

My grandparents used to have an apartment in Orlando. Every morning, after breakfast, Papa and I would go to the pool. We used to race across the pool. I would always win. My papa would make a big deal about how hard he tried to beat me, but he just couldn’t because I was too fast. Years later, I realized he had always let me win. We would go to the Magic Kingdom or Epcot during the day. Nana always really liked Epcot. She liked walking through the world showcase and going to the Mexico pavilion. She loved the “El Rio del Tiempo” ride. I don’t remember much about it except it a lot like “It’s a Small World.” The dolls were clad in the clothing and music that my nana had grown up with, in Mexico. She said it reminded her of home. After we spent the day at the park, we would go back to the apartment. We would eat dinner and then Nana would give me Neapolitan ice cream in my Mickey Mouse bowl. Papa and I would sit on the balcony and he would teach me about the stars and outer space.

“When we were in the park, people would stop me. They would tell me that you had the most beautiful curly hair. You have beautiful curly blond hair, Jamie.” I wince on the other end of the phone as I pace around my den, my hair in a shower cap because I decided to dye it purple several hours earlier.
“Thank you,” I say.
“I’m going to go. I’m tired. I just wanted to say thank you for the card. I haven’t gotten a card in years. Thank you for thinking of me, Jamie. I hope the world gets less mashugana soon and you can come home and visit.”
“Happy Mother’s Day, Nana.”

Lj Idol: The Way Back

lyssa027 — Tue, 05 May 2020 15:48:21 GMT

This was written for week 21 of therealljidol

This story is based on a real event and takes place in a real place. Peanut Falls are part of several hiking trails at the Palisades in New Jersey/New York. Since this story, the trail has been rebuilt. I recently hiked there last time I visited home. Here is a picture I took

We had made it down the cliffs, but I wasn’t very sure of the way back to the top. There used to be a path to get back to the main hiking trail. But when Hurricane Floyd had come to New Jersey in September, he had washed out the path. That had never stopped my friends and me before. We probably hiked down to the waterfall, at least a couple of times a month, but usually, Cat was the one, who led us up and down the cliffs. It was just him and I for now. But I could just worry about that later.

It was pretty quiet at the bank of the Hudson River. The two of us were sitting on a fallen tree. The tree probably fell during the hurricane too because I didn’t remember it being there before. The only sounds were the crashing of the water lapping as it splashed on the bank and the trickle of the water as it dripped down Peanut Falls. The cascade wasn’t really impressive. The only time it was impressive was after a marginally heavy rainstorm. At the same time, you didn’t really want to hike down a washed-out trail when it was just a hill of mud.

“I think I’m going to climb the fall,” Jeremy said.
“I’ll watch,” I said.
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” he asked.
“Nonexistent when it comes to climbing things. You know I’m a klutz. Slippery rocks and me probably aren’t the best idea.”
“Your loss,” he said.

We walked towards the falls. The pool in front of the falls wasn’t very big, nor was it very deep. It had been a particularly dry winter with only a few snow flurries to my dad’s disdain. April hadn’t brought us many showers either. I walked over to the stone wall to the right of the falls and sat down.

A long time ago there used to be a garden. None of us knew very much about the garden except that it used to be a part of a much larger estate in the 1800s. All that was left of the garden was dilapidated stone and brick walls built into the cliff and the remnants of columns scattered on the ground. Empty beer bottles, cigarettes, and graffiti-filled what was left of the foundation of the estate, but even so, there was something beautiful about its decay. It was one of our favorite places to hike to.

Jeremy managed to scale the waterfall pretty easily. He shouted my name from the top and waved at me. I gave him a thumbs up.

Climbing had been his thing. We had been counselors-in-training together at sleepaway camp; he spent most of his time at climbing tower. I did too. I would lie on the benches and read one of the millions of books I had brought to camp over the summer. Occasionally, I would move and change whatever CD was playing in the wooden shack. Jeremy had tried to get me to attempt to climb the tower many times, but I always said “no.” Once in a while, I would rappel. Rappelling was easier. I just had to climb a ladder, and then sort of hop down the wall, on belay. It was easier to go down then up. I was sure hiking back to my car later today would follow that same motto.

Hiking had been our thing. During the day, we would go for short hikes in the woods. We would hike to the low rope course, and play on the different obstacles. The rope swing was my favorite. After curfew, the two of us would meet up behind the cafeteria, and hike up to The Rock. The Rock had been the campout area at camp. I wasn’t really sure why it was called The Rock, there wasn’t any rock. The two of us would hike up to the campsite. Jeremy could find his way there in the dark without a flashlight. It probably wasn’t a very far hike, but it always seemed long under the guise of moonlight and stars. I would point out the two constellations I knew, Draco and Scorpius, and he would try to teach me the others. Occasionally, I recognized a planet or two, usually Mars or Venus.

The hike went up a hill behind the cafeteria and into the junkyard. The junkyard was covered with old camp equipment. There were rusty bicycles, broken down Hobie Cats, deflated soccer balls and basketballs, old pottery wheels, and faded lifejackets. Once you passed through the junkyard, there was a small clearing in the woods, and then you made it to The Rock.

We would spend most of our nights at The Rock. We were close with the pioneering counselors, who didn’t care that we were violating curfew. In fact, one of my counselors was a pioneering counselor, and the other had been a CIT the summer before, and breaking curfew was just a CIT Rite of Passage. We would toast marshmallows for S’mores. Jeremy would laugh at me because I would light mine on fire. Sometimes, Jeremy or one of the other counselors had a guitar and they would play songs around the fire. My favorite was Fade to Black by Metallica. I loved to watch the sky for shooting stars. But mostly, we would sit in comfortable silence.

“I think I’m ready to go,” his voice brought me back from my reminiscing.
“Okay,” I said.
“Thanks for bringing me here. It reminded me of the summer.”
“Thanks for visiting me. I’ve missed hanging out with you.”

We started up what was left of the stone stairs. It was going to be a long way back, especially if we trusted my sense of direction.

Author's note: We did eventually find our way back to my car. We bushwhacked through a lot of the off-trail land. About three days later, my legs were covered in poison ivy. It's also when I discovered I was allergic to poison ivy. My legs were so swollen that I couldn't walk and missed school and prom because of the severity of the reaction to poison ivy.

LJ Idol: Boondoggle

lyssa027 — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 15:52:19 GMT

Author's note: There is a real bar in the Houston area called Boondoggle's

Second Author's note: This is just a part of the story, albeit a sligtly fictionalized version, of how I met Justin, my husband. I hope I have an opportunity to write more of it.

Third Author's note: I really do love pineapple and chicken pizza. It's delicious.

“We’re here,” Kat said. She pointed to the building in front of us. It was a two-story brick building, lanterns with electric tea-lights hung from the ceiling of a covered porch. There were a few wooden tables there. A few were occupied by people sharing pitchers of beer and thin crust pizza. “This is Boondoggles.”

There were a small group of us. Kat and her boyfriend Chris, there was also a couple, who had introduced themselves to me when we had first met them in the parking lot. I forgot their names already, All I remembered was that they liked roller coasters, and were planning a road trip this summer, where they planned to drive from state to state, go to amusement parks, and ride the popular coasters, make vlogs for YouTube, and rate them on their blog.

And then there was him. We had met at the New Year’s Party a few nights ago. I wasn’t really sure what I thought off him. We had played a few board and card games together, but he had been drunk. We had “talked” a little bit, if by talking, you meant I wrote words down on a yellow legal pad, he read them and responded, and then I would write more words. I had had laryngitis that night. I remembered he liked Doctor Who and had never seen Firefly.

We walked into the bar. Kat and Chris waved to the bartender, who waved back. The hostess nodded at them. It was obvious that they were frequent diners. They led our group to a tall wooden table in the back. White fairy lights hung all around the bar, and various animal heads hung on the wall next to lit up oversized beer bottles. Kat and Chris sat at the head of the long vertical table, I sat next to Kat, he sat across from me, and the nameless couple sat to my right. The hostess handed us menus.

“It’s not New Jersey pizza,” Kat said, “But it’s not too bad for Texas.” She shrugged.

“Do you want to share a pizza?” he said, “The pizzas are pretty big here.”

“That depends… how do you feel about pineapple and chicken on pizza?”

“I hate pineapple pizza.”

“I don’t think this is going to work out,” I said, half serious, half joking, and not sure if I meant sharing a pizza, or having a future.

“Half pineapple? Half bacon? I’m okay with the chicken.”

“I can work with that,” I agreed.

The waitress came and we placed our pizza order. I also ordered a cider and a cup of maraschino cherries on the side.

“Cherries?” he asked.

“They’re good,” I said.

Next to us, the couple were having a conversation about whether or not they wanted to add Disney World to their road trip plans so they could blog about Splash and Space Mountain, for any possible families, who subscribed to their blog and or YouTube channel. On my other side, Chris and Kat were talking to each other in baby voices.

I could either… stare at my cell phone, and hope one of my friends from NJ would answer one of the frantic texts I had sent several hours ago or I could try talking to him… I hate blind dates; I have no idea why I let Kat set me up with one of her “friends.” I wasn’t like I lived here, I was from New Jersey, and I was only here for the week. I stared at my phone for a few more minutes… why did my friends at home choose tonight to have a life?

“So, what do you do?” he asked.

“Can you be more specific? Like what do I do as a job? Or what do I do in my spare time?”

“Both, I guess,” he shrugs.

The waitress comes to the table with our drinks, and a Jell-O shot sized container of cherries for me. I eagerly take the first cherry and put it in my mouth.

“I’m in school,” I say, after I swallow the cherry. “I graduate this May. I’m studying to become a special ed teacher. I also tutor and babysit almost every night.”

“Cool, I’m a teacher too.”

“What do you teach?”

“Math.”

“I hate math.”

“Most people do.”

“I had a lot of bad math teachers in school. I also have dyscalculia. I think my teachers focused more on my disability and because of it I didn’t really get any confidence in my math ability. I’m really good at statistics though, and I took some weird advanced math like factorials and truth tables and I was pretty good at it… So sometimes I wonder I’m actually better at math then I was left to believe.” I shrugged. I really didn’t want to talk about math all night. I needed to change the subject. “I also like hiking and camping. I like to visit national parks.”

“I’ve never been to a national park before. Which one is your favorite?”

“I’ve only been to Acadia National Park in Maine. I was in middle school. I don’t remember very much of it except there was this island. You could walk to it when the tide was low, but you had to get back before high tide came in or else you’d be trapped there.”

“That sounds pretty cool.”

“I’ve always wanted to visit Olympic National Park. That’s in Washington state. When I was in sixth or seventh grade, we had US history, and everyone was assigned a national park. Our social studies teacher had a baseball cap and everyone randomly pulled the name of the park out of the bag so people wouldn’t fight over a park. I got Olympic. I don’t remember much about my report, but I remember looking at pictures of it in a magazine and there were these beautiful waterfalls. I love waterfalls.”

“I’ve never seen a waterfall before…”

“Not even Niagara Falls? It’s like a rite of passage for every high school on the east coast to take a trip to Niagara Falls. You poor deprived thing.”

The conversation continued. More national parks were discussed. Favorite bands were compared. Embarrassing stories about our mutual friends were shared. I wasn’t sure if this was the start of a relationship, but at the very least, it could be the start of a friendship, and at that moment in time, that didn’t seem like the worst thing.

This was written for week 20 of therealljidol if you enjoyed my story, please consider voting for me, as well as for any of the other talented writers in the competition.

LJ Idol: "I can't get calm"

lyssa027 — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 16:12:28 GMT

The car ride had seemed long. Long but interesting. Highways weren’t the most fascinating things on Earth, especially when driving at night. But the sunset had been pretty, and it was always fun to read the exit names in new places.

For the most part, during the 1.5-hour car ride from Kutztown, she had played DJ with different burned CDs, most which skipped during songs due to the fact that she had no place to safely store them in her car and sipped her drink that was mostly cream with a touch of coffee. Mike, her best friend at college, had been silent during most of the drive, keeping his eyes on the road, and occasionally telling her something random from his life story.

They drove into the lane made of orange and yellow safety cones and paid for their parking. The lot was filled to the brim, but they found a spot in the back. The two of them got out of the car.

“Do you have the tickets?” Mike asked. She could barely see his face in the clouded orange light of the parking lot, but she could tell from his voice that he was just as excited as she was.

“They’re in here,” she said, getting a folded crinkly envelope out of her purple striped Nightmare Before Christmas purse. She preferred to keep things in her back-jean pockets, but she had also already lost 2 school ID cards that had been in her pocket, and they had only been in school for about a month. “They were a birthday present from my dad.”

Mike said nothing.

The two of them walked towards the building. Part of the it was domed, and there were a lot of windows. Through the windows, the crowds of people made a living and blurring mural. The name of the place made eerie shadows on the outside of the building under the harsh lighting.

They didn’t really have much time before the show started. There were classes and traffic. Mike had picked her up, right as her 4 pm psychology class had ended, and they were just barely on the road at 6. The show started at 8. As they got to the door, the line was barely ten people long consisting of last-minute non-cohesive stragglers in a crescendo of gratitude because they had just made it on time.

They rushed through security. The security man barely glanced through her bag, not even giving the pack of cigarettes a second glance before he handed it back to her.

The two of them followed the signs to their seats. They were so close to the stage that she could practically touch it. The arena smelled like sweat and cigarettes. It was so different from a ballet or opera in New York City, where people dressed in their most expensive clothing and the theater reeked of expensive perfume and mothballs. Instead of opera glasses and binoculars, the crowd had lighters and cups of sloshing beer.

“Is this really your first rock concert?” Mike asked.

She barely got a chance to nod when suddenly the lights went off, and the guitar riffs and drum beats started. The band on stage started playing her favorite song. The singer started singing. She remembered the first time she had ever heard this song. He sounded nothing like it did on the various scratched CDs in her car, but she loved every second of it.

The stage was chaos. The lead singer moved around and jumped so quickly. As your eyes darted in one direction towards him, he had already pranced to the other side of the stage. One second, he was at the front of the stage, slapping hi-fives and taking a quick selfie with the lucky people in the mosh pit. The next second, he was shaking his fist in the air. Under the stage lights, the sweat started dripping down his face, his eyeliner melting in uneven streaks. The crowd thrusting devil horns in the air with their hands. People were singing, the voices of the audience was a cacophony of melodious and unmelodious screams.

The song finished. She started screaming with the rest of the concert-goers.

The real lj idol, week 6: Blood Harmony

lyssa027 — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 02:11:35 GMT

It was humid in August. We were doing laps around the airport passenger pickup. The airport wasn’t as busy as it could be since it was a Tuesday night, and it was summer. Who wanted to go to Texas, especially Houston, in summer?

The air conditioner in the car was blasting. But even at night, without the sun shining down into the windshield, it was so hot, that the AC could barely sputter out any cold air. The plane was already two hours late. There were thunderstorms on the west coast.

We did another lap around the passenger pickup.

My phone buzzed. His plane landed. They were taxiing on the runway. He didn’t have a lot of luggage. He was on his way home from a business trip in Washington state, and he was used to traveling light. But it would probably still be another twenty minutes.

Time to do another lap around passenger pickup.

We pull up the automatic doors at baggage claim. I fidget with the radio display, and find a certain song on my phone, and cue it to start as I start to take off my seatbelt.

“Really?” My fiancé asks when he sees what I’m getting ready for the car to play.

“Trust me,” I say. I open the car door and step down from the SUV. “I’m going to go get him since there are way too many exits at this baggage claim, and I want to avoid anything that might frustrate him.”

“Okay.” I close the door behind me.

It’s been barely a minute and my hair has already started to frizz, and I can feel the sweat starting to pour down my face. Houston humidity at its finest. Or maybe it’s anxiety. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. My cat-bitten flip flops make a small sound as I take steps towards the revolving doors. As I get inside the baggage claim, the buzz of the air-conditioner provides a slight relief. I walked towards the monitors and start to scan the baggage claim assignments.

It doesn’t take very long before I spot my brother. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, and even longer since we’ve had an in-person conversation. I had come home the previous summer, but he had been away on a business trip to Germany. He looks the same. He carries a beat-up black leather satchel over his shoulder. He comes over to me, hands in the pocket of his ill-fitting khaki pants.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“How are you? Is it…?”

“They say it should be gone, but I don’t know.”

“How do you feel?”

I shrug. “Empty, I guess.” I start walking towards the doors. “He’s waiting in the car.” My brother starts following me. We don’t really have much to say to each other. We never have. Even as children, we were never really close. I know he’s only here because I had cancer.

We get over to the car. I get in the front seat and my brother gets in the back. He and my fiancé exchange pleasantries, then my brother starts texting on his phone. It’s silent, but not awkwardly so.

As he shifts the car into gear, I hit play on my phone.

A familiar sounding melody starts playing through the speakers.

On cue, my brother starts singing, “Valjean, at least, we see another plain, 'm'sieur le mayor, you’ll wear a different chain.”

I join in. “Before you say another word, Javert, Before you chain me up like a slave again,” and for two minutes it’s just like childhood.

The real lj idol, week 5: Moon shot

lyssa027 — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 21:39:01 GMT

The only thing I knew when I was younger was that I didn’t want to spend my life living in New Jersey. I just wasn’t sure where I wanted to go.

The one thing I knew was that I didn’t want to move to New York City. There was nothing wrong with NYC itself, in fact, I love the city. I really enjoyed having museums, Central Park, and Broadway shows just about an hour bus ride away. I enjoyed spending summers with my friends at Coney Island and being able to the beach whenever I wanted to. I enjoyed being able to take a combination of buses, subways, and trains to get to almost everywhere from concerts at Jones Beach to visiting my best friend Amanda in Philadelphia. No, there was nothing wrong with the city itself, except for its apartment prices. A studio apartment that was about the size of my walk-in closet had rent that exceeded anything I thought I could make from a teaching job. Even my brother, who works odd hours on Wall Street doing international trading couldn’t afford an apartment with his six-figures salary, and he lived with three roommates.

For a while, I considered moving to California too. I could apply to PhD programs there, and I knew a lot of people, who lived in California. But I had the same problem with California that I would have had with New York City, it was too expensive, and I couldn’t afford to live on my own. So I had to reconsider my options again.

The first place I thought about moving to was Northeastern PA aka NePA as my friends and I lovingly referred to it as. My best friend Bethany lived in NePA, and at the time I was in a somewhat-serious relationship with her first cousin and spent most of my weekends up there. I would drive up to Clarks Summit after my last graduate class on Thursday nights, and wouldn’t come home until around 5 am on Monday morning, when I would leave either Bethany’s or her cousin’s house and make it to campus before my ten am English classes started.

I really enjoyed life in NePA even though it was unlike anything I had ever experienced in New Jersey. In NePA, I learned to shoot a gun. Bethany’s cousin Cliff had a makeshift gun range in his backyard. Social activities consisted of fire parties, which was when somebody would light a huge bonfire, and people would gather at their house. People would just drive their trunks up on somebody’s lawn, park them in a circle around the fire, and whoever had the best sound system in their trunk would play DJ. Beers were served out of coolers filled with ice cubes, and it was completely normal to just burn things… old CDs, broken radios, furniture, clothing, anything was game to help keep that bonfire lasting through the night.

Sometimes on weekends, we would drive to Ithaca, New York, which about two hours from NePA, and we would go wine-tasting. The routine for these trips included waking up before the sun rose, filling Cliff’s jeep up with gas from Sheetz and grabbing coffee. Bethany would usually pass out in the backseat, and I would play DJ with my iPod and FM transmitter. Cliff and I generally liked the same music: classic rock like The Doors and Billy Joel, rock like Fall-Out Boy and Blink 182, and prog rock like HIM and Delain, and the two of us outranked Bethany, so she always had to put up with our music as opposed to her Britney Spears and Pink related pop.

About 1.5 hours into the drive, we would pull into a Flying J on the side of 81, get even more coffee, and drive until we got to Ithaca. In Ithaca, we’d always get some lunch, buy NY state lotto tickets, and then spend the next 4-5 hours stopping at different wineries until we were too buzzed to drive. Most of the time, we would camp at the nearby KOA in Watkins Glen and head back to PA the next day. On these trips, Bethany would always spend hundreds of dollars on boxes of different wines to hold her over until our next wine-tasting trips. Shenanigans also always occurred on these trips. Eventually, our wine-tasting group expanded, and we ended up having to take two cars, mine because it was bigger than Cliff’s. Also, Bethany’s wine cravings got larger, and then Cliff’s best friend Steve’s Mazda because him and his wife started accompanying us. I had a Cheshire cat plush from the Disney movie in my car that rode by my rear windshield and the game during wine-tasting was keep away with the Cheshire cat.
But as I got towards student teaching and graduation, life had a nice way of throwing a curveball at me. Cliff’s job transferred him to Arizona, and he didn’t want a long-distance relationship or even friendship to follow him to Flagstaff. At the same time, Bethany started dating an abusive asshole, who made her choose either her relationship with him, or her friendship with me, and she chose the former. Thus, ended my dreams of moving to NePA.

After NePA was Austin, Texas. I had just gotten out of a serious relationship, not with Cliff, but with a guy, who I had been on and off serious dating since undergraduate years. It was a really hard breakup for me. I knew I was better off without him, but at the same time, it’s really hard to end something that you feel so passionate about without lasting and lingering emotions.

My cousin Bambi lived in Austin, Texas. Her and I had always really clicked well. She was like the older sister I always wanted, and lived a very interesting life in Austin. To get my mind off of Ex, my parents were more than happy to send me away to Austin for a week, in hopes that it would cheer me up.

I had a blast in Austin. It was a completely different planet from New Jersey, and even more different from NePA. I spent the week in Austin doing mainly outdoor activities even in the Texas humidity. Bambi and I hiked to the top of Enchanted Rock and meditated atop of the rock as we waited to see the sun set. We spent hours sunbathing and swimming at Barton Springs. I had my first ever food truck experience. It was a taco truck and they were the best tacos I had ever had in my life, and made my favorite Taco Bell Chalupas go to shame. We went to a twenty-four-hour Thai restaurant and had Thai Teas and I tasted my first ever curry. Ever since then, I love curry more than almost anything else. At the Thai restaurant, around three in the morning, we bumped into a tarot card reader, who offered to read our cards. She asked me how old I was going to be and when my birthday was. When I told her, I was turning 27 on September 27th, she told it was my golden year, and it would be unlike any other year I had lived before.

The week in Austin was amazing, and I wanted to go back as soon as I could. I booked a three-day weekend around Halloween. I flew down the night before Halloween, and Bambi and I dressed up the next day. I was Alice in Wonderland and she was Little Red Riding Hood. We went to a club and befriended some local musicians, who were pretty well known in the Austin music scene. After their set, we followed them back to their house, where the party continued. We got drunk on apple cider Jell-O shots and listened to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and contemplated all the different genres of music until the sun rose the very next morning.

After Halloween, Austin was the only place I wanted to be. I started researching doctorate programs at UT and found one that focused on autism and other behavior disorders and started filling out my application. Bambi and I texted daily about how we would change her house up once I moved down there. I even planned the route across the United States that I would take to drive there, planning detours at Graceland, Nashville, and Dallas on the way.

But then Matt happened. Matt was one of my friends from sleepaway camp, and we had recently reconnected on Facebook. To be honest, at the time, he remembered more about our friendship than I actually did. All I remembered was that he used to get all the male leads in our camp musicals. Matt was a junior at Temple University in Philadelphia and absolutely loved it and invited me down to tour the campus and visit graduate services. Temple was one of the few colleges that actually offered the MFA in creative writing that I had always wanted. So that November, I drove down to Philadelphia.

I’ve always loved Philly. I spent a lot of time in Philly because most of my undergraduate friends lived in suburbs of Philly from one direction or another. Matt lived across the street from the Franklin Institute and was within an easy walking distance of the Philadelphia Art Museum, FI, Wawa, Whole Foods, and Starbucks.

Matt was true to his word and showed me all around campus. There were delicious food trucks with cheesesteaks and crepes. I enjoyed all the buildings I spent time in while I was there and really could envision myself being at Temple and living in Philly. After marching band practice and an ice cream food truck, we went back to Matt’s apartment and marathon-watched Firefly, while eating delivery sushi, and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. About a month after I had first visited Matt, we started dating.

From then on, everything was about Philly. My graduation was getting closer and closer. I graduated that May and still had no idea where I was going to go or what I was going to do after getting my Master’s Degree. I fell in love with Philly. I loved walking downtown or taking the trams around the city.

Also, Amanda lived in Philly, and I loved how easy it was to see her. The two of us had a favorite coffee shop called the Rim Café, that had the best frozen raspberry mocha I have had to this day. Amanda and I were there so much that the owner knew us by name and even took selfies with us on his Instagram. I loved spending my weekends with Amanda during the day. We would wander South Street and giggle at the sperm fountain in Condom Kingdom or catch concerts at the Electric Factory, TLA, or Troc. We would hang out during First Fridays and show off Amanda’s jewelry or photography. We had a favorite Thai restaurant in Fishtown that we would go to. We would go to the zoo with our cameras and tripods and take pictures of all the animals we saw. Sometimes we would hop into Amanda’s car and drive to New Hope for the day and see if we could see ghosts at the crying bridge.

Sometimes I would just spend weekends with Matt. We were both introverted nerds so our weekends together consisted of ordering takeout, binging RiffTrax’ of our favorite movies, or re-watching favorite shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Other times, we would just play video-games. I’d play final fantasy or chrono trigger games on my Gameboy 3ds, we’d play Peggle on the computer, or Matt would try to get me to play games like Portal.

Philly became my new haven. I started researching public schools in Philly that I could apply to work at, and Matt and I talked about how we would transform his one-bedroom apartment into a place that we could both live in. It involved installing curtains to separate his huge bedroom so that we would each be able to have some privacy, and starting to budget how much it would cost to split the rent and utilities.

Right before graduation, Matt and I broke up. He had been cheating on me with a girl her met on the internet, and cheating on her with me, and eventually it slapped him in the face. At the same time, Amanda’s family decided to move to South Carolina and she decided to move there with them.

Then my grandfather died. I had been in Israel on birthright, the summer after graduation, and came back to my father and brother waiting for me at 2 am at the international arrivals sign at JFK airport to tell me he had died while I was in Israel. I had been very close to my grandfather, and I fell deep into depression, and just stopped caring about anything. I didn’t care about my future, I didn’t care about moving, I didn’t care about getting a job, I just wanted to be left alone to wallow in Farscape reruns on Netflix.

In December, my friend Kat invited me to Houston, Texas. She had been seriously dating a guy named Chris for four years and thought he was the one. Since she had thought he was the one, it seemed fitting that I needed to meet him. Every year her and Chris threw a huge New Year’s Party, so she thought that would be the perfect time for me to meet him.

I flew to Houston on New Year’s Day and had laryngitis. I was fine when I landed, but the second that plane touched the tarmac, my voice disappeared and I had to rely on communicating via a notebook and pen. At Kat’s party, I met this guy named Justin. Kat had told me all about him and thought we’d either really hit it off or hate each other. I hated him. He was drunk and obnoxious. But as the party went on, Kat wasn’t really good to game with because we were playing cooperative party games and she had no poker face. At the same time, Justin always got thrown out of those games first, so I thought maybe if him and I teamed up, we might have a chance of winning.

We didn’t, but we spent all night “talking” and for the rest of my week in Houston, wherever I was, so was he.

About two weeks later, we started a long-distance relationship.

Two years later, I moved to Houston to be with him.

One year later, we got engaged.

Three years later, we got married.

Last week, we celebrated our five-year anniversary by buying a ready-made Coldstone ice cream cake and getting drive through Chick-fil-A since every restaurant was closed because of the coronavirus.

I’m now officially a Texan. Houston is NOTHING like New Jersey. For example, there are no Dunkin Donuts unless I drive about thirty minutes from my house. There’re no such thing as back roads, and there are highways on top of highways. In New Jersey, BBQ was my dad cooking something on the grill. In Houston, BBQ is an art form. There aren’t any seasons in Houston either. It’s either bearable, hot, or unbearable. Christmas is a thing. There are so many different Christmas displays and celebrations. There are food trucks for everything, from artisan soda to peanut butter and jelly to grilled cheese sandwiches. People are friendlier here. The first time we went to Freebirds to get nachos and the worker started having a conversation with me, I was extremely confused. There aren’t just neighborhoods or streets in the suburbs of Houston, everything is a smurf-village housing development. The beaches have no waves.

It’s not exactly like the moon, but it might as well be, but I don’t think I would have it any other way.

the real lj idol, week 4: Backwards and in Heels

lyssa027 — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 21:18:25 GMT

*All names are fictional; all stories are true*

“You only have seven students? I wish I had seven students.”

If I had a dollar for every time, I heard that throughout the year… Well, I wouldn’t be rich, I’m sure I’d still have to teach… But maybe my Starbucks budget would be bigger?

I’m a PALS teacher. PALS is my district’s “unique” way of classifying the class, it’s known as PPCD throughout other parts of the United States, and I’m sure by other names in other places, but it’s all the same thing. I teach special ed for students from the age of 3, who are my EC students, the age of 4, who are my PreK students, and the ages of 5-6, which are my kindergarten students. The range of ages that I teach, means, depending on when a student’s birthday is, I can have them anywhere from 4-3.5 years to 1 year. And since I teach PALS, I sort of have a melting pot of students, I get them all. I get autistic students, speech delayed students, emotionally and/or behaviorally disturbed students, intellectually disabled students, students with health issues [students who might be absent a lot due to asthma or other similar health issues], students with genetic disorders [think down syndrome or fragile x, for example], or students just classified as NCEC, which means that they might have an issue, but it’s too early to classify them with anything. When they’re done with me, I decide their fate. They might go to Lifeskills or SLC, which is Lifeskills but more structured for students, who might need that structure. Or maybe they’ll go to PSI, which is for students, whose disabilities severely impair their performance in cognitive and developmental areas. Occasionally I have a student who might go to a BSC class, for severe behavior issues. We also have TREK, which is inclusion with built-in time to address sensory or other issues, or they might go into a gen ed class.

I absolutely love what I do, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, but it sure as hell isn’t easy because my students don’t really see the world as other people.

This year, a student of mine, who I’ll call Aiden, will be graduating from me. I’ve had Aiden since he turned three. We came back after being off a month due to the damage from Hurricane Harvey, and Aiden’s apartment had flooded, and they stayed in a hotel near our school until they found a new apartment, which zoned them to my school. I’ll never forget my first year with Aiden. On the first day of school, we went to the playground for recess. Nobody knew anything about Aiden. We weren’t at his initial ARD [aka an IEP meeting, we call things strange acronyms in Houston] because he wasn’t originally zoned to our school, he just sort of showed up. I bent down to tie my shoe, and the next thing I knew Aiden was gone. I started freaking the fuck out because I didn’t even see him run away. He was there less than 30 seconds ago, and that’s all it took for him to disappear. After almost dying of a heart attack and screaming for him, one of the fifth-grade teachers came up to me with Aiden in her arms and asked jokingly if “he belonged to me.” Why yes, he does. And that is how I learned Aiden was a runner.

We had a lot of adventures with Aiden during his first year. He used to love taking all his clothes off in the cafeteria during lunch. He would steal other student’s food. He would try to run away from the cafeteria and he’d just think it was funny. He loved to turn the lights on and off constantly in the classroom. He wouldn’t sit still at all, and it took about a year before he was able to sit at the table and pay attention to what I was teaching. I’m happy to say we’re mostly past the stripping now, and he hasn’t run away in a long time. I may have cried last week during class pictures because I realized that it was the last class picture, I would ever have with him on my lap. And why is he on my lap, you ask? Well, it’s because he tries to run away from the class, every time we try to take a class picture. We’ll always be a work in progress.

We’re not perfect. I was dead to him last week over some sausage. Once a week, the PreK and Kindergarten students get a different breakfast. The PreK get sausage sandwiches, and the Kindergarten students get a breakfast bar. Aiden loves sausage. I don’t know what he loves more, sausage or fried chicken. Anyhow, he saw the PreK students getting their sausage sandwiches and he wanted one. I kept trying to explain to him that since he was no longer a PreK student, he couldn’t have the sausage sandwich, but he doesn’t understand. He sees the sausage sandwich, and he wants the sausage sandwich.

That’s where special needs kiddos and general ed kiddos are different. You can rationalize with a gen ed kiddo. You can explain to a gen ed kindergarten student that they can’t have sausage for breakfast anymore because they’re in kindergarten, and only the PreK students get sausage, and they’ll understand. But my kids don’t really see the world that way. Aiden sees sausage, and he wants the sausage, there’s no reason that he shouldn’t be able to have that sausage when it’s right there. So, throughout the entire morning, he gave me the death glare, I was dead to him. He refused to hold my hand when we transitioned from place to place, and he refused to participate in anything that day because he was mad over sausage.

My students aren’t good with schedule changes for the same reasons. Our schedule has been different lately because of all the state-testing. I can tell them that we have music THREE times this week [and they hate music] because the older kids are taking the TELPAS test, but those words mean nothing to them. They just know that normally on Thursdays, they go to computers, and for the past three Thursdays, we haven’t been able to go to computer because of testing. But they don’t rationalize the testing part. They just know their schedule is different, and they don’t like it. My students hate changes, especially the autistic students.

I’m pretty sure my vice principal hates me because I send her a trillion emails every week about how I don’t approve of her schedule changes because it greatly upsets my students. I’ll fight for them. Two weeks ago, we were supposed to have the trail riders for the Rodeo ride by our school and then have a mini cookout. My VP sent an email with a lunch change for the day. I have ancillary [what we call specials like art, music, etc.] from 9:45 to 10:30 and she was sending me to lunch at 10:30 when my lunch is normally 11:10. The thing was, fifth grade was going to lunch from 11:25 to 11:55. The special ed students sit at a table to the side of the cafeteria as opposed to a regular cafeteria, which pisses me off to no end, but I won’t get to that here. But the point is, we don’t sit at a regular lunch table. The last lunch started later than my lunch normally does. I wrote to her asking her if she could just let me have my regular lunch. We don’t sit with anyone else, so we wouldn’t be taking over a table they need. Her schedule change was too drastic for students to cope with. After ancillary, we have read-aloud and then either workstations or library before lunch on a typical day, and that’s what my students are used to. Also, we weren’t going to the trail riders because I have runners, and putting students, who run, on the sidewalk of a main and very busy street through downtown Houston seemed like a horrible idea. She wrote back to me telling me that she made the schedule the way she made it because of the cookout, and I responded being telling her that fifth grade has lunch after my lunch would normally be anyways and my students cannot cope with changes to their schedule, and she relented. She was probably tired of my emails.

Lunch is another interesting ordeal in a PALS classroom. Most of my students are nonverbal. Some grunt, some make sounds, some say words, and some say simple sentences, but they cannot verbally express their thoughts. A gen ed class can just drop their students off at the cafeteria, and be off to Sonic, Canes, Starbucks, or Subway like that. I have to wait with my students in a line. They need constant redirection to stay in line and need help placing food on their trays and carrying it to the table. On top of that, they’re very picky eaters, and they cannot verbally express their dining preferences themselves, so we need to tell the cafeteria workers everything. We need to tell them that Aiden likes his nachos with cheese and meat, Jared won’t eat cheese on his burgers, and Nathanial doesn’t like his tacos with meat. Also, since the gen ed teachers are probably drinking their venti lattes as I’m waiting with my students in the lunch-line. I’m also usually the one, who must discipline their students on the line because if I don’t, nobody will. By the time, my students are through the line, and their milk cartons or ketchup packets are open, about ten to fifteen minutes have passed, and I’m lucky if I get a good 10-20-minute lunch for myself.

Rainy and cold days are another issue. After lunch, we have recess. For recess, we go to the playground. My students have gotten better at understanding the concept of rain, and realizing that if it’s raining, we can’t play on the playground, but we haven’t yet grasped the concept of cold. Texans aren’t very good in cold weather, as soon as the temperature hits about sixty degrees, they come out in parkas. To them, a temperature of anything below about 65 degrees is extremely cold [at least in Houston, where the climate is generally hot, hotter, or hot as hell]. When we get a cold front, and it does get a bit chilly, it’s too cold for my students. They’ll shiver and cry, so we tend to have an inside recess, but they’re not always okay with it. You can tell a gen ed class that it’s too cold to play outside, and they understand. I can tell my students that, they won’t understand it and they’ll be upset, or I could try to let them play for a few minutes, but they tend to get upset because they’re so cold, so either way, it’s a losing situation.

Fire drills are another issue. They’re ALWAYS during my naptime. No matter how much I beg the administration to hold fire drills, in the morning, they refuse. The gen ed students must come first, especially the fifth graders. According to admin, the morning is “prime time” for fifth-grade academics, and they don’t want to interrupt that because the fifth grader’s scores on state tests are very important, more important than my special needs students’ needs. They can’t have them after ten am because it interrupts the lunch schedule, which starts at around ten am and lasts until almost 1 pm. My nap time starts at 12:15, and my students need those naps. They may be chronologically 3-6, but mentally, they’re much younger. So like clockwork, during the last week of every month, there’s a fire drill during naptime. My children are DEEP sleepers with varied sensory needs, imagine how traumatic it is for them to be woken up from REM sleep to a very loud siren and not having any idea what’s going on, then being rushed outside, in a crowd of 500 something other students. They’re not okay with that, and to be honest, I don’t really blame them. I can tell them about the fire drill, I can use a visual schedule to show them a fire drill, or I can read them a social story about a fire drill, but none of that adequately prepares them for an actual fire drill, and that’s just the nature of their disabilities.

One of the best things about my students is their honesty. They don’t know how to be dishonest or how to lie. There have been years when I have had verbal students, who I could have a conversation with. One year, I was reading a book about naming a cat as our read-aloud for a week, and I was telling them I had five cats. One of my girls looks at me and told me that “You have too many cats, you need to make real friends.” Another time, I read the book Leaf Men by Lois Ehlert and we were making our own “leaf men” during art time, and one of my boys said, “I don’t want a leaf man, I want a girlfriend.” If my hair or makeup looks bad, I can always count on one of my students to tell me so. One time we were rhyming words in the “at” family and one of the words was “fat” and one of my students told me I was fat. I ran for an extra-long amount time on the treadmill that week. Their compliments are also the most meaningful. If a student tells me that I look good that day or they like my outfit, they probably mean it since just the last week, they told me that my “hair looked like crap.”

Special needs students also don’t really have a lot of drama compared to gen ed students. My one girl, the one who told me I needed friends, decided that she was going to marry two male students in my class when she got older. I told her that she could probably only choose one of them and asked her which one it would be, and she just shrugged and told me that she would work it out. It’s not like when I taught first grade, and Sofia had a different boyfriend every week, resulting in some messy breakups, and fighting on the playground.

Teaching PALS, I seem to spend 50% of my time in the bathroom. Since I get children, at such young ages, we’re usually the ones, who are responsible for potty-training them when we deem their ready, or when parents demand it in an ARD meeting. A gen ed teacher can just send a child to the bathroom and that’s that. If I’m potty-training a child, I’m with them in the bathroom, sitting them [or standing by the toilet or urinal, if appropriate] on the toilet, with a stopwatch, trying to sing happy songs about going to the bathroom, and encouraging them. The song I coined during my first-year teaching PALS goes “Pee Pee in the Potty, Pee Pee in the Pot,” which makes no sense, to be honest, but my students seem to love it. If my students have accidents, I can’t just send them to the nurse with a change of clothes like a gen ed student, I must change them myself. Just the other day, I was potty-training, Gabe, one of my newer kindergarten students, and well, he just doesn’t understand potty-training or anything, but mom is insistent. He sits on the toilet, and says, “I did it” and that’s pretty much as far as we’ve gotten. He has absolutely no concept of needing to go to the bathroom, nor does being wet or soiled bother him. During dismissal, after holding it all day, sitting and trying before dismissal, he just peed in the hallway and was sitting in a puddle of his own piss. He didn’t seem to notice or care. I had to tell the janitorial staff, for at least the third time that week, that they needed to clean up more pee in the hallway, and the dirty looks they gave me were epic.

I also change a lot of diapers. When I first started teaching PALS, I think it took me a good 10 minutes or so, to change and clean a child, I’ve gotten it down to less than 3 minutes. But even when you’re changing a diaper, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the child is doing his or her business or will keep their hands still when you’re wiping their butts. I learned early on, in my teaching career, to keep complete changes of clothes, always. One time, we went on a field trip to the zoo, and a mom didn’t bother to tell me that their child was having diarrhea issues because she didn’t want her daughter to miss the trip. Almost on the hour, I had to rush her into the zoo bathroom, put on gloves, and change her diaper and clothes.

And that is the glamorous life of a PALS teacher, and I still wouldn’t change it for the world. Nothing makes me happier than when a parent tells me how much I’ve done for their child. Nothing makes me happier than to see all the growth I see while my students are in my class. To have a student go from crying for almost the entire 8-hour school day to coming in with a huge smile, and excited to start his or her day. Nothing can beat the excitement when a student says their first word, after being nonverbal for an extended period of time, no matter what that word might be. Nothing makes me happier than making a difference in a special needs child’s life.

So maybe I only have seven kids, but I do everything and more than a gen ed teacher does, forwards, and backward, but without the heels, because most likely because I’m running after a student down the hallway, and I’d trip in heels.

The real lj idol, topic 3: Busman's Holiday

lyssa027 — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 16:59:28 GMT

For the most part, I’m happy at my job. I love what I teach, my kiddos are pretty damn adorable, especially this year, my co-workers are all nice, and I get along really well with the special ed team. The admin leaves me alone, and I have the freedom to run my PALS [PreK special education] classroom how I want it to run, and for the first time since I’ve started teaching, I’m content. However, the one thing I really hate about my job, and it’s really the only thing, is my commute.

My commute is insane. It’s not too bad in the morning, if I leave my house by 5:45 am, but it’s bad when I come back from school. My commute takes me 25ish minutes in the morning, and then that 25 minutes turns to 60 to 120 minutes, depending on traffic and weather in the Houston area. On a good day, it’s 60 minutes home, when it rains it’s about an hour to get home, but when there’s an accident or I’m stuck at school til 4:30 for a pointless staff meeting that never has anything to do with SPED, I’m lucky if I get home by 7 pm. There’s no way around those driving times. There’s only one highway that leads to the city I live in, and to get to that highway, I have a choice of three other highways, and to be honest, they’re all equidistant to my highway, give or take five minutes. Not only that, it seems that several highways are always being worked on at once, and the road work never seems to end. Every day, there’s a new detour that I get to take. Let’s pretend that my commute never has any issues, so that would be 5 hours alone just in driving home, which equals about 20 hours, in my car every month, only going home from work. School is in session for about 10 months, I’ll round it down to 9 months with all of the holiday breaks… So, 20 times 9 is 180 hours that I spend in a car every year, and that’s NOT even including my commute to work, which would be about 90 hours. So, in a school year, all together, I spent 270 hours driving in my car, and that’s assuming I never ever hit traffic.

You would think that with spending all that time in a car, I’d want to spend my various breaks, NOT in a car. But instead, my husband and I are really into road trips. We both hate flying, I hate it because I’m claustrophobic and LOST didn’t help my fear of crashing, and my husband just hates the pressure of having to be somewhere at a specific time, and spending money just to be squished like the insides of a hoagie sandwich for several hours on a plane. This year, we went on several road trips. For Thanksgiving break, we went to Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Park, and for winter break, we drove all the way to Key West and caught a ferry to Dry Tortugas National Park. It was about 10.5 hours one way to Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains, and it was 20 hours one way to Key West, Florida. That’s 61 hours of driving add that to the 270 hours I already spend driving to and from work, that’s 331 hours. There are 8760 hours in a year, and my trips this year were 3.7% of them.

Road trips will make or break a couple. When you’re stuck in a car, for about 10-15 hours with another person, relationships are tested. On the way to Key West, as well as one way back to Key West, I almost wanted to kill my husband. The only thing that kept us sane was Dresden Files audiobooks because it distracted me enough that I wasn’t thinking about how long I’ve been in the car. I’m not even allowed to drive on our road trips because when we went on our honeymoon, which was a road trip through the west to Yosemite National Park to Crater Lake National Park to Olympic National Park to Yellowstone National Park to Rocky Mountains National Park before we finally returned to Texas, I almost killed us. We rented a SUV because we knew there would be a lot of mountainous driving, and we needed four-wheel drive to feel safe. I had practiced driving the SUV around our town and I thought I was fine, but as soon as I got behind the wheel on a highway on the way to Amarillo, Texas, I almost crashed it into an 18-wheeler. I haven’t been allowed to drive ever since. Instead, I play DJ, and crush caffeine pills, strawberry watermelon 5 Hour Energy, and red bull to stay awake so my husband doesn’t fall asleep.

The worst part about any road trip is night-driving. There’s nothing to see at night except streetlights, exit lights, and headlights. Driving during the day is a little bit better, there’s a lot more to see from the green forests of Oregon to the Waterfalls of Washington to the snowy Mountains of Colorado. Even driving from Houston to El Paso, you get a change of scenery. You pass San Antonio, and then there’s pretty much nothing until you get to El Paso. The worst scenery is the drive from Houston to New Mexico. It starts out okay, but then the GPS redirects you to these backroads, where there’s nothing to see but oil fields and dust.

The other is going to the bathroom. When you drive to so many places in the United States, not all of them are accessible by main highway. Sometimes it’s hard to know when the next bathroom is coming up, so you learn to stop whenever you can and wherever you can.

Sometimes we hit traffic. Usually we’ve been lucky in the traffic department, however. The worst traffic we ever hit was driving to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. We were driving on a two-lane highway, and there was a car accident. Considering the highway was only two lanes, and in an area devoid of 5g or cell towers, the traffic delay was epic. Another time we hit traffic was entering California from Nevada. There’s a California Agriculture Inspection Station at the border. The inspectors are looking to make sure commodities coming into California are free from exotic invasive species within plant materials such as fruits, vegetables, and firewood. We had none of that and were waived through immediately, but imagine how much time it took, when there are only a few inspection stations and so many cars and trucks are driving on the same road. We also had a lot of traffic driving through Yellowstone National Park, and with the wildlife going on the roads through the park, as well as all the cars that visit Yellowstone every year, it can sometimes take over an hour to get from point A to point B within the national park.

There are plus sides to road trips, however. We always stock the car with our favorite junk food before we leave. For me, that includes at least three different pringles flavors, vanilla frosted cupcake pop tarts, and every and all trail mixes with peanut butter anything. For my husband, it’s usually goldfish crackers, s’mores pop tarts, and cheez its. If you don’t pig out during a road trip, you’re not doing it the right way. There’s also nothing quite like Flying J and Pilot Coffee, or seeing a Dunkin Donuts en route to wherever, and knowing I can get a frozen or iced coffee from there. [We sadly lack Dunkin Donuts in my area]. On the East Coast, there’s Sheetz and Wawa, my two favorite convenience stores, which sadly pwn Bucc-ees, in my opinion… Sorry Texans… There’s also the fun of discovering random restaurants wherever we are, such as that time in Kennewick, Washington, where we discovered the best Indian food ever. I also love seeing so much of the United States, I’ve been to 45/50 states, 44 of them via driving and road trips, and there’s so much beauty in this country that people never get to see because they take planes to get from point A to point B, or they just ignore visiting national and state parks all together.

The scariest drive we had was driving from Saguaro National Park in Arizona to Zion National Park in Utah. The drive started out fine. We took a detour to Horseshoe Bend. On the way to Zion, after that, we got distracted by the Glen Canyon Dam, and like all the other tourists, we parked our car on the road so we could take pictures of the Dam during sunset. It started getting dark as we left the Dam, and at the same time, we entered a different time zone. About an hour or so after left the dam, it started snowing. It was pitch black, there was pretty much no light on the roads, and the snow swirled in the air making blurred shapes at such a rapid pace that we couldn’t see two feet in front of us.

We passed a Hampton Inn, a little before we were about to drive on the Zion-Mt Carmel Highway. I told my husband that we should just get a room for the night because the snow was getting bad and I was worried about making it to the park. He insisted that we would be fine. This was December 2018, and the national park shutdown had just happened. This trip had been planned over a year ago just to get lodging within the national parks, and we didn’t want to cancel it due to something beyond our control. Utah was paying money to keep their park open during the winter tourist season, but they still had a reduced staff. As we drove down the highway towards Springdale, Utah, the snow got harder, and visibility was reduced to pretty much nothing. The highway was filled with curves and switchbacks. There were no safety railings on the road as we started our descent down the cliff, and we couldn’t see anything in the snow. At one point, we just stopped moving. We didn’t move for over an hour, and I kept on thinking this was the end. I wasn’t sure if we had enough warm clothes or food or water to survive a night in the single digit temperatures of Utah. After a very tense hour, a national park service employee tapped on our window and explained that a car had slipped on the ice and nose-dived headfirst into some of the packed snow on the road. A plow was helping to dig the car out, and she told us we could follow the plow down to Springdale, Utah. Later, my husband confessed that he really thought we weren’t going to survive that drive, and that that was the end. At least, we would have died together, in the car, where we had most of our adventures in.

Another frightful drive we had was when I moved from New Jersey to Texas. We decided to make a pitstop at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We drove all the way to Clingman’s Dome at the peak of the mountains, and as we got to the top, took our pictures, and as we were driving back down the mountain, the beautiful blue skies turned a smoky gray color. Suddenly, it started to pour. When I say pour, I mean that I couldn’t see two feet in front of me, the windshield wipers weren’t strong enough to fight the rain, there was thunder and lightning everywhere, and we were driving down a mountain with no safety rails and some very impressive curves.

One of the coolest drives we had was through Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Maybe it was because it was the middle of June, and desert temperatures average around 90 t0 100 degrees, or maybe it was because the Petrified Forest isn’t as visited as the Grand Canyon, but we had the entire park to ourselves. We drove the 28.6-mile scenic drive throughout the park and saw the Painted Desert and the Blue Mesa. The colors and landscape made it seem like we were on another planet. We bought our national park passports there, and got our first cancellation stamps and stickers, which is a tradition we’ve kept up since we visited Petrified Forest. We’re both on Passport number 2 now because we’ve filled the pages with so many cancelations from different parks we’ve visited over the years.

Another favorite drive was driving the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive at Big Bend National Park from Rio Grande Campground, where we had been camping, to the Santa Elena Canyon. Big Bend National Park is so big that you could probably spend about a week there, just driving from destination to destination. The landscape at Big Bend is so different from the landscape in other parts of Texas. There are the swampy marshlands by Rio Grande Campground, the natural hot springs on the Rio Grande River, which are always open, and I highly recommend visiting them as the sun rises. Then there’s the limestone cliffs of the Santa Elena Canyon, and the mountains near Chisos Basin. The Chisos Mountains are the only mountain range in the United States to be contained in a single national park. The stars at night are amazing. The best time to visit is during a new moon, where there’s no light from the moon to disrupt the endless stargazing. There was one night during our three-day camping trip there, when I saw at least ten shooting stars, and during certain times of the year, the Milky Way is also fully visible.

We’re taking most of next year off from going on vacation. It’ll be kind of weird NOT being in a car for one of our breaks, and just staying at home and playing video-games and marathoning Netflix and Hulu. Our next trip is in June 2021. We’re going to Glacier National Park, crossing the border to Canada, and driving to Banff National Park, Yoho National Park, and Kootenay National Park. Altogether, the driving for that trip totals 1018 miles and 14 hours or 841 minutes in a car, starting from the Spokane airport.

With how much driving to and from school and how much my commute pisses me off. I guess it’s kind of ironic that I spend most of my free time, choosing to be in a car for very long periods of time, but it’s worth it for all the things that I’ve seen during those long drives even though it seems like the majority of my waking hours are spent driving in cars.

LJ Idol, Second Chance, Topic 2: Echo Chamber

lyssa027 — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 20:09:25 GMT

Trigger Warning for abuse, drugs, and anxiety? [just thought I should put this just in case]

Topic 2: Echo Chamber

On the first day of my teaching career, the echo chamber in my mind seemed louder than usual. I’m not even sure whose voice I heard first. All the voices were pounding into my brain to a point, where the anxiety I was feeling was causing me to panic so much that I couldn’t function.

As I stood in my classroom, eyeing it, and remembering all the time I had spent over the last two weeks since I moved to Texas decorating it and trying to make it pretty. I had posted pictures of it from every angle and posted them on my Facebook because I wanted to show all the voices that they were wrong. From the star bulletin board borders to the gigantic golden stars that I had painstakingly written the classroom rules on in my best handwriting to each of the individual name labels I had placed at each table, I was proud of my classroom.

But as I stood by the pencil sharpener, sharpening all of the pencils for each table, I began to question my career choice for the thousandth time. The voices didn’t help. How was I supposed to teach thirty first grade students? How was I supposed to keep those students engaged for eight hours every single day? What the hell am I doing becoming a teacher?

Maybe they were all right. The voices first started during freshman year of college. I wasn’t prepared for college. I really wanted to take a year off and find myself. I wasn’t mature enough for college. My birthday was late September, I wouldn’t even turn 18 until I was in college. I had just barely made the cut-off for kindergarten back in elementary school. I was so much more immature than almost everyone else in my grade, and even though I scraped by high school, even I knew that I wasn’t meant for college, just yet. I had begged and begged my parents to let me take courses at the community college and get a job working with children while I found myself. Unfortunately, to my very education-oriented family, community college was an embarrassment, and if I went to community college and didn’t go to a four-year college right away, I would NEVER go to college and embarrass them even more.

Being as socially awkward as I was and still am, due to horrible bullying in high school [and this was before social media, I couldn’t imagine my high school life is we had had Facebook or Instagram or anything like that], I wasn’t good at making friends. I gravitated towards people, who didn’t have many friends like me figuring they weren’t that picky. I spent the entire first two weeks of college watching video tapes in my room and making Ramen noodles in a coffee pot. I met my first two-supposed friends during my 8 am art history class, two weeks into the semester, when I still bothered to wake up for my 8 am class. They were two boys, Scotty and Mikey, who lived in my dorm.

After Scotty and Mikey, I met Kat in intro to anthropology [a class with a professor, who insisted we call him Bill, and bragged about his time as a graduate student doing research on the Sikaiana Islands, where all the local ladies fell in love with him because he had a hairy chest. I’ll never forget Bill, even if all Kat and I did was write notes to each other instead of taking notes on the classroom material, though it was usually Bill bragging about his romantic life]. After Kat, Juliann was added to our group because Mikey remembered her from Freshman orientation and was in love with her. Our group of five got along great, but eventually it branched out even further and started to include Tom, who lived next door to Mikey, Dennis, Tom’s roommate, who had the worst acne I’ve ever seen and thought he was the shit because he could drink and hold his liquor like a frat boy. Lauren, Scotty’s ex-girlfriend, whom he had met on AOL, who just so happened to wind up at the same college as he did, joined in, followed by Amanda, who started dating Scotty even though Scotty was sort of dating Kat at the same time.

As our group got bigger, drama started, as it usually does. For me, the drama started with my mother. My mother was addicted to drugs. It started during the winter of my senior year of high school. She slipped on some ice, when she was racing our garage door. She got knee surgery, and a prescription to opioids. To sum up a long story, she got addicted to opioids, and around the time I started college, she was abusive to me, mentally, psychologically, and physically. I didn’t really know how to deal with the abuse, as well as my stress from being a freshman at college, when I wasn’t ready to be in college, and started drinking, robo-tripping, and smoking weed whenever I could get it. Robo-tripping was the easiest to accomplish in college because all I had to do was drive to the 24-hour Walmart in Reading, PA and buy cough syrup.

That was when the first voice started. It was winter break during my freshman year of college, and in-between trying to beat Final Fantasy IX on PlayStation, and sending AIM messages to my friends until the wee hours of the night, Kat confessed something to me. She had started to act awkward around me like she wanted to tell me something but was afraid to tell me something. However, Kat was never good at keeping secrets, so eventually she fessed up and told me that my so-called friends, mainly Scotty, Dennis, and Tom had been talking shit about me at the end of the semester when she had been hanging in their room. She said that they said that I was never going to graduate college. I was going to “end up on the streets, selling my body for drugs and booze.”

The second voice was my brother’s voice. My brother was always the golden child. He got perfect grades, had a genius IQ, was captain of three sports teams in high school, got a full scholarship in engineering at Georgia Tech, and was on the crew team. My parent’s favorite subject was to go off about how wonderfully successful my brother would be, and it was like they didn’t have a daughter.

My brother liked to tell everyone how his sister was a slut. That was how he introduced me. “Meet my sister, the slut” even though I’m pretty sure he’s slept with so many more girls than I have guys. The second thing he liked to tell people was how I had no future. How I barely graduated college and was going to live at home mooching off my parent’s money for the rest of my life. The third thing he liked to tell people was how I was going to end up alone because no guy was ever going to fall in love with a loser like me.

I wish I could say that my brother has changed, but he really hasn’t. He got married last month, and while he was in the grooms room getting ready, he was extremely drunk on bourbon and started ranting to my husband about how surprised he was that I actually had a job and house and found somebody to fall in love with me because our family had been pretty sure I had no future.

The voices got a little bit quieter about a year after I graduated college, and my brother had extended his stay at Georgia Tech and was renting an apartment there and decided to stay on for a few more years to get his graduate degree in quantitative and qualitative finance.

I finally had a job. I was a teacher’s aide in a local school district. This meant several hours out of the house and away from the echoes of failure I always heard from my family when I was at home. I worked in an autistic PreK class, and I absolutely loved everything about. The classroom teacher I worked with, Liz, was amazing, and the other TAS: Marie, Joanne, and Kiki all became close friends. They constantly flooded me with praise, and their praise made the voices shut up. It was after spending two years working in that class that I decided to become a special ed teacher.
Going back to school was hard. All I could think of was that my friends from my ex-college were right. I’d never do anything with my life, being good at my job was just a fluke, and I had no future except for a future of prostitution and failure. The first day of classes, I didn’t even want to say anything. I was afraid I would say something wrong, and they’d be right, I didn’t belong in college. I was too stupid to ever be successful in college considering I barely graduated the first time.

Surprisingly, the voices quieted in college. I had a professor, Dr. Marshall, who made it very clear from the first day of his class that anyone who didn’t participate in his classroom discussions would fail his class. I didn’t want to be a failure. I didn’t want to prove Scotty, Dennis, and Tom right.

I ended up being one of the best students in my major. I was constantly showered with praise, and the praise shut the voices up. To this day, I still credit Dr. Marshall with teaching me that the voices were wrong. I’m not stupid and I’m not a failure. I can do things. Dr. Marshall and I keep in touch. He was a guest at my wedding, and we exchange holiday cards every year. If I’m ever in New Jersey, I try to stop my old university, where he’s now the philosophy chair and say hi.

I wish the voices stopped then, but they didn’t. The third voice I heard was a cacophony of the special ed teacher, whose class I did my student-teaching with, and the disapproving voice of my supervisor from the university. I excelled in teaching courses. By the time I got to student teaching, I almost had a 4.0 and everyone had high hopes for me. But my student teaching placement changed everything. My supervising teacher was a miserable bitch, who constantly frittered on about how she only had about three years until she could finally retire. She treated the kids like they were robots without personalities, which was so different from how Liz had treated her students. When I had my observation, she wrote the entire lesson plan telling me it had to be this way, and she didn’t want any of my input. My observation went horribly, and when my supervisor asked my supervising teacher why it was so bad, the teacher went on about how I refused her help and just did my own thing without cooperating with her because she didn’t want to look bad. The next week, I found myself in a committee meeting with the Dean of Special Education, my supervisor, and my advisor asking me if teaching was really what I was meant to do and threatening to fail me in student teaching, if my scores didn’t get better. Meanwhile, I had to continue to be in this woman’s class, listening to her rant on and on about how I was the worst student teacher she’s ever had in how ever many years she had been teaching. She also criticized my hair, my clothes, and everything about me and told me it wasn’t good enough. I passed student teaching by the skin of my teeth.

I met Justin shortly after I graduated. We did the long-distance thing for about two years, and then I accepted a teaching position in Texas and moved here. Between meeting Justin and saving up enough money to move, I got a job as a TA in a middle school Lifeskills class, and once again the voices quieted, and I excelled at what I was doing. When I accepted my job as a first-grade teacher, I was so excited to finally start my career. Sure, it was a strange and rocky road to get there, but I was finally there.

I wish I could say the voices ended there and I had a happy ending, but I didn’t. During that first year of teaching, I was horribly bullied by my principal. I don’t know why he didn’t like me. Sure, he wasn’t the one who had hired me. I had been hired by the previous principal, who wrote an email about two weeks after I had been hired, that she was transferring to a better district. He sat in my room almost every day and would call me to his office at the end of the day to tell me what a horrible job I did. When I got my first observation, I got straight 1’s, which was the worst score you could get and was put on an improvement plan. He told me I picked the wrong career and it would be better for everyone if I just quit teaching. He would follow me around the school and corner me after going to the bathroom to tell me I sucked. He would yell at me over things he didn’t yell at the other teachers about. Like once we had a field trip, and I wore jeans because the field trip was going to a farm and it had been rainy, and it was bound to be muddy. He stopped me in the hallway to tell me I was violating dress code even though all the other teachers were wearing jeans too. He changed my position every year. The first year I taught first grade math and science, the second I taught PreK, the third I taught Lifeskills, and the fourth year I started co-teaching, which I hated, only to be transferred back to first grade at the end of the year because a teacher quit.

I stopped sleeping. I would try to fall asleep, but the anxiety would keep me up. Every night, when I was trying to sleep, all I heard was the echoes of his voice telling me what a shitty teacher I was. So why didn’t I transfer, you ask? Oh, believe me, I tried. I even got as far as being hired by a different district, but to make the transfer official, the district had to call him to ask about my teaching, and he told them I was horrible teacher and probably one of the worst teachers in his school, and they never contacted me again.

I stopped going to the bathroom during the day because I was afraid, he’d corner me and harass me again. I would come to school extra early and stay until almost night fall because I didn’t want him to stop me when I was arriving or leaving school. He wrote me up during my wedding because apparently getting married wasn’t a good enough reason to miss two days of school before spring break. I started having panic attacks walking through the school because I was afraid, he was hiding in the corners and trying to find me.

Eventually, I escaped. I finally got a job teaching special ed PreK, which is what I had always wanted at the school I teach at now. I don’t know why he finally let me escape, I think it’s because I threatened to alert TEA about all the violations he was making to the law when it came to the SPED students he decided to randomly put into general ed classes even if they weren’t ready for it, dissolving all self-contained special ed classes.

Jobwise, I’m in a good place now. I have the job I always wanted and went to. I’ve gotten two years of the highest possible teacher ratings you can get within the district. I love my kiddos, who are special needs students from ages 3 to 6, and my brain is a lot happier now, but it’s not perfect.

The psychological damage is still there. Even though I know my current principal likes me, it doesn’t stop me from having an anxiety attack when she calls me to her office because the words from my ex-principal echo throughout my brain and I’m afraid she’s going to tell me what an awful teacher I am. Other teacher are friendly to me, but whenever I see them talking to each other at lunch or during recess, my brain things that they’re talking about me and saying things like “She’s the worst teacher in the school and we don’t know why she has a job” like my brother used to tell me or my so-called friends used to think of me. Every time I get observed, I always think my supervisor and supervising teacher from student teaching are right and I can’t write a proper lesson plan or teach a whole or small group lesson. Whenever I see admin, or other teachers walking in the hallway, I panic. Sometimes I’ll even change the direction I’m walking because I don’t want to cross paths with them because I’m afraid they’ll corner me and say something like my ex principal did.

For the rest of my life, I’m pretty sure the echoes of anxiety will forever haunt me and repeat themselves, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever find anyway to escape the echo chamber.

LJ Idol, Second Chance, Topic 1: Hungry

lyssa027 — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 15:53:46 GMT

In my family, Thanksgiving used to be a big deal. For as long as I remember, I’d wake up early on Thanksgiving morning, and go down to the kitchen. We would never eat breakfast because the first rule of my Jewish family holiday celebrations was “You had to come hungry.” It didn’t matter if your Papa thought you were getting fat [something I heard my entire adolescence], if Nana put a bunch of food on the plate, you had to eat every crumb of it or risk offending her. If she gave you seconds, you had to finish the seconds too.

My Nana, on my mother’s side was a Holocaust survivor. When she was very little, right before Nazis were invading Russia, her mother, my great-grandmother Jana, who I’m named for, sent Nana and her brother Max to the United States to escape persecution. They took a boat to the United States and tried to get into the United States at Angel Island Immigration Station in California in San Francisco Bay. According to my Nana, officials refused to let her and her brother into the United States because they had “already met their quota of Russians.” So, the ship dropped them off in Mexico, and Nana grew up in Mexico.

She met my Papa during the Korean War. My Papa was an ophthalmologist. He grew up in the Bronx. He worked at a medical center in Mexico during the war. My Nana also worked at the same medical center. She had studied in Mexico and become an obstetrician. It was love at first sight, from what I understand. After the War, Papa took Nana back to New York and the two of them lived there until around the late 1950s, when they moved to New Jersey. My mom lives in the house she grew up in.

Nana’s entire family minus her and her brother were killed in concentration camps. They had starved to death. That is why you were never allowed to waste food during Thanksgiving.

After I woke up, I would go the kitchen and turn on the Macy’s Day Parade. My favorite part used to be when the Broadway shows would be performing. Now-a-days, I’m lucky if I’m even awake for any of the parade. Every Thanksgiving, I would make brownies from a box. Papa’s favorite treat was brownies, but Nana had him on such a strict diet due to his various medical conditions, including diabetes, heart issues, and cancer, but she would always let him have brownies on Thanksgiving. Considering they came from a box, and the kitchen and me were NEVER best friends at the time [something I’ve been trying to remedy over the years], they probably weren’t the best brownies, but to Papa, they meant everything and represented Thanksgiving.

We left for my grandparent’s apartment around three pm. They were forever on “snowbird” time, and Thanksgiving represented the last week they were in New Jersey until they relocated to their apartment in Boca Raton, Florida until Passover.

Thanksgiving was one of the few times I got to see my entire family before they all had excuses as to why they couldn’t make certain occasions. My Uncle Denis would come with his wife Aunt Carla and their only child, Jerry Garcia. Yes, that’s really his name. Every year, Carla would make her cranberry sauce, which wasn’t really a cranberry sauce, it was more like a cranberry strudel. And every year, we had to make sure we each got a little bit of it as soon as it came out of the oven because my brother would eat the entire thing. Aunt Susan would drive up from Massachusetts with my cousin Sammy and her late husband Jim. She would always bring a variety of deserts, there was always one kind of cheesecake, homemade chocolate whipped cream, and an apple pie. When my cousin Jacky was older, and went to college in New York City, she started to come to Thanksgiving too. She would take the bus up from NYC the night before Thanksgiving and spend the night at our house. I loved it when she came over because she was the closest thing to a sister I ever had. We would stay up all night talking, she would attempt to give me makeup and hair tips, and we’d gossip about whatever boy I was dating or into at the time, and then we would take lots of selfies. Her and I would wake up and make the brownies for Papa together.

The first course of Thanksgiving was always “Nana’s Soup.” It was a split pea soup with carrots and flanken steak. I’ve tried so many times to remake that soup. I’ve made it in a Crock Pot, made it on the stove, and even got the recipe from my Nana, but it never tastes like hers. The second course was Thanksgiving turkey, Brisket with potatoes and carrots, mashed potatoes, asparagus that never got eaten, and Carla’s Cranberry Sauce. There was also Nana’s applesauce. It’s the family recipe that’s been passed down from Nana to my Mom to me. It’s a mixture of Granny Smith and Golden Gala apples chopped into medium sized pieces, the chunkier it was, the better it tasted, cooked in a reduced diet black cherry soda and sprinkled with cinnamon. It’s the one food tradition I’ve brought with me from New Jersey to Texas for our smaller Thanksgiving celebrations here. The key was serving yourself at Thanksgiving, if you let Nana serve you, your portions would be huge, and then she would get offended if you didn’t finish your entire plate, and nobody wanted to upset Nana.

Then came desert, consisting of Papa’s favorite brownies, and the smorgasbord of other deserts that Aunt Susan brought, as well as some fruit because Nana believed there always had to be something “healthy” to make up for everything else. However, unlike the main meal, Nana wouldn’t lecture you if you didn’t finish your plate. She would judge you based on how much desert you took and lecture how if you ate too much desert, you would get too fat, and you would never find a husband or wife and never give her great-grandchildren. Therefore, the key was taking a tiny bit of everything, ensuring that there would be leftovers for later that you could eat in your own kitchen without Nana watching you.

After the meal, the kids, which meant everyone under age 18 were dismissed to the TV room. The adults would drink coffee or tea and talk. The talk was never anything particularly exciting to me, it was usually about the stock market or listening to Papa lamenting about how none of his grandchildren followed in his footsteps and became a doctor, but I was so happy I was adult enough to be included in these conversations. Eventually, the talking just stopped, and the L-tryptophan started doing its job and everyone became exhausted and the goodbyes started. Carla, Denis, and Jerry were the first to leave, followed by my family plus Jacky. Nana would give us at least a week’s worth of leftovers and almost all the deserts except for Papa’s brownies.

As soon as we got home, Jacky and I would find a movie to see, usually a Harry Potter, if one of them was out at the time. We’d aim to find the movies that ended after midnight. As soon as the movies ended, we’d drive to one of the many New Jersey malls and start waiting on line for those Black Friday sales and we’d try to score as many pairs of shoes, as much makeup, or clothes as we could possibly find. When we got home, just as the sun was starting to rise, we’d model our purchases for each other, or Jacky would teach me how to put on the makeup I just bought before eventually collapsing on our beds from exhaustion.

That was over ten years ago. Papa died in 2010 while I was in Israel on Birthright at his request. Nana tried to make Thanksgiving work the year after that. But it just wasn’t the same. There were no brownies and the feeling of emptiness without Papa made everyone feel hungry. The year after that, I moved to Houston, to live with my now-husband. I used to fly back just for Nana’s cooking and to see my family, but that stopped the year after I moved here, in 2013. Ever since then, we haven’t had a family Thanksgiving. Uncle Denis tried to hold one in his ski house in Vermont, but Nana didn’t like being so far away from home and wouldn’t go. Jim died, and my Aunt Susan keeps herself and Sammy in Massachusetts because coming home brings her too many memories of holidays in the past with both her father and Jim. My brother got married and spends all of his holidays with wife’s family. Jacky recently got engaged and is busy traveling the world with her fiancée.

I don’t really miss the food of Thanksgiving. It was delicious, and I’ve yet to even gotten close to mimicking any of it. What I’m the hungriest for is my family and all the traditions of the past from Papa’s brownies to Carla’s cranberry sauce to Jacky’s makeovers to Nana’s insistence on something healthy with every meal. I’m hungry for my family, especially since it seems like family isn’t a thing for us anymore now that we’re all older.

Second Chance Idol

lyssa027 — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 18:53:44 GMT

After saying I'm going to do it for years and not doing it... Here's to second chance idol [and my first chance attempting any idol]. Hopefully I won't disappoint ;)

Fall/Thanksgiving Friendzy

lyssa027 — Sun, 03 Nov 2019 03:10:31 GMT

[to link back to the friendzy, use this, thanks :) ]

Winter Holidays Friendzy

lyssa027 — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 00:58:36 GMT

Edit: I think the html link is fixed now, thanks zhelana

So I keep getting comments on the friendzy I made back in 2015, so I decided to make another one that's more current ;)

[to link back to the friendzy, use this, thanks :) ]

Only a month to go

lyssa027 — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 01:45:13 GMT

https://www.donorschoose.org/project/learning-social-skills-through-play/2703274/?rf=email-system-2017-08-proposal_approve-teacher_1859534&challengeid=311586&utm_source=dc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=proposal_approve&utm_swu=4258

If anyone has even five dollars to spare, my donors choose only has a month left before all of the funding I've received goes to other projects. Please consider donating to it. Or sharing the link if you can't.

Thank you in advance ;)

Trick or Treating Friendzy

lyssa027 — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 22:39:37 GMT

[to link back to the friendzy, use this, thanks :) ]