"Fashionista" or "Why I should try harder."

Note: This didn't actually happen today, as is written here. I just had trouble posting it last week for some reason.

Yes, another academic year is upon me, and as I think of how I will inspire my students to write freely and with aplomb this year, I turn shamefacedly towards my own, neglected blog. Poor little blog! How I have missed you!

Luckily for me, several elements of the universe have aligned to inspire me to pick up the blog again.

1.) It's September. For everyone in the world besides teachers (and perhaps students) years end on December 31 and begin on January first. But teachers begin each September with a vow to be better, stronger, faster and more organized than the year before, and to pick up things again that we have neglected over the summer.

2.) I saw Britney Spears in concert. If there is a more blogworthy topic, I'm not sure what it is. That will not be the subject of TODAY'S blog, however, because ...

3.) The weirdest thing happened to me today.

My faithful 2.1 readers will remember that I wrote a blog last year that detailed a highly entertaining and surreal ride in a taxi with a driver who (swear to God) claimed that he drove aliens around downtown Toronto. I will admit that this event isn't quite as cool as that, but it's pretty darn funny.

While my students will not return to school until next week, I have already been going in for a week, attending meetings, arranging my datebook, attending meetings, making photocopies, planning lessons and units attending meetings and attending meetings. Once this week I thought I was just eating my lunch, but it turned out that that was a meeting too.

I never find the transition to going back to work easy. It's not that I'm unhappy to go back to school - quite the contrary. It's just that I have forgotten how to get myself ready and out the door in an organized way. My showers take longer, I can never find my keys, I have to go back into the condo to get my forgotten laptop power cord, etc. It's only going to get worse when the students return because then I'll try to have to look nice too.

For many people, looking nice just seems to happen, but for me, it's not quite so simple. I don't really wear a lot of makeup, and no matter how long I spend, or how nice my hair looks when I leave the condo, by the time I get to the elevator it's all flat and insipid, so what's the point?

But hair and makeup is the least of my worries - my big problem is that I don't really know how to dress myself. I blame this on the fact that since I was about fourteen years old I had jobs where looking nice was not only not required, but downright foolhardy. My first job was at a horse stable, and my second was at a summer camp. Then a ranch, where I cared for and fed a myriad of animals which included (but was not limited to) 55 horses, 5 goats, 2 sheep, flocks of chickens and ducks and two giant pigs named Amos and Sochee. Then another farm. By the time I moved to Toronto to begin my teaching career, the only clothes I had were second-hand and came from Value Village. If I ever happen to actually look nice, rest assured, it's either a total fluke, or because I have allowed my friend Em to dress me.

(Note: I am not making this up. Em takes me shopping twice a year, picks out clothes for me and tells me what to buy and then tells me what outfits to wear. Conversations usually go like this:

Me: "Really? I should put a BELT over a SHIRT?

Em: "Yes, really. I'm telling you - it looks great."

Me: "Is it ... you know ... IN?"

Em: (patiently) "Yes, Alison, it's "in." I promise."

Me: (panicked) "What if it goes "out?" Will you tell me? Because I'll never know! I'll never know!"

Em: (soothingly) "Yes, yes, I promise."

Then we move to another store and have the exact same conversation about shoes or nail polish or pairing navy with black. I can't believe she puts up with me.)

Anyway, the point of all this is to say that because I am still in "meeting week" and I wasn't actually teaching today, I didn't put a whole lot of effort into my appearance. I just threw on a T-shirt and a long "hippie-ish" skirt and some sandals and ran out the door with wet hair. And this was all fine until I was engaged in conversation with the guy ahead of me in line at my local Tim Horton's. I was thinking about all of the things I had to do today which was mostly made up of ... you guessed it ... meetings ... and the guy looked at me and said:

"How are the meetings going?"

At this point I panicked. I thought that he must be someone involved with the school that I should know, but don't recognize. This happens to me fairly often - I can have trouble placing people when I don't see them in their usual context. Then he surprised me with:

"It's a good program, isn't it?"

This made me certain for a moment that he was connected to my school, because we do teach a very good program - the International Baccalaureate. But because I still had no idea who he was (or indeed, why he was talking to me) I decided to ask for clarification.

"I'm sorry ...what program are you talking about?"

And he said, "A.A."

At this point I thought he had mistaken me for someone else. "No, no," I clarified quickly, "I'm not in A.A.!"

He cocked his head to one side and looked at me quizzically. "Huh," he said. "You know, seven out of ten times, I get that right."

Yes folks, that's right. He looked me up and down and thought that I was an addict of some kind. And he was convinced enough to make his guess publicly, in a very long Tim Horton's line. Publically and loudly. Needless to say, I was somewhat taken aback.

I mean, I knew that I wasn't dressed up, but I did take for granted that people would look at me and assume that I wasn't addicted to ... say meth, for example. I would have been hurt, if it wasn't so funny. The more I thought about it, the more restraint it took me to keep myself from bursting out laughing. At the next moment he was called forward to a cashier, and I to another, and so this life-changing exchange ended.

It did make me think about possibly trying a little harder with my general appearance. Therefore, in the spirit of the new school year, I hereby promise to try to move up to the fashion level of "trying but clueless" or perhaps even just "lame," rather than "obviously addicted to an illegal susbstance."

I do wish I had had the presence of mind to ask him WHAT he thought I was addicted to, though. In the grand scheme of things, it's not important, but honestly, I'm really, really curious.

Next blog - the Britney experience. Promise.