Active Schmactive

My whole life I've gone through exercise "phases." I'll spend awhile being fairly lethargic (though I've always reasoned that teaching is a physically active job, and I do try to take the stairs instead of the escalator when I'm at the mall), and then I'll decide it's time to get serious and get myself into an exercise routine. When I got married, I thought Mark would be a great exercise partner/motivator. He was a soccer player who liked to go for morning runs and do active, outdoor things like camping and hiking. Perhaps it's actually my more sedate lifestyle that's rubbed off on him, though, as evidenced by last night's conversation.

"Are you going to the Y tonight, Mark?"

"I don't think so. I'm too tired."

"You sat at your desk all day and then sat in a meeting at church tonight. You should get some exercise."

"It's too hot to go out. Besides, I did walk to the refrigerator to get my lunch."

Really Bad Timing

When we first moved into our urban Minneapolis home three years ago, Mark and I were too nervous to leave our front door open if we just left the room for a minute. Time has granted familiarity with our neighborhood, and now I regularly leave the front door open to let in the fresh outdoor breezes for hours at a time. Mark has never been completely comfortable with such casualness, but I've assured him that I do it all the time and nothing weird has ever happened.

Of course the one day that Mark is home alone with the front door open--I left for 20 minutes to get an iced chai--is the day that two unsolicited eastern European cleaning ladies let themselves in, call, "Hello? Hello?" and are in our upstairs bedroom with all their cleaning supplies before Mark even has a chance to figure out what's going on.

He was angry about the incident, and tragically sent them away. To me, it seemed like a fortuitous gift from above. Why don't cleaning ladies ever show up to clean the house when I'm home??

I Will Not Be Wearing Flip-Flops Again Tomorrow

"Nah," Yee said calmly this morning, while casually pointing toward my desk in the front of the room. He followed up with another short phrase in Hmong, in which I could pick out "nah" again. "Nah," is the word for "eat" in Hmong, so I was confused. Was he making some comment about my lunch?

"What are you saying, Yee?" I prompted him with a smile. Rather than ignoring their Hmong, I've been trying to get them to translate for me.

"Mou, teach-ah," he said. Accustomed to the way the Hmong drop all final consonants while speaking English, I ran through the words in my head that "mou" could be. Mouth, mount, month, milk (their pronunciation of "milk" basically sounds like "mou" as well)...

"MouSS, teach-ah!" Kia said insistently.

I got it.

"Mouse? Really?" I glanced toward my desk. Yee was smiling, so I guessed maybe he was trying to say that he saw something that he thought looked like a mouse but realized that it was a scrap of paper. Or something like that. I heh-hehhed nervously. Then Yee stood up and walked over to my desk and jostled a piece of poster board leaning up against the space in between the wall and my desk. Like a bad dream, we watched the little brown mouse race across the front of the classroom and into the kitchen, which is next door. I screamed, bolted for the back of the room and jumped up onto a chair, just like in the movies, but I swear, it was total instinct.

Apparently, this is instinct in America. My students laughed and laughed at me, and told me how the mice in Thailand are much bigger than American mice and that their homes were full of mice who sometimes chewed on their toes at night. Kia would kill them by whacking them with her children's toys.

My heart continued to pound for at least another ten minutes, but I tried to play it cool and pretend like I wasn't really that afraid of mice. And believe me, I'll never forget that "nah" means both "eat" and "mouse" in Hmong.

I Was Born on May 25,1977, Which Means I'm 30

For the most part, turning 30 has been pretty uneventful. I feel the same, I look the same, I still don't have any gray hair, and those fine lines around my eyes--well, they've been around for two years already, so I can't attribute them to 30. The only thing that gets me just a tiny bit is my students constantly referring to themselves as old. It's kind of their schtik; when they can't remember how to say something in English, or when they make basic mistakes they lament, "Teach-ah, I OLD! I no say English Teach-ah, I OLD!" If they were, say, in their 60s or 70s, I wouldn't take it personally. But my eldest student was born in 1968. Now maybe I too would feel old if I had eleven children and two grandchildren, regardless of my biological age of 39 (that would be Mai Chue).

But still, I'm getting a bit of a complex.