I've got a sweet tooth...for licorice drops and jelly rolls...

Drinkin' by myself, ohhhh I'm drinkin' by mah-selffff...

Yeah, I'm on spring break. But I still have to go to work and do two pages worth of shit I said I'd get done sometime in the last year or so...sorry about that. This education shit is for the birds. I want to be out there being fabulous and taking over the world. I love Chicago, I love living here...but...how many more pretty years do I have left? Shouldn't I be out pursuing my amazing career being the daring young girl on the flying whatever right about now?

Today I was contemplating the whole sugar daddy thing. Right now, the Iphy coffers are empty, and mama needs a new pair of shoes. Specifically, some of those girly looking Vans that have the slim sole and tapered toe. I could let some old rich dude grope at my stuff once a week and not have to teach umpity-ump classes to make my rent. I figure, I have bad sex for free at least once in a while. What if I had it on a regular basis for a few months and got myself health insurance and a retirement fund? I know I would be Crossing A Line, but at this point, does it even fucking matter?

There are logistics to consider. How much is the standard? I don't want to undercut anyone, y'know. How often does...it...happen? Does Daddy Warbucks really want to come to the barrio and make the beast with two backs in my creaky Ikea bed? What about my room mates? Also...what about the whole serial killer factor? Would I need to tell one of my friends about my sordid little scheme and set up an elaborate system of daily texts at a specific time, with a name and address to give to the police if one of those texts doesn't show up? Would I need to buy a tazer? Pepper spray?

On some levels, I can't believe I didn't do this sooner. On others...well, would you want your daughter considering this? Your sister? Your best girlfriend? It would be degrading banging a relative stranger for a generous flat rate, but it's also degrading being in your mid-to-late twenties and buying your clothes in the children's department of Target.

So what say you, reading public? Do I throw caution and good sense to the wind and find the nearest willing moneyed codger to exploit? Or do I hold on to the remaining shreds of my dignity and keep trying to pretend that I'm really a nice girl?

My long-winded argument as to why the University of the Incredibly Common should accept me into their fold and not make me pay to be there

As I sit writing this, I am not only thinking about the stressful nature of the college application process and my future career as a fourth-grade teacher. I am also thinking about which costume to wear when I perform my hula hoops act at a corporate event this weekend, what music to use for my intermediate trapeze class’s recital piece, and how to improve my explanation of holding on with one’s feet while climbing a rope. As hackneyed as it may sound, I am not a typical college transfer student.

For the past two years, while attending Harold Washington college full time, I have been working as an aerial arts coach and professional circus artist. My life is spent climbing, stretching, balancing, performing, demonstrating, correcting and spotting -- as well as studying. Rather than becoming overwhelmed, through dedication, organization, and hard work, I have managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA while advancing both my circus and teaching careers. After earning a degree in urban education, I plan to share my drive for academic and creative success as an elementary teacher in the CPS system.

As a circus artist, I have traveled across the globe, inspiring people to smile, laugh, and be amazed at the astounding capabilities of the human form. Listening to the echo of applause while I hang by my feet thirty feet in the air or spin nine hula-hoops independently on different parts of my body provides an indescribable rush. Performing has instilled confidence in me; on-stage, you have to believe you’re the best at what you’re doing, because if you don’t, neither will the audience. Acquiring my skills with hula-hoops, silks, and trapeze has given me self-discipline; you can’t achieve something unless you are willing to work for it, and even if it hurts, keep going until you get it right.

I admit that I revel in the glitter, glamour and danger of the circus world, but I also believe in circus’ potential as a mode of social justice work. Social circus, a field in which I have worked in since age seventeen, is a branch of community arts outreach that uses circus arts to foster self-esteem, confidence in learning, and social skills in children and teens. I have worked with toddlers, elementary school students, teenagers, children with special needs and at-risk youth, in both the U.S. and my native Australia. I have taught everything from aerial silks to clowning to juggling. I myself started out in an after-school community circus program created by the late Dr. Reg Bolton, a pioneer of the social circus movement. I credit him with inspiring me to become a performer, and even more so as a defining influence in my work with children.

One of Reg’s key philosophies was that there is no such word as “can’t.”  When a student says they ‘can’t’ do something, we should correct them by explaining they can’t do it yet, but if they keep trying, one day they will be able to. Nothing makes me prouder than watching my students perform. I love seeing how far they’ve come and what they’ve achieved, especially the ones who insisted they’d never be able to get off the ground, the ones who initially were too scared to try, and the ones who had only ever been told what they were failing at, now realizing that they have the capacity to succeed. 

Through social circus outreach and residency work, I have spent abundant time in schools of every caliber, here and abroad. From my experience working in the CPS system, I feel I could contribute patience, understanding, and an ability to relate to and work with children from across the social strata. Expanding upon my social circus background, I intend not only to give children the academic and structural tools they need in school, but to build their confidence and teach them how to overcome adversity in life. I can move toward achieving this goal by studying urban education at UIC.

I continue to love my career as a circus artist, but I have always known it would not be my lifelong vocation. Backstage at shows and en route to out-of-state performances, I have always been the one with my nose in a book during warm-up, trying to expand my knowledge base and critical thinking as I increased my flexibility. I love to read, learn and find new ways to connect ideas. While my rotator cuff muscles are beginning to show signs of wear, my intellect and desire for knowledge are primed for performance. An academic degree has always been part of my plan, and I expect to attain it with the same focus, perseverance, and creativity that I used to obtain my circus skills. I hope I will be able to do so in UIC’s urban education program.

Another A+ load of rambling.

I liked what Descartes had to say about the things our minds invent in dreams. We think that dreams are pure imagination, creating things that don’t exist in waking life. But because waking life (reality, if you want to think of it like that) is all we know and all we have experienced, our dreams have to take elements from waking life in order to exist. These elements might be combined in surprising ways, or be difficult to recognize, but a dream will always contain something that is familiar to us, even if it is only colors or sounds.

            When I was a little kid, I used to have this idea that anything I wasn’t directly looking at right at that moment just turned itself off and didn’t exist until I looked at it again. Maybe I was just a late bloomer in terms of figuring out object permanence because I carried on with this all the way up to pre-operational (up to age seven) when you’re supposed to get it figured out during sensorimotor (birth to two). It was hard to imagine that there could be things going on outside of what I was directly experiencing. I decided that if I couldn’t see someone or something, it / they still existed, paused somehow, waiting for me to come back. When Descartes talks about “neither earth, nor sky, nor anything extended thing, nor figure, nor magnitude, nor place, providing at the same time, however, for the persuasion that these things do not exist otherwise than as I perceive them”, I was reminded of my peculiar childhood philosophy. Maybe God plays a trick on us so that things only exist if we see them and think about them.

Descartes suggests that denying the existence and possession of their own body would classify a person as insane. There’s definitely a psychological disorder that deals with feeling like you and your body aren’t one and the same. If you feel separate from your entire body, it’s dissociative identity disorder. If it’s just a limb, (say, that pesky arm that’s been overly intrusive and in your way since childhood), then it’s known as body integrity identity disorder. Most people who suffer from the latter aren’t crazy in any other way, but they’ll go to the extent of severely damaging the offending limb so that doctors will be forced to amputate it. Abnormal psychology is rad. 

So who cares, so what?

When you least want to talk about something is probably the time that you most need to talk about it. When you most need help, you're the least likely to ask for it. This is not me asking for help. The only person who can help me is myself, so let's all hold our breath until that happens. Wait...maybe not. I don't want to be responsible for any untimely suffocations.

Everything I do is wrong. Every decision I make is the wrong one. I know logically that this can't be the case, but somehow it feels like it. Lately I've been feeling like that more and more. I know I should take steps to fix things or to make myself feel better, but seems like it isn't worth it. Nothing I've ever done to try and solve a problem has ever worked, so why keep trying?

There are new photos of me on Everyone's Favorite Time-waste and I look fat. I think it's a gyp that I got all of the depression symptoms EXCEPT the loss of appetite. Shit, it'd be worth being miserable all the time if it made me skinny.

I didn't finish my college apps. I still have to rewrite an essay and I can't muster the bare minimum of self-esteem to write positive things about my life so far.

I stopped seeing Ten Hut because he wasn't nice enough to me. I can't be nice to myself, so someone has to make up the difference. He didn't have that capacity. Probably no one does, when it comes down to it.

I'm broke. Again. I resolved to make more money this year and so far exactly the opposite has happened. Short of banging some old rich dude, or picking up even more teaching (just to make myself a little more tired and stressed), I have no idea how to increase my income.

Everything, in a word, sucks. And before you remind me, gentle reader, I'm aware that these are all first-world, middle-class, white girl problems. No one has cut off my clitoris with a rusty pair of scissors or married me off at the age of twelve. No one has forced me to become a child soldier. I didn't contract flukeworms from wading in a filthy rice paddy ten hours a day. I'm not working in a sweat shop or being sold as a sex slave. I recognize that there are a great many people with far suckier lives than mine. For some reason, this doesn't make me feel any better. It actually makes me feel worse because it highlights how selfish and pathetic I am.

The only thing that keeps me getting up and going to class and going to practice and functioning like a normal human being is that I know if I let myself fall all the way down, it would be that much harder later on. It would be more work to reapply to school if I dropped out at this point. It would be harder to find a job if I blew off the jobs I have right now. If I don't practice I'll just get fatter and feel worse about myself. It's this interesting little catch-22...keep going, feel terrible. Give up, feel worse later on. You can see why some days I think it might be easier to just gulp down a bottle of aspirin with a Grey Goose chaser. Except that's another half-assed thing. Technically, that would be a para-suicidal gesture. "Successful" suicides are a lot more likely to use a means with no grey areas, like a gun, or jumping off a height. Para-suicidal folks cut their wrists or pop a bunch of pills because they don't really mean it. They'll try over and over again but they always make a call at the last minute, always leave themselves a stop-gap. That would be me. I don't actually want to die, I just don't have much interest in living any more.

If you think about it, I don't have that much to live for. My family is on the other side of the world, they're doing OK without me. My friends would just think I moved back to the motherland or something. It'd be like sneaking out in high school. You tell your mum you're coming to my house, I'll tell my mum I'm going to your house, and we'll have an awesome time at the party with no one worrying about us. No one would even notice I was gone.

But what about work and school and performing and teaching and all those wonderful things, you ask? What about them? Gee, I've done such a stellar job with my amazing career, haven't I? I spent the weekend prancing about for the entertainment of a bunch of nicotine-riddled diabetic senior citizens at a casino in the asshole of America. Aren't you impressed and jealous? School...well, let's see. I go to an open-admission school for idiots, fuck-ups, and former addicts. I can't even get it together to apply somewhere else, much less get myself a scholarship so it doesn't bankrupt me to get a degree. Assuming that by some miracle, I did actually transfer and graduate, what would I do then? Be a teacher? Go to grad school? I wouldn't be able to make up my mind. Either way, I'd still be broke and doing a shitty job of whatever it was I fell into doing. And teaching...well, the kids would miss me until someone else came to take my place. Hopefully they'd remember some good things that I taught them, like pointing their toes and being brave enough to try things and persistent enough to keep trying until it works.

When I teach, I am the person I wish I was in the rest of my life. It's the only time when I know what the right thing to do is, and the only time I know I'm doing something good and worthwhile.

I'm sitting here, crying. I have six pages of Descartes to read, and about 25 pages of Montaigne's essays. The classes for which they were assigned won't transfer, so in the grand scheme of things, there's really no point in stressing about getting the reading done. I might as well just stop bothering and let myself have shitty grades to go with my shitty everything else.

I'm waiting for it, the thing that finally pushes me over. That one final straw to break the camel's back. I hope it comes soon. I want to be done. I want it all to be over.

My Totally Rad Poem About That One Time I Had To Take the SAT

On a Saturday morning, chilly and grey
I got up all early, 'cuz today was the day
I munched on some oatmeal, then Ten Hut and me
We zoomed off down Lake Shore to the ol' U of C

I rocked my black t-shirt with just that one word:
"Cash", and the picture of Johnny, flipping the bird
It was my own little way of vaguely protesting
the utter stupidity of standardized testing

After a solid month straight of brain-numbing revision
of probability, algebra, graphs, and division
It was SAT D-day, and I was prepared
to take that shit on with my teeth and wits bared

I had number two pencils, numbering six
one eraser, one sharpener, and an interesting mix
of grit, irritation and fear all bouncing around
just in case the right answers couldn't be found

With a gaggle of high-schoolers, pimply and small
I spent four hours trapped in a cramped lecture hall
Devoid of windows but with comfortable seats
Spaced waaaay far apart to discourage the cheats

I burned through the writing and critical reading
though those passages on politics left my brain bleeding
The math wasn't perfect, but I tried my best
Did the ones that I knew and left blank the rest

A test such as this one sums up your knowledge
and decides if you can go to the fancy-pants college
I can't rightly describe a superior system
But I bet, a lot of smart kids, this crap totally missed 'em

At one forty-five, I closed up my exam
Stretched my neck, cracked my back, and with a mumbled "goddam..."
Got the fuck out of dodge and got on with my life
boozing up at the Derby and looking for strife.