Meth

You all know that, when things come up that make  me think, I share them with you ... to get your take, to open up discussion, even just to get your thoughts roving over that topic.

I also needed a real whangdoodle to re-acclimate myself into the blogging world ;-)

Okay, so here's what happened ...

Addie had a cold, which devolved into a sinus infection.  You can tell when Addie has a sinus infection ... her face gets swollen and she's all pale with dark circles under her eyes and ... well, you can just tell.

I figured I'd found yet another pro to getting Addie a car ... namely, she could drive herself to the doctor and I would not have to miss work.  Score, right?

Maybe not so much ...

So Addie went to the doctor and was told to take Sudafed.

There is no prescription for Sudafed ... and yet you can't buy it unless you're eighteen.

What that meant for poor Addie is that she had to wait ALL DAY for me to get home from work then go to the drug store to buy Sudafed behind the counter at the pharmacy.

I understand that it's a federal law, that meth labs run rampant and that there had to be some sort of crack down.  I get that, I totally do ...

But here are my sticking points:

1.  Addie is seventeen.  She has a license.  Surely the pharmacy peeps could have entered her license as easily as they entered mine so they could make sure that someone with her license number isn't buying up Sudafed all over the northeast.

2.  How many seventeen-year-olds have you heard of operating meth labs?  When you hear about meth operations being busted up (or suspicious fires being caused by cooking meth), the perpetrators are generally in their 30s or 40s.  They are virtually never seventeen.

3.  If Sudafed needs to be regulated to this degree, perhaps it should be a prescription drug.  If Addie had needed Percocet or something, she could have gotten it herself with a prescription backed up by her license.  Yup, she could have run amok with a narcotic, but God forbid she take a nasal decongestant ...

4.  Finally, Addie's birthday is in September.  She's a senior in high school.  Yes, that means that she'll be seventeen when she goes to college.  Does that mean that I'm going to have to take a trip to D.C. if she gets a sinus infection and needs Sudafed?  I suppose I could mail it, but ... if it's illegal for her to buy Sudafed, the idea of mailing it would make me feel decidedly criminal.

I've been doing a lot of thinking on this one, and it seemed a good way to get back to my lovely little blog :-)

Hope everyone is doing well ... I'm off to plan lessons (the two weeks before holiday break necessitate 15 hour workdays for teachers, plus Addie kindly shared her cold ...) after writing a piece for Zelda Lily.

I'll definitely be writing more now that I've broken the seal (or whatever random idiomatic expression you want to use :-)).

Oh, and speaking of Addie, she was quite insistent that I'd committed libel by claiming that her SAT scores were 1750 ... her SAT scores are, in fact, 1850.  My apologies, eldest progeny of mine <3

Coolest Idea Ever (If I Were An Inventor)

I have always envied people that are truly intelligent across the board. I mean, obviously everyone has some things they're smarter at than others (my sister, a brilliant microbiologist, put "toona" on a shopping list made after she'd received her PhD), but there are some that are just true renaissance peeps.

Sadly, I'm not one of them. I had a stroke of genius on my drive home last night, though, that made me wish I was.

So it snowed again (I'm sure you're shocked to hear that), and I had my typical white-knuckled run down the back roads of very, very rural New Hampshire. After I picked Addie up from school, I spent the entire drive home trying to explain to her how to drive in snow, which is a little bit tricky because my car has all wheel drive and hers doesn't (plus it's very small and light), so most of what I was telling her doesn't even apply.

Anyway, I dropped her off at home then went to get Belle, and while I was driving I couldn't help thinking about how fortunate the kids in driver's ed right now are. Addie took driver's ed in the late summer and early fall, so she had no formal instruction (beyond the book, which is of course very theoretical) in the fine art of driving in snow.

There are pros and cons to having an ADHD mind, but one thing that's essentially a wash is the ability to connect things together that have absolutely no relation to a normal person, and to do it in a matter of seconds. My brain synapses are always at hyperspeed unless I'm reading or writing (most ADHD folk have an activity that allows them to "hyper-focus" ... sadly it's video games a lot of the time, but for me it has always been reading). The overactive brain synapses, by the way, are very helpful when writing and explain a great deal about why I write in fits and spurts much of the time ... namely, I picture what happens next in my mind, often at night when I can't sleep, but don't write it down right away.

And I'm way off-topic, which is of course the hard-core downside to the ADHD brain ...

Anyway, I explain that because, in a matter of seconds, I came up with the coolest idea ever. The thought process went something like this:

1. The driving really sucks.
2. There are a lot of inexperienced drivers on the road. Even though I'm crazy overprotective and won't let Addie drive in snow, there are a lot of kids driving today that really shouldn't be.
3. I'm going to have to teach Addie to drive in the snow one of these days. It's going to be horrible.
4. Why isn't "snow-driving" a required part of driver's ed?
5. The space shuttle Challenger exploded twenty-five years ago this week.
6. My fourth grade teacher cried ... I had never seen a teacher cry before.
7. I'm surprised they haven't made a movie of the Challenger disaster yet ... after all, they did for Apollo 13.
8. Apollo 13 was a really neat movie.
9. Gary Sinise always seems to get that "unsung hero" role, which he's very good at.
10. Gary Sinise, playing the role of Ken Mattingly, is what stands out the most to me about that movie because he was stuck in that space simulator trying to figure out how to save his colleagues.
11. I watched an iCarly episode with Belle where Carly and her peeps were in a space simulator.

And ... *ka-bam*

12. How cool would it be if there was a "driving-in-snow" simulator? That would allow driving students to have the experience of driving in snow without being an any true danger. There are a certain number of required hours for nighttime driving, highway driving, and so on ... why not "snow driving", at least in areas where snow is a concern?

I wish I had some idea of how to actually go about doing this, because I think it would be very helpful :-)

Do Teenagers Get a Bad Rap?

I have the opportunity to interact with teenagers virtually every day. The school year goes without saying, of course, and then there's summer school. Oh, and the incidental fact that my precious Addie is about to turn sixteen.

Yeah, I guess you could say I'm kind of an expert at the adolescent beast.

When people hear that I teach high school, I inevitably get some form of, "You must be very brave." The thing is, though ... nope. It's not bravery and it's probably not stupidity or masochism or any of the other negative stereotypes tied to teenagers.

Adolescents are young adults ... they are forming their moral cores, their values and beliefs, and learning the skills--both academic and real life--that will serve as the foundation for who they will be as adults.

Honestly, it's a true honor and privilege to be a part of that.

I was reminded of the bad rap teenagers get when I took the girls school shopping at Target the other day. We got binders, looseleaf, pens, pencils, and that sort of thing for Addie, then we got Belle some clothes. Addie a few shirts. Me a couple of things. Oh, and a birthday present for a party Belle was going to later that afternoon.

Anyway, our basket was pretty full. One of those weird ingrained things my mother passed on to me is the need to watch the cashier ring everything through. I've gotten double charged for things on more than one occasion, so I always watch just to be sure. Belle was clinging to my arm, but I suddenly noticed that Addie was nowhere to be found.

"Where's your sister?" I asked Belle.

"She went running outside," she replied with a shrug.

Just then, Addie came back into the store and walked over to us. She started putting the bags into the cart, and I couldn't help noticing that she was near tears.

I waited until we got to the car before I asked what was wrong because, like me, Addie is going to cry if she's close ... and she hates crying in public.

Basically what happened was that there was a woman with four children in the next check-out line over. One of her children was in a wheelchair, and she obviously had her hands full on many levels. When she went to leave, trying to push a wheelchair, balance a toddler one a hip, and keep track of two other kids, she forgot one of her bags at the cash register.

Addie saw what had happened, told the cashier she was going to catch up to the woman, grabbed the bag, and went running after the woman. The woman was extremely appreciative for Addie's help and thanked her very much.

The Target cashier? Not so much. She basically told Addie that she was wrong to do what she did and that it was basically stealing. Even though Addie's motives were obviously pure (the cashier saw her chase down the woman in the parking lot and hand the bag over), the message that my daughter got was that she was wrong to try to help someone out ... and that she was worthy of an assumption of guilt simply because of her status as a teenager.

Now, I hate helicopter parents as much as anyone. I cannot stand it when parents have this idea that their kids will always tell them the truth and go all Mama Grizzly when told that their child cheated on a test or something.

I also have no illusions that my children are perfect. I could easily write blog posts chronicling the negative sides of both my daughters. I don't do that because it feels wrong to me, but I am not one of those "my kids are perfect" parents.

This incident just really bothered me ... mostly because it really bothered Addie. I think this was the first time that she was unfairly judged by an adult, with the irony of course being that she was going out of her way to help a poor woman who would have had a hell of a time trying to get her kids all buckled in just to have to go back into Target to get a stupid bag.

There are bad teenagers, and I won't argue that. However, there are also bad adults.

Is it fair to judge all teenagers by a stereotype that, when push comes to shove, is really pretty unfair?

Behind the Eight Ball, but Needed to Weigh in on New Moon Concerns

The film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's New Moon comes out at midnight, and the country seems to be abuzz with concerns. I'd noticed the latest vocalization about a series I make no secret of being exhausted with, but I hadn't realized the scope of the chatter this time around until reading an excellent post on Zelda Lily on the theory of Twilight as pro-abstinence.

Since then, I've noticed a lot of people talking about Meyer's characters in a less-than-complimentary light. One of my Journalism students actually mentioned a news report talking about how Bella and Edward are the very epitome of an unhealthy relationship. On my way back from the teachers' room at lunchtime today, I came upon a group of eighth grade girls reading The New York Times (yes, you read that correctly) and discussing--intelligently!--the merits and shortcomings of concerns raised in an article.

I'd never really thought of the Twilight saga as more than a collection that was marginally entertaining the first time around. Now, people are talking about why America is putting an emotionally twisted relationship on a pedestal ... about the sexual repercussions of the books ... about Bella's inability to have any sort of individual identity beyond the men in her life (Edward, Jacob, even her father Charlie) ... about the coyly ambiguous relationship between Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart ...

And I like to think of myself as one who finds philosophy everywhere! Geez Louise ...

My thoughts, in a nutshell:
1. Any books that lead to children reading cannot be all bad.
2. It really pisses me off when there are film adaptations made of books that kids actually read and enjoy (Holes is a great example ... the Harry Potter films are exceptions)
3. Bella and Edward are not good for each other. You do not need another person to make you whole, and their emotional obsession with each other is really pretty creepy.
4. The idea that these books are pro-abstinence is laughable. I mean, there are some pretty hot scenes throughout the course of the series. Although Bella and Edward do (because of circumstances and timing) hold off from actually having sex until they are married, I somehow don't see the pro-abstinence groups embracing the sort of intense foreplay both implied and stated in the books.
5. Bella is a pathetic "leading lady" in that her actions and choices are dictated by men (or her mother, whose life revolves around her new husband).
5a. I think it's kind of ironic that Bella names her baby daughter Renesmee after two women in her life--two mothers, if you will--when neither played what could be called a pivotal role in the saga.
6. Pattinson and Stewart are probably dating (or something ... but were told to keep it on the DL so as not to spoil that "pro-abstinence thing")

While I have read the entire series, I did not see Twilight and I do not intend to see New Moon (much to Addie's chagrin). My thoughts are based entirely on the books.

What are your thoughts on the bizarre phenomena of suddenly coming up with all of these concerns about a series that has been in the public eye for years?