Thanks to everyone who hoped I would get better. Things are coming and going out of all my orifices in the correct direction and at the right consistencies now, and “Feeling uncomfortable after eating at Hooters” has taken on a whole new meaning for me.

Yesterday, I was working in a 9th grade science class. An interesting thing about 9th graders and 6th graders is that they drop about 5 years in maturity during that year before rebounding to normal age-appropriate maturity the next year. There’s something about coming to a new school and being the youngest ones that sends about half of them barreling into full retard. An average 6th grader is a lot less mature than a typical 4th or 5th grader, and an average 9th grader is about on par with a 7th grader. I don’t know exactly what causes this, but it happens.

Anyway, the teacher I was working for warned me that in his last class of the day, a lot of the students were kind of goofy and he had two special ed. kids in there. One of them would start dropping F-Bombs if she was angry, and the other one would bang his head into the table if he was frustrated. He said that it was not uncommon for the kids in the back to try and antagonize the girl so she would start yelling fuck, which would frustrate the other student.

He told me about a day when the kids in the back had been screwing around while one of the special needs kids was slamming his head into the table and the other one was yelling “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” at the kids behind her.

Needless to say, I was a little bit nervous about 7th block.
I immediately started scoping things out when they showed up to class. The students in the back were, indeed, goofballs. The special needs kids were sitting in the front row next to each other. The girl was kind of quiet and slouched over with a scowl that made her look kind of like a clean shaven Phil Anselmo.
Seeing that someone looks like Phil Anselmo is awesome news if you’re looking at the lead singer at a Pantera concert or if it’s the attorney general (See below), but under the circumstances I was in … well, it was actually still pretty awesome.

Will Ferrell - Bill Clinton and Janet Reno


I doubled my resolve to make sure that nobody fucked with this girl.

And honestly, they didn’t try very hard. One guy whispered something to her when she walked by her that pissed her off a little bit. I saw her bristle at whatever he said, so I just glared at him and said “don’t” like I was talking to a disobedient pet. He made a half assed attempt to make up an excuse about how he had actually been talking to someone else, which I replied to with another “Don’t.” After that, either nobody bothered, or I didn’t pick up on it and the girl was just feeling calmer than usual that day (Which seems unlikely, because, like I said, she totally looked like Phil Anselmo.)

Later, one of the kids wanted to go to the bathroom. I let him. What can I say? I’m a generous guy. twenty minutes later, he still wasn’t back, which didn’t really surprise me. Kids do that all the time. The solution is to only let one person go at a time. When other kids ask me if they can go, I tell them that as soon as the other student is back, they’re welcome to. It seems to work reasonably well, because when the person who was wandering gets back, the students that want their turn to go slack are pissed off, and the people that go after tend to be quicker.

One of the guys in the back started half joking that if the guy who was out didn’t come back soon, he was going to just go in a trash can. We went back and forth for a while, and I ended up having to semi-seriously talk him out of peeing in a trash can, not really because he had to go, but because he thought it would be funny. I can respect that, and as anyone who took physics in high school with me knows, I can also relate, but it seemed like a bad idea to let someone do it in class. He grudgingly humored me and waited until the other guy was back.

So, I survived. It wasn’t the best day class that I’ve ever had, but nobody was slamming their head into anything, nobody was screaming “Fuck” at anyone else, and nobody took a dump in a trashcan.

(I just had a moment where I realized that those are the things I use to gauge how successful my day was. This is a strange job. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everybody does that. Maybe, when a doctor comes home from work and his wife asks him how his day went, he says “It was pretty rough. We kept getting more and more patients, we had this one guy that we couldn’t diagnose, and we lost a woman in surgery today.”
His wife nods and puts her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s not so bad, Sweetie,” she coos, “At least nobody took a dump in the trash can.”)

As I was packing up and leaving, the teacher who is in the classroom after me asked me how my day went. I told her that it was fine.
“Really?” she asked, giving me a skeptical look.
I told her that the last block had been a little bit wild, but we made it through in one piece.

Then, she told me a story about 7th block. Apparently, the last time the teacher I was there for had a sub, when she had come in and asked how the day went, the sub had showed her the right side of the room, where students had poured vegetable oil all over the floor and were sliding back and forth on it.

So actually, my day was really fucking excellent and I did an awesome job of classroom management, I guess.

Which reminds me: I don’t remember who, but I think that someone mentioned Phil Anselmo earlier. It would be a crying shame if I didn’t put a Pantera video in here somewhere. This song is 15 years old and still rocks far harder than most “hard rock” that I hear now. I’m looking at you, Nickleback.

You fucking pussies.

Friday night was my good friend’s birthday. He wanted to hang out in Denver.

First on the agenda: A trip to Hooters. Second, an evening at one of the local strip clubs.

I hate both of these activities, but he’s my friend so I met up with him and headed to Hooters. Hooters was like Hooters always is: Women in very small, tight outfits who touch your shoulder when they talk to you and call you “sweetie” serve you fairly filthy food. You watch the girls walking around when they’re not dealing with a table with vacant, bored looks on their faces that are immediately replaced by glowing smiles as soon as they’re working a table. As uncomfortable as that makes me, it was a relatively pleasant time. The server that we had was fairly interesting (as Hooter’s waitresses go) and seemed less irritated with the whole job than most. The food was all right, and my friend had a good time.

At this point, my friend had too much to drink, and I was the new designated driver, so we headed to the strip club. We were there for three or four hours, and it gave me some time to think: why do I hate going to strip clubs so much? It’s just a place with topless girls. I like girls, and am fond of seeing them without their tops, so why is it that going to a location who’s biggest source of income is girls with no tops on such an unbelievably uncomfortable experience for me?

I had a LOT of time to think about that last night, and I think that I’ve come to a conclusion.

I remember in Jr. High when some of the girls started realizing that they could get boys to do things for them if they flirted a little bit. If they batted their eyes at someone and made some sort of physical contact, they could get someone else to do their homework for them. The boys didn’t stand a chance; they didn’t have any experience dealing with interaction like that, and the girls were holding all the cards. When I walk into a strip club now, I feel like it’s like that again, only you’re paying 30 dollars and they’re not wearing a shirt.

And it weirds me out a little bit to talk to someone who I know is interacting with me for money. I’m also apparently very poor at it. Some girls came up to the table that my friend and I were sitting at and started making casual physical contact and asking us questions. One asked me what I did. I told her that I was a substitute teacher. “Oh, so you get to put up with all the bullshit,” she joked. I chuckled and asked her what she did. She looked at me like I was retarded for a moment and then told me that she worked at the club we were at. “Oh, so you get to put up with all the bullshit,” I told her.

She glared at me for a second and then got up and walked away. I didn’t think that it was an especially hostile exchange, but apparently I was wrong.

Later, another girl came up, put her hand on my shoulder and said…something to me. I don’t remember what. What I do remember is that she was completely fucked up. She was trying to look at me, but she couldn’t quite focus her eyes, and so she was actually looking about 30 feet past me. She asked me to buy her a shot, so I got one for her and my friend. Then, after a few more moments of me uncomfortably ignoring her, she told the wall behind me that she would be back, but that she was going to go walk around for a few minutes. I think she told me that she would be right back so I wouldn’t be jealous, even though I think she was misreading me a little bit if she thought I would be jealous if she tried to find a friendlier customer with deeper pockets.

I think that there’s just too much bullshit for me to handle. My friend says that he enjoys the simplicity of it all; each side knows what the other wants, and they give it to each other without the bullshit of a relationship. I can respect that, but I don’t feel that way at all. I feel like I’m up to my eyeballs in bullshit when I go into a strip club. The girls can’t even really tell you their real names, for christ’s sake.

Or maybe it’s just complete overstimulation for me. I’m a little bit uncomfortable in large, noisy groups of people, and maybe throwing naked girls into the mix just overloads me a little bit. I don’t know.

Like I said, I don’t see anything wrong with the whole strip club experience, and it works for a lot of people. It’s just not my thing.

Oh, and according to my friend, when Kobe Bryant comes to town, they line up all of the girls in the V.I.P. room for him and he picks one to take back to the hotel room with him. It’s good to be a professional athlete, I guess.

Anyway, after spending several hours doing my best to spend money and act like I was having a good time, my friend was willing to take off. I drove him home and then headed to bed.

For about an hour and a half, before I started puking.

I’m not sure if I had food poisoning from Hooter’s “delightfully tacky, yet unrefined” food or the flu, but I spent the next ten hours regularly depositing the contents of my stomach into a bucket. I think I slept for about 20 hours yesterday, in between throwing up. Even better, I threw out my back while throwing up yesterday, so I’m sick and crippled.

What I’m trying to say is that this has been the best weekend ever, and if the Broncos lose to the Chiefs today, which they probably will, I am going to murder someone.

I will leave you with the video for “Lapdance” by N.E.R.D., because it kicks ass, is loaded with strippers and Pharrel looks hilarious with that goofy mustache.