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Zola Potts' Journal
Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.
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2006.12.24 18.55
I've been under so much stress the past two weeks that of course, as soon as I could lay down for a full night's sleep, I got sick. Sick as in shaking with fever and trying to swallow with a painfully swollen throat, and sick with no-one to check in or care for me since I caught the former BF in a serious lie and all he could do was keep denying what was literally pictured and dated in front of me. The truth and an apology are apparently more expensive than the loss of my trust.
Anyway, last week there was a holiday pageant at one of my schools. The kids I work with, being special ed, are usually hidden from sight on the fifth and sixth floors of their buildings, but on this occasion they actually got to use the auditorium. Their families sat in relative comfort as the children sang and danced -- and even recited poetry -- on stage. There was one rather unwise musical selection -- "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" -- considering that many of the kids are autistic and actually rocked around the tree.
Other than that, it was all pretty impressive and brought tears to my eyes several times as I realized that quite a few of the kids couldn't talk two years ago, much less read, recite, or sing. The amount of love and work that most of the teachers pour onto these children is truly amazing.
Mood:  sick
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2006.12.17 18.30
squirrel surprise
Perhaps the squirrel in the bucket (and the baby with the baboon heart) ended up in some good ol' situationist presentation like this:
Squirrel Suprise
Posted on March 6th, 2006
Grass Valley, CA
At 10:28 a.m. a caller from the 100 block of Park Avenue reported she found a dead squirrel covered in mustard in her mailbox. Caller requested a log entry only.
Found in The Union
Mood:  sad
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2006.12.08 16.53
Squirrely
I found an adult squirrel huddled on the sidewalk by the fence outside my apt this Wednesday morning. He or she was quite exposed, and while it didn't appear injured, it made no move to escape when I went right up to it. It
just pulled its tail tighter around itself and tried to snuggle into
the sidewalk.
I considered letting it stay in my bathroom, but then remembered that
I no longer have cat carriers in which to keep it; it would have to run free, and I'm not so far gone that I believe that giving a live, wild, and probably angry squirrel free rein in my bathroom is a truly viable option. Instead, I put some shredded newspaper into a cat litter bucket along with a piece of bread loaded with peanut butter, scooped the now bitey squirrel into the bucket,and took it to the nearby "woods" where I jammed the bucket into a
tree crotch some feet off of the ground.
The squirrel didn't resist much after its initial biting. In fact, it swished around in the paper a bit and started to make soft chirring noises, so maybe it found the peanut butter and had a bit of its misery eased.
I went back with a flashlight to see if it was still there and still alive when I got home, which was after 6 pm. I was slightly bewildered to find that the whole bucket was gone and there was no sign of any shredded paper (or shredded squirrel, for that matter). With a bit of guilt, I imagined one of the scenes that may have unfolded: a local hobo crackhead finds a perfectly good bucket jammed in a tree, thinks something along the line of "bingo!," removes the bucket from the tree, and when he or she reaches even ground opens the top all the way and sticks his/her face into it to see what it contains. If only there had been time to grab a sharpie marker and write "Caution: Contains Live Squirrel" on that bucket...
That's probably a best-case scenario. There are a lot of dag-nasty Chinese and Mexican restaurants in my area, plus weirdo animal fanciers. That squirrel has probably been converted into something greasy and fried or, if it's still alive, is languishing in a small birdcage in some wackadoo's apartment.
Mood:  okay
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2006.11.09 23.33
my next job
Yesterday I accompanied the kids from one of the schools I "service" to a local firehouse. It was awesome! If nothing else turns out to be good or worthwhile from these few months, I'm glad I got to facilitate autistic kids interacting with real live fire engines with spinning, flashing lights...even if two kids got into a fight because one called the other one's invisible friend a firetruck. The firemen even set up the firehose and let the kiddos blast water at people walking across the street from the front of the garage.
Then we went back to school, went the gym, and put on roller skates and fake police helmets and fireman hats. It was fun beyond my wildest work-related dreams, and could have been better only if we had passed out grape popsicles.
Of course, for allowing this to happen without any kind of objection and for posting about it in a public forum, my next job will probably be in a place like this:
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2006.11.02 20.02
"f you rescue me, I'll stay with you forever."
I saw "The Science of Sleep" about 2 weeks ago, and can't recommend that movie enough. I especially liked the song interlude in which the main character and his office mates were dressed up as cats (in VERY rudimentary fur body suits), playing as a 4-piece mod combo, singing a version of Lou Reed's "If you rescue me":
"If you rescue me, I'll be your friend forever.
If you let me in your bed, I'll keep you warm in winter.
Oh the kitties are playing,
They're having such fun..."
You can hear it at http://www.myspace.com/scienceofsleepsoundtrack
It perfectly caught those moments in my own dreams when I'm singing along to some absolutely appropriate and exquisitely expressed song and suddenly realize that I'm dreaming and should try very hard to remember the words and music. It never works, though.
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2006.10.24 20.24
now I'm jerkwad3000 on OK Cupid --soon to be deleted, i'm afraid.
 | | The Peach
Random Gentle Love Master (RGLMf)
Playful, kind, and well-loved, you are The Peach.
For such a warm-hearted, generous person, you're surprisingly experienced in both love and sex. We credit your spontaneous side; you tend to live in the moment, and you don't get bogged down by inhibitions like most women your age. If you see something wonderful, you confidently embrace it.
Your exact opposite:
The Nymph
Deliberate Brutal Sex Dreamer
| You are a fun flirt and an instant sweetheart, but our guess is you're becoming more selective about long-term love. It's getting tougher for you to become permanently attached; and a guy who's in a different place emotionally might misunderstand your early enthusiasm. You can wreck someone simply by enjoying him.
Your ideal mate is adventurous and giving, like you. But not overly intense.
DREAD: The False Messiah
CONSIDER: The Loverboy, The Playboy, or The Boy Next Door |
Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating.
My profile name: jerkwad3000 |
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2006.10.17 09.19
Bunions are not funions
I kind of like how this happy pedestrian is posed near the College of Podiatry and Foot Medicine and appears to be waving at the guy clutching his heart on a large billboard for hard liquor. (Strangely, even mildly upmarket brands of hard liquor, such as the one advertised here, don't appear to be sold in that part of Harlem -- I've tried to find some during "training days" in that area. I had to settle for a fifth of dollar-store mouthwash and a rag soaked in gasoline.)
Man, my bunions ache. I'm finding very little encouraging information about bunion treatment and surgery -- maybe if I enlist and go to Iraq, I'll blow both my feet off and get some snazzy new prosthetics, like the new Mac IFoot that can hold 6G of music and is bluetooth capable. I hear it has great "toe cleavage."
Mood:  anxious
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2006.10.14 22.47
it's not as great as I wanted it to be...
and it's totally pathetic that I am morphing into a stepford spinster enough to care. Tonight, with everything else going on and a shitload of other stuff to think about/work through, I was really looking forward to evaluating the performance of my newly-purchased liquid fabric softener. It just couldn't stand up to that kind of pressure.
Maybe I need to join an S&M club or something... get a tattoo of Herve Villachez to spice up my 'tude.
Mood: gassy
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2006.10.11 02.58
Awww...
It looks like my ex's wife, or maybe ex, has been stopping by to check out my various profiles and journals. In case you're back, hi there! Hope that diet is working out for you, or you're getting great conversational mileage out of the new LL Bean catalogue, or whatever it is that you do.
I almost wish I had time to scour the interweb for stuff about them, or at least had posted some pictures in which I am apparently hot rather than flamingly silly in bad teeth and batman masks. Then I remember that I'm working on another degree, have a career and avocation that I love, friends to play with, and a sweetheart to make plans with, and hardly have time to keep up with people I actually like. Also, in case any of my students soon reach cognitive critical mass and become search-engine savvy, I really don't want to be recognizable. (Although really, I would have to squelch my urges to celebrate any of my students "stalking" ANYONE as long as it involved using language skills and self-directed, goal-oriented behavior.)
I spent the last few days antiquing, walking in sunshine, and eating high-fat food. This was much better than the not eating and working myself into the ground I had been doing. I bought a breakfast set from the 1940's (crackle glaze, squared, demure floral pattern -- Cannonburg Spartan Ivory -- with creamer and sugar bowl and egg bowl and bacon platter) and a depression glass bowl with floral carvings. I picked up a few other goodies, which I may post pics of on my flickr account, if you want to see a sweet floral necklace and earring set in what I like to think of as "Helen Keller Blue."
Hedda asks, "Why shouldn't I mouth carpenter bees?"
Mood:  sleepy
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2006.10.02 20.03
bring it on, nick
Reality is much stranger than anything else I’ve encountered. For example, during a horrible break-up of a long-term relationship last March, I had to get out of Ithaca and bury myself in a new pursuit and so applied to the New York Teaching Fellows as a science teacher. This program offered the degree of intensity and potential for adding more useful qualifications to my bag of tricks that I needed to distract myself from how much time I’d wasted with an inappropriate partner as well as on non-marketable studies.
Fast forward to September: I am teaching English as a second language to largely non-communicative autistic students ranging from 5 to 21 years old.
Oddly enough, I’m pretty content with this so far. It meshes with much of my research interests in cognition and communication, and makes use of my experience with non-human animal training and observation. We’ll see what I think about it in a few months. Since I’m the “new kid,” AKA everybody’s bitch, I “get” to go to lots of meetings and try to meet my instructional caseload at the same time. Seems impossible from my current vantage point; maybe I’ll find a time machine in one of the overflowing dumpsters around here. If I did, though, I probably wouldn’t waste energy padding my current schedule so much as excising large swaths of my past.
In one of my on-line searches for resources, treatments and therapies for autistic children and youth, I happened on a familiar-ish name/email attached to a picture of a tiny boy being assisted on a surf board. How could that be, I wondered -- unless my ex husband (whom I never talk to) and his current wife had had a child who is autistic. After a very brief Google session, it certainly seems like that's the case. Weird. Although I can sympathize with the kid -- living with my ex drove me into offended silence for years -- I hope that the fact that they live in CT and I'm in NYC keeps us out of each other's orbits.
Mood:  blank
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2006.09.29 20.44
yes, but I smell like chicken.
| You Are Fish | 
You have a well formed palate and a daring appetite. If it's served to you, you'll at least try it.
People are pretty scared of your exotic ways. But once they get a taste of you, they're addicted! |
Mood: drained
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2006.09.29 20.40
random qui-qui-qui-quiz
| You Are 76% Evil | 
You are very evil. And you're too evil to care.
Those who love you probably also fear you. A lot. |
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2003.06.18 18.13
Where pharmacists have fan clubs...
and pass out free cookies -- that's next door to one of the places I work. The cookies are quite good and look like giant pills.
Sometimes I wish I could produce entries that reflect some of the angst and despair that bubble under my daily life, but then I hear a song by Frank Zappa on my earphone radio. I believe it's titled "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes."
Go here and listen to some of these. I think that the author has had some similar experiences, but was unable to keep a proper distance.
http://www.ubu.com/sound/dec.html
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2003.06.16 18.31
you should know better...
Exchange with the unique snowflake at lunch today:
U.S.: "Why do you have a dead bee in a sandwich bag in your purse? "
Me: "You should know better than to ask me questions like that. Look, I also have a sports sock."
U.S.: "Just one?"
Me: "Yeah -- that's all I need."
Tomorrow I am going to go watch the DA float a log down a stream into Cayuga Lake while I try to coordinate pre-teen essay behavior. If that seems to make no good sense, it's because it doesn't. I think it' some kind of local conservation situationism...
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2003.06.13 17.44
cleaning house...
Yeah, I've been out of commission for a while. Lately, though, I've been busy, and the only kind of busy in Quadrant Five is Insanely Busy.
This week I've been cleaning out a house that set new standards for unliveable filth. The tenants had been evicted, and despite having had plenty of notice, didn't seem to pack anything. They even left their dog and cats behind. All kinds of feces -- dog, cat, probably human -- were smeared all over the place. The carpets and subfloors were saturated with cat piss. The basement was filled floor-to-ceiling with bags of moldering trash; the only clean thing there was a boot-cleaning brush made of "real water buffalo."
Another worker found a cup of coffee with human shit in it, which made her puke. Unfortunately, the toilets were all clogged so she had to add to the bubbling creek of filth on the floor.
At the "end" of the clean-out we were ripping out layers of floor in the kitchen. I commented to someone, "What if we are destroying someone's happy memories? What if someone is saying, right now, 'Remember the time we made two boxes of macaroni and cheese and then I shat in that cup full of coffee? We can never go back there again!'." He looked at me as if I should be shot, swept up a few more shards of piss-saturated fragments of plywood subflooring, and said, "If those are their happy memories, they deserve to be destroyed."
The guy in charge of the project has done a lot of horribly similar clear-outs. I suggested that he write a monthly column titled "How can you live this way?" for the local free paper. He said, "Yeah, I considered that, but you know that guy who keeps coming by the job site? The big trashy-looking blonde? He was one of the people kicked out of here, and he's a convicted arsonist."
I am working on getting out of quadrant five...
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2002.11.27 22.08
happy holidays
Oh how I dread the holidays. Well, all except Hallowe'en. Even before my retreat into quadrant five, it was always best for me to be isolated. This year is no different, except that I will be celebrating it at the compost heap. All the creatures that live in and around it are in for a real treat when I clean out the fridge. It's loaded with 3 people's rotting food -- quite a bit of smelly mush in any quadrant, but an awful heap here. There may be raw carp at the bottom of the vegetable keeper, or it could be a fox spleen -- it's really hard to tell because I won't look at it too closely. This is much worse than the house I lived in on Long Island. There was a frozen baby squirrel monkey on top of the ice cube trays in that freezer.
I may then treat the Ithaca fire department to a small emergency when I attempt to clean the plugged-in fridge with kerosene. That stuff will dissolve almost anything. At least it dissolved my hair when I was 3 or 4 and used it to get a tick off my scalp.
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2002.11.21 13.59
Low tide
The other night I went to the movies. I was hovering over a toilet seat in the women's room when I heard the woman in the next stall say, "Hmmm. ***rustle rustle****Smells like fish. Well, I guess there's nothing I can do about it now." She left the stall without flushing, and the bathroom without washing her hands.
The whole room stank of low tide; there were starfish in my toilet bowl. That had been the quadrant five coochie fairy.
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2002.11.20 01.01
Oh, how the mighty have fallen...
I had a friend back in quadrant four who, as we were wandering around a shopping square one day, pointed and brightly said, "I want a puppy like THAT!!" This woman didn't say things brightly very often, so my attention was immediately directed to where she was pointing... right at a double amputee crackhead repeatedly ramming his wheelchair into the brick facing of a boutique. "Cocksuckshit!! Yo momma fuckin EAT this thing! Oh yeah she do! Excuse me miss, can you spare some change for a veteran? Oh no? Then touch it!! I said touch my jimmy, bitch!! It's the least you can do. Yeah, you look at my stumps -- I'm unwrappin em just for you."
Um, what?
I tugged at her sleeve and said, "You mean HIM? I don't know where you'd get one. You'd have to make it like that yourself, like a bonsai kitten."
"WHAT? No, idiot, that shar-pei over there. Isn't it adorable?" Oh, there was a puppy to the right of the guy in the wheelchair. It was cute, but not extraordinarily so.
Well, I saw her Quadrant Five equivalent on the commons the other day, leading around a double amputee crackhead in a wheelchair. He had a small tape player on his lap and was "rapping" over the Starland Vocal Band/P. Diddy version of Afternoon Delight. "You THINK that music is good for you, but what you know, cunt-licking asshole CRACKER whore!" She was carrying plastic bags and a pooper scooper.
"Isn't he adorable? I just got him from the SPCA -- someone just didn' have enough room for such a big puppy."
" You FUCK that stick! Don't you fucking touch me!"
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2002.11.15 22.17
I wonder what the livejournals in other quadrants are like? Here most of the posters are so young that I'm beginning to lactate. The ones who aren't posting pictures of themselves weeping exaggerated tears are 30-and 40-somethings whose lives make me glad to be shiftless...
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2002.11.14 22.33
Not all bad...
Not everything is bad in Q5. A few semesters ago I was TA'ing for a guy with brain damage, which was kind of bad in some ways. He would write his lecture notes on 3X5 note cards and as he read each one he'd shift it to the back of the pile. He usually forgot whether he was reading from the back or the front of the pile at about the fourth card, and continued shifting the same card back and forth and reading the same card for the rest of the class, no matter how confused the students looked.
Anyway, one day I was rushing to class after having graded and made editorial comments on well over 100 term papers. I was carrying them with me as I ducked into the bathroom to pee, and things were going ok until it was time to flush. Then there was an avalanche of graded papers into the piss-filled toilet.
I didn't know what to do. The papers were bad, but not so bad that they deserved to be pissed on. I grabbed them out of the toilet and tried to dry them off with paper towels, wrapped them in some more paper towels, and then headed out the door.
I immediately ran into the professor I worked for. The papers were dripping pissy water as I held them at arm's length from my body; the prof didn't seem to notice.
"Oh Zola, we need to talk."
Geez, this was going to be bad. His seeming cluelessness was hiding... well, it was hiding a mind that would notice a large stack of term papers soaked in pee. I steeled myself.
"The few papers I graded were so bad that I'm going to make them do them over again. Don't even give them their originals back -- they need to start from scratch."
Joy! I used up all of my luck for the whole year in that one interaction, but it was worth it. He walked with me to class and never mentioned the nastiness I was carrying.
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2002.11.12 18.46
female trouble
Of all the wacky things in quadrant five, I have been most relieved to find that feminine hygiene products are pretty much the same. The sizes are kind of odd, but with a little experimentation you can learn to get what you need.
What's odd are the advertisements. Most of the television commercials I've seen feature thugged-out rappers dancing with pads, tampons, and big-bootied bleeding bitches of all races. In one, a gold-toothed madman is gangsta-rapping to a version of the old song "King of the Road," only he is boasting about being "King of the Flow." At one point he has some thick-ass pads stuck to his hands as he does the "raisin' the roof" dance motion. I don't even want to describe where he puts them.
I think I recognized Busta Rhymes rapping about "Who stopped my flow?" while his hair was braided with some seriously big tampons.
Kool Keith does the commercials for OB tampons here, so they're my brand of choice. His ads have a kind of cannibalistic spin to them, but what the hell, he at least brings up the point that they're less environmentally damaging than other brands because they lack the plastic applicator, known in all quadrants as a "beach whistle":
"YO, why you need that plastic
Up in your snatch? Ick!"
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2002.11.12 13.29
???
????
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