Things I've Learned about High Schoolers....so far.

Yes, I am aware of the huge pile of blogfail currently sitting at the top of my blog as my header. I wanted my blog to look more fancy and less like I write it in my pajamas at 5 pm on a Saturday and don't know the difference between HTML and a hyperlink (ps. I kind of don't).

So anyway I made what I think is a super cute header collage and tried to affix it to the top of this page, and ended up with what you see above. I don't know what the black chunks are on either side of it and I don't know how to get rid of them. HALP me, plz.



Since I last wrote, I started full-time student teaching English I to seven blocks of 189 ninth graders at a local high school. I have made some discoveries about 9th graders and about my sad excuse for a life in that time.


1. High school students think that Jersey Shore is more important than Martin Luther King, Jr.

True story: When my coaching teacher asked our students if any good specials/celebrations had been on TV the day before, my students responsed with: "Yeah! Jersey Shore!"

The day before that was MLK, Jr. Day.


2. No matter how close in age you may be to high schoolers, if you are not in high school anymore, you are automatically an old loser who is a lot less intelligent than said high schoolers.

My students have tried to tell me that "Smirnoff" is a brand of gum, that the "real" bell actually rings at 8:15 and not at 8:00, and that college couldn't possibly be as hard or boring as 9th grade English.

they pretty much see you like this. even if you are only 23.


3. High school students do not have it in their physical capacities to maintain possession of a piece of paper you give them from one day of high school to the next.


4. High school students will pick up on even the most minute, obscure sexual innuendo you have the misfortune of accidentally uttering, and will take this innuendo and ruin the next 30 minutes of your life with it.

*Note: They will forget every scrap of information you share with them on Animal Farm, but they will remember this accidental sexual reference until the end of time.

5. If there is one tiny detail you forget when teaching any given subject, high school students will ask you 17 questions on that detail during that lesson.


6. At least a few students in the class will take literally almost everything that you meant sarcastically.

One day, when trying to get students to raise their hands and participate, I made the mistake of telling them that it's a special talent among teachers to be able to just stare out into a room of silent students for as long as it takes for someone to produce a response.

Next thing I knew, a student in the back row was encouraging all of his classmates to "test Ms. Townes' talent," and all of my kids went mute. Teacher fail.

7. High school students think you are really stupid.

My students think I really don't know that they ask to go to the bathroom so that they can roam the halls for 5 minutes instead of sitting in class, that they act confused and ask questions to which they almost certainly already know the answers just to waste class time, and that if they tell me their name is "Elmo" that I can't simply go to the roster book and discover their name is actually John.


8. High school students may hate you, but they hate substitute teachers more than you.

This results in a very weird camaraderie on days when your coaching teacher is absent, and you are there alone with your students and a substitute. Suddenly the ones that despised you yesterday are your best friends. The ones that already liked you have clung to you like leeches and are your staunchest defenders in the face of a foreign invasion by a substitute.


9. Although I'm sure they possess them, high school students do not use their inference skills very effectively.

My students were having quite the heated debate about how old they thought I was one day.

Student: Okay, so are you old enough to buy alcohol?

Me: Yes, I am.

Another student: WAIT, but are you old enough to buy cigarettes??

Yes, Bobby, I'm at least 21 years old, but somehow not yet 18.


10. High school students will make fun of you at ANY and EVERY opportunity you give them.

I recently made a mix-CD for my students for a lesson on theme, and they scoffed at the fact that I had NINETIES music on this CD. As in, the 1990's. This prompted me to ask what year they were all born and subsequently experience my first "I feel so old ballz" moment when they all responded they were born in 1995 and 1996.

My students have also exploited my fear of roaches and love of Star Wars, and flat-out could not put their little brains around the fact that I go home at night and plan lessons and activities for them to do in class the next day. I guess they thought the magical lesson plan fairies deliver their material to me when I get to school each morning. If you don't have a thick skin, I wouldn't recommend venturing into the minefield that is a 9th grade classroom.



All that being said, it is "so far, so good" in my student teaching experience. Maybe I'll go watch Clueless or High School Musical or Bring It On and reflect on how wildly unrealistic they are in their depictions of what goes on in high schools.



"Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves." -Virginia Satir
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Winter Break Cabin Fever

Today, my mom came home from running errands with Chick-fil-a kids meals for my sister and me. My 19-year-old sister and my 23-year-old self. As we dug into our 4-pack nuggs, Suz was bustling around the kitchen, straightening things up and doing Mom things, when she casually stated:

"Ginger threw up a sock today."

What?!

"Yeah, she threw up a sock. It was just a gross, balled up mess of sock parts and bile."

After she told us this delicious little bit of information, I was wondering two things...

Where was the sock now? And did she take a picture?

When Suz told me that she threw the sock mess away, and that she did NOT take a picture of it, I was legitimately upset. Like, actually upset that I didn't have evidence of the sock-vomit.

Why?

Because if she had taken a picture, I could have written a whole blog post about my nasty dog and her nasty sock vomit.

I kid you not, I even contemplated RE-CREATING what I thought the regurgitated bile sock might look like and writing the blog anyway.

And that's when it hit me that winter break has officially gone on for way too long.

When you become noticeably, admittedly frustrated that you don't have any photographic proof of a ball of sock mess and bile that your dog vomited earlier that day, it's time to go back to school and be a real person again.

This got me thinking back to the events (or lack of events) from the past month that led up to this extremely low point in my life.

I left the house a few times over the course of winter break, I swear.

The first thing I did was go on a road trip up to Washington, DC back in the second week of December with my friend Jen.

Jen's mom lives outside of DC. So we went up there, had a few nerdgasms in all of the DC mall's awesome museums, hung out with Jen's awesome mom, and just had a generally good time. This short but sweet trip had me feeling pretty good about how winter break was gonna go down.

nerdgasm in the lobby of the museum of natural history

A few days after that, my family and I headed up to Asheville and had ourselves a lovely time at the Biltmore estate. Another very pleasant trip. My spirits were still good. But this was only about a week into break.

A couple days after the jaunt to Asheville, that creepy little menace known as boredom started to sneak up on me. In recent years, when I am home at my parents' house with my sister and we start to get bored, a trend has developed...

We do stupid shit to our hair.

So, 2 days before Christmas and 4 days before our formal, professional family portrait session, Stephanie and I went to the hair salon.

And accidentally dyed my hair red.

Prior to this incident, I had been a platinum blonde for all 23 years of my existence. I went from platinum blonde.......to this.........

just call me Ginge.

Some of my friends and family members told me that they liked it and that it didn't look that bad, but all I could think was OHMYGODI'MAGINGER.

I have nothing against redheads, but on my own head? Hideous. Plus, Suz was none too thrilled about me taking the formal family portrait with these new locks.

Now, keep in mind I did this to my head 2 days before Christmas. So there I was, on Christmas Eve, on a desperate search to find another hair salon to fix the hot gingery mess on my head before the Christmas weekend and before our family portraits.

My sister happens to have quite a bit of experience in the hair catastrophe department, and managed to track down a salon in downtown Greenville that would take me, last minute and with no appointment on Christmas Eve, to try to salvage my coif.

In an epic stroke of luck that doesn't usually befall someone like myself, this woman was a hair miracle worker. She took one look at my head and went straight to down with highlight foils.

thumbs up to destroying the integrity of my hair to avoid ruining formal portraits and being etched off the family tree.

And so, several stress filled hours and 200 dollars later, Susan the miracle worker at Headquarters day spa in Greenville had saved the day. The new finished product went from holy-redhair-batman! to this:

crisis averted.

Some have said it still looks dark blonde, others say light brown. But all I see is "not red." So i'm happy.

Also, those of you who know me know that I don't wear glasses, so I guess I should essplain those.

I'm really obsessed with glasses, but unfortunately I was cursed with near perfect vision and have no actual need for them. Thus, I buy fake glasses and wear them around like I'm bat blind without them.

And I don't even care that I'm announcing that they're fake right now because I just love glasses that much. And I especially love looking like a nerd, so I'd say these huge specs I picked out do the trick.

The hair debacle entertained us for a few days. Oh, and I guess Christmas did too. And just when cabin fever was setting in again, it was time to ship out to Atlanta for the South Carolina bowl game in the Georgia Dome on New Year's Eve.

I had high hopes for New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, USC's football team and the Marta subway system conspired to bring those hopes swiftly crashing down as the clock struck midnight.

We lost the bowl game kind of miserably to Florida State, which is embarrassing enough. After all, they are in the ACC for crying out loud.

(And on a sidenote, if I ever have to hear the Seminole tomahawk chop cheer ever again, I might murder someone. Death by tomahawk chop.)

After the game, my friend Kate and I had a very simple plan: take the Marta to a club called Cosmo Lava, pick up our tickets we had already pre-paid for, and ring in a fun New Year in downtown Atlanta.

We did not take into account, however, how the Marta system has magical powers that turn two decently intelligent 20-somethings into complete idiots with zero sense of direction or common sense.

15 minutes before midnight, we got off on a stop on Peachtree Street.......literally 18 blocks from where we were supposed to be.

We admitted defeat, sat down on a street curb in the middle of downtown Atlanta, and rang in a very anti-climactic new year with this guy:

This man is called Dwayne. He is homeless, has two fake legs, and fought valiantly for our country in Vietnam.

Someone asked me on New Year's Day if I had a NYE kiss. I replied "No," because if I had had a new year's kiss, it would have been Dwayne.

Dwayne was nice and all, but homelessness and prosthetics just don't really do it for me.

I got back to Greenville from Atlanta on the 1st, and for the past 5 days have done almost quite literally nothing except StumbleUpon and watch movies on demand with my sister and drink wine.

That brings me to this evening and my yearning for Ginger's sock vomit. So I wrote this blog.

Happy 2011 everyone! I need to go back to school.


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Nerdfest 2K10

It's almost unbelievable.

If I didn't take pictures and document them in writing, I swear to god no one would ever believe that things like the following exist.

I mentioned in a blog post last week that one of the reasons I blog is because going home to my parents' house is like entering some weird alternate universe where the 1980s are still cool, made-up "designer" breed dogs run loose and wild, and in any given closet or alcove you might find an enormous hidden stash of bird seeds or a life-size Darth Vader head staring out at you from the back corner.

This weekend was no different.

Friday night rolled around, and my parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew were all here for a nice Friday-night-in with Pizza Hut for dinner.

The pizza got eaten, and conversations were had about the usual things: everyone's work week, my school week, what funny things the kids had done lately, etc.

After dinner, my brother, nephew, and I went to the upstairs den. We put on Men in Black, busted out the K'Nex, and started making kick-ass pieces of K'Nex construction equipment, with my nephew serving as construction manager and pointing out every tiny thing I was doing wrong in my K'Nex handiwork.

And then, right there amidst the Christmas decoration explosion that covered every inch of my parents' house, my sister-in-law came sprinting into the den, shrieking with excitement and teasing us with taunts of "Guess what I found?! Guess what I found?!" as she came scurrying down the hallway that led to the den.

My brother and I exchanged glances. We didn't know what the hell Mandy had found, but we knew it had to be good. We. were. excited.

We were not disappointed.

Mandy had apparently accidentally stumbled upon a treasure-trove of a bookshelf in one of my mom's upstairs guest rooms. This bookshelf might as well have never left 1982. Every book on it was 30 years old. And most of them were Star Wars themed.

Honest to god, sometimes I wonder how I ended up being such a dork, but then I remember....Oh yeah! My mother has entire bookshelves and rooms and storage closets and Christmas wreaths completely devoted to Star Wars or any of the franchise's various spin-off stories.

The thing Mandy had found was this:

This is a children's book entitled "The Ewoks and the Lost Children." Awesome.

After this, it was game over. We were all on missions to explore what other hidden caverns of nerd-dom the Suz had hidden away in closets in her house.

Something like this happens every time I come home to my parents' house in Greenville.

It's like....

Oh hey Mom! The North Pole called, they want all their Christmas shit back. Or....

Oh heyyy Mom, George Lucas called, he wants his massive collection of weird-ass Star Wars memorabilia back. Or...

Oh heyy Suz! The 1980's called, they want all of their creepy-ass shit you only ever see on "I Love the 80s," that you have stored in all the closets of your house like it's totally normal to still own an Atari or a Care-Bear, back......

So, like I said at the start of this post, if I didn't have photographic evidence, people might never believe that some freaks in the year 2010 (my mom) still actually own this stuff and keep it in their house like it's completely acceptable.

Exhibit A:

You see that name scrawled in the upper left of this device? Yes. It says "Michael" in small-child-chicken scratch. This first belonged to my 30-year-old brother when he was about 5. And my mom still. has. it. Why? The world of normal people may never know.

It's the "Fisher Price Big Bird Record Player", by the way, and the record we put in it tonight was this also-30-year-old record of Empire Strikes Back.

I find this especially comical because my mother never really let us watch Sesame Street. She thought that the characters looked decrepit and homeless and didn't think they were good examples to show her young children.

....But by god she bought the Big Bird record player.....and kept it for thirty years......





I just stuck this in here because after the childhood toy artifacts started coming out, I figured I might need it, and I got really excited that Rolling Rock is making "Rock Light" now! Awesome!


Exhibit B:

This poor child doesn't know it yet, but she's doomed for a life of LucasFilm-fueled dorkhood just like the rest of us.

The bookshelf where Mandy had found the initial Ewok book that sparked this foray into the Outer Rim of course had to be revisited, where books like the rest of these seen above were found: "Shiny as a Droid," "Return of the Jedi: The Ewoks Join the Fight," and "Star Wars: The Wookiee Storybook." Classics!



Exhibit C:

I just felt like "Shiny as a Droid" was too epic not to give it its own close-up. I'm thinking about bringing this in to my 9th graders for a read-aloud to help them think about imagery and vivid details. Just kidding.......or am I?




Exhibit D:

I wasn't kidding about the giant life-size Vader head. I found it in a closet, accompanied by this....

A giant shiny life size C-3PO head!

And before you go thinking that these little guys are just for display, and don't actually serve very legitimate purposes.....I opened them up and found this inside....

Star Wars character figurines inside a giant Star Wars character travel case inside a closet filled with nothing but blast-from-the-past Star Wars memorabilia. You're welcome, George Lucas.


AND, just so you don't think this household was COMPLETELY biased towards and obsessed with Lucas-lore, I give you....


Exhibit E:

Donatello, in all his green, teenage, mutant, turtley, bandana-ed glory. You can't tell from the picture, but this thing is about 2 feet tall.

*For those of you in my grad cohort, you now have a visual representation of what I wanted to be for Halloween the year after my mom made me go as Alice in Wonderland. And I had to settle for being the trampy, harlot, green M&M instead.*


Sometimes I fear I talk about Star Wars a little too much. But, this is my blog after all, right?


Let's go GAMECOCKS, and may the force be with you.


And just for good measure, some Admiral Ackbar parodies:





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Sh*t My Professors (and Classmates) Say

Oftentimes when I am sitting in class, I get bored. I look for avenues to rectify this situation in a variety of ways. But most often, I entertain myself either by drawing ridiculous things in my margins, or by quoting ridiculous things I hear come out of the mouths of either my professors or my classmates.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you may be familiar with a post I did called Notes from the Margins. This post will be similar to that, only I decided to also add in all of the random quotes I copy down during class.

This is partly because I take a lot of my notes on my computer now, so drawing in the margins isn't really an option during those classes. And partly because my professors and classmates are hilarious, in my opinion, and I want to share their deep thoughts with the world. Enjoy.

The other day, one of my Education professors was having us engage in an activity on imagery. She walked to a classmate wearing a flannel shirt and posed the question:


"What does Rachel's flannel shirt feel like?"

My classmate's response?


"Flannel." Well said, Jen.



And from that same professor comes these profound ideas:

"You'll just want to stab yourself in the face with a fork. You'll just stab yourself."
(regarding the idea of us trying to fully grade every piece of student work that comes in)


"Your grades are dropping like prices at Wal-Mart."
(self-explanatory)


This next group of quotations comes from a Professor on whom I loosely based my Endearing and Hilarious Quirky Professor. I have him for a graduate English/Film course, and the guy is an absolute trip.

"Capitalism castrates men. They must win their balls back with Fight Club!"
(we were discussing Fight Club that day)


"Are you opening it?....Is that you?.....Oh! I thought it was Tyler Durden!"
(on the classroom door creaking open from a draft)


"I didn't mean to humiliate her. Oh wait, actually I did."
(on calling a student out for being late)


"They're freshmen! They're scared of me. They don't yet know I'm a pussy cat. Meow!"
(talking about the other, undergraduate level course he teaches)


"Piss ant! I love that word!"
(I can't remember the context, but does it matter?)


"You guys want to look at the vomiting scene? I love vomiting."
(during a discussion on Brokeback Mountain)


"If you guys know anything about S&M communities, this is exactly what happens in S&M communities."
(he then retracted this statement after he realized it might not be 'school appropriate')


"If I spit on you, I'm sorry. This is my blanket apology in advance."
(apparently he is a spit-talker. I never sit close enough to experience this.)


"You're freaking me out over there, baby cat!"
(he calls several of the girls in the class 'baby cat', for reasons unbeknownst to me)


"I love Hearts. I play Hearts all the time. Cause I'm a girly man!"
(on his affinity for the card game Hearts)



And now, some actual notes from the margins:


this was during a lecture on Genesis. obviously my Professor had just addressed this particular phrase...





homegirl LOVES her some pride and prejudice. this was her reaction when someone questioned Mr. Darcy's suitability for marriage. "Oh my god, he comes with a wonderful package!"





just a nice little rendering of a potential book cover for Kafka's Metamorphoses. I think my roach is especially nice, given my opinions towards roaches.




some classmate who never says a "peep" during class wouldn't shut up during this particular lecture. which led me to draw Peeps?





"All the other royalties/crowns of Europe were pooping in their pants." I think she may have been talking about British imperialism or something. Regardless, i thought it was worth writing down.




This is a margin note between Heather and myself. I can't recall the exact context, but I know we were talking about tyranny in ancient Greece ("tyranna"-saurus rex). the rest is up to your imagination to decipher.




"Actual child being butchered in front of you? Not cathartic...traumatizing." ....during a lecture on catharsis.




possibly my nerdiest margin note drawing yet. it's an owl, complete with a Hogwarts acceptance letter, addressed to the "cupboard under the stairs."




i. was. tired. i guess i thought drawing sheep and Zzzz's on my paper was a good alternative to actually counting them in my head and falling asleep.




my professor is Italian, and sometimes her English doesn't translate exactly right, resulting in words like this: "sexuated"...in reference to Marilyn Monroe.




I believe we were talking about paganism of some sort, and I was particularly proud of my illustration of Pan. mythological goat demons FTW.



And finally, although these last two quotes don't fit exactly into the parameters of this blog post topic, I found them worthy of posting:

From my lovely roommate:

"Well, do we have any mugs? or any particularly big, spacious cups instead?!!"
(on whether or not we had any clean bowls to eat ice cream out of, and her desperation for finding a suitable replacement without having to do any dishes)


And from my oldest brother, who has a 5-year-old kid....we were getting into the white van my mother had procured for transportation to another brother's wedding in NYC:

Brother: "Well, it has windows, so at least it's not a child molester van."

5-year-old nephew: "Daddy, what's a child molester van? WHAT IF IT IS A CHILD MOLESTER VAN?!"

Brother: "Oh, uhhh....Daddy's just being silly."


Father of the year award goes to......?



Cheers! And go Gamecocks!
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Why I Blog

Sometimes people ask me why I like to keep a blog, or how I come up with things to write about. I can think of a whole slew of reasons and answers to those questions, but I thought I'd provide you with a few general examples. Here are some reasons why I blog.



Reason #1: I am a nerd.

And nerds do nerdy things like write regularly and keep blogs about nerdy things they find interesting or entertaining.



Reason #2: I am in grad school.

It's like a bottomless pit of blog topics between my classmates, professors, high school students, rants about classes/term papers, etc. Also, my head would most definitely explode if I didn't engage in some writing (read: venting) outside of academic papers. Barf.

For instance, the picture below depicts what my classmates and I did in a graduate course of ours this past Wednesday night. We constructed "masks" out of tissue paper/masking tape/plastic serial killer-looking-face mask combinations as a way to teach high schoolers "characterization." Right...

Coneheads, anyone?



Reason #3: I come from a family full of nutjobs.

Now before all of you crazy family members get offended....don't. I mean this in the best possible of ways. If you guys weren't all complete weirdos, you'd be super boring. So, thanks for being freaks!

This might be the biggest reason of all. I could spend two whole weeks at my apartment in Columbia and not come up with a single thing to blog about, but after an hour home at my parents' house in Greenville, I'm suddenly inundated with topics. Let me explain...

A couple of weeks ago, I came up to Greenville on a particularly slow weekend in Columbia, hauled my laundry basket into the utility room, and made my way to the kitchen to raid my Mom's cabinets. I also did a quick survey of the kitchen counter to see if there was anything left over from dinner.

However, instead of congealing fettucine alfredo or pot roast remains, I found this......on the KITCHEN COUNTER......:


Why yes, that IS a dead snake placed inside a ziploc bag labeled "Warning! Monster Snake!", just in case you were unsure of the bag's contents.

The author of this bag's label, my Dad, spied me snapping a picture of it from the next room and came bounding in. Apparently, if I was going document this, I was going to document it properly. (Can someone plz fill me on on standard snake-corpse-photography procedures? Kthx.)

He proceeded to pick up the snake-bag, maneuver the python corpse inside until it suited his demented preferences, put it back down on the counter, and demand that I do a re-take.


Much.....better? Thanks, Dad. It appears that Steve committed this reptile execution on one of his many obsessive sweeps down our driveway with Weed-B-Gone.

So, that weekend in a nutshell? Snake carcasses on the kitchen counter. Totally normal.

I came home again this weekend to watch the Doodles because Suz would be out of town. One of the first things I did when I got home this time was go to the refrigerator for a Diet Coke fix. I found a Diet Coke alright, but I also found this.....INSIDE the fridge....:



Why yes, that IS the spare set of keys to the house, stashed inside the box of Michelob Ultra...inside the fridge...

It appears that Suz thought this hiding spot would be most conducive to my actually finding the keys. This tells me that my mother is either very hilarious and sneaky, or she thinks I'm such an alcoholic that the FIRST place I'd think to look (or anyone for that matter) for a hide-a-key is INSIDE a case of beer, INSIDE the garage refrigerator.

Sorry for telling the world about your hiding spot, Suz.

And while we are on the subject of my mother, that brings me to my third reason-du-jour why my family is usually a pretty supple source of blog topics.

My mom has the creepiest, most obsessive relationship with Hallmark ornaments and Christmas decorations I've ever seen. And I've been to a national Hallmark convention.

Almost every single surface in our house already looks like Santa rolled in here and exploded all over everything. So I took a little tour of our house, snapping pictures in any given room of the creepiest decorations I observed on my walk-through....



THIS is the first thing you see when you come through our front door. I left the ladder in the picture for scale. Did I mention that this welcoming fellow is on display BEFORE we even made it to Halloween? Meaning our poor little child neighbors will be subjected to his pedophilic gaze come Saturday night.

Santa really IS always watching you, kids. And Santa is a 7-foot-tall creepy-ass Freud-lookalike.

These next three pictures are in various parts of our house, but all come from the same Christmas decoration "designer." These hideous abominations are called Anna Lee "dolls," but feel free to switch the term "dolls," used very loosely here, for "maniacal demons" or "satanic imps" or something along those lines. What kind of sick person thought that making dolls' faces look like acid trips would create feelings of Christmas joy or holiday nostalgia in any sane person?



(by the way, these 2 are in a random, rarely used upstairs bathroom. Suz leaves no surface un-Christmased.)



And just a few more examples of Suz's decoration-infatuation-blog-topic-inspirations...

Suz has so many ornaments that she can devote entire Christmas trees and entire Christmas wreaths to certain, very specific themes. This one is obviously the Star Wars wreath. In the words of Yoda....Think it's awesome, I do.

Anywhere, literally anywhere you go in our house, you can look around and find some version of the creepy pedophile Santa staring you down. I don't know how any of my siblings or I got through childhood thinking that old Saint Nick was a jolly, good-intentioned soul with these mutant Santas lurking around every other corner.

We certainly wouldn't want anyone to feel devoid of Christmas joy whilst sitting on the porcelain throne!

As if the 7-foot-tall-front-entryhall Santa wasn't disturbing enough on his own, this little sidekick gremlin stands guard at his side. He is apparently "checking Santa's list" for him, a.k.a marking down the names of trick-or-treaters they'd like to molest later.

And finally, a nativity scene. So we can pretend like we are good Catholics when guests come over, and that we don't just go to church on Christmas Eve...... drunk....... (just kidding...)

So thank you, innate dorkiness, grad school shenanigans, and the weirdest (and best) family I could ask for, for providing me ample material to keep this little guy going.

I am, however, always open to suggestions. Happy Halloween!

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