>what time it is? the past week and a half has been filled with teacher training and workshops and all manner of thrills. today, i spent three hours being instructed on how to send an email. not a joke. well, actually, i was writing letters and sending and receiving text messages, which i think proves that i have enough technological savvy that i could have tested out of that workshop. we do what we must, i suppose. i have been thinking lately about how easy it is for us to get into patterns of lifestyle and behavior. good or bad. another thing that has really become evident to me since my return from mexico is a sense of sadness about how our american society has conditioned our men to not necessarily opt for chivalry. what do i mean? i have seen a number of situations where a gentleman wanted to open the door for a woman or allow her to pass in front of him through a doorway, and she has brushed him off to do it her way. and have we conditioned our men not to feel comfortable complimenting us in a tasteful manner? it is not always, or even most all of the time, sexual harassment. maybe it is just a man wanting to compliment beauty. i don’t know.

i just finished reading an interesting novel called the dirty girls social club by alisa valdes-rodriguez. it dealt with six college friends, all latinas, who have at least two annual get-togethers to keep in touch and share life stories. there is quite a bit of spanish in the text, and it is not always translated for the reader. but it was fun and even a little culturally informative at times. and it’s a pretty book cover, which, sometimes, is all we are really looking for in a book. a few days ago, i started another Ann Patchett novel called the patron saint of liars. i was talking to my sister yesterday, and she just finished reading it. synchronicity. neither of us knew the other had it in their possession. i am taking my temperature right now, because i thought i was having some kind of hot flash or something. it’s fixed at slightly above normal. ever so slightly. and i am tired of holding the thermometer under my tongue. i think it’s making a bruise.

so far this week, i have received three pieces of mail at my new apartment. all three of them were hand-written correspondence (muy exciting AND a little old-fashioned, which i love), and all of them were invitations to little girls’ birthday parties. this weekend, my niece is having her 12th birthday party at a water park in louisiana. next weekend, my life long best friend’s little girl is hosting a tea party for her 4th birthday. and the weekend after that, a former co-worker’s daughter is having a ‘down on the farm’ party, including an actual chuck wagon, for her 2nd birthday party. and i was worried about my social calendar not filling up. when i see a number of birthdays piling up in the same month, i always am compelled to count forty weeks back and see if there was a common occasion that those couples might have been ‘celebrating’ when they conceived. like, i think i might have been a valentine’s celebration, as my birthday is 40 weeks to the day after valentine’s day. coincidence? i think not.