9.5 percent fun.

I tried. I really, really tried. I woke up this morning with the overall goal of raising my funness percentage by one point. That's really all I could hope for for a Monday. Here were my tactics for increasing funness today:

• Tell the following joke in one classroom setting: What the rock say to his wife? "You take me for granite!"
• Accept all food offered to me.
• Jump in without invitation in all co-teaching lecture settings.
• Meet all direct insults with an upbeat and perky, "That's not hilarious!"
• Wish happy greetings to every single person I encounter.
• Teach Avery (which is not his real name) how to pronounce the short vowel sound for the letter a.
• Make up a song.
• Never, even once, complain about my job even a little bit. In fact, say "I love my job!" no fewer than ten times.
  

That would have earned me one fun point, I figured, even though I had to be at work all day, and after work I had to sit for three hours in this Teachers' Practitioner Seminar. You know when you hit that mental wall? When you've just been working way too hard all day and you suddenly just can't get anything else into your brain? And you start misspelling simple words like "exercise" and "jump"? And you begin to crave really unhealthy foods, such as Hot Pockets? And you make little doodles of skinny indie girls and daydream about being one and maybe hanging out with Mary Kate Olsen, and you get really really sad that in that very moment you are missing the amazing experience of Blake Lively's wardrobe on Season 2 of "Gossip Girl"? Yeah, well, I hit that during this seminar. HARD. And that wall really brought me down a few notches. Although I did try to stick to all my rules. Some notes:

• The joke did not go over well, because my students thought I meant The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), and not the rock (granite). Plus they didn't know that granite was a kind of rock. They just thought that was how you pronounce "granted." Which would make the joke sound like this: "What did The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) say to his wife? You take me for granted." That's just not a funny joke. Except that The Rock is gay I think.
  
• I got some Cheetos and that was awesome.
• I loved jumping in as a co-teacher. It was really fun to lecture again, and to walk around the class, and to feel in control. It was like a breath of fresh air after spending the first few weeks being a policeman who the students couldn't respect me in that position for the life of them. I actually really like teaching science. It reminds me of being in Mr. Penk's classes in high school, and how exciting Chemistry was before it was waaaay too complicated. I have a crush on scientists.
• Some girls shouted at me while I was working with a student: "Hey you fuckin' ho, where you got that fuckin' dress you look like some Target-ass retail bitch!" I turned around and said, "That's not hilarious!" And they just kind of cracked up in that oh-my-god-this-woman-does-not-understand-anything way. Back to the drawing board. I'm getting really bored of these insults.
  
• People hate happy greetings on Monday.
• Avery hates learning vowel sounds. Which is disappointing because Avery likes literally everything else about school. Everything except reading. But he's going to turn 21, and I will be damned if he leaves Rabouin without knowing how to read.
• I made up several songs. This process is generally met with blank stares. Then I usually say something like, "I just made that song UP!" And then someone will say something along the lines of, "Well, obviously."
• I caved in the car on the way home from seminar and told Kristen that no one would want our jobs. Oops. So close.

Also, at one point I took the class mouse out of the cage during Seminar tonight. And do you know who thought that was awesome? NO ONE. People thought that was a realllllly dangerous thing to do. You know. Because that mouse wasn't MINE after all, and so much DISASTER could have erupted. HOW CAN I BE EXPECTED TO BE FUN IF ALL THE FORCES OF THE UNIVERSE (besides the mouse, obviously) ARE WORKING AGAINST ME?

Also, I did that thing I do where I took some thumbtacks off the board to move them onto ANOTHER board elsewhere. I have always done this, always. It's my version of being a kleptomaniac. And guess what?! I GOT IN TROUBLE! The leader of the seminar was like, "Um, those are not our thumbtacks. You can't take those." What. The. Fuck. Who even fucking CARES whether I take a thumbtack or not? NO ONE is going to miss that thumbtack. NO ONE. Not ANYONE.

So down 0.5 percentage points. I did have a really nice conversation with Lisa Curtis, but it wasn't quite enough to redeem the rest of the day. Oh well, tomorrow is an entirely new endeavor. Tomorrow my top aim is to go grocery shopping and cook enough food for the rest of the week. Cake, mostly.