Family game night with the dagos...

I've spent more time commenting on other people's blogs than writing comment-worthy posts of my own. Above you will see a picture of Millennium Park in Chicago. I have been engaged in an ongoing Chicago v. New York debate with Lizzie. Once a New Yorker as made up her mind about it being better than Chicago, there's no convincing her otherwise, even if she is so obviously wrong. It's okay; I'm used to that. I kind of like being the underdog city anyway. It keeps us grounded.

Christmas was interesting as always. My Italian family is, well, loud. After the Bears game ended, instead of staring at each other around our dining room table for 3 more hours, cutting in half Fannie May candies to find one worth the calories, we decided to try something new this year; we decided to attempt playing Cranium as a family. When I say "as a family" I know most readers picture a few people around a table quietly trying to decipher if their teammate is sculpting a white picket fence or an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie out of the purple clay provided by the makers of Cranium. Those readers would be inaccurate in assuming my family was engaged in any activity even remotely resembling this stereotypical American family game night. Here's how it really went in my family. There were about 13 of us crowded around a small coffee table (admittedly not the ideal number of people nor the ideal surface on which to play such a game), only 3 of whom actually had ever played Cranium. A couple additional people floated in an out of the game, making keeping score particularly challenging. My uncle didn't have his reading glasses on him, but that didn't stop him from trying to be the reader for every turn. Believe it or not, all of these elements would have been tolerable, were it not for the fact that my brother-in-law was on my team, and he had just finished a freshly opened bottle of pinot noir. Our opponents were an assortment of cousins, aunts and uncles, none of whom are familiar with the concept of "inside voices" so there was a lot of yelling, hands flailing and cursing. My brother-in-law and I have a bit of a checkered past, so I should have known our role as teammates would have an ugly ending. When it was our turn, I was charged with spelling 'delicious' backwards. I happen to be quite a good speller, both forwards and backwards (while sitting in traffic, I often challenge myself to spell words backwards- and since I spend a good 2 hours/day in my car, I've become quite proficient in spelling things backwards). However, my weakness has always been in spelling the -ion, -ous and pys- words backwards. I got it wrong and my brother-in-law proceeded to chide me with insults like, "You can't even spell! And you call yourself and English teacher?" This is my biggest pet peeve- this idea that because I am an English teacher, I must know ALL about language. What? Because I am an English teacher, I have to be able to spell EVERY SINGLE WORD in the English language- not just FORWARD but BACKWARD as well? People do this all the time. Do math teachers have to deal with this? Like, when the bill comes at dinner, if it takes the math teacher a few minutes to figure out the exact amount of money owed by each diner, does she hear, "And you call yourself a MATH TEACHER? JEEZ!" How about PE 'teachers.' Or Science teachers? Or are English teachers the only one subjected to this type of ridicule? If I had known this would be my lot, I would have chosen to cut hair for a living, a job at which, frankly, I'd be making more money than I am now. Although, that would make a bad hair day particularly challenging. "And you call yourself a hair stylist? Look at that mop on top of your head!"

I think I have a ghost, and that ghost has a small bladder. Several times/day, my toilet starts running even though no one has used it. Also, I often hear the sound of someone peeing when there is clearly no one peeing my bathroom. Let's hope this ghost doesn't get cute and expect me to spell anything backwards because I'm just touchy enough where I'll have to box its ass if it stumps me.