Well, Mr. Justin has made it through his first week as Mr. Ross. That's right, if you didn’t know, just this past week I have begun my career as a High School English teacher. I am teaching at Mission High School, an inner city school in my neighborhood (which is great cuz I don’t have a fucking car). I just thought I would share with you some of the trials and tribulations of week one (cuz I know you care, and I love to say trials and tribulations):

Though I don’t do it when I am addressing the whole class, when I am leaned over, talking to students one on one, I often call them dude. Dude is just a bit too ingrained to just drop straight away, dude.

In teacher training school they told us not to apologize unless you really really fuck up bad. I think that is stupid. However, I have this habit (it runs in the family--not the Ross family, the other family) of saying "my fault" whenever I see or hear something go wrong--absolutely regardless of whether or not it is my fault. It is like a natural reaction, like saying "bless you" when I hear someone sneeze. So every time someone drops a pencil, knocks something off a desk, assorted other booboos happen, and even once or twice when a student was reading aloud and pronounced the word wrong, I have said "my fault."

From Sunday night to Thursday night I have gotten about 5.5 hours of sleep a night. This whole teaching thing could turn out to be a serious impediment to my nighttime drinking habits.

I am not even remotely funny at 8:10 in the morning. Not at all. By 10:00 I am between a little bit and ish. But at 8, no dice.

I have one class that has 2 boys named Ronell. What are the odds? I have a class that has a Faith and a Charity. Unfortunately there is no Hope (nickel, please). There is a (saving) Grace, however.

9th grade is what I'm teaching. These kids are fucking tiny. And cute. And stuff.

Since I don’t have a car, I walk there. It is almost a 20 minute walk and by the time I get there and climb all the stairs to the third floor, I am sweaty. Isn't it weird how the sweat catches up with you? You know what I mean? How you can walk for 20 minutes and not really be sweaty but then you sit down and the sweat starts creeping up, all delayed reaction style? I have to get there at least 20 minutes early so that I can cool off before class starts. But I guess it is kinda moot cuz I try to get there early anyways. Funny though.

Day one, my first period, I was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and tie and that collar just started choking up on me like a motherfucker. I was all sweating and shit. It sucked. I'm actually rather impressed with myself; I haven’t even so much as broken out into nose sweat since that first period of the first day.

OK, maybe there has been a little bit of nose sweat, but that even happens sometimes when I am sitting at home watching TV, so there.

I have already had kids ask me the following questions: Do you smoke cigarettes? Um, no. Do you smoke weed? That stuff is illegal. Do you drink? That's legal. So...um...sometimes.

OK, now back to your regularly scheduled crap. Thanks.

Really...you have a third nipple? I didn’t notice.

Did you all hear that Bush called the war in Iraq a "Catastrophic success" last week? How do you say some shit like that and then get reelected like a couple of months later? It's some scary shit.

Heaven is a truck
that got stuck
on the freeway
Pavement

Fun with the dictionary: I was looking something up in the dictionary and I came across coitus interruptus, which means to pull the penis out of the vagina during sex so as to not ejaculate in the vagina. So, as any good dictionary would, I will use in a sentence: I can't stand coitus interruptus. I hate it when they interruptus.

You know how when we were kids and we were suddenly able to make dorky business cards on the computer with perforated sheets that became low-budget business cards? I been thinking I kinda wanna bring that back into style. I was thinking about one that said:
Justin Ross, MD
Gynecologist
Clit Commander and Associates

The Birth of Separation: when I was in 7th grade, my friends and I would go up to girls and say, "Let's pray" and we would put our hands together and press them against our male cleavage area. Good times...

We also totally used to push each other into the girls we liked ("dude, push me into her"). Did everybody do this? I still do sometimes, when I am drunk at a bar. I know, I am such a team player.

Whilst dwelling on adolescence, I must also say that in High School this week, we let our kids check out all these artsy coffee table books that we had in the classroom. Of course they all found all the nudey paintings and semi-nudey photos and started getting all giggly and showing them to each other. When they left, Lindsay (master teacher lady) and I were talking about how teenage boys are (boys will be boys). Then I went to go check my email on the classroom computer (prep period) and sure enough, I got an email from Mike Dub with a picture of Maria Sharapova deep throating a banana in the break of a tennis game. Boys will continue to be boys. Good times...

Sometimes the gesture is more important than the results; it is all I can control.

The only way that I really have any chance to not eat the whole burrito is if I am about to get lucky (later that evening). There are primary reasons: 1) it is hard to feel sexy when I have the burrito reforming into a log in my tummy, and 2) because all the shaking around with all that burrito in my belly will give me cramps.

So I guess the Olympics are over, or something. I think that I give less of a shit about the Olympics every year (and by every year I mean every 2/4 years). We basically win in the things we are supposed to win in and don’t in the things that we aren’t supposed to win in. Boring. The best part was in basketball, when we were supposed to win but didn’t (see).

Speaking of the Olympics, so I was trying to force myself to watch some and I was watching the javelin competition, and all I could think was, anybody could do this. Not to discount all the hard work, sacrifice, and dedication that an Olympic javelin chucker puts into a lifetime of training, but these guys that are throwing the javelin are like 6 feet tall and 175 pounds and just skip up to a line and throw a javelin. Seems like something that doesn’t require a whole shitload of specialized skill. With the proper training and enough time, couldn’t anyone who is remotely athaletic and coordinated with a little bit of strength be a good javelin thrower? Am I missing something here?

Of course the other thing I always think of when I think of the javelin chuck is Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds and how they designed a special javelin to complement his limp-wristed throwing style. Fuck all, if even Lamar could do it, anyone could.

I just got off the phone with Bert and he reminded me how back in the day I always used to say "...I'm hungry neow." Like we'd be talking about food and someone would say, "Well, let's go to Safeway." And I would say, "But I'm hungry neow. Maybe we should go to Burger King."

By: Justin