So, I guess my Magazine Club students don’t actually hate me. I was afraid that after the first meeting we had that they were going to all go and change their clubs to something else, but in fact the opposite happened. I’ve got three new girls, all friends of students already in the class. And several times now I’ve had students in the hall run up to me and ask me about what we were going to do in club on Monday, or have kids invite me to come and sit with them at lunch.

Going to classes isn’t as easy. My school has an open-classroom policy, meaning that people can come into classes at any time and no one is supposed to be surprised or upset. Our principal told us just to walk into classes and see where we can help out, or just observe classes and see what the kids are learning and how the classrooms are taught, but I feel so awkward about it. The teachers aren’t upset to have us in their classes, but they don’t really need help either, and I feel a little like a third wheel hanging out in the back of the class
I went to a pumpkin beer festival over the weekend which is basically what it sounds like: a beer festival where all the beer was made out of pumpkins. The beer itself ran the gamut from insanely delicious to mind-bendingly horrible, and all in different variations and strengths of pumpkins. In the end I think I consumed more alcohol than I should of. I started with tons of tickets from the festival itself, then some other people gave me theirs, then there were a series of bartenders who didn’t take tickets… and then I proceeded to text my friends half a dozen times.

We then proceeded to leave the festival and catch buses to go out somewhere else (don’t ask me how we came to that decision, I don’t think there was much thought put into it) and ate burritos and bought more beer. I say bought because I distinctly remember sitting at the table and staring morosely at the beer that somehow had gotten from the glass from the pitcher and having a very strange conversation with myself. It went a little something like this:
“No. I see you beer. You are looking at me. You want me to drink you… but I am not going to. No. It’s not you beer, it’s me. I’m all sloshy. I think I may have finished off one of your friends and then somehow you got into my glass as well… but it’s all a lie. You are not my beer. You are a tricksty tricksty hobbit. You want me to vomit over myself. You’re kind of pretty, the way the red light hits your sloshy foam, which is kind of the same way my blood vessels pump in my body and keep hitting my sloshy tummy which is probably why I’m having a problem and is why I can’t drink you, and I think I’ll stare at you for awhile instead of drinking you. Because. Yeah. No.”

Apparently one of the non-drunk people we met there came back to the table and found three of us just staring deeply into our beers, sitting silently at the table. Sometime during contemplation of these beers I found time to text my brother. He left me a funny, berating message about how I was drunk on a Sunday and why the heck was I drunk on a Sunday when I was supposed to be a role model to children and do good deeds and not waste money on the devil’s drink. It was amusing.