Four things that made me happy today

1) I have been watching American Gladiators. It's not as good as the original, but it's still filled with awesome cheesiness. I really want to start up some kind of regular AG watching night where I hang out with some people and we make jokes about the show MST3K style as we watch.

And I totally want to hang out with Titan at a party. I mean, look at him:
2) I started using Aussie shampoo and conditioner last night. My hair feels like a satin rainbow. I was shaking my head in slow motion all day like those sexy women in the commercials and I kept running my fingers through it and going "Look at that shine!" It was really freaking the kids out.

If I were David Letterman I would now hear a knock on my door and open it to find eight boxes of Aussie products in my hallway. Hey, Aussie, I could really use some antifrizz.

3) Today was a dazzlingly beautiful day. I took my kids outside to write haiku. This was my favorite:

Ms. Blake walks around.
Sporting her light blue jacket
And stunner shades

4) In Spanish class tonight my writer brain was in full swing. I'm doing pretty well in there. The other class members called me and my reading partner the class "Stars" which fills me with pride because I always want to be that kid who knows all the answers but doesn't really like to talk about it. My pronunciation rules because I'm surrounded by Spanish all day.

Anyway, as the class was reading through this dialogue where these people were introducing themselves before they went on a field trip together I couldn't help but notice that the plot was just a tad thin. So while we read about Ines being from Mexico I imagined Maite just hauling off and pounding her fist into Ines' face.

Since I know lots of Spanish cusswords I was able to write the story in Spanish in my head. Kinda.

Me llamo Emily

Today I started a beginner Spanish class sponsored by LAUSD. For $20 I get three months of classes complete with snacks. Today we learned to say what our name was. I feel smarter already.

In addition to language acquisition I get three salary points, which is all I need to get a raise.

For our ice breaker activity we were supposed to say our favorite food so I said "tortas con queso" because that's what I had for lunch so it was the most delicious thing I could think of at the time. In order to learn our names the teacher replaced our last names with the food and that's what we called each other as we learned the three ways to ask someone their name.

So I was "Emily Tortas Con Queso" all night. I probably wouldn't have mentioned the cheese if I'd known everybody was going to have to keep saying it for two hours.

I kind of hope the class moves faster but I'm not sure that's going to happen given that the majority of our class is old fat guys, one forty year old large lesbian gym teacher and the Chinese girl who got really pissed when she couldn't understand why we kept calling her "Jene Tofu".