the navel times and observer

Heard something unusual today, at least in comparison to the things I've been telling myself lately. Last weekend I signed up to be a literacy tutor to help teach people how to read or better their reading and some related programs. I hadn't been contacted this week about taking on a student and today the director of the organization, the Laclede Literacy Council, told me she was looking for a GED student for me to help.

This lady, an extremely nice old lady, thinks the world of me, and that's not being modest, because I wrote two things for the literacy council in the newspaper. She called me today to invite me to join the Kiwanis Club (honestly not something I would have ever considered but apparently around here everybody's involved in something and I wouldn't mind some involvement, maybe even some friends) and told me she wanted to reserve me for a GED student because she sends those to the smartest tutors.

That struck me, I don't consider myself very bright, or don't allow myself to think so. It's a status I wish were reserved for truly intelligent people and not thrown about to anybody who can express themselves using almost proper grammar. But people have applied that term to me, and it still astounds me how they reach that conclusion -- perhaps because I feel like I'm woefully inadequate to do most day to day tasks, frequently find my foot in my mouth, get that deer in the headlights (in the what-were-you-thinking? way) look from people when I do open my mouth, hearing most frequently the "d" word, like, duh, frankly and provocatively stating the obvious, frequently forget things, appear lost, feel incapabable of expressing myself most of the time. The words simply aren't there or the knowledge is just flat out lost.

I'm sort of anxious about being responsible for teaching someone else something. I've had a couple opportunities irregularly and had some success there, but I can't help but worry about knowing enough about any subject to actually teach it to someone else. So often am I sort of pulling information together and coming up with conclusions on the spot without being an expert in anything whatsoever.

In other news I'm a little concerned about my relatives' survival instincts.

My father, aunt and uncle went to a baseball game yesterday in St. Louis and walking to the stadium could not stand up and in fact had to lean into the close to 80 mph winds blowing in from the east (as opposed to from the west which is where all of the non-fluke winds come from in St. Louis). They sat down, or tried to, in a stadium in the midst of a horrendous storm that ended up flooding the lower levels. Then, while the storm damage was bad enough to knock a plate glass window off of the press booth and onto about 30 fans (none of them related), my relatives, my role models, waited in the interior of the stadium for two hours to wait until the field was ready for play and the storm went away.

They then sat through seven innings of the game and left at 11. Cards beat Braves, 8-3. The question unasked while battling apocalyptic winds: And why are we going to a baseball game in this?

With that strong survival instinct I can't help but think our species would have been among those holding their arms and freezing in the open while other species evolved endothermic bodies, fur and live births 65 million years ago after that nasty rock hit us.

I mean after all, it's not like it was a football game. Baseball and its fans I thought were at least blessed with enough common sense to know when to get out of the stadium, you'd think the glass ( or Plexiglas, what do I know?) falling would have been a sign to write it off as a loss. One of those games that unfortunately didn't end in a rain out because even then the sensible people could have least seen a game played.

I dunno if I'm going to be able to pull this together, but nothing wrong with giving it a shot, why not?

On top of that, we got PAID today! That means not only can I afford gas to drive to places, like Marshfield, St. Louis, etc., but I can actually pay my bills!