Miss Cindy, the reading instructor

I work with a woman, let's call her Cindy. She is a teacher's aide. She usually helps the students with reading in Mrs. Pinkman's classroom. She is a native of Idaho, born and raised in St. Anthony. She's told me on numerous occasions that she's never been out of Idaho. She is thirty-three years old. She loves to talk non-stop. In fact, if you let her she will talk for hours on end, even if she receives no responses or confirmations from the people around her. Mostly she tells disjointed personal anecdotes that have no context whatsoever. She will flow in and out of old stories, personal opinions on everything from politics to cake, and stream-of-consciousness rambling. Listening to her speak is kind of like a sublime free-form jazz, except if jazz were twice as annoying and fifty times more repetitive.

The amazing thing is how she can keep going with so little input from me or the other teacher in the room. I usually never speak a word to her, concentrating on cutting shapes out of construction paper or whatever task is at hand. The other teacher, Mrs. Pinkman, will either completely ignore her or start talking over her, sharing her own endless personal "anecdotes" until there are times when they are overlapping! They just talk over one another! I know this sounds crazy, but they do! Neither will stop, and once they start they can go on for five minutes or so of just overlap talking!

So both of these women are insane. But for my money, I'd rather have Cindy's ramblings because they're a little more baffling.

I had the excruciating experience of listening to Cindy read to the children from various books. Every morning when the children arrive, before the individual mentoring Mrs. Pinkman asks Cindy to read to the kids. It's a cruel thing to do, like making a mortally wounded box turtle participate in a biathlon. By Cindy's own admission, she's "not much of a reader." In fact, she tells me that she "hates books and reading." That is, except for Fablehaven, which is a book her eight year old son picked up. She said that she read his copy of Fablehaven and it was "the best book I've ever read in my life." Keep in mind that this book is aimed towards an eight to ten-year-old audience. Of course there's nothing wrong with an adult enjoying a children's book. Good for her. But it's kind of sad that she works as a reading tutor when she, of her own admission, hates reading.

The reason why I said listening to her read was excruciating is because her reading ability is about on the same level as the first-graders we're trying to help. She read a tiny book written at a third or fourth grade level and couldn't pronounce many of the words. For example:

Hovel. "The family lived in a small, dirty hovel. It was a cramped hovel, full of children and pets."
Now from the context clues alone, even if you didn't know this word I'd hope you could guess a hovel was some sort of dwelling place or home. One of the kids asked her, "Miss Cindy, what's a hoe-vul?" (Because she kept pronouncing the word "hoe-vul.") Miss Cindy's response: "I don't know."

Minstrel. "A minstrel came to the town, playing his music and singing songs." Okay, again. Maybe she's never heard of a minstrel, but doesn't the context give a clue here? Plus, she kept pronouncing the word "minis-terel."

Lute. "The minstrel played his lute for the crowd. He plucked its strings and sang..." When the children asked what a lute was, Cindy answered, "A loot is kind of like his treasure. It's like when you loot something, you take all the treasure in a backpack. That's his loot." What that says to me, then, is that Cindy has never seen the word "loot" in print. Because wouldn't she realize this type of "lute" was spelled differently from "loot?" Also, does her definition make a shred of sense in the context of the sentence she read?

Bathe and bathing. "The children of the home hated to bathe. When it came time for bathing, they all ran away." Every time the word "bathe" or "bathing" came up in the story, she pronounced it "bath." So the word "bathe" should sound like "bay-the" but she would pronounce it "bath," like "bath tub." "Bathing" should be pronounced "bay-thing," but she pronounced it "bath-thing." Oh, how I wish I were making this up.

I stopped recording her mispronounced words after she finished about two or three pages. It hurt me too much. Instead, I decided to keep a small record of her ramblings after all the kids had left the room. Here is what I collected in the course of about an hour. Enjoy!

"I looooooove to go hucklebeerryin'. I could spend all day huckleberryin'. My aunt used to take us huckleberryin' for huckleberries down by [some place]. My kids all love huckleberryin' too. My first date with my hubby was when we went huckleberryin' -huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'- etc."

"Well I don't get gay people at all, because you know what? It's supposed to be Adam and Eve, not Adam and STEVE! Get it?? It's Adam and Eve, like from the Bible, not Adam and Steve! It's not Adam and Steve, is it? No. It's Adam and EVE. Adam and EVE in the Garden of Eden, it's not Adam and Steve!"

"I love the smell of rubber cement. I used to smell this all the time when I was a kid."

"Got a call from my son's teacher because he was out peein' on the playground again. I told him to stop it, but he's just so used to peein' that way at home! How am I supposed to get him to stop? He sees his daddy do it on the front lawn all the time, and so he wants to do it too."

"Oh I hate it when people use hick slang for things. Like my father-in-law, he always says 'up-again.' Like for instance he says 'the ladder is up-again the garage over there.' He always does it!"

"I was born and raised saying 'crick' and not 'creek' and I hate when people out-of-state say 'creek' when they really mean 'crick!'"

"When I was in high school I was everybody's best friend. Everyone always got excited when I walked into class because I was kind of like the class clown, but a cool version of it. So everyone was always happy if I had class with them. I was such a terror! One time I made a substitute teacher cry! I brought some fart spray to class and whenever she had her back turned I would keep spraying the fart spray. Oh it was stinky in there! And the substitute teacher kept saying 'Whoever is doing that had better stop!' but I kept doin' it! And everyone was just cracking up at how funny it was! I'll always remember that."

"One time when we were baking a cake for a football team I got me and the other cheerleaders to spit in it. We were so mad that the moms asked us to bake a cake for the team, so to get revenge I had the idea that we should spit in the cake! So I did and I made my friend do it, too. We laughed so hard when we gave the cake to the boys and they ate it! They told us how good it was, too! Ha ha ha!"

"I never got in trouble at school. Well, except once. But no one ever told me I wasn't supposed to say nigger in school! How was I supposed to know that was a bad word to say in school? My dad said it all the time at home! How was I supposed to know? I was only fifteen!"

This place really takes it out of you...

So I started this thing with a lot of enthusiasm and gusto only to find, weeks later, that I had not updated it or anything for a while. It's funny because when I was creating this blog I attempted many different names before "thisbubblelife" that were all taken. Here are some examples:

bubblelife.blogspot.com

rexburglife.blogspot.com

bubblebobble.blogspot.com

lifeinthebubble.blogspot.com

rexburg.blogspot.com

lifeinrexburg.blogspot.com

thebubblelife.blogspot.com

livinginthebubble.blogspot.com

The amazing thing is that most of those blogs are the same thing that I wanted to try doing! They're blogs by people living in Rexburg and writing about their "kooky" experiences here. The other thing you'll notice from visiting them is that most of those guys didn't get past one or two entries!

At first I thought they were just slackers, but now I understand what they were going through. This place really just sucks the creative energy out of you sometimes. I think it's because it's just so overwhelming and after a few weeks you no longer have any sort of connection with reality anymore. Like I have this article here from The Scroll, which is BYU-Idaho's student newspaper... It's so ridiculous and laughably stupid... I've been meaning to write about it, but what the hell is the point anymore? It's like I could say, "Hey! What a stupid article this is..." But who would even care? I feel like I'm pointing out two or three oddly shaped blades of grass while standing in a vast field hundreds of acres wide in the middle of nowhere. Where to even begin?

My first entry tried to point out the insanity of the physical appearances of the women here, and now I've almost grown numb to that, too. They still look hideous to me, but when the hideousness is all around you all the time, how can you even distinguish it from anything else anymore?

***

Okay.

I'm not giving up, though. I'll tell you a little about my job. That's a nice place to start.

Some of the public schools in Eastern Idaho make Great Falls, Montana look positively metropolitan by comparison.

When I was offered a teaching job interview in Great Falls several years ago, I showed up to the interview wearing a full suit and tie, shined shoes, everything. I had my resume and other documents with me. I was told beforehand that I was supposed to prepare a short English lesson to present to my interviewers which would include the school's principal and vice-principal, the head of the English department, and one or two other teachers. This would take place in the school library where I would have access to a white board and a table and stuff. I was a nervous wreck, but it all went well and I was offered a teaching job.




Here in Idaho, I got a call to show up for an interview at district building in St. Anthony, which is a small village about 15 miles away from Rexburg. I showed up at the building, again dressed in my suit and tie. The secretary had no idea who I was, and told me to go to the back to look for my interviewer. I went to the back of the building and found a large empty office area. I wandered around, knocking on doors and opening them. They were mostly empty and dark. I eventually found another person wandering around the building. I believe she was the lady in charge of driving the school bus. I asked her if she knew my interviewer. I don't think she did, but she helped me look for him.

Eventually we found a man and a woman sitting in a room looking over some files. I introduced myself and was told to go into the other room and have a seat.

They must have been in the process of moving or something, because other than a few stains on the carpet the room was totally empty. No chairs. "I'll just stand," I said amiably.

"Oh wait, there's no chair in there, huh?" The guy said. He shot up and bolted out of the room, urging me to follow him. We went from room to room in the little office, looking for a chair for me to sit in. Finally we found a small empty room piled up with old cardboard boxes. There was a metal folding chair inside. He flicked the fluorescent light on and told me to have a seat; they were almost ready for me.

So I sat down, wondering if I had come to the wrong place. The chair was facing a wall, so I decided to turn it around and face it out of the doorway and into the dark hall. After an unknown amount of time had passed, I heard the sounds of people talking down in the distance. I instinctively knew that they had forgotten about me in the dark, empty room. I started to speak up. I poked my head out the doorway and said, "Hello?"

"Oh shoot, that guy!" I heard the man say to his co-worker.

They ushered me into their little office and had me sit down. The man was dressed in cut off jean shorts and a polo with some grease stains on it. The woman had on jeans and a t-shirt. I felt awkward wearing a full suit, but I'd always been told that it's better to overdress for an interview.

I sat down and they started asking questions. The man was mostly incoherent to me as he had the ability to somehow sound as if he was tweaking on meth while stuttering at the same time. He had a vaguely Canadian/Mexican accent, which didn't help. The woman remained silent, only looking at me knowingly from time to time.

At one point the man asked me, "Hey man, s-s-o what what what is your teaching philoso-ph-ph-phyy and stuff? You know, dude? Like how you gonna teach 'em k-ki-k-kids?"

I started to give my answer when he stood up and walked towards me slowly. He had his hand facing me palm-up, as if in the "stop" motion, so I trailed off. He was looking at something that was apparently behind me. He placed his hand on my shoulder and slammed his foot down on the carpet.

"Sorry bra! It was a hobo! I hate them hobos... Had to kill the hobo... Kill it."

A hobo, for those of you who don't know, is a type of a spider that apparently lives in Idaho. I've only ever heard of it while in Rexburg, and everyone in Rexburg knows about them. I've seen commercials on TV advertising their extermination and ads on billboards about them. I don't know if it's just an Idaho thing or what, because I've never heard of seen anything about hobo spiders anywhere else in the U.S. In college I remember people saying how they were deadly poisonous, although I've never known or heard of anyone ever being bit by one, let alone dying from it.

I just Googled "hobo spider" to confirm whether or not they even exist, and apparently they do. I even found this web site all about them, actually: http://www.onewest.net/~dkv/hobospider/

The web site had this baffling first line at the top of the page:
Well known spider expert  Darwin Vest has been missing since June 1999. This website is now maintained by Darwin's family and may not contain the latest data. For the latest updates on the search for Darwin click here: http://hobospider.org/dar.html

So I clicked there and wouldn't you know it, the oddly named expert on hobo spiders Darwin Vest was from Idaho Falls, Idaho.

See what I'm talking about? This place is obsessed with "hobos."

Ugh... Why does the name "hobo spider" bug the crap out of me? I don't know, but it does.

The Most Beautiful Woman in Idaho

There are a lot of things I'd like to write about Rexburg, and I'm going to start with Rexburg's concept of beauty. After living here for about three weeks, I've got a pretty good idea of what men and women in Idaho consider beautiful. 

The ideal look involves electrocuting yourself and rubbing Flaming Hot Cheetos dust all over your skin while in a state of impregnation. This may seem like the beauty advice of a clinically insane person, but how insane is something if every single person within a 200 mile radius is doing it? I never had much of an inclination to pretend to talk to my spoon as if it were a cell phone, but if all my neighbors were carrying spoons and talking into them all the time, and the people at the grocery store were doing it, and the librarians were doing it, and the police officers were doing it, and parents were giving spoons to kids and telling them to do it... I mean, I'd eventually give in and start doing it myself, right? If girls walked around holding spoons in both hands while their thumbs rapidly moved up and down them in a texting motion, it wouldn't seem so weird any more. Right?

No. 


Talking into a spoon would never appear or feel normal to a right-thinking person. This is because pretending a spoon is a cell phone is an insane thing to do. This woman, to anyone born outside of this place, would appear to have the look of someone who was probably born with fetal alcohol syndrome and taken advantage of all her life. If she was alone, I would have assumed just that. But no, this woman represents the vast majority of women who live around here. And you may be saying to yourself, "Sure, sure, but that's just a cartoon exaggeration of a human being. Surely no one looks like that." Oh, how I wish that were true. And yet, there are thousands like her, all of them orange, all of them pregnant, all of them with hair sticking out nearly on end.

The appearance of the women here is probably the most foreign part of the whole experience so far. I have no idea where this look came from. I've never seen anything like it on TV, not even on CMT. It's as if it's a completely native Idaho look. It's as if someone took a bunch of girls and placed them on a deserted island in the South Pacific. The only reading material they had at their disposal was an issue of Country Home Living from 1978, and they formed their entire civilization and culture around the women from this one issue. As hundreds of years and generations passed, the styles became more and more exaggerated as they tried to out-do each other on the crazy, eventually evolving into the orange pseudo-humans we see now.

The funny thing is that I had a student a couple of years ago (let's call her Jessica) who had just moved to Montana from Idaho. She was your typical teenage snotty little brat-girl. I could tell she had been considered popular in her former school. She had that air of confidence and stupidity about her that cheerleaders and other popular sluts often have. She made friends quickly in the new school because of this and because she wore expensive clothes, and there was no denying that she was fit and "attractive." I put attractive in quotes because she was only attractive in that Idaho way. The orange-tan skin, the big poofy country hair with skunk streaks, the raccoon eyes, etc.


I remember a time when the kids were talking about her in class. 


"Who's Jessica?" 


"She just moved here. You sit next to her in biology!" 


"I don't know who you're talking about." 


"You know, the girl who got in trouble for texting?" 


"Oh! The one with the crazy hair?" 


"Yeah!" 


At that, all the kids started chiming in. One of them even asked me, "Mr. L, why does that girl do her hair like that? She looks crazy." 


I tried to explain cultural differences. The thing was, Jessica thought her hair was the epitome of stylishness and beauty. You could tell she took great pride in making it bigger and bigger. Her makeup, too. It was visibly caked on to at least a millimeter off her face. 


I thought it was precious how all these teenagers found her hair freakishly huge. They were so young and innocent! It reminded me of the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes. These kids were still young enough to tell it like it is: your hair looks insane. 


This place is just different, though. Everyone goes around like it's a contest to see how impractical and the most like the hide of a rabid animal their hair can get without anyone saying a word about it. I carry a notepad around at all times just to sketch pictures of some of the hairstyles, like a birdwatcher eagerly drawing the most exotic of plumage. I'll post more as I find them.

Welcome to The Bubble

Originally I wanted to just make a blog to make fun of and cope with the insanity that is Rexburg, Idaho.

After seeing a man dressed in a banana suit walking a goat through the parking lot at the grocery store in an effort to sell juice, I think we realized it wasn't really fair to just sit back and make fun of this place. We see the bizarre hair-dos, the countless screaming babies, the diamond merchants on every corner, and we realize it would be like making fun of some foreign culture just because they did things differently. Idaho is a neighbor to Montana, but we feel as though we're anthropologists living with and observing an alien culture on their home world.

I guess this is what happens when you take a ton of Mormons, make them farm potatoes in the middle of nowhere, start a big religious university with very strict rules, invite young Mormons from around the world to attend, and surround the whole thing with endless desert wasteland. Welcome to The Bubble.