This week I am grateful for my students. I teach fourth and fifth grade as I've mentioned many times before and this had all the makings of a very difficult and very complicated and very frustrating, very stressful school year. And I was pretty cynical in August of 2020. I was relatively certain it was gonna be terrible for everybody. I was ready to do what we had to do to stay safe. But that didn't mean I was going to enjoy the year. I thought my kids would hate their masks. I thought my kids would hate staying in their seats longer than they used to. I thought my kids would hate not learning in groups like they used to. I thought every day it was gonna be this awful fight just to get through. But as it turns out, I was just reminded of how resilient kids can be and how awesome they can be. And surely we're all going through this collectively, which almost makes this class perhaps more special than many other classes I've taught. Most of the time I have not taught a class while going through a pandemic in my life. So it's been a struggle in many degrees, but it blows my mind every week how well my kids have handled things, and how optimistic they've been, and just what pros they've been. Sometimes I hear parents speaking for children, speaking of how they can't stand another day wearing masks, or not being able to high-five their friends. My class and I collectively agree that we can't wait for the day where we never have to wear a mask again, when we can take the plastic barriers off our desks and emphatically throw them into the trash or recycle, and when we can high five for real again. We all miss that, but on the same hand, we're not gonna sit here and just mope in the meantime until we get back to it. What almost everyone's done is just -- my kids have just gone on with life and they've adjusted to the way things are. You can still smile at kids, and you can still read smiles. We've had to change we've had to adjust, but you find this equilibrium where things are anything but normal but it feels normal. I can still give a nod to -- a nod of…

Okay, I have had a weird experience with a salesperson. And this is with a door to door salesperson and it was about -- let's see four years ago. I was living in Aztec, New Mexico in a rental house. My husband was at work, I had two small kids at the time, and a man came to the door selling vacuums, which would, y'know, like "no, thank you." Not only was he selling vacuums, but he was selling like --I think the vacuum cost thousands of dollars for a vacuum, which especially at the time we were just so broke, with my husband working as a poverty lawyer on the Navajo Reservation. We had no money and I was certainly not going to buy a thousand -- multi thousand dollar vacuum cleaner, but for some reason and I can't remember why, uh possibly because I've been bred to be very uh accommodating, I let the guy in the door so he could -- he said " couldn't I just vacuum your rug. You looks like -- if -- you just look like you could use some help vacuuming the rug, which is in hindsight a little bit offensive, but I do remember that was the -- that was the sales pitch to get in the door. "I'll just clean some surfaces. You tell me no, I leave." Well, this person -- this man, he must've been in his, I'd say, early thirties maybe. He would not leave. And he kept pushing these articles at me about how like all of my furniture and pillows and mattresses must be just like 98% bed bug and dust and mite poop and like -- so like went for the terror angle and kept vacuuming different things and just like, "oh look at all this dirt, can you even believe this filth that you've been living in?" Like, "thank you. Thank you for showing me how dirty I am. Please go. I cannot afford a thousand -- multi thousand dollar vacuum cleaner. Please go." But he wouldn't go. Finally my husband comes back and I'm hoping that he's quite a bit more direct and a lot less worried about hurting people's feelings, that he'll get the guy out of the door, and even he couldn't get the guy out of the door and it had to get to the point of the most…

So I was eight years old and I was with my family, my parents and my brother and we were at a fair. And I wanted to play some games. There was this one prize I thought was really cool and it was at one of those games where you throw the darts, you pop the balloons and then see how many balloons you can pop. The guy running it was, yeah, I want to say he was Lithuanian based on his accent, it was very thick. And he came by and you know, I told him I want to play he's like, “okay, no problem. We can do that.“ So, I hand him some money and he hands me the darts. Well afterwards, I got done throwing my darts. Then he kept handing them to me and he goes “try again. Try again. Try again.” And he wasn't asking me for money at all. I was very confused because most of the games you would pay before you play. And so he just kept handed me the darts. I’m like okay well if you're not gonna charge me that's okay. So I began throwing more of the darts each time and then I decided I was done. I tried to walk away and he grabs my shoulder and goes “no, no you have to pay now.” I thought okay. I thought I was gonna owe him a few extra dollars and turns out it was up to $110 that he was looking for. I started to freak out and I can't remember where my parents were at the time. I think they were sitting at a table watching and my brother was off somewhere else. And so I looked at my parents I told them come over I have a problem and so they came by and the guy asked like “oh this your son” like yeah. “Well, he owes me $110.” And then that is when my parents snapped and they went “why?” and he was like “oh well he kept playing.” My mom -- that was to the point where she had red in her eyes, not so much angry at me but angry at the fact that the carny took advantage of me and thought he's an 8 year old kid, he doesn't understand this and you just hustled him for a ton of money. But…