NoJoMo 3: California Uber Alles

Wednesday is my busiest day.  I have another school that comes in for the whole morning and they have now decided to pay me as the teacher rather than the assistant so busy busy.  It also means that I am in the water with the third grade.  We have some kids who are still getting over water fear.

But with that school I also have seventh graders.  The teacher who is with them, who is great, takes care of the 3 kids who can’t swim very well (all three are immigrants.  We see this a lot.  They are most likely asylum seekers from places like Somalia, Iraq or other places and have most likely never seen a pool or been in the water.  We also have one Muslim girl who wears clothes from head to two, including a hijab.  Cool enough, I guess, though I hear that the father is pissed that I, a man, was there at all.  We said it’s my job and I am there or she doesn’t swim.  She swims…or tries to.) and I get the ones who can, in this case, because of the Muslim girl, this is an all girl class.  I am teaching them crawl and today some basic lifesaving.  

But the reason I mention it is the way they flirt with me.  I see this all the time at school.  I very often have a flock of sixth and seventh grade girls around me when I am outside.  I am the cool American and they like to speak some English and apparently work on their flirting skills.  The girls today at the pool were all giggly like they normally are.  I was teaching them the behind the head hold to bring someone in from out in the water and one girl was not quite getting where her hands go.  So I was behind her on land and she was in the water and I bent down and held my hands under her chin, barely touching her face and she blushed bright red.  It’s kind of cute, actually.

In other pool related news, I can tell Canchita that a lot of kids use bathing caps.  They are required at some pools, usually older ones or ones with older filter systems that don’t deal with hair well.  Our pool is old-ish but has a newer filter so we don’t require hats.  We do require girls to tie their hair up, mostly just so they don’t have a face full of hair when they are trying to swim. 

Also, I took my yearly lifesaving/CPR certification this evening.  The instructor even made us do CPR for five minutes and if you haven’t done that before it is exhausting!

I’ll talk about stuff other than swimming tomorrow.

I should mention the elections.  Eh.  Not what I was hoping for of course but not out of line with what I expected.  Lots of talk about mandate and the public has spoken.  Just a couple of comments.  I read on Twitter somewhere that it wasn’t the Republicans riding a wave to a win but them driving a wave to the polls.  There is a difference.  And I also read that in 2008 the youth vote was 8 percent higher than this election and the senior vote was 10 percent lower then.  It isn’t so much that "the public" has spoken just that a different demographic was excited about this election.  

But the right won.  I hope they do something more than subpoena the Obama administration to death or impeachment like they did Clinton.  And it would be nice if they actually proposed something to fix America’s large problems because they don’t seem to really have an agenda other than Obama bad, taxes bad.  We’ll see.

Videos!

In light of the elections I kind of have to post California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys, what with Jerry Brown governor again.

 To stick with the punk theme, a band that for some reason wasn’t really considered punk but were.  Motorhead with Ace of Spades (actually the clip is from the old British show The Young Ones, which was awesome!)

 And finally the "real" punks didn’t like this one either because a few people who weren’t punk liked it. But this song is classic!  Suicidal Tendencies with Institutionalized.

Zaphod