blush, blush

This has been an embarassing week. More precisely, Thursday and Friday were mortifying. I'm pretty used to feeling embarassed about just about everything I've done in the past (ages 11-16 are a pretty much a blur of remembered agony.) Plus, I suffer from drinker's remorse in the worst way, ("did I really say that?" "was I tilting my head funny at the bar? Oh god, I was! I'm a weird head tilter!" "The cabbie totally knew I was drunk and was making fun of me in head head"), so I'm accustomed to trying to talk myself down from the ledge, usually with reminders that everyone else there was drunk, too, and thus unlikely to remember my relatively tame drunken antics. But this week, there was no alcohol involved, which is making the cringe-worthiness all the worse. It all started with the damned local school council elections. Mayor Daley sent out a heartfelt plea, asking concerned Chicagoans to get involved in local schools, to step up and do their civic duty, and since I'm a sucker for civic duty speeches, and since I would be pretty much content to hang out at schools and hang out with kids for free anyway because it's one of my favorite things except hanging out at schools without a purpose is bound to get you arrested for general sketchiness, I decided to run. I dutifully filled out my candidate nomination forms and turned them in the day before they were due, and the nice lady at the school office told me I was the first person to turn in any forms and I felt all warm and fuzzy and gratified that I had answered the call to service. I would be a local school council member! I would guide a troubled high school (29% graduation rate; 74% chronic truancy rate, average ACT score a dismal 14) into less-troubled waters! I would Serve My Community! You can guess how this turned out. I went to a candidate forum two weeks before the election and learned that there were TEN CANDIDATES for the two community representative positions, several of whom noted pointedly in thier candidate speeches that the black community would be better served by black local school council reps. (This high school is officially designated racially isolated African American, with less than 1% of the student body non-black). Things were not looking good for the Pseudostoops in '06 campaign. Three votes. That's how many votes a do-gooder white girl law student gets in a local school council election. Three. And they PUBLISH these results on a BIG BULLETIN BOARD with the number of votes that everyone got written in RED INK. That's me! Pseudostoops! Recipient of three votes! One from me and two that were probably a mistake, as my name was right below that of the winner! Haha! Embarassing, right? Yeah, that's a fricking walk in the park compared to what happened on Thursday at school, where I spent half an hour making fun of a perfectly nice 1L to a friend of mine, mocking her fakey-nice attitude and her seeming eagerness to identify the "coolest" person in any room and try to become friends with them, and there may have even been a snide comment about her "town bicycle" reputation (note to self: stop being a bad feminist.) Of course I learned, four hours later, that the friend to whom I was talking about this perfectly nice 1L is DATING HER. Of course he is! Haha! I'll just set about extricating my foot from my mouth now! And then Oscar, who we are puppysitting again, ate a bunch of daffodils and puked them up on my friend Beignet in the car on the way home. I might never be able to show my face in public again.