Month: October 2010

I just interviewed a new babysitter.  As I write this I think, “Darn  why didn’t I ask her about her late evening availability?”  I was so busy thinking about our regular schedule and what would I like to get done if I didn’t leave the apartment at 2:30 to pick up My Kid from school and then follow her as she either went to the park for exercise which I advocate or to the library to ostensibly do homework which I also ostensibly advocate but don’t actually feel the need to be there for… so I need a babysitter…

There are a lot of things I am trying to get done this month and the chopped up day with middle school tours and YMCA Pilates mat clases and some grocery shopping and some hours spent at the laundry mat and researching and visiting  MIDDLE SCHOOLS (with and without my child) all that has to happen between 9am and 2:30 p.m. I’m just not getting enough done.

So I need some help and I’m willing to pay for it.

Looking back, I should have been paying for this all along.

But, I have always had a hard time committing to a set schedule an even as a toddler, my baby would be sleeping like a log at the appointed hour for me to transport her to the neighborhood daycare, and she and I just never quite got the whole thing worked out to my advantage…

While running a small print job as class parent, I was reminded of the difficulty I had with clerical tasks last fall while we were putting together the show Clown Axioms. Then as now, I made a special trip home in the middle of the day just to print something out and I had about 45 minutes in the apartment to accomplish the task.  However, the e-mail attachment was in Microsoft word which slowed down my Mac so much that I couldn’t even open the file until it was too late and I had to leave to go pick up My Kid from school.  By then I had also discovered that we didn’t have any printer paper and so after I picked up my kid we went to the office supply store, but it was closed, so we went to Target and by the time we got home there was half an hour to get some homework done before The Husband came home for dinner, and of course that was the time the homework was left at school and there were tears and there were time outs and dinner was delayed for hours.  And then there was the  humiliating reset of my laptop by The Husband because of something I did in the process of trying to get the Microsoft document to communicate with my Mac.  Technology is not an endeavor in which I possess an abundance of natural gifts.

And so the next morning, in the rain, I went to Kinko’s where the the inattentive counter staff and inserting of credit cards into multiple machines, adding colored paper to the tray and waiting for the clerk to void a mistake made the whole thing take far longer than I ever would have guessed when I first read the e-mail about the form to copy and distribute. What ever can go wrong will go wrong.

I just looked at  a couple of modest apartments for sale on the Cocoran real estate website and now I feel a kind of ill.

I woke up last night at 2:00 am.  I couldn’t get back to sleep so I got on my laptop and googled and re-googled Insideschools reading the reviews of District 13 middle schools that my daughter is eligible to attend.  I thought about the school I toured yesterday —the school that appalled the mothers from Brooklyn Heights.  That middle school was one of the top three District 13 choices for almost every 5th grade parent I asked at our elementary school last year.

I input my zip code on a website to find out what other middle schools are nearby.  Three schools came up.  One was a selective school in District 15 ten blocks from our home and open only to students from District 15.  The well organized photo and information filled website had a graph.  It showed which selective high schools had accepted how many of that middle school’s 8th grade graduates the previous year. The two District 13 middle schools listed my zip code did not even have links their own websites, not even the boring government-issued default New York City Department of Education template.

I googled “District 13”.  I googled “District 15”.

I wondered why all the selective schools in District 13 are also open to students from districts 14, 15, 16, and 17 but all the selective schools in District 15 are only open to District 15 students.

I googled “separate but equal”.  I googled “segregation”.

I was still awake at 5:00 am.