I thought I settled this in Kindergarten

Yes, my name is Welch. No, I have nothing to do with the grape juice.

Great. Now I’m a racist.

“This is some racist bullshit!” To be fair, four out of five of those words absolutely did describe the situation that I found myself in the other day, standing outside the classroom having a yelling match with a couple of students who happened to be the only black students in the class. Let’s go back to the beginning…

Students can be total jerks and sometimes, only sometimes, they do something that really gets to me. Usually something incredibly stupid, as the case was on this day. The last period of a long day came and I was tired of them and just tired in general, so when someone decided to play a neat little ditty on their cell phone for all to hear…I kind of threatened to “murder [them] all” if it didn’t stop. Did I mention it was also really hot that day?

Needless to say, it didn’t stop. And unfortunately one student decided it would also be fun to act threatened about the whole murdering thing, and I was forced to use my best this-conversation-is-f-ing-over-voice, which is actually pretty scarey. It did stop the whiney kid, but it didn’t stop the noise. The noise kept coming because they knew, and I knew, there was no definite way of stopping it. Except one: the faces.

High school students cannot lie. People think teenagers are good liars, and I’m sure they are, on their own. But in a pack, they give each other away, they can’t help it. Sometimes these Masters of Subtlety will be real smooth and a whole group will look at you at the same time and then turn away quickly. You don’t really have to wonder if, but what, they’re doing wrong then. But the best trick is to look at all of them at once, like a magic eye poster. It might be a stifled giggle, a quick glance towards the guilty party, or a stupid I’m-not-doing-anything-wrong smirk. Today it was the smirk. The problem was, as it was so delicately pointed out to me by one of these gentlemen (see the first line of this post), that the only guys wearing the smirks were the only black kids in the class. So when I kicked them out, things got a bit…yell-y.

“You don’t know what we go through” said one of the boys, incidentally the same kid who didn’t like the idea of me murdering them. He was right, and I told him so. I don’t have a clue what it’s like to be a black teenage boy in our society, I can imagine it’s not always pleasant. That wasn’t the point of why they were outside, but it certainly became the point, to them at least, and frankly who am I to argue? Well I’m the person who is not cool with being called racist. So we did argue – for practically the whole period, in little outbursts every time I stepped outside.

Every time I stepped back inside, though, a certain song kept popping in my head as it does quite often in situations like this. If you know the chorus to Radiohead’s Just, then you know what I’m talking about. I shouldn’t have threatened to murder anyone, I shouldn’t have even acknowledged this sound, except possibly with my you-are-all-stupid-little-children face that is usually quite effective. But I don’t know, something about that damn crying baby really irked me and apparently turned me into a perceived racist. And it sucks to know that someone thinks that of you, even if it is a totally misguided notion. Does it even matter that it is misguided if that’s how I made them feel?

So I kept going out. I kept trying to talk to them, and eventually we worked it out, sort of. We all apologized for overreacting and they even took out the work they were supposed to be doing (granted, they put it right back when I walked away). I came back in feeling nauseated and extremely confused about how I handled the whole thing, a feeling which will probably never go away. But I left knowing that Thom Yorke is right, I did it to myself.

Dear kid who tried to call me out,

We’ll call you Drew (because that’s your name). If being cool is dressing like a slightly drunk college professor whose wife has just left him, enjoying political conversations, actually watching the historical video I put on, and wanting to be Peter Jennings, then you, sir, are the coolest guy in town. And lest you think I’m making fun, please know that these things, in my opinion, are very, very cool.

Anyway Drew, it was nice to talk to you the other day, as it is rare that I can have a conversation with the young men of your high school without there being a pathetically veiled sexual innuendo thrown in. You didn’t do that, you just wanted to talk about Obama, various television news journalists (Katie Couric is lame)…and my career path.

“Then what are you doing here?” you said, after hearing that I went to film school. “Why are you substitute teaching?” It was so cool to hear the idealism in your voice, the purity, the foolishness. Why not just go make movies and be successful at it? Why not?! I don’t know what I’ve been thinking, wasting all this time trying to earn money so I can have health insurance (maybe we can discuss this problem next time).

But, I hope you noticed Drew, that I passed your little test of dedication to my field, and that kind of made my day. I was able to tell you that I just made a short film and I’m working on writing a longer one. That I’m taking classes and will hopefully have an agent soon. That I’m here because it’s not quite as easy as you think it is, but I’m still not giving up on it. And with a nod that was both understanding and a little condescending (I would expect nothing less), you turned back to daydreaming about 60 Minutes, and I went back to working on my script.

Substitute is only three letters away from prostitute

I’m going to go ahead and admit that the title to this post has little to do with the actual post. Disappointed? Too bad, you’re here so just keep reading.

Fun fact: Substitute Teachers are also known as Visiting Teachers! Okay maybe not a euphemism up there with concentration camp or turn a trick, but certainly false advertising. “Visiting” has a positive connotation right? Like there should be a welcome party or something. Please don’t get me wrong, the girl who walked into class saying “not this bitch again” was charming, even if she did lack a bit of warmth. Mostly, though, the word implies that I want to be there, that I want to spend some quality time with a whole bunch of obnoxious teenagers.

I wasn’t always so anti-teenager. There was a long period of time when I believed I liked them. I thought small children were the awful ones, with their diapers and drool and lack of conversation skills. But I was wrong – teenagers are still children, they just have a slightly better vocabulary (a topic for another day) and they’re often bigger than me and therefore that much less under my control.

Getting back to the point, the title isn’t all bad. An example: “Okay guys, let’s watch this really interesting History Channel Biography of Joseph Stalin. Oh what’s that? You’d rather jump on your chairs, have a water fight, make out with your girlfriends, and literally throw your textbooks out the window? Well, it’s pretty important that you learn about the past so you can understand what’s going on in the world around you, not to mention pass your test…buuut what the hell. I’m just visiting.”

Becoming Sub-human

Those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t do anything, substitute teach.

As students, we learned almost nothing about them. Where did they come from? What do they do? Why are they here and not at a real job? It was a mystery, and one that I never intended to solve. But I live at home at twenty-five years old and something has to be done about that.

“You should think about subbing,” my mom said to me after what may have been weeks of racking her brain trying to figure out what film school graduates can actually do with themselves once they leave the comforts of college, and thus excuses. With seconds of careful thought I responded with all the rationality and maturity I’d gleaned from those 4 (or 5) years of hard work: “Ew, gross.”

I mean, really. I’m way too cool for that kind of thing. Just as I’m way too smart to work in fast food, way too creative to work retail, and way too free-spirited to work in a cubicle (visualize something with a bird and a cage…). But hold on. Oh yes, that’s right, I still live with my parents.

Just to clarify, I like my parents, they’re nice people. They pay for stuff and give me space, and I clean the kitchen. It works out. And at this point, it wasn’t as though I didn’t work. I just didn’t work a lot. I worked freelance, which is code for “I work when I want to”. Admittedly, this was not often.

“You need a flexible schedule. It would be perfect for you.” And she was absolutely right, I did need a flexible schedule for getting depressed about not knowing what I was going to do with my life and rarely being able to find the kind of work I wanted to do. With subbing, I could still do that and make money at the same time! But of course, there was the problem that high school wasn’t so far behind me, and the idea of going back, even in a different and seemingly more powerful capacity, gave me the undeniable sense of having gotten nowhere.

The thing with feeling that way though, is that money is important. No, that sentence doesn’t make sense, but on we go… I don’t worship it, or love it, or swim in it. I just like it and need it for things. Things like paying future rent and buying food and clothing. And “working when I want to” became “working when I can – which is not often enough”. So sitting in class for 6 hours telling kids to sit down and shut u- please be quiet and little else for more money than I would make working retail or other jobs my major qualified me for, suddenly seemed okay.

Thus, I became Ms. Welch and agreed to share my awesomeness with the youth of Southern California, who in return would provide me with some fairly entertaining stories to share…