Weekend (or Gimme the HEMI)

Roux's home. The poor baby has staples in a six-inch line up her leg, and she's getting around in painful slowness, but she's home. The vet said that upon inspection of the injury it appears that her ACL injury occurred because it deteriorated because of natural causes. He said this sometimes happens in dogs and that in the next six months to a year it may happen again in her other leg. He said there's nothing that can be done to prevent it; apparently, it's a genetic issue. As I watch her limp from room to room, I pray that this is all for her. If her other leg goes, I'll do whatever I have to by way of surgery, but it will be so much better if she can recover from this and be healthy and happy.

Friday, while I was waiting to hear about Roux's surgery, I went with my parents to go see my uncle, and we wound up stopping on the way at a car dealership instead. Dad needed a new vehicle. With gas prices going up and the reliability of his 1991 truck going down, it was time. Although I don't think they intended the purpose of the trip to be purchasing a new car, Dad came home in an 07 Chrysler Pacifica. It's big enough for him to fit in and it gets really good gas mileage. We took it north today on the rescheduled trip to see my uncle, and it was very nice. I think he's excited about having it, and I think it's about time. It's the first "new" vehicle he's had since 1981. He was way overdue.

While he and Mom were conducting their business, I was somewhat left at loose ends, so I talked to some of the salesmen, roamed the lot, and drooled over the Chargers. I was standing and staring at their curving loveliness when all the headlights started flashing. I stepped back, a little startled, and one of the salemen stepped out with a handful of keys. He said, "Pick one." I started making noises saying no because I cannot trade cars right now, even though I want almost nothing in this whole world more than a big-HEMI Charger. I didn't want to be a test-drive tease. He just smiled, and said again, "Pick one. You want to drive the red one?"

The red one was a big HEMI R/T package, and it was fine in every way, but it was not the one that made my heart skip a beat. The one that made me want to cry was a big HEMI 08 in a color called Titanium. I smiled at him, and I swear I felt like a kid in a candy store when I pointed at it and I said, "That one. I want to drive that one." He handed me the key and told me to have fun and went back inside.

Oh BOY, did I have fun. I didn't trust myself to test drive it long. Otherwise, I'd still be driving it. That was the second one I've driven, but the other one didn't have a HEMI, and oh what a difference that makes. As soon as I got it around the block and out onto the open road, I just floored it to see what it would do. I swear, it felt like the thing stood up. There was no hesitation, no pause, no sickening moment of waiting for the rush, just pure power and a purring roar from the engine. The RPMs kicked high briefly to meet the immediate demand, and I was doing 85 before I could even blink. I was giggling like a fool and furtively looking around me for highway patrol before sanity returned and I slowed down to a speed less likely to get me arrested. There was almost no traffic on the road, so I slowed down to crawl so I could hit it again to hear it roar and feel it fly. It was so amazing. All I could think was, "I LOVE this car. I LOVE this car!!!!"

The day when I have one of these for my own is going to have to come soon. When I got back to the dealership and parked it, I felt a great loss at turning the ignition off and getting out. I just wanted to keep driving it, not at daredevil, lawbreaking speeds, but at every speed. Maybe the legislature will give us a 200% raise soon and I'll be able to afford one....

Roux to the Vet

This morning, I got up early, got dressed, and took Roux for a long walk around the yard. She sniffed every blade of dew-wet grass, overturned every brown live-oak leaf, and followed every track left in the yard by nighttime animal visitor in the yard. Her poor back leg trembled with every step, but she was so excited to be outside in the cool morning air that her ears were perked up and she wasn't really paying attention. Yelldo, who'd come out with her, was dancing around, sniffing and exploring happily, getting ready to enjoy another morning of outdoor fun.

When I was sure she'd taken care of her bodily needs, I brought her back in, gathered up my purse and keys, and helped her into the car. She, as she always does, climbed right across the passenger side and into the driver's seat. Once I persuaded her that she couldn't drive, we hit the road. She is always such a good dog in the car, so peaceful and calm. She looks out the window at the passing cars, and she never seems nervous at all. She is always perfectly composed, stately almost.

Today, I just kept petting her and telling her over and over what I've been saying since Wednesday, telling her she'll feel so much better when this is all over and that I swear I'll be back for her as soon as I'm able. I don't know if dogs have memories for things like this, but I believe they do. I worry so much that she will flash back to her life as a shelter dog or to the time when she was in rescue before she had a permanent home, and that she'll think that I've given her up. I know the surgery will be painful for her during and after the procedure, but she's a pit, and a healthy one at that, so I'm not worried so much about her physically. Mostly, I don't want her great big loving pit bull heart to suffer even for one second thinking that I left her somewhere. That's happened to her before, after all.

Now, I'm just waiting by the phone to hear that she's okay after the surgery. Once I hear that, I can begin the countdown to her return to me tomorrow morning. I know all too well the pain of knee surgery, so I am ready to help her start on the road to recovery once she gets home. I just need her home. It's hard to have part of your heart away from you.

Quote on Political Correctness

While on my favorite BlackBerry site, CrackBerry.com, I found this gem as a signature file in one of the forum posts. I had to copy it and share it here....

Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end. - Texas A&M University Student

Twilight

Choke...

Part of me does NOT want to admit that I read these books..... Does it make me a mewling preteen to have read these books? Jeez....

Anyway, because of all the hoopla surrounding the upcoming release of the last volume of the series, I got curious about Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. I ordered the first one off Amazon with a bunch of other stuff expecting to be underwhelmed but at least culturally literate. When you teach teenagers, you need to at least try to be marginally culturally literate. Most of the time I fail miserably, but this was at least something I could read, so I figured I'd try it.

The first book was not well-written at all. Every thirty-seven words or so, the characters either glared, rolled their eyes, or chuckled. I felt the desire to slap the main character (just can't call her a heroine, sorry) about every fourth page in the hopes that she'd grow a spine or brain in reaction. Yet, somehow, despite all that colossally-ill-written prose, I still wanted to see what happened next. Somehow, I had to know what happened with all the rainy gloom in Forks.

So...I sent away to Amazon for the other two books. When they came, I felt embarrassed as though the UPS driver could see inside the plain brown box and knew what sort of literary crap fiction was inside. I think I would have been less shamed if it had contained an illustrated Kama Sutra. I spent the remainder of the day with Bella, Edward, Jacob, and that terrible writing watching their world fall apart in impossible ways through the two books. I finished New Moon about dinner time and Eclipse about 2 a.m. The good thing about pulp fiction is that you can rip right through it, reading-wise.

When I finished the third book, I started thinking about all the screaming prepubescent hordes who lustfully adore Edward, the vampire love interest in the books. He certainly isn't like any of the fictional vamps I've read in the past. His main personality trait seems to be "control," not something I personally find appealing. His attraction to Bella is based on some prey-drive thing, but her attraction to him is never really explained other than by saying that he's really good-looking and sexy and in to her...and the author says that about every fifth sentence. Their conversations don't ever feel real to me. They are filled with mutual worship and angst instead of real speaking and listening.

Bella does have another love interest, a best friend who shares a lot with her, named Jacob. With Jacob, she does real things (sometimes) and has real conversations. Some of the best writing in the series, some of the most believable characterizations and conversations in the series come from their time together. She seems like she's on the verge of serious commitment to him a couple of times in the course of the series, but always she turns back to the dysfunctional Edward each time he crooks a finger. Of course, all this is tossed in with supernatural stuff like vampires and werewolves, so it does get a bit muddled at times....

I decided that Edward must fill that immature "star-crossed lover" desire that so many teenagers seem to have, that craving for the guy you just shouldn't have, the relationship that is as full of drama as you can possibly make it. I was never really into that, personally, but I saw it in full effect in the lives of some of my friends. They dated guys, I'm convinced, that they never would have given a second look to if the relationship had gone smoothly. As we get older, I think most of us lose that drama urge. Love is hard enough without looking for soap-opera complications on the side.

All in all, I guess this series is okay. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, for sure, and anything that gets people to read can't be all bad. I guess I'm just a little too old to get into a bother over cardboardy control characters. I'm curious enough and OCD enough to read the final book in the series when it comes out. I just don't intend to announce it loudly when I'm done.

Roux's Knee

Roux has been limping worse than usual the past two days, so today, I loaded her up and took her in to see the vet again. I was afraid that she'd reinjured or worsened the existing injury to her rear right ACL. She licked her lips in pain and only yelped a couple of times as the vet moved her leg, but I could tell it hurt her so much. The ultimate diagnosis didn't come as a surprise. She's going to need surgery to correct the torn ligament in her knee.

Roux was so sweet and good the whole time. Everyone always remarks on how beautiful she is, and I am always so proud to be able to tell people that she's a pit because I know that too many people have too many wrong attitudes about what pit bulls really are. The whole time we were traveling, the whole time we were sitting in the waiting room, and then while the vet was seeing her, she just kept looking up at me with that same loving trusting expression. Even when the vet had twisted her leg into a position that caused her pain, when he was done, she stuck her head into the crook of his arm as though he was a refuge for her. How could anyone look at that and see a dangerous animal?

She's going to have surgery Friday morning, and I'll need to crate her up for awhile. This, of course, doesn't mean that she wouldn't be perfectly capable of doing exactly what she's been doing and turn off all the pain to run full out after whatever she wanted if the opportunity presented itself, so I'm going to have to be very careful about keeping her on the leash and watching that she doesn't dash out the door for awhile. I hope that even after Friday's surgery she'll still be able to look up at me with that same love and trust. I know from personal experience how badly knee surgery hurts.

Easy Key Lime Pie Recipe

The pie is great. If you want the recipe, check here on the RealSimple recipe page for it. I will say that because I can't seem to find an 8 oz. container of heavy cream or a 6 oz. can of frozen limeade that I doubled the recipe instead by simply buying another pie crust and another can of sweetened condensed milk and making two pies instead of one. Now what will I do with that second pie?

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

I watched this tonight with my faux Mexican, and I was reminded of why I am fascinated by the Tudors. I loved the first movie, Elizabeth, tremendously. I have it on DVD, and every time I watch it I am a little more impressed with it. I know it's not exactly accurate historically, but it's fairly close, and just to see the period come to life in that way and to gain a window in to how Elizabeth might have felt when the events of her life unfolded is powerful.

The Golden Age had many of the same qualities. The romance element from the first movie was largely absent, or at least highly sublimated, but the history was so rich. Mary, Queen of Scots made her fateful decision and lost her head, Philip II schemed his megalomaniac schemes, cloaked in religious zeal, and the Armada sailed. Just seeing the Armada being built and then the later battle with the fire ships was incredible. Seeing Elizabeth deliver her famous speech to the troops as the Armada approached was also very well-done.

I think, though, the very best moments of the film revolved around the conflict with Mary, Queen of Scots. The actress who played her played Jane Eyre in the BBC/A&E production. I can never remember her name, but she's very good. I never would have thought of casting her into that role, but now that I've seen her in it, I don't think I will ever be able to think of anyone else in it. She carried herself with such perfect composure and regal grace. She was a wonderful foil for Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth, and let's be honest, that wasn't going to be easy to do.

When Mary's plot to assassinate Elizabeth was discovered and she knew her life was basically forfeit, she still maintained her dignity. She went to the block like a queen.

Just as moving was the reaction of Elizabeth. It humanized that whole part of the story. Elizabeth was torn in making the decision to order Mary's execution for many reasons, and even when the decision was done, in the film, she could not watch it. Again, I'm not sure of the historical accuracy of any of it, but it was compellingly played on screen.

I'm glad I finally got to see it. All in all, I liked the first one better, I guess. It would have been hard to live up to it, too, all things considered. I will want this one to show bits and pieces of for the Armada scenes, especially, and I'll definitely want to watch it again.

Reengineering Wireless and Key Lime Pie

After a long night of really bizarre dreams, there's nothing like checking your bank balance prior to going to the store and finding that you have $0.76. Really. Seventy-six cents. After I took care of that, I squelched my trepidation, kissed my dogs, and went to town for the first time since last Tuesday's robbery. I was out of practically everything.

My wireless network here at home has been spotty since I moved the router to the back of the house to get it out of the living room, so in an effort to continue yesterday's office cleaning and revamping, I decided I would fix the problem today. Nothing is ever as easy as it seems, though.

The room roughly in the center of my house has very high ceilings. It's the room that joins the two houses that make up the house as a whole. There is a display ledge that is formed by the ceiling of one of the rooms, and that is where I decided to put my router.

I got my ladder and climbed precariously up. I managed not get the router up and myself down without killing myself, a minor miracle, and then I fought with the cords for fifteen or twenty minutes. When I finally got them all hidden behind doors, under rugs and along crevices, I plugged everything in, turned it on, and was pleasantly surprised that, so far, everything works.

This was pleasing, but was by no means the best part of my day. The best part of my day was the easy key lime pie recipe I made with my Kitchen Aid. Mmmm-mmmm. I love key lime pie, but making the real thing is a pain. I love any pie you can dump the ingredients for into a mixer and then pour into a pie crust. I haven't had the actual end result yet as it's still chilling, but I did, um, "clean the bowl" before I washed it, and I have to say the prechilled mix was fine in every way.

I am now going to go make some faux Mexican food and watch a movie. It's been a good day.

Cleaning Up

I decided that today is a cleanup day. I am going to tackle the office today and see if I can't bring some order to the chaos. I want to have some people over for dinner one night, and I certainly need to clear stuff up if I'm going to reach that goal. It never ceases to amaze me how messy one person and five critters can make a house. I hope I can at least get this one room cleaned up today. Here's hoping.

Nothing to Say

I could have just as easily not posted this, I suppose. Since the robbery, life has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. I didn't sleep more than a few hours the first two nights after it happened, and I didn't want to leave the house at all. Gradually, I was able to get past that, and now, I can almost feel okay again about leaving the house. I still expect to come home and find the front door standing wide open every time I do, but I know it's going to take a long time for that to dissipate back to my usual level of livable "what-if" again.

Mostly, I haven't been writing because what I'd write would just be more of what I've been writing, and I see no reason to inflict that on everybody again. More and more, I want to be somewhere else. I don't even care where now. Out west somewhere maybe? That would be wildly different. Maybe up towards Seattle where L. is? I'd know somebody there. Back on a plane overseas? It's the midsummer doldrums which I know will go away, but I'm not blogging about it more than this one last entry because writing about it doesn't actually seem to help. I feel more and more like an actor waiting in the wings here for a cue that never comes, and I don't know exactly what to do to force my way onto stage to take part.

Anyway, I'm sure there's something more productive I can do that this, so I'm off to find it. If all else fails, there's always a house to clean and a yard that always needs mowing, clipping, pruning, and so forth.

Thief

There is nothing that destroys the sense of safety every person is entitled to in his or her own home like a robbery. Today, for the second time in my life, that sense of safety has been stolen.

Mom took her dog to the vet this morning, and she called me on the way. I was up, but not active yet, so although my dogs were out, I had all my doors closed to prevent the UPS man from sneaking up on me in my pajamas. She was calling to tell me that there was a strange vehicle in my yard, and in fact, I heard the dogs going crazy outside as she was talking, but I figured that either it was UPS running very early, or it was one of the utilities checking something, so I didn't worry about it because I heard the vehicle leaving. I got up, got dressed, and got ready to start my day. I don't know that this vehicle slowly cruising through my yard has anything to do with what happened next, but some gut feeling tells me that it does.

Mom called me again about an hour later on her way home to tell me something, and we chatted briefly. When the phone rang again moments later, I figured she'd forgotten something she wanted to tell me, but she was out of breath and upset. My first thought was that she'd been bitten or stung by something on her way into the house, but she told me that as she'd walked up to the house with her dog on the leash, she'd noticed that the front door was open just those few ominous inches that every heart fears to see. She paused long enough to take in that the hall closet doors were also wide open, something they should never be, and that the light in the hall had been switched on, and she grabbed her dog's leash and ran back to the van.

As soon as I could tell that she was okay and safe back in the van, I got off the phone with her and called the sheriff. One of my friends is actually the dispatcher, the joys of living in a very small area, and he calmed me down and sent the cavalry while I shut down my own house to go up to Mom and Dad's to wait with her.

I kept flashing back to that horrible afternoon in high school when we came home and the house had been broken into. The thieves had pulled everything out into the floor, torn things up, and taken things that could never be replaced. I didn't sleep well for months, and every time I left the house, I expected to come home and see that same horrifying three-inch gap in the door.

This time, though, we were really blessed. If a house had to be robbed, I guess this was the way you'd want it to be done. The thieves took a jewelry box of my mother's, but they didn't destroy the house. They didn't break things and make a mess. They didn't hurt the two cats who we finally managed to coax out of hiding places deep under and behind things where they'd apparently gone when the intruders started coming in.

Truly, the only thing that wound up being irretrievably lost that matters is that sense of safety. How long will it be now before I leave the house again without being afraid to come home, even with a pit bull in the yard? I know that there is no deterrent against a thief, and that what they want they will take, but even before this happened, I was already coming home afraid of the open door. How much more will that fear be with me now, and how do I overcome it?

Even now, I'm pausing like a deer in the woods at every sound, listening for danger, trying to decide if the sound of the engine I hear is on the road or in the driveway. Is that somebody turning around, somebody pulling into my neighbor's drive, or somebody casing my house? Why are the dogs barking? Is it the full moon, is it distant coyotes, or is there somebody outside? I know it's irrational, I know I'm as safe as I can be behind very thick heavy deadbolted and chained doors with large dogs, but this is truly what the thieves take: confidence.

Somehow, I'm going to have to find the courage to go to sleep tonight without waking up every five minutes to twitch at every noise. After all, I'm sure the sheriffs are out and about. More importantly than that, though, somehow, I'm going to have to get the courage to leave the house, to lock the door, and leave it in the hands of God.

Too Funny Not to Share

This is from I Can Has Cheezburger....


more cat pictures

That Trapped Feeling

The wanderlust is so strong in me today that I could throw a change of clothes and the rudimentary toiletries in a bag, point the PT Cruiser in a random direction, and drive until I found something...else. It's a strange restlessness that crops up in me every so often, a need to see something new, a change of scenery, a change of mind.

Podunk is starting to close in on me, and there's no hope of escape this summer. I am way too broke to go anywhere or do anything other than take mental vacations, so I keep having to pretend I don't notice the fact that that the walls are getting closer together, that the "sameness" of Podunk that I normally find so comforting and charming is becoming almost painful. I don't need a jumbo jet to another country, although that would be nice. I just need to get out of here for a few days, to see something that's not here. I got out my Mississippi: Off the Beaten Path guidebook two days ago when this nagging little ache began, and I found the perfect place to go, but since all my friends were eaten by their children and I'm flat-broke, I have no one to go with and no money to use, anyway. I wish I had somebody to travel with, somebody who enjoyed going and doing.

It's not that I hate living here. I love Podunk, otherwise I never would have come back home. Coming back was a choice I made, and I knew when I did it that there would be times like this, times when I'd miss the other life I had. I knew I was sort of giving up my wings to come back home. Sometimes, though, especially in the summer, I miss them so much it hurts. I guess it's because I'm not busy, so I actually have the time to think about it.

I'll find a way to break out of this, I guess, and everything will go back to normal, but for now, I so wish I could just get away from here for awhile.

That's the Smell of Fear

I was minding my own business, watching TV and contemplating tomorrow's errand run through town (something that, because of high gas prices, has become as precisely choreographed as any tactical military attack) when my mother called me on her way home from choir practice. It seems the ladies of the church have been conspiring against me. Well, that's inaccurate. It seems the ladies of the church have been conspiring for me, at least one of them. One of the ladies of my church believes she has found The Man for me, and she's given him my phone number. Yes, that odor that assaults you is the smell of fear....

From what I've been told so far, This Man sounds interesting, which is more than I can say for about 98% of the unmarried male population I run across in my day-to-day life. Granted, I have been given only the briefest of thumbnail sketches. For all I know, he's got a great big new axe, shiny and waiting to be used in the trunk/bed of his vehicle. You just don't ever know, do you? That's the horrifying part to me. You just don't know. I thought T. was normal, thought D. was normal, and look at how that all turned out. Fear, fear, fear...mind-numbing, house-cleaning fear.

Worse yet, it's not like I'll get to email this person first, use words in writing where I might stand a chance of coming off like a person with some fragment of intelligence, grace, or wit. No, no, no. I have to use the PHONE, a medium in which I will undoubtedly sound like a vacuous sixteen-year-old in need of an IEP.

Who knows whether or not this person will even call me? Right now, I'm voting for no because I'm too scared to vote for yes. I have already scrubbed every pot and pan in the kitchen sink, and I'm going to sit down and fold all the laundry that's accumulated. Hopefully, by that point, I'll be something like a sane person again, or at least as close as I ever get. I wonder if there are any copies of that brochure "So, You Want to Date an English Teacher" laying around anywhere?

Bad Pet Parent

I took Roux to the vet today for her regularly scheduled shots, and while I was there, I asked the vet to look at her back leg. She's been limping again, and I figured she'd pulled something again. She leads an overly active life, and as you may know from previous posts, she comes in scratched up from too much dog play on a pretty regular basis.

He lay her down on the exam table and started probing her back leg pretty firmly. Anything done on a pit bull has to be done pretty firmly. They sort of ignore things that aren't. I've never, ever seen her show pain. Her greatest pain response ever has been to lick her lips repeatedly when something like a major cut was being probed. Whenever she had that deep wound that caused me to rush her to the doctor before, she only licked whenever she was moved. When he cranked on her leg and she actually yelped, I wanted to cry.

Apparently, at some point, Roux tore one of her ACLs. The vet told me that it's begun to stabilise itself and heal now, so he's not recommending surgery yet. He sent me home with a huge bottle of dog pain pills and orders to put her on chondroitin, but I still can't get over the shock of it. I didn't know. How is it possible? She's been running flat out like a beefed-up greyhound with a blown-out knee? How is that even possible? Except for favoring it slightly, she hasn't even lessened her activity level. She roams around, she runs, she chases, she jumps, she plays....every time I thought of her active life, I felt more and more guilt. I just kept stroking her head and trying not to cry.

The vet said that it was because she's a pit. Again, that pit pain tolerance kicks in, and when she decides that she wants to do something, she shuts down the pain and she just does it. Having torn my own ACL and been through this whole process myself, I cannot imagine having that kind of pain and just getting up to run again.

If she responds well to the treatment he prescribed, then she might not need corrective surgery, but she will have arthritis due to her injury. I am a bad pet parent, and I didn't take care of my baby when she was hurt, but I'll see to it that she's taken care of now, whatever it takes. All afternoon, I've been sneaking her extra treats and loving on her even more than usual. I know it's not enough to make up for not knowing, but maybe it's a start.

Yard Work

Today was a day of little chores outside. All the birdfeeders were empty, so I cleaned them out and refilled them. The squirrels, or furred pigs as I've come to think of them, keep dumping all the seed from the feeders, so that has become a full-time job. There comes a point when squirrels stop being cute....

Several pots of caladiums had been sitting on my porch since their purchase last week, and I potted them up in their new home near the metal shed I keep my gardening supplies in. I put the petunias I got at the same time in the pots around front, and I sure hope they fill out some, because right now, they're horribly spindly and unpromising. I cleaned out the lantana bed near the garden shed, and watered everything in well. I also watered my porch plants and the two pots of tomatoes I am trying to grow. Right now I have four little green tomatoes on the two plants. They're not big enough to pluck yet, but I'm already dreaming of fried green ones. After that, I moved around front to tackle the rose bed.

It amazes me how fast stuff grows in that bed. It can't have been that long ago that I did a full weeding on it, but I pulled a huge double-armload of grass and weeds from it. It's a job that I have been putting off, but now that it's done, the roses look much happier. If I can just get some mulch down before it all grows back in, maybe that work won't be in vain.

Frosty Shake

I was seduced by the commercials for Wendy's Frosty Shakes, so I decided to go get one after church tonight. When I pulled through the drive-through, there was only one vehicle ahead of me, and I congratulated myself on what I was sure would be a quick trip. Ha-ha-ha-ha.....foolish, foolish assumption. Fifteen minutes later, I was still sitting behind the same white car waiting or my strawberry Frosty Shake.

I don't know how many thousand things that person ordered, but three large white sacks of food came out of the window, one at a time, several minutes apart. I also don't know why the employees didn't ask the driver to pull around and park for an order that large. I thought that was standard procedure. Instead, cars just kept stacking up behind me, and I could hear teeth gnashing.

By the time I finally got my shake, it was very melty. That was okay because I like soft ice cream, but it certainly wasn't the speedy trip I had imagined. Oh well. The best-laid plans of mice and men and all that.... It was really tasty for all that.

Quote Irony

As I was complaining about my inability to bend Moodle to my will, this was the quote of the day.....

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
John Wooden

Spoiled by a WYSIWYG World

Today I've been playing with Moodle. I think my school is going to get it, and I downloaded it to my machine here at home to start playing around with it to get a feel for it since it seems it can do everything but make coffee for you in the morning. I've been at it now for about eight straight hours, and my eyes feel grainy and hot, as though they might explode. It's been a long, long time since I've spent this long in front of a computer and accomplished this little.

I feel like I used to back in the old days when I built my very first webpage and I had to write the HTML by hand. It's been TOO long since I did that, and too much has changed. I am spoiled by WYSIWYG editors, and I desperately wish that some enterprising soul would craft one for Moodle. GOD, how I wish there were one out there for it. It took me the better part of two hours just to change the background color, the text color, and get a logo up on the test page I'm running here at home because I had to locate all the files, look up all the stupid codes for the colors, scan through the massive coding on the color file to find the fragment that codes for the background and text, resize, relabel, and relocate the logo, and rewrite the code that tells it where to look for the logo. When I finally loaded the main page and the background was a sort of turquoisish blue with the little reading cat in the corner, I wanted to cry with happiness. This is coming from someone who can put together an entire "web universe" on something like Google in an afternoon....

I don't see how people do this all day long. Don't they just want to fling themselves out windows? Granted, I know that people who do this professionally know how to do this much more efficiently than I, and they probably don't have to stumble around with the ineptitude that I did, but I very much missed the visual element of what I was trying to do. I think Moodle would become a great deal more user-friendly than it currently is if someone would just do that one little thing for it. Why can't someone help it be visually appealing? And I don't mean by that charging an arm and a leg for a professionally-made theme, BTW....

However, since it's a creature of open source, I'm sure nobody cares. It seems that open source stuff seldom gets the user-friendly touches. The people who craft it always rather seem to expect you to get "hard core" or get out, and making things visually appealing is always low on the agenda. Right now, I really don't know what to think about this experience. I don't really have the time to get "hard core," and apparently I'm not hard core enough right now to make it look the way I want to. I can make it do most of what I want to functionally, but it looks just awful.

Coyote

Today, I got cabin fever very early. I wasn't in a mood to wander aimlessly around Wal-Mart or to go junking, and as I've said before, there is no place for me right now at school, so I grabbed a big bottle of water and The Count of Monte Cristo and headed to the Red Field. It was a typically-hot Mississippi summer day, but the smothering blanket of humidity hasn't descended yet, so it was still tolerable. A strong, dry wind blew all day long, and under the deep shade of the porch it was quite comfortable.

I was reading when I became aware of the sound of something moving in the edge of the field. I expected a deer or maybe even a stray dog to emerge, and I sat still to see what it would be. We have all kinds of wildlife up there; one Saturday my family and I were up picnicking and we saw a wild turkey tom come strutting out of the woods calling for his hens.

I wasn't expecting what I saw, however. A largish canine form came trotting across the clipped pasture in front of the porch, and I almost whistled to it before realizing that what I was seeing was no lost dog. It was a coyote. That was as close as I've ever been to one. I could have thrown my book at it and hit it.

It was alone, and it didn't ever seem to notice me. I must have been upwind of it, and I certainly wasn't making any noise sitting still in my chair reading. There is so seldom anyone at the Red Field that I suppose the animals no longer take any notice of the construction there. For them, it just is.

The coyote slipped through the grass and paused at the edge of the woods to look around, and my phone chimed three times, the noise it makes when I get new email. I saw the coyote prick up its ears and look around, but it never looked towards me. It continued into the woods and down the hill toward the stream that runs at the foot of it. A little later, I saw it through the trees on the other side of the stream and heading away.

It was a strange encounter, and the only time in my life that I've seen a coyote alone and that close. I've heard them in the distance at night more times than I can count, and seen packs of them several times crossing open fields, but this lone encounter was a first. I wasn't afraid of it, but I have to say that after that, I became more aware of the rustlings in the woods that I had always just assumed to be deer before. Who knows what else might slide out of those dark green depths into the edge of the pasture?

Chesterton Quote

This is taken from the Anchoress' wonderful blog, but it's something to think about as Election '08 and the inevitable circus o' crap start warming up.

“Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.” - G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News 9/11/09

Chaos

I went to school today to take care of some business, and I went by my room for few minutes while I was there. I really shouldn't have. It's so depressing to open the door and see the chaos of all my stuff everywhere. The walls are bare, all the little personal touches that I've put up over the last four years are down, and there's nothing anywhere but boxes, crates, and mass confusion. It's horrible. I had planned to box up a few more things or pull down an old bulletin board, but all the drive I had was completely sapped, and I wound up simply sitting behind my desk staring at the piles and piles of boxes.

Adding to the mess are the boxes and furniture of the teacher who is supposed to be moving into my room. He's gone ahead and moved his stuff in so his room would be open for the person shifting into his old space. I feel really bad for him, too. He can't set up anything or finalize his move until I get out. He's stuck in the same limbo as I am. I had told him to go ahead and bring his things in because there was no reason for everybody to be stuck waiting on me, but I know just bringing his things in and dumping them in the middle of the room probably wasn't his ideal solution. Fortunately, he's a very easy-going person who doesn't seem to have a lot of personal doodads the way I do, so there's room for both of us in the space, just barely, but we've managed it.

I still don't know exactly when I'm going to be able to get in my new classroom, maybe some time next week. I know it's going to take me several days just to get everything back out of boxes and on shelves again once I get it from the old room to the new room, but maybe I won't feel so sad and frustrated once that process begins. Right now, I can't even think about anything related to school without a feeling of deep futility. I'm trying to focus on good things about the move, like the decorating (getting new shower curtains to cover the tall shelves) and finally being able to have space enough to have a student computer station instead of having that set up on a corner of my own teacher's desk, but whenever I go in my current classroom, all the things that are to come fade in the face of horrid mess of what is. I guess I'll just keep telling myself the old cliche, "Patience is a virtue."

The Dragon Painter

I just saw a 1919 silent film on TCM called The Dragon Painter. It was from Japan and only an hour long. It was altogether lovely. The story reminded me of many of the folktales I've read from Japan, and it might in fact be an adaptation of one of them. I'll have to go back and look. I wish they'd do a later showing of it so I could go back and watch it again.

Of course it made me wish for Japan again. It never takes much, but the gardens, the houses the characters lived in, and the Meiji costuming really pushed all the buttons. It's summer to boot, and I always feel the need to take a plane then a train in this weather loaded only with a Nikon and a guidebook.

I won't dwell on it. I won't dwell on incense-filled temples, leaf-shaded fox statues, bright cotton yukata, and summer fireworks. I won't dwell on oppressive summer heat, the smell of bus exhaust, or crowds in the train station. I won't dwell on any of the thousand little details that I miss, the thousand little shards of daily living that make the whole. Instead, I'll just dust my pottery cats, have a bowl of instant miso, and pretend the discovery of this beautiful film didn't just rouse up my sleeping need to see Japan like a careless kick to an anthill.

Nothing Days

It's amazing how much nothing one can cram into a summer day. I forced myself to get up about 9:00 this morning because I'm expecting a delivery just any day now, and I hate for the UPS driver to find me in my pajamas. I know they neither notice nor care, but there's just something about going to the door in my robe that bothers me. It makes me feel decadent and scuzzy at the same time. Whenever I know UPS is supposed to be coming by, I always want to be up, dressed, and doing something productive. It's an OCD thing. I try not to examine it too closely.

Today, however, after I got dressed, I just ran out of go juice. I wound up here in my office cruising eBay looking at old tablecloths. After that, I started reading a new book. I talked to a couple of my friends on the phone about various things. A little brown and white dog strayed into my yard and was a distraction for a couple of hours. Midday melted into afternoon. I had chicken salad with my parents. Afternoon dissolved into evening. I paid my bills online and almost had a heart attack at what my new BlackBerry and its first month activation fee had done to my mobile bill. Evening disappeared into night. I find myself here, and none of the grand plans I had for today have been done. I've checked nothing off the master list of indoor or outdoor "To Do." Hmm.

Oh well. As Scarlett says, "Tomorrow is another day." Maybe I'll get more done tomorrow. Then again....

The Collectors

I had a moment of epiphany recently thinking about some guys I have known. There is a certain type of guy who lives to collect women. Not in the icky, "girls I've made out with" chart-on-the-wall way two guys I knew and studiously avoided in high school did, mind you. Not in the "Women of the World I've Wooed into Bed" way that my devious ex, T., did, either. What I mean is that there are certain guys who seem to need an entire fleet of women around them all the time to survive, so they studiously collect different types in different places to make sure they have the complete set.

I'm still not sure about the exact driving force behind this particular type of guy. I'm pretty sure it's not a libido-driven thing. Maybe for some of them it comes from growing up with lots of sisters. Or does it come from not having any? I feel like I need to do field research and find out. I've only known two confirmed Collectors in my time, and I don't think that's a broad enough research base to make any firm conclusions with.

All I know is that I keep winding up as a collectible for this type of guy. I guess I'm enough of an oddity that I'm like a limited-edition trading card or something that has a flaw in it and became collectible for that reason. I'd love to know what label I allow them to check off the big mental list, maybe it's something like Traveling Teacher Geek or Chick Who Likes Science Fiction, Old Movies, and Reading. Maybe it's She Who Might Edit My Writing.

I think that coming to this current working thesis about Collectors is going to be a good thing. I think that knowing they're out there, gathering up huge numbers of women to surround themselves with is useful. It doesn't really mean that you're not a friend to them; it just means that you are only a certain type of friend to them in a certain type of situation. As long as you remember that you are only one of the "village that it takes to take care of a Collector", then you should be okay. The trouble I got into before with D. was that I didn't know this about him, didn't understand that I was only one of the shiny objects in his showcase rather than someone he felt that he could love. I knew he didn't love me, knew I couldn't ever make him love me, but I never could figure out why he was around me. I think the Collector theory might just cover it.

Of course, this might all just be a lot of crap...

Lightning Storm

Tonight after church I had the craving for fast food, so I took the drive down the two-lane highway to the only place with a burger joint some eight miles away. As I drove, I saw the storm that had passed through Podunk earlier in the distance. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. The lightning was in constant motion, dancing from cloud to cloud in flashes of hot pink and pale orange against the flat dull blue of the darkening evening sky. Jagged little spears of it would flicker in and out of the clouds like needles trying to sew the tears back together again. I wanted to just pull the car over to the side of the road and watch it gather and roil. It was the kind of weather and night that made me feel like something surreal was going to walk out of the deep gloaming of the wet green-black Mississippi woods and onto the cracked and pitted blacktop. Eventually, I accomplished my fast food mission and drove home drinking the milkshake I decided to splurge on while watching the sky simmer and explode. It was wonderful.

My Fair Lady

I'm watching My Fair Lady on TCM, and the scene where Eliza sweeps down the stairs in that unbelievably wonderful white ballgown has just come on. Every time I see it, some innately female part of my heart just sighs with envy. God, I wish I could look like that once in my life. I guess probably every woman who's ever seen this movie has had that thought. Audrey Hepburn is always so lovely and chic, but to me, that moment, that dress, is the ultimate princess fantasy. Of course, what follows not long after isn't very princessy....

I have very mixed feelings about MFL. I always have. I love old movies, and I really enjoy some of the older musicals, even though they are full of cheese, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers being a prime example of this. In MFL, though, I have to say that I absolutely loathe Higgins. I know you're supposed to dislike him or at least find his exterior gruff, but I find the ending, Eliza's return to him, totally unwarranted. After all, she's the one who has changed herself. She's the one who has been declared worthy of being a Hungarian princess. Why does the woman who is capable of walking down those stairs in such radiant loveliness that generations of little girls and grown women wish to be her wind up shackled to a man who makes his own mother shudder in public situations?

I know love is blind, but the story has always been so one-sided to me. It ends with Rex Harrison sitting in the big leather armchair asking for his slippers and Hepburn standing in the doorway staring in adoringly. Yes, he's been caught listening to her voice on the cylinder, for him an admission of emotion, but honestly, after everything else, is that really enough? After his repeated verbal cruelty, has anything he's done balanced that out? I've never thought the movie adequately showed that he redeemed himself enough to deserve her or even make her feelings for him credible. When was he ever kind to her except for actually taking her in off the streets?

I know, I know, it's only a movie. Let it go. Focus on the lovely dress and the songs that get stuck in the mind for days. (Even now, I am mentally humming "I could have daaanced all niiight....") But I have to say that as I'm adding DVDs to my collection, I pass up MFL again and again and will continue to do so. Something about my twenty-first century sensibilities can't quite let the dress and sparklies blind me to the jackass in the tweed standing in the wings.

Husqvarna Resurrection

Today was Yard Day. My Husqvarna zero-turn has been broken down for about two weeks and the bahaia has been about to take things over. The part and enough time for my dad to come and repair it finally got together, so the first part of this morning was spent hoisting the big orange mower up off the ground and balancing it while Dad put the new idler pulley in.

One of the crappy things, in my opinion anyway, about being a single woman, is that when there's a repair to be done, you pretty much are always involved. I would love to have a husband to send out in the yard to either do these things or help my dad do these things, but that's not to be. Most of the time I don't mind, but sometimes it does get old. A perfect example of this was when I had to go get this idler pulley from the local Husqvarna dealership/repair place.

It's the sort of place that fairly reeks of testosterone, and not in any way that could be construed as good. They have this really obnoxious sign they printed off a computer posted on the front door, on the main checkout, taped to the central support posts, everywhere, really, that says, "Your wife called. She said it was OKAY!!!" I know somebody thought that was the cleverest thing ever, and I'm sure that most of their clientele who comes in there to pick up a four-wheeler, a dirt bike, a big zero turn, or one of those little hopped-up offroad four-wheel-drive golf carty boy-toy things probably hikes up their bass fishing belt buckles and laughs, too.

It's the sort of place, too, that they don't even bother to greet you when you walk through the door. I went after the last day of school, and after all the nonsense that's been going on at school lately, my patience probably wasn't at its highest point. That being said, I stood there for at least ten minutes while two different men walked back and forth behind the big counter, glanced at me, and kept on walking without so much as nodding to acknowledge that I was more than a figment of their imagination. In the meantime, a big shiny Mercedes load of rich, young, bratty males pinned my poor little PT Cruiser in the tiny gravel lot as they poured into the showroom to stroll through the dirtbikes and trail their ennui-filled fingers over them. One guy behind the desk just sat in his chair talking on the phone with his feet up on a desk, ostensibly on business, but he never even so much as waved at me or did anything other than stare at me like I was something from a different planet.

My blood pressure was steadily climbing. By the time one of the men finally asked me if he could help me, I was straining for polite and praying that everything would just go fast so I could figure out some way to get my PT Cruiser out of the lot and as far away from there as humanly possible. Not being a terribly mechanically minded person, I had brought the operator's manual in which I'd had my father show me the part I needed. He'd told me the number and pointed it out specifically, so I laid the manual on the counter and told the guy which part I wanted.

He took the book from me, looked at it, looked at me, and asked the question that still rings in my ears, "Are you sure this is the part you want? Are you sure this is the right one? There are several pulleys? This is the one that bolts to the frame. Is that the one you want?" He spoke very slowly, as if he were speaking to a child who'd just asked for a live rattlesnake instead of a stuffed toy. The other old guy there to pick up his mower and the one other employee who was periodically passing back and forth behind the counter ignoring everyone paused to hear the answer. The anger, oh, OH, the anger.....

What response to give? Drag him across the counter and wallop him senseless with the bright orange manual? Tell him, "Well, chump, since I only had to help jack the damn thing up last week when it tore up and take it apart, duh...let me think...."? Ask to see his manager (despite the fact that I pretty much figure he WAS the manager)? Diatribe about how women are capable of ordering parts for lawnmowers? All these things raced across my mind light heat lightning across an August sky.

Finally, I did something that confuses me still. I fell back on Old South Girlism. I don't know why I did it. It's not really like me at all. I simply said something about that being the part that my father had sent me in to buy and that being all I knew about it. The moment I brought my father into it, the rotten skunk behind the counter was all smirks and approval. After all, as long as there was a Y chromosome involved, how could the part selection be wrong? Why did I play along with that Old South tradition? I knew that's what they were waiting for, what they were expecting.

I still don't know. All I know is that once he passed the part, mercifully cheap, across the counter, I paid for it and made good my escape. I didn't know until today that he'd forgotten or been so smug in his manliness that he'd not told me that I'd need an insert to go in the middle of the assembly to complete it. Fortunately, Dad and I cannibalized the old one and the Husqvarna lives again. I am grateful for that on many levels, but primarily so that I don't have to go back there again and deal with those idiots and my own bizarre response to them.

Very Old Country Music

I'm listening to a radio station that was the pop hits station when I was in high school. During the period of time when I was in Japan, there was apparently some sort of hostile takeover/shakeup of the local radio stations here in the Podunk metropolitan area, and now this station is a "Classic Country" station playing "Country Legends of the 60's, 70's, and 80's."

This music always evokes very particular memories for me. I always think back to getting my hair cut when I was very young. The lady who used to cut my hair had a shop in the back of her house, and this type of music was always on the little radio in the window of that shop. I can still smell the Aqua Net and hear the hot gossip.

It also makes me feel the sensation of the nubby plastic seat covers in my grandfather's white Chevy pickup. I still don't know why any company ever make seat covers with the texture of really hard bubble wrap, but I was always fascinated by them. I remember spending summer days bouncing down red dirt roads with this type of music on the radio trying not to burn my legs on those seats when we got back in the truck.

Being here in my grandmother's house, I keep feeling as if I should be in my Strawberry Shortcake shirt and as if I should be able to walk out into the kitchen, take the ever-present gallon jug of sweet tea out of the yellow refrigerator, and get a boiled egg out of the plastic container to go with it, maybe. I keep feeling as though my cousins should be here and that we should be headed out into the yard on some adventure.

I keep waiting to hear my Granny somewhere in the house, too, because this is very much her music. That's probably the most poignant memory being conjured by these songs. Of course, that's pretty much a constant thing living here in this house that has so much of her still in it, but with songs like "One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus" mixed in to the playlist, it's hard not to hear her soft footsteps, hard not to miss her more than usual.

I think since I'm feeling better today, I'll go work in the kitchen some. I wanted to mix up some sourdough starter anyway, and I have a sudden craving for boiled eggs.

Trying to Recover

Now that I don't have to go to school every day, my body decided it was safe to fall apart. I had a major attack of something Sunday night, and the past three days have been spent limping around the house taking care of survival matters. I suppose I wasn't as fine as I thought I was and everything just caught up with me. Tonight is the first time I've felt lucid at all. I'm hoping that I can avoid going to the doctor. I'm taking Nyquil and Dayquil along with a handful of other stuff. I really don't want to start the summer off with a round of antibiotics.

I had forgotten how stupid daytime TV is. In between naps, I've had it on some in the vain hope that a good old movie would come on, but to no avail. I will break out the vintage movies tomorrow, and Netflix will be my summer salvation, I suppose.

I spent some time on eBay today. I was looking for things with owls on them since they're supposed to be the mascot for our new small learning community at school. It's amazing how many things you can come up with on eBay if you type in "owl" in the search bar. I found one or two things I might bid on, but I can't decide just how deeply into that I want to get. I have enough crap in my room to catch dust, after all, and I still have to move all the stuff that's in the old room into the new room before I can set up anything new.

Well, even though it seems like I should have rested enough for six weeks' worth, I'm still tired. I guess I'll go to bed. Maybe I'll be more interesting soon. At least I'm writing....

School's Out

It seems I blog more from my BlackBerry than any other place these days. I don't exactly know what to think of that. I guess it's not a bad thing. It certianly means that I have a freedom to record my thoughts that I never had before. The BB makes it possible to blog from anywhere there's a phone signal, so this is much more like taking out my pen and putting it to paper to clear my head.

And there's so much to think about. Another year has come to a close at Podunk High. I watched all my little birds fly out of the nest. They're headed out to test their wings in the bigger skies now. This class has been such a sweet one. I will really miss them.

This year was full of the unexpected. I certainly never expected to find some of the good things it brought my way. Quite out of the blue, I've found some new friends this year who are very dear to me and rediscovered some old ones.

It wasn't stress-free, and not all the stress is done as my school redesigns itself physically and structurally, but I have to say that I'm filled with a reckless kind of hope for next year. As happy as I am that summer finally got here, I'm also looking forward to seeing if we can fulfill the promise of what we've dreamed so far. It's exciting. It's also exciting to have friends who feel the same way instead of the same-old negative cloud of "no-we-can't.". We may not get everything right, but at least we're in there trying. I think it's wonderful. If that makes me naiive, so be it.

Well, there should be a more regular blog now that school's out. There's much more to tell, but one's thumbs do get tired!

Live from the BB

Weariness

I have a lot of my classroom packed into large storage boxes and stacked all over the place. It's too depressing for words. As yet, there's no place to move the boxes to since the actual move hasn't begun, so I'm stuck staring at those boxes and brooding. I wish the move were done. I hate this displacement, this time between the ending of one thing and the beginning of another. I hate for my "nest" to be disturbed. I know that soon enough, the big day will come and I'll have to get everything out of the old room for the last time and be a little sad about it, but right now, I am so unbelievably tired that all I want to do is get everything somewhere for good and sleep for about a week.

I'm past the point of just worn out. The end of school rush to get all the summer reading assignments prepared, typed up, and distributed, to get all my grades finished, entered, and proofed, to get the bookroom cleaned out and prepared for storage, and the hundred other little things that are cropping up are killing me. That's why I haven't been writing here much, either.

I don't have anything left for the little stupidities of life, either. A perfect example was when I came home this afternoon to find water pouring from my meter box. An absolute river was cutting through my yard to my house. I was too tired to even feel panic. I just went in, found this month's water bill, called them, and told them to come fix it. I could barely summon up enough concern about the whole thing to even wonder when it broke. I don't think it was like that this morning, but it was raining so hard that it might have been. Who knows?

Well, I'm going to bed. At least I managed to get something like a blog posted. It's not good, but it's something. Maybe that's progress.

New Toys

I just got a new micro SD card for the BlackBerry, and it may be some of the best money I've ever spent. Before, the poor little beast was so low on memory (its brain came from my old Moto RAZR) that just calling up the address book sent it into seizures. Now, though, with 4G under the hood it's a sleek racehorse. Were 4G necessary? No. Do I come from the school of more memory is good memory? Oh yeah....

Live from the BB.

live from the BlackBerry

I bought a.BlackBerry yesterday. I have wanted one for a long time, and my old phone was starting to show signs of wear, so I decided to go by and see how much it would cost to upgrade my equipment. Amazingly, it was not nearly as costly as I'd thought, so now I have a BlackBerry Curve. I've been tweaking it ever since the sales rep put it into my hands, and I think I just about have it where I want it.
The thing that's most wonderful about this is that I can get to email all the time now, blogs, too. I won't have to haul my laptop around with me everywhere. Plus there's the simple joy of a new gadget to love....

Well, it's time to stop playing with it for awhile and get something done. I just can't seem to stop toying with it!

Truly Honored

Tonight, I stood on the big stage in our auditorium and received an award for being named this year's STAR teacher. I still can't believe it. I am completely humbled by this. It's so very hard for me to believe that anything I do from day to day is award worthy, actually, because I have such a good time (most days) doing it. Every day, I get to take people on tours through some of the best literature there is and watch them discover how wonderful it is for themselves. That can't be worthy of an award. In fact, I keep secretly wondering when people are going to catch on and take this job away from me. Who wouldn't want to do this if they truly understood what it is when it's done right?

The student who selected me said something that (no surprise if you know me very well) made me tear up. He said that one of the reasons he'd picked me was that I'd helped him enjoy literature again. The tears were for two reasons, first that that love had ever for a moment been allowed to fade, but second, and most importantly, because that was probably one of the greatest compliments anybody anywhere has ever paid me.

I may never turn out an English scholar. None of my students may ever go on to produce the next great American novel or doctoral dissertation. However, if they can leave my classroom knowing how to do well the kinds of writing they need to survive and succeed in college and with that love of literature they used to have when they were little and wanted to be read to rekindled then maybe all these five-a.m. mornings are worth it, after all.

I'm going to treasure tonight. I'm going to keep that certificate on my wall alongside my diplomas and the certificate from kindergarten that shows where I learned to tie my shoes. It's another sort of milestone for me. I may never, ever have another student who thinks highly enough of me to honor me in this way again, but I will always strive to live up to the honor of having been chosen by this one.

The Reason I Teach

And I believe this down to the very core of my weary, weary little soul......

Only the educated are free.
Epictetus

Final Papers, Willie Nelson, and Disaster Films (Yeah, NOW You're Curious....)

I can almost see it. I can almost reach it. I feel like those people in disaster movies who are almost out of the cave in/crash site. The cold, pale light of dawn is starting to filter through the gloom, and I begin to think I might survive.....

Of course, isn't this usually about the point in the film that things get really stupid?

No, no, I won't be a pessimist. Really....

You'll have to excuse the more-than-normal giddiness. I've just put the almost-final touches on the last of the big papers. I have a final left and a final refining of this paper and then, ladies and gentlemen, I'M FREAKIN' DONE!!!

(Willie Nelson just came on the radio...."On the Road Again". How appropriate. Everybody sing along.)

I've been up way past midnight for about three weeks in a row, and I have no reserves left. I almost had at least two wrecks on the way to work in the past two weeks, and I'm grateful that God was looking out for me even when I wasn't. I'm past grouchy, past incoherent, past simply burning the candle at both ends; I'm up to having nothing left to give.

It's okay now, though. I feel as though someone should come wrap me in one of those emergency blankets, hand me a cup of hot beverage, and start asking me questions about how it all started....

Yeah, it's clearly time to go to bed now.

More blogs later. Aren't you looking forward to more of THIS crap? Why do you read me again? (Insane laughter fades as she limps off toward a shower as hot as the pitiful little water heater can provide...)

Update

It seems I'm back to the once-a-week posting schedule. It's a shame. There are lots of things I want to write about, but I'm never near a computer when the thoughts are floating through my random mind....

Life has hit critical mass, and I'm flailing madly. Papers are due, both the ones I have to write and the ones I have to grade, so I can only steal moments I ought to be sleeping to do anything that I want to do. I hate this time of the year. Even when I sit down to eat, I feel guilty about it. That's not right.

Oh well, only a few more weary days and then.....

For now, it's time to go to BED, at least for a few hours.

New Pen

For months now, every time a new Levenger catalog has come, I've leafed through the pages and drooled as usual over the lovely tools I can't afford. One thing in particular caught my eyes more than all the others, though, the Plumpster pen. The swirls of blue and caramel remind me of pictures taken of the Earth from high altitude, all seas and desert sands swirling and mingling. Time after time, I've looked at it, longed for it, and sighed. After winning third place in our local poetry contest and being named STAR teacher, I decided to treat myself to something nifty, so I added to my debt and got one.

It's gorgeous. Sometimes I just take it out of my purse and hold it in my hand just to look at it. The pictures really don't do the resin of the barrel justice. Even though the nib is a little wider than I like (it's marked fine, but it's really not), it's beautifully responsive. I got ink called Skies of Blue to run in it to match the colors, and I love the total effect. Sometimes, happiness is a new pen, I guess.

Pierced Ears

So stress is making me do spur of the moment things again. I went shopping Saturday, and since I was in the mall getting some cards for upcoming birthdays/Mother's Day, etc., I swung by the accessories shop and had the second set of piercings in my ears redone. Just like that. Bam, snap, bottom on the chair, studs in the ears, no flinching. This lack of inhibition and forethought does not bode well for what's to come in the next few weeks of my life. When I get like this, all things become possible....

I've had this set of holes since my sophomore summer of college. I got them in Costa Rica, where it seemed every woman I saw had at least three sets of piercings per ear. I actually felt gauche with only one set of holes. I had a lot of little pairs of studs I like to wear, I was in a foreign country, I was stressed about the loss of somebody back home who was close to me, I was in the mall with a friend, and bam, snap, bottom on the chair, studs in the ears, no flinching, I had new piercings when I came back from Costa Rica that summer. I liked them then, and I still do.

There's no need to worry that I am about to launch into a manic body art phase in which I suddenly become one who will set off metal detectors. Two sets of studs in the ears is enough. It's bothered me for some time that the second set had closed up; one side had been pierced just a little too high, and it never did heal up properly. The girl at the store fixed that when she did this set, so I'm even now.

I almost feel like I got something back by having these put back in. That may be the most absurd sentence of all the absurd sentences I've ever typed. Pierced ears are hardly daring. Somehow though, I feel a little bit of that tico summer return, and right now, with all the stress that's crushing me on every side, I need a little of that confidence. I only wish I could actually get on a plane and lose myself in the multicolored shadows of San Jose or La Fortuna's cloud forest. Maybe the earrings can pierce the veil of memory enough so I can get by on that alone.

I Miss My Friends

I never see my friends any more. It's like our lives ate us. As I'm typing this, I am actually stealing time that should be devoted to sleep to do it. I'm so completely exhausted that I can literally sleep standing up given enough stillness and relative silence. Sitting at my desk to try to get grading done is a nightmare; rarely am I let alone long enough to have that problem though....

I feel as though I've barely left my classroom during the past month, and although the light of school's end is beginning to glow dimly on the horizon, I can't tell if it's really bringing relief or if it's just deceptive faerie fire yet.

Even the friends I used to be able to talk to at school I hardly see anymore. It's hard to imagine that we can be in such close proximity and have so little contact, but everybody is just trying to survive research papers and test preparations with as much grace and sanity as can be salvaged.

I'm going to try to go to bed now. I'm sick again, and the medicines (bronchitis battalion, standard edition) are keeping me awake despite the general fatigue. If tomorrow weren't Friday, I think I'd have to cry.

book quote

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. -- Franz Kafka

The Joy of Books

After reading a recent post by AC, I started thinking about a couple of other things, and this post came from it. I'm not blog-plagiarizing, I swear....

I have a friend who is the single father of a precious little three-year-old boy who's just learning to read. This dear sweet man is having the joy of watching the little one discover Dr. Seuss; their current favorite is There's a Wocket in My Pocket, a venerable classic I remember enjoying as a child. Every time I listen to my friend talking about his little boy and their reading adventures, I have to smile both at the pride and wonder in his voice and at my own memories of reading as a child.

So much of who I am now comes from being read to as a child. The love I have of books was given to me by my parents and my grandparents. Every night, my father would read me a story. I have no idea how many times he read me The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (also Dr. Seuss), O See Can You Say, or the story of Joseph from my children's picture Bible, but he never complained. He always tucked me in, sat beside me or in the rocking chair, and read me whatever I brought him.

I always had books. My parents took me to the library during the summers, and I ripped through large stacks of them. I also don't ever remember going into our town's one tiny bookstore and ever coming out without at least one book in hand. I might not have gotten a toy every trip into town, but they never told me no about books. The things that were important were afforded.

I am the person I am today because of that philosophy. My love of language, of literature, of knowledge is a direct product of those bedtime stories, those summer expeditions to the public library, those indulgences in the bookstore. I just can't be grateful enough. I hope my friend will keep reveling in his little one's newfound reading. I hope someday I'll have little ones of my own whom I can read to, buy books for, and take to the library to get their library cards.

Easter Dinner

Mom, Dad, and I had an Easter Picnic at the Red Field today. It was a little too chilly to stay as long as we had planned, but it was really nice. We reclaimed one of the huge old cable spools my grandmother had long ago converted into a table, and, with the addition of some plastic lawn chairs, we had a dining set. I fried chicken in one of my heritage cast iron skillets and took it, and Mom made the rest of the meal: macaroni salad, baked beans, a salad tray with deviled eggs and veggies, and cornmeal muffins. I took one of my vintage 1940's cotton print luncheonette cloths to cover the table, and it was great. We had pecan pie for desert.

It wasn't a baked ham, fresh flowers, and bone china, but then again, we're not really that type of family. We can do that, and we have the stuff for it, but somehow, paper plates and the wide, hand-planed oak boards of the Red Field porch seemed to fit us better today. After we ate, we watched Mom and Dad's dog race around the field chasing birds, we talked, and we read until the wind just got too cold to bear. We left with a since of having made a good family memory.

The whole time we were there, I kept thinking about my grandmother. She would have loved it. Our eating there reminds me so much of summer meals when we used to have hay hauling dinners out in the pasture with big boilers of baked beans, huge baking dishes of macaroni and cheese, and sandwiches for the hay hands. I am looking forward to a long summer of picnicking up there and making new memories. If my friends can overlook the absence of indoor plumbing (it is a hayfield, after all), I want to share it with them, too. It's just a wonderful place.

Stupid Wednesdays

I hate Wednesdays. They are always rushed, off-kilter, and absurd. This past week was no exception. It started with a torrential downpour just as I was starting to leave and my big umbrella out in the car, safely furled and totally useless on the back seat. It was also garbage day, so I dashed out with the garbage bag and an old "emergency" umbrella I dug up that had been patched with duct tape, loaded up the car, and tried to start my day.

When I got to the bottom of the hill, I quickly got out of the car, pulled the trash off the roof of the PT Cruiser, and shut the car door to keep the rain out while I put the trash bag out for collection. When I came back to the car and pulled on the handle, the car was locked up tight, lights on, engine running, windshield wipers complacently sweeping back and forth in the heavy rain. I won't go into what I said at that point, but let's just say it wasn't very grammatically correct nor was it very elevated language.

Since daylight saving time has kicked in, I had to hike back up my driveway in the dark to retrieve a spare key from the house. Fortunately, I had a spare house key if not a spare car key, but by the time I could get back up to the house for the key and back down to the car with it, I was completely soaked since the patched umbrella had only shielded my upper body from the rain. I drove the car back up the hill shaking and dripping.

I ran in, frantically dug through my closet for something dry that would match the top I had on, and wound up with a pair of black pants that are about a size and a half too big. Since I was running very late, I didn't have time to be creative, so I just toweled off and dove into them, praying they wouldn't fall off me at some crucial point during the day. I got in the car, found that the car seat was still wet and needed to have been dried first, and finally headed off to school.

I won't go into the rest of the day, but it pretty much went like that, only I was inside and didn't get rained on for the rest of it. As I said before, Wednesdays really ought to be illegal.

Like There Never Was a Holiday At All

Tomorrow, I'm officially supposed to be in three places at the same time, 2:45. Apparently, that is the magic hour for Wednesday afternoon academic meetings. Not 2:30. Not 2:00. Two freaking forty-five. Emails kept coming in today telling me that one committee after another in the never-ending assortment I'm a part of was going to meet, and I kept thinking, "Well, isn't tomorrow going to be grand?"

I've done practically nothing but grade since Sunday afternoon, and I feel like my eyes are burning. I've completed two sets of essays, a set of largely essay tests, and half another set. I have two more sets of essay tests and two full sets of essays still waiting along with several lesser types of grading that just came in over the last two days, and every time I look at the pile of papers on top of my filing cabinet, I just want to run away. I think longingly of the Red Field and my Adirondack, sigh, pull another red pen out of the drawer, and push on. Sometimes it feels like I never even had a Spring Break at all. At least this is a short week....

Big Ten Loss

Being a Hoosier alumnus, I am a bit rabid about basketball. Thanks to the wonders of DirecTV, I get the Big Ten Network, one of those things that ranks up there with sliced bread for me during basketball season. I don't really care about any other team very much. I'll back Duke if IU is out and support them moderately, but put me in front of a Hoosier basketball game and you'll see a very loud person come flailing out.

Tonight was no different. The game against Minnesota was a heart-breaker on many levels. This season has been hard, and tonight more than any other game I've watched them play, they just looked like they were out of steam. Nevertheless, I whooped and hollered from my courtside couch right up until that lucky kid from Minnesota tossed that buzzer beater in. I just knew that they were going to win it.

We're headed to the NCAA tourney anyway, and maybe this way the team will have a chance to rest up some and get their heads together a little. I sure hope so, anyway. I am looking forward to more IU wins. I figure the Illini will take care of those yellow rodents tomorrow night, anyway.

Wondering Who

This is mostly an exercise in clearing my mind of the cobwebs that develop. If you go right back to the first posts that I wrote, you can tell that. However, I've been aware of a subtle shift as these three years of my blogging have elapsed, a shift toward a conversational style. I don't think it's possible to write a blog in a vacuum, to be unaware of the fact that it is sitting out there like a book left open on the kitchen counter, waiting for somebody to come by and read a page or two.

I can't imagine who might be interested in thumbing through the pages, to tell you the truth. I know I have some family and friends who read this as sort of a newsletter to find out what absurdities I'm up to in the long intervals between our face-to-face or voice-to-voice contacts, and I have a couple of blog friends that I've made, but other than that, I wonder.... I certainly don't have a rock-star life, no high drama, no romance to speak of, just little fragments of the daily life, like pieces of sea glass worn smooth along their edges by the constant friction along the water's edge. Well, whoever you are and for whatever reasons you come here, I hope there's some satisfaction for you.

Reading Day

Today, I didn't go to the Red Field. I stayed home and read instead. I got my lawn chair cushion from its cat-proof storage spot next to my washing machine and sat in the glorious sunny beauty of my yard with a pile of books. There were certainly other things I should have been doing, but I resolutely ignored them all.

I finished up the Bill Bryson biography of Shakespeare. It was really good. I like Bryson anyway; his A Walk in the Woods is still one of the funniest books I've ever read, and even though I am not a big camper/hiker, it always makes me want to go try the Appalachian Trail. This bio of Shakespeare was good because it was clean. He stuck to the facts, more or less, and presented anything that couldn't be backed up with a document as an opinion. I learned a lot, including some really bizarre stuff.

I also woke up to the sound of Roux and Yelldo exuberantly chasing the UPS truck down the driveway this morning, so I knew that my Spring Break treat, some chick lit, had also arrived. I just got through with it. I probably should have doled it out over the next few days, but I did it cover-to-cover today after lunch and Shakespeare. Sort of a nice symmetry to the day, no? Shakespeare in the morning, chick-lit in the afternoon....

Also in with the chick lit was another of the Everyman Pocket Library collections of poetry, this time under the topic heading of Solitude. It has a much different feel to it that did the Love Poems collection, but it's equally as good. It's not quite what I expected, as Solitude and Loneliness seem to be interchangeable for the editors of the collection (I don't really see them as the same thing), but I have put several little flags in the collection all the same. I like these thematic collections. It's a nice way to see a broad spectrum of writers from different time periods and schools viewing different things.

Well, I think I'm just about worn out with reading. I do have one other book about halfway done, and there's a book I need to read for my classes, so I might read some more tomorrow, but I think I want to vegetate in front of the TV now. Ah the luxury of Spring Break, when all sorts of indulgences are possible!

Another Good Day in the Country

I spent the majority of the day back at the Red Field. I read most of a biography about Shakespeare by Bill Bryson, hiked around some more, and generally enjoyed not having any other responsibilities. When school starts back and I'm no longer able to pack my bag and hike out to my refuge every day, I don't know what I'm going to do.

While I was out for one of my walks, I took some time to hike near the creek that runs through part of the property. I fought my way through some of the Katrina-downed trees to get over to a particularly pretty bend of it, and as I was looking down at the water and rocks, I became aware of the HUGE freakin' water moccasin sunning itself on one of the dry stones in the stream about the same time he became aware of me. I'm not quite sure which one of us was more appalled or which of us moved sideways faster. Despite the fact that I was about five feet above him on the bank, I still decided that discretion was the better part of valor, especially since I didn't have snake leggings, a bill hook, or a gun, and I got away from the creek. He was a very healthy specimen, probably about five feet long. I completely understand Emily Dickinson's quote about feeling a "zero at the bone." I have a "live and let live" philosophy with almost all God's creatures, including rattlesnakes, but cottonmouths and copperheads don't make that list.

Despite close encounters with the reptilian kind, the rest of my trek was nothing less than peaceful. I startled two beautiful deer out of a pine thicket where they were grazing. I don't think they were all that afraid, actually, but they were lovely to watch in motion sliding through the pine shadows. All the little blooming trees are budding. In a week or two, the woods should be veiled in green mist. It will be even more beautiful then and even harder to leave at the end of the day.

I have that quiet, calm feeling of being agreeably exercised and appropriately sunned. I will probably go back again tomorrow, even though there are other things that I need to be doing as I approach the end of my week. I think I'll take a bill hook, though, and maybe some stouter boots....

Birds

The yard to the south of my house is pretty much dedicated to the birds. It didn't start out that way. I think I brought one bird feeder home from Indiana with me, and I hung it in a tree. It got mobbed, and that response and the beauty of all the little feathery gems pleased me, so I bought another one. Any of you who feed birds know how this story goes....

Currently, I go through about forty pounds of seed a week, and that's just because I'm adamant about only filling the feeders once a week and making the little jewel-tone slobs clean up after themselves before I put any more out. I have suet-baskets and bird baths. At last count I was up to six feeders, only one of which is "squirrel proof" (yes, they too, love the big buffet).

I love to watch them from my various windows and doors. I have some really bright and exotic ones, bluebirds, cardinals, goldfinches, and the occasional oriole, but I enjoy the wrens, sparrows, and chickadees just as much. They aren't as flashy, but their songs are sweet, and just watching them and hearing the flutter of their wings when the windows are open is a peaceful thing.

In a way, I like the simple birds more sometimes. I am a simple, plain bird myself, after all, and maybe I feel a kinship with them. They are not gleaming blue or red, but there is a loveliness in their brown shadings. After all, the winter wren was the King of Birds for the Druids. God tells us, too, that he takes care of these little birds just like he takes care of me. One of my favorite hymns has always been, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow."

I have a statue of St. Francis that I bought at a place locally that has a menagerie of concrete yard art. He has a bird in his cupped hand. I'm not Catholic, but I've always admired St. Francis. I have a copy of one of his prayers up in my classroom, and I respect him as the patron protector of animals, as well. I put the statue at the entrance to that part of the yard. I thought it was appropriate. We're all getting something in the south yard, the birds and I, a little bit of seed or suet, a little bit of refreshment of some kind. I don't think St. Francis would disapprove.

Quotes on Thinking

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
- CS Lewis
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Red Field

I spent today at the Red Field, a pasture my family owns where we've built a structure from wood from an old barn. There is no sound there but the sound of wind through the trees. It was perfectly peaceful. I opened all the windows and doors of the building and sat in my chair on the porch reading for hours. I hiked around in the woods when I felt like it, down to the creek that runs through the property and around through various paths that animals or generations of people have cleared. I took a bottle of bubbles and enjoyed the simple childhood pleasure of blowing soap bubbles and watching them dance in the breeze. Sometimes solitude can be oppressive, but sometimes it can be a healing balm. Today, it was exactly what I needed. I may go back tomorrow, too. It's nice to be in a place where I know all the complicated and ridiculous nonsense of the day-to-day world can't find me.

Complications

I like things very streamlined. Maybe it's the Aquarius in me. I have a very logical and structured life, and I can turn most things over in my mind until I understand them, until I can separate them into their component pieces, digest them and break them down. Things that don't follow that pattern, that don't allow me to resolve them in this way, frustrate me to no end.

Yesterday, I found a wrinkle in the fabric of my tidy little life. Someone I thought I knew, I found I may not know at all. I suppose this happens all the time. I could wax philosophical, I guess. "Do we ever really know anyone? Blah, blah, blah..." The thing is, I really did think that I did know this person, at least somewhat. I'm not claiming a soul-deep bond, but I felt that I had a basic understanding of a personality, of the core values and appreciations, I guess. All of that was jerked out from under me yesterday like a tablecloth from under a place setting by an amateur magician. You've all seen the results of that. Broken china everywhere....

My mind has been grinding on this since it happened, turning the shards over again and again, but I can't resolve the issue. I thought this person and I had so much in common. Do we? I can't tell anymore. What's the truth? Is the person I knew before the real one? Was yesterday a misreading? If the image I saw yesterday was the true one, then I have been so wrong about so much. I'm simply going to have to pick up those broken pieces and make a decision, I guess, about whether the relationship in question is still worth gluing together and putting back on a shelf or whether it's time to put all those pieces in the trash for good. I'm confused, and there's really nothing I hate more.

Robert Graves' "The Portrait"

I added this poem to my blog as a permanent addition today just under my "About Me" section. When I read it, it struck me as though it were written about me. At least, I wish some man had written it about me; I feel this way so often. I feel like I stick out by not sticking out, if that makes any sense. I know for a fact I'm looking for the man who is different, too. I don't know if he's out there. I keep hoping, sort of in fits and starts, that he is.

Poetry Collections

I just ordered two books of poetry from amazon.com, and I have to say that they were money well-spent. The first one was a Penguin collection of 500 years of the sonnet, and just going through it makes me wish I could write them better. I've never had the discipline to try my hand at them. Just thinking of trying to write in iambic pentameter makes my head hurt. I love to read them, though. Well-written ones are that much more lovely to me because of the extra rigor involved in keeping the form. Claude McKay's sonnets amaze me. A collection of his stuff is next on my "to buy list."

The other book of poetry I bought was, and don't laugh, an Everyman Library Pocket Book of Love Poems. The Hopeless Romantic (not Hopeful, that's my friend) just couldn't resist it when it came up as a "Customers who bought this book also liked...." as I was putting the sonnet collection into my cart. It's fabulous. I spent time I should have been sleeping last night going through it and marking poems that moved me. About half the book has little post-it flags on it now. All I need now is somebody who enjoys them to talk to about them. HA!!!!!! Yeah, they're lining up around the corner for THAT...more like fleeing at top speed.

In all seriousness, it's one of the nicest collections of love poems I've seen. Some of the expected ones are there, Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, "She Walks in Beauty like the Night", and so forth, but there are also translations of things I've never heard of from ancient texts and other languages that are powerful. Combined with incipient Spring, they have my stupid, sappy heart sighing. Ah well, at least I can enjoy the poems....

BLEAARRGHHH!!!

That's the noise I make right before my head explodes....

Tonight I stayed after my night class to talk with my professor about my upcoming paper. I needed to run my topic by him to get the imperial thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Yes, it's something I should have done long ago, I admit. Sue me. I'm am frantically treading water right now just to stay afloat.

Along with the royal nod of permission to pursue my humble little paper topic, I also got The Lecture about how I Should Have Started This Paper When the Semester Began. I just wanted to throw my Riverside at him and run away. Perhaps he's right. Certainly, it's a huge paper. Definitely, I will have to burn the midnight oil to get it done. However, I am wearing so many hats and doing so many things right now, that I'm sorry, but that paper isn't even on my horizon yet.

I am proud, though. I managed still and smiling pique. All I said was, "Don't worry. I'll get to it. I promise," and I gracefully swept off to my car.

Geez, I'm tired....

Longing for Balance

When I'm tired like this, what I want more than anything is someone to lean on. It's hard to have to be strong all the time. I do it. Everybody does. It's what life is made of. You get up in the morning, and no matter how hard it is, you do what you have to do. I just wish, though, that there was someone to help me hold it all up. I feel like a caryatid who is unable to support the architecture. I need the telamon that is made to balance on the other side of the door frame. Surely even a woman of stone wasn't intended to bear that weight alone. I don't want to be cosseted and petted. I don't want to be sheltered. I just need my mate to help me keep it all in balance.

New Style

I succumbed to the temptation to add a template to my blog. I hope I haven't gaudied it up too much. I just wanted some color. Of course, that means my hit counter at the bottom has completely reset, and also that I had to totally redo all my little widgets, but overall, I like the bit of color. Maybe it's not too tacky. It's amazing how long it took me to pick this one. Of course, nobody but me even cares what it looks like, and you, gentle reader, will simply glance, nod, and go on about your merry business. For me, though, it was a bit like picking out wallpaper or paint for the living room....what will company think? You know all the time that no one will say a word unless you've chosen some horrible shade, but still....

Man, I need to go to bed....

One Week Left

...until Spring Break. I can't wait. Not that I have profound or exciting plans, mind you. It's just that I can't wait to sleep late and do nothing. I plan to take a bottle of bubbles and some good books up to the Red Field pasture watch clouds for at least half the week.

I feel good, generally speaking, about life, no dark clouds overhead, but I'm bone weary. I have a lot of work to do before this week is over by way of grading and so forth, so I'm sure by the time I actually make it to Friday, I'll be even more tired.

I ordered two new collections of poetry for a payday treat that I'm excited to get, though, so I'll have those to look forward to when they come in, and I've got a pile of stuff on the shelf to keep me busy.

The only potential dark spot on Spring Break is a party that I've been asked to. I want to go; the party itself is not the problem. The problem is that I suspect there's a fix-up lurking just under the surface. I'm hopeless with men, and to be sort of thrown at one I don't know in a social setting is a little like my idea of hell. I am usually very quiet around people I don't know well, anyway, and just let me have the first hint of "this is supposed to be a fix-up" and I will automatically become the most gauche, mute, and pitiable person within four counties. This is just one of the many, many reasons I am still single.

This poor, unsuspecting soul probably has no idea that my dear, sweet friend is about to foist me, the Amazon queen, off on him, either, and I think that's not a good thing to do to someone without some preparation. I am almost positive that I require advanced preparation. Maybe I should type up a card or brochure or something. Let's see how would that go? "So you want to date an English teacher! Tips and strategies for survival." Maybe a nice 1950's image on the front.....(Ha!)

The whole thing makes me queasy. Why does it have to work this way? Why couldn't I just be friends with somebody, and then, bang, suddenly the two of us figure out that we were crazy about each other? It would be so much easier that way. I could be myself that way. That's the way I have always dreamed that it would work.

Whenever I have to think about "dating", I'm never myself. Maybe that's a good thing, but realistically, at some point, all the various shades of me are going to come out, and whatever particular variety you may think you know may not be the whole picture. A friend would know that because I don't have to reign in the me who likes stuff like old disco, Johnny Cash, or the Rolling Stones played really, really loudly while I drive. With somebody I don't know well, and basically, anybody that I'm "dating" is going to fall into that category for a long time, I'm not going to feel comfortable with any choice I make. It's excruciating.

Well, all this is just a tempest in a teapot. I'll go to the party. Maybe I'm wrong about the fix-up. If not, I just won't let it turn into a big deal. Maybe the guy will be a wonderful person. I need to meet some nice guys, God knows. I just keep thinking back to some of my last ventures in dating and what those were like, and I can't help but shudder....

Hmmm.....

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable. ~John Cheever