Italian Dreaming

It's just possible that I might be going back to Italy.  Three years after the first trip, I have the chance to go again....if everything works out just right.  I will know later this week, but just the thought of being able to go back thrills me.

This trip will include Rome, Florence, and Venice.  I loved Rome last time.  Florence, a day trip, was spectacular.  I desperately wanted more time there.  Venice has been a dream of mine for a long time.  It seems too beautiful and delicate to be a real place.  I want to see it with my own eyes, maybe fall into a canal or something, and know that it's possible.

Even though there is still a detail waiting to be finalized for me to be sure of the trip, it hasn't stopped me from looking online, from downloading the free editions of the Lonely Planet guides for Florence and Venice.  There are so many things I want to see again.  There are so many things I want to see for the very first time.

I have a "real" camera now.  Every time I think of how glorious everything I saw was last time, I get even more excited by thinking about going back and getting to capture it well this time.  My little point-and-shoot that I carried before was in no way capable of getting the kind of detail shots I like.  It recorded the big stuff, but it's the little things that are so fantastic in Rome and Florence.  I am going to need a BIG memory card if I do get to go.

The most exciting thing to me, though, about this trip is that my best friend is probably going to get to come along.  I know that Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, has been a dream of hers for a long time.  I remember her talking about it back in college.  To be able to go and see her get to experience what for her will be both her first time out of the country and one of her life-list goals at the same time will be awesome.

It will also be fantastic on my end because I'll finally have somebody along who thinks like me.  Sometimes, when you're stuck with a group, it's hard to be alone inside it.  This happens to me frequently and I just roll with it.  To be in an incredible place with somebody I've known quite literally since my first day of kindergarten is going to be just that much greater an experience.

I'm really hoping this comes together.  It's one of those things that I'm fairly sure about, but that I can't quite believe is actually going to happen.  Maybe all the stars will align one more time, and I'll get this great good thing.

Pro-Crastination

So I have this ginormous project due.  Tomorrow.  Guess how close to being finished with it?

Yeah.  That's about right.

Sigh.  Procrastination has come back around to bite me once again.

There's this block that jumps up when I have a lot of something, anything to do.  There's this stubborn little streak inside me that absolutely refuses to start it.  I know that I must do it.  I know it's not going anywhere.  Despite that, I still find inane tasks to fill the time as though some magic fairy is going to swing down from a star and make it all disappear.

I'll be up until the crack of dawn as a result.  You would think that as old as I am, I would have learned by now, but I am truly a professional procrastinator.  It's never as bad as I think it's going to be once I begin.  So.  I guess I should probably get on that.  Soon.  Really soon....

Pain

Headache.  Day off.  Headache.

This is my life right now.  I don't know why.  Maybe it's the weather.  Maybe it's the stress.  Maybe it's just crap to be me sometimes.

I get so tired of hurting.  On the Topamax, off it, it doesn't seem to matter.  Why can't I just be a normal person?  The kind who doesn't feel like her head is going to explode every time there's a flashing light on a cop car or a thunderstorm blowing in.

Last night, it hit me as I was preparing to play for the revival service.  All the lights were too bright.  I toughed it out, though.  I finished the congregational hymns and then I stumbled out and drove myself home.  The whole way, I drove about 35 mph, saying, "I can do this.  I can do this.  I can do this...."  I hope it would have made Mrs. Sarah, my music teacher, proud.

Some of my most immediate stress ended today.  I still have a couple of more things to resolve, but maybe if I can get all this stuff cleared up, my head won't continue to impede my living.

Inhumanity

"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity." ~ George Bernard Shaw

Photographs

Yesterday, I was fooling around with my computer and my iPad when I ran across old folders of photos.  Since I was in the process of transferring a few from the netbook to the iPad, I wound up scrolling through images I haven't seen in a long, long time.

I looked at places, faces, and events from my past.  I also looked at the dates.  Can it really have been as long ago for some of those things as that number says?  It doesn't seem possible, to be honest.  Yet, I know it must be so because as I looked at some of them, little details that had become blurred came back into sharp focus.

After all of that, at some point in the day, I checked in on FaceBook.  I'm not on there even half as much as I used to be.  I get notifications to my phone, and I find that I'm just not as interested in what happens there unless somebody close to me is having a problem.  I check in once or twice a day now to catch up instead of leaving it running as I used to.  I don't know what that says about my interest in my fellow man, but there you have it.

As I was on FB yesterday, I saw a photo of someone I haven't seen in a long time.  Almost the only contact I have with him these days is through the random FB mention.  He doesn't post much.  I suppose he's too busy with his job and his obligations.  He never has been one for FB, less now than ever.

I looked at the image and thought about how much he's changed, how much he's still the same.   Memories of how we met and the time we spent together made me smile.  His wry sense of humor and quick wit came back to me.  I wished once more that we weren't so far apart, that I could see him again somehow.

One of the crappiest parts of getting older, it seems to me, is that paths tend to split and people who are dear to us tend to wind up going in directions we can't follow.  Even though we intend to "stay in touch" and hold on, life intrudes, and the best of intentions all too often fails.

I think I read an article somewhere talking about how FB completely destroyed the natural life cycle of human relationships.  It said that in previous generations, it was completely normal for people to pass in and out of one's life and be "lost," that every friendship had a life cycle.  If I remember correctly, it sort of accused FB of hindering the rightful deaths of these connections.  At the time I read it, I hated it.  Who has the right to say how long or to what degree a person is important to you?  Should there be an expiration date on how much you care for someone?

Even though I haven't seen him in the real world for a long time, it still brings me joy to know he's out there doing well (better than well, actually).  For some reason, it's a hopeful thing.  We will probably continue to e-talk and make plans to see each other that fall through.  I will continue to be proud to know him from this distance that separates us.  Maybe we will never see each other again except for the images on an online social networking site.  I can't say.

All I know is that seeing that picture made me miss him all over again.

The Fun Just Never Ends

I woke up this morning to a really horrid stench.  I knew what it was, but I couldn't figure out where it was.  As I got ready, I looked everywhere for the source.  It wasn't until I went to the back to walk my dogs that I found it.  Chewie's normally snow-white self was covered in nastiness.  He'd had attacks of diarrhea in the night, and he, his cage, and even the wall behind his crate had paid the price.

What started as a part of my daily routine, that last quick walk with the dogs in the morning, turned into a rushed festival of unpleasantness.  I took Chewie out, watched him struggle with the sickness, brought him back inside and led him to the bathroom.  When I closed the door, he started getting nervous.  Somehow I manhandled him into the tub and bathed him.  This is such a calm description for such a frantic episode.  He stood drooping and miserable while I washed him.  He tried to get out, I grappled with him, he slipped and fell.  Meanwhile, the time I needed to leave for school crept ever closer.

I dragged the pan at the bottom of his crate out to wash it with the hose, and Mom arrived, coming to the rescue.  She sent me to school, and finished things up.  She checked in on Chewie to make sure he wasn't dehydrating himself through being ill.

I worried about him all day.  By the time I got home, Mom had been forced to wash him twice using the hose outside.  I took him for one last walk, and no sooner had I stepped out the door than he pulled the retractable leash out my hands and took off.  I ran to the house and got my flashlight, and then I found myself walking down this deep woods path in the uneasy quiet of a Mississippi night.  I heard all kinds of things rustling, but none of them were Chewie.

I came back to the house and was about to go to the cut-over across the road when I saw his white form glowing in front of me.  I jumped out of the car and gently called him until he finally came to me, leash dangling.  He put his head on my knees and just leaned.

I need tomorrow to be less adventure.  I'm not sure I can stand otherwise.

A Passing Thought

Today I wanted to talk to someone quite a lot.  I woke up sick with a migraine looming, but oddly, this person was so much on my mind.  And so there they stayed all day.  Granted, I was so busy today fighting off the sick, dealing with the usual assortment of classroom circus acts, and flailing hither, thither, and yon to get all my responsibilities met that I had few free moments for it stick its hand up and wave for attention.  In the relative stillness of my car on the way home, though, that want came back.  So far, I've ruthlessly ignored it.  I've watched a movie, fought with a laptop, downloaded some music, updated a few files, toyed with my Cricut.  Now it's time for bed.  The desire to talk to that person is shrugging its shoulders, folding its hands, and resting its case.  Maybe I should have intruded into their day.  I couldn't make myself believe it was a good thing to do, though.

Yeah.

Sometimes life is a lot more ridiculous than it looks from the outside.

Captain America

(in which I watched a movie)

I seem to remember a TV show for Captain America when I was little.  It was of that Wonder Woman variety, super cheesy I'm sure, but I have always remembered the shield.  I don't remember anything else but that.  Therefore, unlike most superhero films of recent years, I really didn't know what to expect.

I was charmed.

I shouldn't be surprised by that.  Right now, whoever is controlling those Marvel films is turning out some very engaging stuff.  I really and truly love the Iron Man films.  Part of that, granted, is because of Robert Downey Jr., an actor whom I find charming, intelligent, and humorous, but the writing is fun, the plot is fast-paced, and the characters have a depth that I respect.

There was something more with Captain America, though.  Maybe it's that they focused so much on him as a developing individual rather than just, "Oh, hey.  Lookit.  I can has powers now."  The powers were important, but the film was much more about just how far he would go, just how much he was willing to give up to do the thing he believed was right.

I can hear you muttering "Boy Scout" behind your hands, and you're right.  He was one.  But, as I tell my seniors every year, our epic heroes/comic book superheroes tell us a lot about what we value, what we as a culture think is most important.  He had strength without arrogance, a willingness (even a drive) to help his fellow man, badassedness and total fearlessness on the field of battle, a background rich in technology and gadgets, a history of overcoming and rising from humble origins, and (and here I feel a blush stain my maidenly cheeks) physical beauty.  I think that's pretty much the catalog of virtues from America.  The only bell he didn't ring was super intelligent, but I think Iron Man does that about eight times anyway, so Captain America doesn't have to worry about it so much.

As far as the superhero movies go, I will have to watch it again.  That is high praise for any film, really, since I don't even half-watch most of them the first time.  It was nice to have the mythos of that character re-examined and to refresh hazy memories.  Maybe someday they will reboot Wonder Woman in the same way.

What's Going On

A list.  It's all I am capable of.

• Migraine.  Big, bad, nasty one.  It caught me in Wal-Mart, doubling my misery, and then I had to wait at the checkout while a manager was called repeatedly to come and open a security box for an ink cartridge.  I finally left the cartridge and fled to the car for my medicine.
• iPad.  I love it more and more.  It lets me do so many things on the move in my classroom.  Today, I used it to show parents grades on my desktop and to adjust things by way of makeup grades and so on as needed.  There are some distinct limitations to what I can do on it, but it's a great tool.  Plus...
• Doodle Jump and Fruit Ninja.  God help me.  I can't stop playing them.  
• Fall Weather.  I have the windows open and the attic fan on.  It's delightful.  I got to wear my new Birki clogs, and today I even put on a scarf.  I hope this weather sticks around awhile.
• Eggplant Parmesan.  I came home from a long day of school followed by Parent Teacher Conferences, and I was thinking in the simplest possible terms of supper:  peanut butter and jelly.  I opened the freezer to look for an option, and there, waiting like a surprise gift, was a frozen eggplant parm I'd forgotten I'd bought as a payday splurge.  It was doubly good for that.
• DVR.  Last night's headache made me forget about one of the few TV shows I watch with regularity, Warehouse 13.  It occurred to me on the way home today that I'd missed it.  Then it came to me.  Even though I was out of it doesn't mean my DVR was.
• Well-groomed lawn.  It's a simple and cheap pleasure to walk through my yards now that the grass has been cut.  It's so pretty that I don't know why I don't do it more often.
• Tired.  So achingly, miserably tired.  Doesn't matter how much I sleep.  It's still there.  I'd like to curl up in ball in the middle of my bed with the cool air washing over me and sleep for days.
• Busy. Meetings and tests and plans, oh my.  Meetings and tests and plans, oh my.  (And me without any red sparkly shoes....)   

A few more stubborn minutes of Downton Abbey, and that's all for me for tonight.

The Hollow Woman

We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
~ "The Hollow Men" - T.S. Eliot
_______________________

Today was Baby Dedication at church.  Even though my cousin's youngest was in the lineup for the service, I had not planned to go.  Despite my mother's wistful disapproval, I was firm about skipping it, meeting up with everybody afterward to go out to eat.  I needed not to be there.

Of course, that's not the way it worked out.

I got a text about ten til ten telling me that I was needed to play for the service, so I gathered my fortitude and headed out.  I managed to put together some music, and it went okay.

I sat on the organ bench watching as the babies and their parents came forward, and I thought about my own life and my own situation.  I couldn't help it.  It wasn't about me, but it made me think about things I try desperately not to drag out into the light very often.

I am constantly surrounded by children, by families.  How is it I am not going to have that?  The most basic of single-celled organisms can reproduce, yet I won't.  Butterflies in the yard, crows in the treetops, they manage to find some other that they fit with, become a part of a pair.  What is wrong with me that I cannot?

And yet, I can't seriously feel as though I should be searching for anybody. I can't seriously feel that it has the least possibility of working, barring a miracle.  I'm too solitary, too...odd, too set in my own ways, too demanding, and then there's the always present whisper that I probably cannot have children.  How could I stick somebody with all of that?  Who would possibly want it?

So I walk around feeling hollow.  I feel somehow less real than other people, somehow like I am just a simulacrum of a woman, something that can trick the eye from a distance but is just paste and paint when viewed too close, something that can be taken out for emergencies and then neatly folded and put away again when it's not needed.

I can't say that I'm wildly unhappy.  I don't feel deeply depressed.  It's just days like today pile on top of me like that old Puritan punishment of pressing, one and another and another, eventually making it hard to breathe.

On the Go

This is the first post I've tried to write on my new iPad. To be honest, although I adore this thing, typing quickly on it is going to take more than a little adjustment. Part of the problem, of course, is that this is still an iPhone app. Apparently, not enough people want to blog like this for Blogger to feel like they need to improve/expand their app. I wish they would. I Dan already tell you that if it stays like it is, I will be using my regular computer for this instead of the iPad.

I think that's something of a shame, too, since blogging on the go seems like a natural part of what the iPad should be about. I would be far more likely to write more lately if this were a little more user-friendly.

There's more I want to record; I haven't been writing much because I've been busy. I will wait until I'm back home to do it, though. This is wearing me out.

Road Trip

Despite overcast skies, my friend C. and I took off toward West Point early Saturday morning just as we'd planned.  It was time for our annual trip to Prairie Arts.  It sprinkled a little on the way, but the storms that had been hanging around in Isaac's wake held off.

When we got to West Point, we went to the Pizza Inn, our traditional lunch stop during the trip.  I don't know what they do to their pizza, but it's some of the best restaurant pizza I know of.  As we ate, we talked.  For the second time in as many weeks, just how much of my friends' lives I am unaware of was brought home to me.  I've had two conversations with two people I dearly love and rarely see, and I've learned things that I would have loved to have been able to help them with.

And maybe, truly, they weren't the kind of things somebody could have helped with, ultimately, but I hate the thought that people I love were going through challenging times, and I could not give some kind of aid, even if it was just a listening ear or a silly distraction.  We are all so far away from each other:  in geography, in life stage, in so many ways.  However, just knowing they went through these things, even though some of them were years ago and far away, made me feel like a bad friend.

That's another conversation that has been much on the lips of those I'm around lately, the disconnectedness from each other we feel, the fact that we only know about each other's lives from FaceBook updates.  Everyone has expressed a desire to "do better," to see each other more, to have conversations, not just "like" statuses.  Are we finally at a point now where we will be able to do what we say?

I get so lost inside my job.  I have friends who are also teachers, who live a million miles away, who are trying to meet the demands of college life or young children.  Can we find a way to get over all the hurdles and be closer?  Is it unrealistic even to want that?  Or is it ultimately a matter of priorities and effort?

I am hopeful that it is the latter.  My friends genuinely matter to me.  I think it's time they started being more of a list item than an afterthought.

The best part of the trip yesterday was the talking.  We saw fantastic things at Prairie Arts, ate at Dooey's in Starkville, enjoyed a good bookstore and coffee, but the most important part was that sense of reconnection.  I want to find a way to make it last.  I don't know how to go about it,  but it's time to try something.

Quickly

There's more to tell, but I have to go to church in a minute to play for night services.  Today, I decided that I needed a dedicated workspace for school stuff.  I am tired of working in my lap or at my dining table.  I packed myself up in my little blue car after lunch with Mom and Dad and went to my favorite junktique.  I pretty much knew what I was looking for, but I never expected to find it so fast.  I got a small enamel-top table with a drawer, and then as I made a quick circuit of the huge place to make sure I didn't see something better suited, I ran across a wooden captain's chair somebody had painted a bright, cheerful teal.  The color matches the speckled edge of the enamel table, so I grabbed it, too.

There was a moment of concern when it came time to load the table in my car, but again, it managed to hold more than it probably really ought to be able to hold, and I came home.  I put my new small metal donkey (from Prairie Arts yesterday) and assorted other desk things on it including a good work light.  I've been grading papers there ever since, of course, with plenty of feline assistance.  I can finally get things done here at home.

I have more to tell about the past few days, but right now, I have to go try to get meaningful noise out of a musical instrument.

Well, Now You've Just Pissed Me Off....

The Land Mass thing is everywhere on the web right now.  Some of it is amusing.  One bit of it, though, pushed the big red button.  Fasten a seatbelt and enjoy the ride.

A comment on a friend's FB status about the Land Mass read, "Why SHOULD Mississippi be considered a state?  What has it ever given the US?  LOL"  I started to respond there, but I decided I needed more space than I had and also that I didn't want to scream at the top of my FB lungs.  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  Are you really that ignorant?

Oh sure, we here in-state gently and not-so-gently mock ourselves, but we know very well that not everything that comes out of here is bad.  While it's okay if we are laughing at ourselves, it's not okay for somebody from the outside to point fingers and make accusations.  It's not that we don't have problems; heaven knows we do.  It's that it's just RUDE, honey.  We may have all kinds of issues, neuroses, and battles, but at least we know not to point fingers.

What then has Mississippi given the US?  Here's the short list:

• Musicians - Marty Stewart, B.B. King, Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmie Rogers, Charley Pride, ELVIS, Jimmy Buffett, Robert Johnson, the entire band 3 Doors Down, Leontyne Price, Faith Hill, 
• Writers - William Faulkner, John Grisham, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Nevada Barr, Greg Iles, Thomas Harris, Anne Moody, (and I'll just STOP here.  there are too freaking many.)
• Entertainers - Jim Henson, Sela Ward, James and Robert Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, Oprah Winfrey, Diane Ladd
• Athletes - Walter Payton, assorted Mannings, Oil Can Boyd, Brett Favre, and so many others there is just a separate list of them available online
• Art - George Ohr, Walter Inglis Anderson
• Creators - Hartley Peavey, James Hardy, Haller Nutt

There are more.  So many, many more.  Check the PAGES of stuff on Wikipedia for what Mississippi has given to the rest of the country.  Then, if you please, fold your stupid comment in four corners and insert it somewhere where it might remind you not to be so much of what you are next time.

Simply

Simply put,

• I'm tired today.  Everybody is too excited by the weather, and I have had a hard time getting them settled so we can get things done.  I feel like the day has been ten times as long as it should be.
• I am worried about the coming storm.  Even though it's nowhere in the same category, I (and everybody else, too, I guess) keep having Katrina flashbacks.  Maybe you always do if you go through something like that.  I cannot help looking at the trees in my yard uneasily and wondering which of them will still be standing when the storm is gone.
• I am in pain.  My stupid pit bull decided to run as I was trying to untangle her leash from her leg, and the wound I was worried she would receive is across my fingers instead.  The retractable leash extended so fast that by the time I opened my fingers, the damage was already done. I put aloe from my plant on it which finally allowed me to stop crying, but it still looks hideous.
• I'm ready for the long weekend.  It just can't get here fast enough.  I have started, very gently compared to last year, to need to get away from this place.

That's probably enough for today.

My White Whale

Every single printer I had ran out of toner and ink at the same time today.  Of course, that time was the moment when I needed to print tests, worksheets, and instruction sheets for all my classes.  Joy.

To prevent another day of intensive crappery, I knew I'd have to go to OfficeThing after school and pick up the necessary supplies.  I had a meeting, did some work, and then headed toward that part of town.  I had no idea I was about to have another encounter with my own personal white whale.

As I cruised by one of the car dealerships between me and my goal, I glanced at the lot.  I like to look at the pretty cars.  Sue me.  On the end of a row near the road sat a gleam of royal blue.  I did a double take.  Sure enough, it was the vintage Charger convertible.  It was back.

Being that it was five o'clock-ish traffic, I couldn't get over in time, and I kept on toward my office supply destination instead.  I toyed with the idea of going back when I was done, but it seemed silly.

I bought my toner and ink as fast as I could and before anything else could waylay me and steal massive amounts of my money.  (I have no control when I am near shiny office stuff.)  I came out and tucked the precious lifeblood of my classroom into the back, and paused.  Should I go back?  Shouldn't I just go home?  For the same reasons I went to look at the RoadRunner, I decided that I had to see it.

Back through the hellish traffic.  Back onto the lot.  And.  Of course it was gone.  I couldn't believe it.  I'd been less than thirty minutes.  Was it even real?  Is it just a cruel mirage?  I muttered to myself about using employee vehicles as bait and fought my way out into the traffic, hit the interstate, and headed west.

Someday, it will be mine.  Oh yes.  It will be mine.

Why Evernote Is Awesome

1)  It works everywhere.  I mean EVERYWHERE.  I have it on my iPhone.  I have it on my computer(s).  I will have it on whatever tablet I get.  All my crap is available at the slightest whim.  This means I can stand in the middle of Wal-Mart and look up the ingredients I need to make cachasa Brigadero.  And while I might not be able to get all that stuff AT Wal-Mart, it's worlds better than having to tote index cards or not have what I need to try.

2)  The logo.  Have you noticed that it's an elephant?  Elephants (after owls and giraffes) are some of my favorite animals.  It's also a happy-looking elephant.  He's so spiffingly pleased because he hasn't forgotten that document he was going to share with his coworkers on a USB drive that's at home.  This is the secret to happiness, after all.

3)  The ability to make and share notebooks.  Most awesome tool for team collaboration ever.  You can throw anything in, PDFs, web clippings, images, your own freaking handwritten notes, and then pass along the treasure trove to somebody else.  I used to do things like this with ring binders or file folders (which, of course, were never where I needed them).  This is the digital equivalent of my resource cabinet in the back of my classroom.  I want to start my students using them, too, so they can do group research projects with greater ease.

4)  Clearly.  If you're using Chrome and Evernote and haven't managed to stumble on this extension your-own-self, hie it over to the web store and get it now.  It strips pages down to their essentials (removes ads, ornate headers, and other fluff) so all you are saving is something that can be easily edited or printed without taking 487 pages.  It lets you preview and then "clip."  I am preparing all sorts of articles for teaching (Common Core, anyone?) simply by putting them through Clearly when I find them online and then tucking them into notebooks for later.

5) CamScanner.  This one is brand new to me, but it's something I've been needing.  It's an iPhone app that lets you create PDFs by taking pictures with your iPhone's camera.  SHEER GENIUS.  If it works like they say on the tin, it will replace having to take a document to a big scanner for quick recording.  It will also allow me to archive some things that I only have in hardcopy from the days before I did everything digitally.

6)  Did I mention the green elephant?

7) The latest advance in their OCR technology and the fact that they just hooked up with Moleskine to use a specialized notebook to ease scanning in of handwritten stuff.  I admit it, as much of a technophile as I am, I still prefer to use my fountain pen and paper when I need to take notes.  However, having those notes put into Evernote when I'm done allows me all sorts of options I didn't have before.  Since I usually wind up as the "recorder" or "scribe" for every group, I think I can try to do it by hand now and turn it into a PDF, etc., so I don't have to write then type.

I could go on, but I think this is enough.  I am finding new ways to use it all the time.  Tonight, I added an IFTTT action that will archive my Instagram photos automatically, saving me the hassle of individual downloads for each one.  Good stuff, that.  If you're not using it, I think you should at least give it a spin.  Who knows, maybe the green elephant will make you happy, too.

Who I AM, Who I'm NOT, and Who I Will BE

written as a sample for an assignment for my students

Attempts to define me must take in
the three-fold nature of my being
I am a triptych
a self-contained  trilogy

Like the triple goddesses
the Narns, the Morrigan
no attempt to understand me is complete
without the triune aspects of my soul

I am too tall for heels
and lots of pants
too smart for most guys
too Southern when I say “Mississippi”

I’m an eager student of everything
a collector of owls and pottery,  images and words
cats and dogs,PEZ and Potato Heads
connoisseur of fast cars and smart blue-eyed men

Soy una hispanohablante
a wannabe lusophone
a hardcore Japanophile
a defender of the Queen’s English

I am a teacher and a child of teachers
caretaker of a legion of fur
middling musician
Queen of my classroom domain

I’m not always patient, good, graceful, or kind
Not able to suffer fools gladly
Not always able to keep my temper
despite my best efforts to the contrary

I’m not going to be here forever
not going to miss an opportunity
to grow my soul
to see the soil of another country

I’m not married and
I’m not sad about that
except in those few minutes
when there is something extraordinary to share

I am going to be wiser after every day, good or bad
I’m going back to Brazil someday soon
going to be less tired and more healthy
going to make myself a priority, too.

Dylan says behind every beautiful thing
there’s been some kind of pain
All my scars will make me lovely
and I’ll spread my glossy black wings
and fly away.

3 Dog Night

Around 2:45 this morning, Chewie decided that the apocalypse had arrived and that it was his soul mission in life to sound the alarm.  The apocalypse apparently was a little less sure about itself since he barked rabidly, stopped, waited for me to fall back asleep, and then repeated the cycle about twice more.  The last time, Roux got in on the action, too, her deep "woofs" a counterpoint to Chewie's.  Yelldo, blessedly, slept on or at least chose not to get involved.

Needless to say, I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night.

Added to that, when I did sleep, I had terrible nightmares.  People I know dying.  School evaluations for PBIS.  You name it.  If it is bad, then I had it.

Now I'm facing the day more tired than usual.  I almost fell asleep in the shower, no mean feat.  I need sleep, and LOTS OF IT, soon.  I am thinking Saturday will be a festival of sleeping.

Thanks. No, Really. THANKS.

I was looking for some quotes on dating and relationships for the last post, and Google helpfully popped these ads up.  As a very dear friend of mine once said, "F--- you, Google.  F---- you."  I will PIMP SLAP you, biyatch.

This Will End BADLY

"People go to casinos for the same reason they go on blind dates - hoping to hit the jackpot. But mostly, you just wind up broke or alone in a bar."  ~ Carrie Bradshaw

So.  I'm sitting on the couch reading the other evening and my iPhone dings.  Text.  Okay.  I read it, and it's an invitation to a party Friday.  Again, okay.  It will be fun.  I haven't seen some of the people who are coming for a really long time.  I love them dearly, and we're all too busy or childrened or whathaveyou to hang out much now.  Any chance to get together is not to be missed.

Here's the thing, though.

There is also supposedly a guy for whom I am apparently "destined" whose birthday is the whole reason for the festivities.  Oh holy Cheezus.  It's a roommate and an awkwardness and an appraisal.  It's a set-up.

I'm going.  I want to see my friends.  I want to eat the absolutely divine food that will be there since one of my friends is a caterer/chef who makes things that will, quite literally, make that old cliche about slapping yo' mama come true.  I do, however, have extreme doubts about whether my "destiny" is waiting to begin on Friday night.

I am just going to go and be me (whoever that is), and everybody there can take me or leave me.  It's all I know how to be.  Let's just say I am sure the evening will be pleasant, but I'm not exactly optimistic about more than that. Unless he's smart as hell and at least as tall as I am, it's sort of doomed.  I can also deeply and profoundly wish that nobody has pitched this idea of destiny about to this guy.  Quite frankly, after a long week in the classroom, I don't think I'll be able to live up to that..... Another friend, I can always use.  Somebody who is avoiding me in horror and dismay all night, not so much.

Disquieting Muse

I am dreaming of you again.  You show up…everywhere.  Inevitably the nightmares come, but just when things are at their most bizarre, I look up and you have stepped in.  Sometimes you even stop the strangeness, lay your hands on my shoulders and turn me in another direction, wave your hands in a dismissal and I wake up.  Sometimes it's just a flash of perception as I flee or fight whatever demon is on the nightly marquee, and the world of my unconscious spins on.

There are the dreams where you talk and the dreams where you are a silent part of the background.  There are the dreams in which I have no idea why you would be there at all, nothing in them relating to you in any way.  You are the perpetual dress extra, the Hitchcockian cameo that defines the genre.   It’s enough to make me wonder half-seriously if you are something from a sci-fi novel, someone who can walk in the sleeping mind of another.

It’s not uncomfortable, but it is strange.  Why would I dream you sitting in a blue and buff melamine desk, pen twiddling in your hand, occupied with whatever is in front of you but still bored?  You do not fit there.  Why would I dream of a house I’ve never seen in which you show up in the hallways and corridors just to say hello and disappear like mist in the sun?  Sometimes we actually talk; sometimes you greet me and we are swept away into other things.  When I wake up, though, I always remember that you were there, playing "Where's Waldo" with the fragments and detritus of the day.

Please understand.  It’s not that I’m not glad to see you.  It’s just that you’re becoming more and more like de Chirico’s Disquieting Muses, something that gets more and more unnerving every time it is contemplated.  You are the shadow that no angle of light should be able to cast, the thing standing just out of frame that can be sensed but not quite caught. If there is to be any face on the subconscious that drags me through the world of dreams every night, I think we would both prefer it not to be yours.

Mighty Revelations...

(a list.  and a facetious title. prepare yourself.)

• Tablets that don't work really suck.  Especially when you want one a lot.  It's a tease.  I don't like teases.  Put up or shut up and get out, sweetheart.
• It's really expensive when the pharmacy fills a scrip that was supposed to be filed instead.
• The "linen & clean air" scent of Febreeze car air freshener will knock you straight down when it's been sitting in Mississippi August heat all day.
• A six-pound, fourteen-year-old black cat can whip a seventy-eight pound, year old Pyrenees. (true fact)
• I regularly wish to be as much of a badass as my six-pound, fourteen-year-old cat.
• People still amaze me on a regular basis, both with their kindness and faith...and with their lack of both.
• American TV networks should never, ever try to reproduce successful British shows.  Except  The Office.  That one, I'll give them.
• I dream of the same weird and incredibly detailed places all the time.  They remind me of deChirico paintings and not in any kind of good way.
• People are crazy, and times are strange.  I used to care, but things have changed.
• One of the best feelings in the world is to be clean straight from a hot shower and to slip between cool, fresh sheets.
• Having a constant camera on my iPhone has made me pay more attention to the world around me.
• Just once before I die, I want to drive all the way across the country and see things, maybe with an Airstream, even.
• I do NOT want to see The Possession.  Ever.  Or The Apparition.  Or any other scary movie  dealing with demonic possession that ends in "-shun."  
• I still want that 440 V8 RoadRunner.
• The best fountain pen I own cost me about $10.  (Pelikan Pelikano Jr., for the record.)
• Sometimes nothing but cheese will do.  Interpret that however you like.
• Wearing blue sparkly polish on my toes makes me feel like dancing.
• I firmly believe my life would be better if the new seasons of Sherlock, Doctor Who, or Downton Abbey were currently rolling.
• Slipcovers hide a multitude of sins.
• Some songs demand broken speed limits.
• Every time I think about the upcoming election, all I can think of is, "This is IT?  This is ALL?  Oh CRAP, we're in trouble...."
• I really hate talking to people in the morning.  It's not that I don't love you.  It's that the evil of pre-noon doesn't deserve to be acknowledged verbally.
• There are days when I would like to wear all my favorite pieces of jewelry at once like a Gypsy queen.  
• It's not late, but I'm still going to bed.  I roll like that.

(randomness out.  love ya.)

The Fairy Tale

Although it's been a long time since I could say it is true, today I found myself believing in the Fairy  Tale again.  Maybe it's a product of my having caught the last part of the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, the season 2 finale of Downton Abbey, and Pure Country all in one week.  I don't know.  Suddenly, for the first time in ages, I don't want to laugh and throw things at all the happy endings.

I am still pretty dubious about winding up with one myself, but it doesn't seem preposterous in general.  It feels good to see things positively again.  It's part of a larger trend.  I came home yesterday afternoon, and even though it was Friday after a very long week, I still had energy enough to sing along with the radio.

I'm not sure what all has made the difference, but I'm grateful for it.  I feel like myself for the first time in a long, long time.

Notes to Myself

In preparing a lesson plan, I opened an old Norton Anthology to skim it for a particular work.  As I thumbed through the pages, it became less of a search and more of a discovery.  I had an accidental encounter with myself, long, long ago.

All along the margins, carefully written with the needle-pointed black pens I preferred all through college, were annotations, questions, lecture notes, commentaries.  Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" contained terse notes on interpretations, plays on words.  Plath's acerbic "Daddy" is written almost completely up with marginalia about symbolism, biography, metaphors.

Inside the text itself are other little pieces of me at that time, a draft of a note I wrote to a professor I was going to interview and write about for a paper that became one of my all-time best was hiding in the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, an information slip about a get-together to go see Romeo and Juliet marked a segment from D.H. Lawrence.  As I rifled through the pages, the fragments of my undergraduate slipped around me, pulling me back to that time briefly even though there was not one single picture to be seen.  I remembered the hot, tatty lecture rooms of Lee Hall with their battered furniture, peeling walls, and tatty tile.  I remembered the roar of too-loud window units straining to cool us or the tick-ping-ping of a steam radiator fighting an early December chill.

I remember, too, all the other things that were going on in my life, a grandmother in the last stages of a battle with cancer, the unresolved and endless ridiculousness of my relationship (or whatever) with D., persistent questions about what was coming next in my life.  This bulky volume with its onionskin pages brings it all back, every golden gingko leaf on Engineering Row, every late-night conversation.

Sometimes the past comes rushing back in to swirl around me again, like a tide that shifted without warning. Just that quickly, the fragments I surround myself with coalesce, solidify, and that strange duality of the person I was then and the one I am now have to make peace with each other, find a way to share the space.

Second Thoughts

That last post was incredibly selfish and ill-conceived.  My whole sense of being trapped is, too.  If I am trapped, I did it to myself.  It's not fair to take this unpleasant feeling I have and say that anybody other than myself is responsible.  I need to be just.  Whatever I am or have, it's on me.

The Land of No

Monday or Tuesday, I was driving past a car lot in town when I saw a really, really gorgeous thing.  It was an old royal blue Dodge Charger ragtop convertible.  I almost pulled in right then, but it had been a long day, and I contented myself with watching it in the rearview mirror.  It started me thinking, though, about what I'd like to replace my own car with when that day finally comes.

I have always liked old things better than new, and the same ethos applies to cars.  I love an old muscle car (all of them except Corvettes and Mustangs, that is).  Cars from the 40s and 50s charm me with their graceful flow.  That love of vintage is why I have the car I have now, a throwback design to those other days.

I started talking with my Dad about that car and about another one I'd seen driving past a place on the other side of town on a regular basis.  He knows a lot about cars, having rebuilt and/or raced a lot of them in his youth.  I am just learning basic things; I still don't know as much as I'd like to on the technical end.  After talking to him, I decided I would go back and see the cars and just see what the sticker prices were like.

The blue one was gone.  Who knows if it sold just that fast or if it was only ever there to pull people in, the private property of someone on the lot.  Across town, though, I found the reddish orange one sitting as though it were waiting on me.

It's a 1969 or 1970 Plymouth RoadRunner with a 440 V8 in it.  Basically, it's the Plymouth version of the Super Bee.  It looked like, given the slightest provocation, it would kick your ass and then take off into flight.  I found it quite lovely.

There was no sticker in the window, so I still don't know if it's for sale, but getting that close to it made me want it.  Lots.  I came home and talked to my Dad some more about it, and that's when the "Noes" started.

No.  You don't need a car that fast with that much horsepower under the hood.  No.  You don't want a car with that age on it.  No.  You would be unhappy with the gas mileage.  No.  You don't want it because it needs constant tinkering which you can't afford.  No.  No.  No.

It was kindly said, and I'm not saying it's all wrong.  I fall in love with things and talk myself out of them all the time because they're not wise or not right for me right now.  So I'm not saying that the car is the issue.  It's just another symptom of a bigger thing.  What I am saying is that I am getting powerfully tired of No.

No.  You shouldn't want to go anywhere else even if this place is eating your soul.

No.  You shouldn't even talk about changing jobs because this one, although it is not paying you enough to pay all your bills, is at least a safe option.

No.  You shouldn't want to go out of the country on any kind of exchange because who will take care of your house while you're gone?

No.  Even if you applied for it and they told you you're going, isn't it somehow going to fall through and be bad?

No.  No.  No.

My life feels like an auxillary portion instead of its own legitimate entity.  I am so powerfully tired of  it always being no or you can't or their close and evil cousin, have you thought about...should you really.  It makes me feel like a fool or an infant.   I wasn't aware that I'm either.  It makes me unbearably weary and sad.

No.
No.
No.

This Land of No is killing me.

Beautiful Morning

The dogs woke me up this morning making impatient noises.  I got up, pulled my mind together from the strange dreams I was having, and I hooked Roux to a leash so we could all go outside.  Stepping outside always sort of sets the tone for the day.  Sometimes a thick blanket of hot wet air wraps around me, and I just feel ick.  Today, though, it was cool and dry, autumn in it.  It was wonderful.

I hate it when it's humid and miserable.  I don't want to be outside at all.  When it's cool and pleasant, just that little hint of a breeze rifling through the leaves, I always feel like anything is possible. I wish it was like that more often here.  I think about the climate of Brasilia, how it was pleasant even at more than 80 degrees because there was no wetness in the air.  There are days here when it's almost hard to breathe.

Everything was nearly idyllic.  This is the season where I have a million butterflies in my yard, and they and the hummingbirds were busy with the lantanas and the feeders.  The sun hadn't quite made it over the trees across the road, and everything was shady with only patches of light spotting the grass I mowed yesterday.  It felt good to be alive and outside.

Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, I wish all I had to do was stay home and walk in the cool morning grass, come in and take care of things inside, that this was enough for a life.  I guess after awhile, I would get bored out of my mind, run out of things to do, start to feel claustrophobic.  It's just hard to imagine that when everything is pastoral and lovely on perfect mornings like today's.

Shooting Stars and Other Travelers

Yesterday, after a long but mostly good first week of school, my friend and I were working on lesson plans for next week when F suddenly appeared in the doorway.  I haven't seen or heard from him in quite some time.  I had assumed he was either frantically busy or that I perhaps no longer fit into his world.  It shouldn't have been a surprise that if he was going to turn up this was the season, I guess.  His orbit usually brings him near at the beginning or end of a semester.

Anyway.

By the time he arrived, I had a) missed eating real food for lunch because we'd been told something would be provided and there wasn't any left by the time the majority of us needed it, b) been fighting my school computer for two hours because it had inexplicably become almost useless, and c) tried to figure out how to get all the things we need for teaching into a tiny little non-adaptable grid so it could be submitted on time.  Needless to say, I wasn't at anything like my best.  The candy I'd eaten as a lunch substitute was trying to catch me up on sugar, but it wasn't doing a very good job.  I felt sluggish and grumpy.  I had planned to go home as soon as I could get something on paper for lesson plans, but I rarely see F, so I stayed and we talked.  He's on his great adventure, about to start a new leg of his journey.  I remember what it was like to be in a place similar (but not, of course, exactly the same) to his.

We talked a long time, as we always do, and we covered a wide variety of things.  Nothing unusual.  He asked me, as he almost always does, if I had thought of going somewhere else.  For some reason, this time, I started to ask him why.  (And F, if you read this, I guess you'll find out what was going on behind the mask....)  I told him that I am planning on going back to Brazil on a Fulbright or some other program if I can, and he made a comment that started an disquieting range of questions tumbling over each other in my head.  He reminded me that I don't have forever.

I felt several things.  First, well, quite frankly, I felt old.  And maybe I am.  I rarely feel my age, though, which may be good or bad, depending.  I felt every moment of it when he said that.  Second, I felt a little paranoid.  I know I have changed, especially in the last two years, but I wasn't aware that it was so.... visible.  Am I in such poor condition, so ragged around the edges that I need to flee?  (It's possible.  It's entirely possible.)   Finally, I felt that old discontent that is always present in my life but usually quiet wake up, shake a bit, and show its teeth.

I'm happiest when I am somewhere else.  I've known that for a long, long time.  I write better.  I feel better.  I think better.  It has been so long, though, since I have been anywhere but here.

There are things that hold me here.  Family duty.  Mortgage payments.  Health care and retirement.  Sometimes, I feel like I will never be free again.  Whenever that feeling comes on me, I feel my heart beat in my chest like a wild bird suddenly caged.  I can't stand the thought that comes with it.  I can't stand to think of retiring after 25 years and coming home to what I deeply fear will be an empty house, a life lived trying to serve others, a remnant used up and ready to be laid aside.

Somewhere along the way, you see, every life reaches a tipping point.  Things become comfortable, or at least they so entangle you that to get free of them would be harder than whatever pain they might cause.  Am I at that point?  If I don't go soon, is it possible that I won't ever be able to?  And what if I don't?  Is that wrong?  Is there no possibility of good that comes from staying?

Again, I come back to that empty house at the end of all those years.  It is a very tangible thing, almost tactile in its reality.  I know, more or less, that if I stay here I won't ever find anyone to share my life with.  I might not ever, anyway, no matter where I may go.  I'm aware of this.  Whatever bloom might have been on the rose was gone long ago.  Yet if I go, maybe that emptiness will be filled with other things even if love and companionship don't manage to be one of them.  I often think of other teachers I've known who never married, never had lives outside of their profession and what happens to them when that profession moves on without them.  It makes me more than a little sad to think of that as my fate.

I turned the matter over tonight as I was standing in a pasture full of tall grass with every star in the universe above it.  I had gone out to see the Perseids, and staring up into a perfectly clear night sky with no other distractions does have a way of making one think.   So do the little trailing flashes of light, the last hurrah of something burning itself out on its journey.  I don't know what the right thing to do is anymore.  I know what I want, but is there a point at which what you want isn't the important thing?  Does everybody always want what is good for them?  Should desire be the thing I follow?  Do you have to wake up one day and say, "This is what it is.  This is what I need to find contentment with and just lay aside the other"?

What I have is not bad by any means.  I am fortunate compared to many.  It's just that I don't feel like I used to sometimes. I feel like I'm becoming something, and I'm not sure what, just that it isn't who I was.  And that little inner beast keeps waking up....

So am I growing up or am I dying inside?  Is F right, and I need to get out?  Or do I need to be satisfied with what I have?

I wish I knew.

Freakin' Wednesdays

To give you an idea of what my day has been, I looked down at my hands as they gripped the steering wheel and had a moment of panic.  The huge amethyst cabochon had fallen out of my ring.  I was home, just about to get out of my car, and as I moved to get out, I saw the stone on the  floormat.  I don't know when exactly it decided to leap out, but at least I found it.  It would have broken my heart otherwise.

The whole day has been a massive list of the bizarre, the irritating, and the wearying.  I spent all my lunch and about a quarter of my planning period detangling the massive knot of charger cords on the laptop cart.  There's a charger cord missing quite inexplicably.  I ran out of white paper, went to my car before school to get some of what I'd just bought out of the back...and discovered that I had somehow managed to buy 8 1/2 by 14" paper, a size my printer won't run.  When I went to buy paper at Office Thing, I wanted to recycle some old ink cartridges, too.  They had burst in the bag and the blue ink leaked on my fingers and stained them.  I was so distracted and rushed this morning that I forgot to put in earrings.  Just a whole drawerful of little things, really, typically Wednesday things....

Fortunately, all of that has been somewhat offset by some good things, too.  My students so far this year seem like they're going to be really good.  I'm going to be able to get all my students school Gmail.  I used Remind101 for the first time today.  The seniors were excellent in the assembly, almost spookily so.

I'm tired now after a long day and dealing with Wednesday in general and then having to go to Office Thing after work.  Maybe the worst of Wednesday is gone.

Soapbox Time

I try to stay off my soapbox.  Sometimes, though, people just insist on shoving me until there's nowhere left to stand.  Today is one of those days.

I don't care what you believe in as long as it doesn't hurt other people.  Every person is entitled to his or her own opinion about things.  We are all (hopefully) thinking beings who take in information and make the best deductions about the world that we can based on those experiences.

What you don't have the right to do is two-fold.  First, you don't have the right to shove your beliefs down the throat of any other person.  Talk passionately about it?  Yes.  Debate over it civilly?  Absolutely.  Go further than that?  No.  Beliefs come from inside a person.  You just can't sway people to your way of thinking by force.  Second, you don't have the right to be hateful to someone who does not agree with you.  Just because somebody hasn't had the same experiences and has managed to come to a different opinion doesn't mean that you get to adopt an attitude of superiority, disdain, or condescension.

What happened to the very civilized idea of people being able to discourse even in disagreement?  When did disagreeing with someone turn them into some kind of mortal enemy?  I cannot understand how talking to someone else who holds a different opinion (again, as long as it's not hurting anybody else) is a cause for somebody to spring into violence, verbal or physical.  Are our beliefs so weak and malleable that we have to fear exposure to all others?  Shouldn't we instead welcome the chance to see another viewpoint, weigh it for its worth, and then made up our minds again when we're done?

I'm tired of every single moment I encounter the news being a stage for people being hateful to each other.  I'm tired of nobody being able to be kind.  I'm tired of the word "tolerant" being twisted to mean "anybody who agrees with MY IDEAS only" and flung around like a weapon.

Okay.  I think I've said everything I need to say.  I'm putting the soapbox up for the evening.  You can, of course, take this with a grain of salt, use it or ignore it as you choose.

Busy-ness as Usual

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday passed in an insane blur.  Despite that, I still am not ready for tomorow.  You know.  Business as usual.

I have helped to put together a course syllabus, gone to a day-long meeting about textbooks, worked on my room, rearranged my house after having my floors steam-cleaned, ordered slipcovers, bought supplies...a million little things.  I keep thinking that I am going to hit the tipping point where I can say, yes, at last, everything is done.  This keeps not happening.  There is, instead, just one more item on the list, and one more, and one more....

Last night, I had one of the "pre-school nightmares" that I suppose are obligatory for teachers everywhere.  It was distressing enough to wake me up and keep me up.  Once I get everything rolling for the year, that will stop.  I hope.

Today was another exercise in here, there, and everywhere.  I did laundry, we had Open House at the school, I had to go to Wal-Mart afterward, and then I came back here and repotted various plants that I plan to take to my classroom sooner or later.  One of them is my beautiful jade plant that has been in my classroom two years now.  It almost died after sitting in my car for too long the last day of last year.  It is still pitiful, but I am hoping that the remainder of the summer outside with some care will help it make a comeback.

Now, I am avoiding the last of the school work I need to do for tomorrow.  I found MacGuyver on Netflix, and I am watching it and pretending (not well) that tomorrow isn't coming with combat boots on....  Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, you know.

Here I Go Again...

(with all due apologies to Whitesnake.  and to you for the 80s rock reference.)

The summer is officially over in one hour.  Tomorrow is the first day of the new school year.  I can't even feel like I am going back to the same school this year for so many reasons. Everything feels different.

For one thing, so many of the faces I had come to know as the rock-steady foundation of our faculty are gone.  They retired, sought other opportunities.  There are certain of them I just cannot imagine our school without, to be honest.  While a part of me knows that institutions transform themselves or die, I am certain I will be looking for those faces like ghosts in the halls.

This summer has also been full of revolutions in my personal life:  Brazil, my uncle's death, the massive overhaul on my house, getting off the Topamax.  Huge chunks of the puzzle of my life have been pried loose, shuffled around, and the picture just doesn't look the same anymore.  I don't think that's a bad thing.  To have gone through all of that and be completely the same would be the bad thing, probably.

There's also the fact that I am nervous about this year, student-wise.  I had some of the most genuinely discouraging moments of my career last year, things that stole that feeling of "rightness" I have always had with my kids.  Sure, every year brings its own challenges, and true, the vast majority of last year's students were wonderful people whom I will deeply miss.  I need that to be understood.  I don't want it ever said that I did not like last year's class or that I put them down here.  They were a vibrant group of individuals with a distinct personality to them, and they frequently made me laugh.  In all honesty, though, there were also some things that happened that made me feel that what I do is an exercise in futility.

I've had students be confrontational with me.  I've had students get in my face or get into fights with other students.  I've had to deal with exceptionally thorny discipline issues and "battles of the wills."   All of that goes with the territory.  I never take it personally even when it is directed at me.  It's about something else almost always, and I just happen to be a handy target.  Even when it does seem to be a personality conflict, it gets dealt with and we move on.  I'm not in a popularity contest.  I'm trying to teach somebody, a whole lot of somebodies, something.  This past year is the first year ever that I can honestly say a student managed to hurt me and did it deliberately, with planning, deception, and a little song in the heart.  That's just never been a part of my reality before, and now I have to fight the urge to see a knife in every hand waiting for me to turn around so it can find a place to sink in.  I don't want to teach that way.  I don't want to live that way.  It makes everything inside my soul grey and dull.

So I came out of last year with scars, and now I'm a little worried.  How will it go this year?  I have very high hopes and am enthusiastic about it going in.  I have two new electives.  We're going to block schedule.  I am going to be integrating a class exchange with my host teacher from Brazil into my curriculum.  So far, in my very limited interactions with this year's class, I feel like the echoes of the past will just fade out, but I won't be able to tell until I actually get in the room and get everything underway.  Hopefully, the enthusiasm I have for all the wonderful things we're doing this year will carry us.

Well, it's late, and 5:00 will roll around appallingly fast.  Three days of PD preparation, and then all questions will be answered.  I am fervently hoping that all will be well and that this optimism of mine, frequently woefully uninformed and out-of-place, is right this time.

Frustrating

I'm working on stuff for the new school year, and as I'm pulling things together, the fact that so few resources exist for high school teachers when compared to lower elementary is being pounded into me once again.  If you don't believe me, check any place.  Google.  Get on Pinterest.  What you will find is a world of "cutsie" graphics and stripped-down, bright and happy language that are nearly impossible to adapt for anyone over the age of 10.

I did, in fact, do a quick search for "education" on Pinterest.  What comes up are thousands of pins, but the vast majority of them are elementary or middle school oriented. The pins for classroom organization have great stuff, but so much of it revolves around "setting up centers" for different subject areas in the elementary room, or outlines for items and procedures that do NOT exist in my universe (for example, the ever-popular discipline chart in which kids move up and down using clothespins...great if you have 30-ish students. Not quite so useful when you have more than 100....)  If you search for "high school education" on the same sight, you only get a few hundred pins, and the vast majority of them are actually the same social media usage poster pinned and repinned by teachers probably desperate to find something, anything that works for them.

High school and elementary school do not work the same way.  It is different enough that most people are licensed for K-6 or 7-12.  We are different tribes.  If you have a big meeting or conference, if you are a careful observer, you can tell the difference between the elementary folks and the high school folks.  Generally, the elementary folks will be dressed in bright garments, school shirts, or "teacher" accessories consisting of apples, rosy-cheeked stick people, crayonish drawings. They tend to move around in large groups.

High school teachers also tend to have an identifiable appearance, but I suppose it is somewhat variable.  There are the immaculately turned-out ones who are always in suit-ish garb.  There are the "rumpled professors" who look just a little bit out of place, stare at things, and wander around.  Their clothing tends to be slightly threadbare, old-fashioned, or in need of an iron.  Finally, you have the quirky ones who wear jeans and and maybe a shirt with something from their subject matter on it.  I guess you can think of them as the geek-teacher squad.  I personally am one of these.  Most high school teachers tend to move around in smaller groups or alone.

Everywhere I go, the scales tend to tip toward the bright tribe.  At conferences, the materials showcase usually is much more about those first years than it is about my students.  Sellers of school stuff tend to make the majority of it in primary colors with adornments that I can only think of as "precious."  When I go online and try to find resources, the majority of those things have something for elementary school on it, such as how to make a chart for the car riders, the bus riders, and the walkers.  (And yes, I know this is a middle school thing, too....they fall into a grey area between the other two.)

I teach seniors.  I need something interesting visually but age appropriate.  I need things that talk with adult phrases and situations instead of toys and balls and big-eyed puppies.  While it's true that I still have students who carry SpongeBob backpacks, they will look suspiciously or outright reject things that they think are "too childish" for them when it comes to instructional material.  Teens are so sensitive to being talked down to, and I think they see these things as a condescension.  They will treat with suspicion or outright disdain and refusal anything that looks too "babyish" (a word that I have actually had students, especially struggling learners, use for things).

In addition to the problem with the students' perceptions is the fit to the teachers' personalities.  Let's face it.  If you know anything about me, you already know that cutsie is not a part of my universe.  I would feel like I was trying to be something I'm not if I had a room full of "ABCs and 123s."  It does not suit me.  I think there are a lot of people it doesn't suit.

There is nothing wrong with any particular style; it just needs to be with the appropriate people.  The content that I have in my room would probably not be appropriate for elementary school.  It would not stimulate them or entertain them.  It might consist of things they haven't experienced yet or contain language that is over their heads.  I know that, and I don't pretend otherwise.  What I wish is that manufacturers of educational materials, be they of decor, resources, or just online handouts, could realize that what works in one age group might not necessarily transfer, or simply push things at us and expect the high school teachers to "adapt them."

Maybe the elementary school teachers just buy more and therefore demand more of the makers' attention.  Maybe the image of the 1950s rosy-cheeked school kid persists, everybody innocent and juvenile.  Maybe most high school teachers are not inclined to decorate or look for things online.

I don't know the cause of it, but I wish we could ALL find what we need.  I have students who are mothers themselves now, students who are working every minute they are not in school so they (and their families) can eat, students who don't have a regular home that they go back to at the end of the day.  I think you can understand how these people, who perhaps have had maturity forced upon them too soon, would not find teddy bears and quaint tiny schoolhouses to be engaging or terribly applicable to their current reality.

Oh, there are companies that do both the elementary and the high school.  Teacher's Discovery has fabulous and appropriate resources and decor for every age.  I can't say enough good things about them.  Trend, the famous poster and bulletin board company, has good posters and borders that can work for everything, but even most of their bulletin board sets are for students much younger than mine.  (I love their stuff, but if I use it, my kids are going to laugh me right out of my room or think I'm one of those teachers who lives in a fantasy world.  And I might be, but I don't live in THAT fantasy world....)  Prestwick House, too, makes great efforts at balance and has many wonderful things for high school.

What I'd love to see (and not have to MAKE), though, is a great bulletin board set of vintage images, maybe from 1930s clip art.  Or owls (since I love them so much) that aren't quite so adorable.  What I have for owl decor in my room is vintage collectibles.   Maybe somebody could do some vintage owls, too?  And as for the same kind of printable resources that ABOUND for elementary school, where do I start?

I know that this probably seems like a minor issue, but it frustrates me constantly.  I spend vast amounts of time creating things that I need when other age groups seem to be able to tap into a fountain of premade items.  While I enjoy making some things, it would be nice to have all those well-made products and options available to me.  Until that day comes, though, I will just continue doing what I have always done: improvisation, creation, and creative junking.  It has worked out okay so far....

Quietly

The week has flown away almost without my noticing the passage of the time.  Suddenly, I looked up, and Friday has come.  One would think this would indicate a period of idyllic bliss, of being so calm and content that the time flows like a smooth, broad river.  I wish that were true.  It's more like chunks of time simply fell away, were carved out, and now a finished shape is revealed.

Two days were consumed with those obligatory doctor appointments that seem to crop up now and then.  They always come in bunches, but I guess that's the best way to do it, all at once and then over with for a time.  I saw my neurologist who told me that I was doing fine off the dreaded Topamax.  For the first time in about five years, I am free. The other two days, I read, watched TV, did laundry, worked through the minutia of life.  


I should be out using the last of my summer in some spectacular way, but to be honest, nothing has sounded good.  The greatest good to me has been this quiet.  It has felt necessary and right.  I have learned to go with that when I feel it.

And yet, I know that somehow it is not exactly a good.  I feel a little tired.  I find myself frequently sad.  This isn't just R&R no matter how many little things I do.

Now, I have to get up and go to the school for awhile, work on my classroom.  There are things that need to be done while it is still peaceful, before the great rush of the new year begins.  I wonder if the rush that accompanies it will sweep away this feeling or if I will continue to move quietly along, a ghost in the shadows.

The Beauty of the Pinterest Recipe

I spent some time tonight after church talking with a lady there who is from Brazil.  She and I were comparing notes about my recent trip, and we started talking about food. She expressed how much she missed certain dishes and items from Brazil.  I know what she means.

Why is it always the food that we miss when we leave a place?  Why does what we eat become such an evocative reminder of somewhere we love?

The taste of green tea, good green, always takes me back to Japan.  It makes me think of all sorts of things...sitting and talking with friends, coming cold and tired into the train station in Nagoya and having a bowl of gold-flake matcha, having green tea soft serve ice cream at the annual pottery festival in Seto.

There are other things that take me other places.  Spicy green curry makes me think of Chiang Mai and walking up all.those.steps to get to the temple at the top, the little hotel where I stayed where I slept in mosquito netting, the market where I bought a cheap pair of flip flops and ate coconut balls off leaves, the bicycle with the broken seat I rode around Sukothai.   Oddly enough, guacamole also always makes me think of Japan where I learned to make it from a fellow teacher.  Thanksgiving dinner carries me back to my college days at State when my friends and I commandeered the Wesley Foundation kitchen and made a meal for about twenty people.

There are dishes from Brazil I want to learn to make.  Feijoada, a sort of black bean and pork stew for lack of a more accurate definition, is the first one.  I adore it, and it is linked to both my recent trip and a friend I lost track of a long time ago who introduced it to me.  Brigadero is a sweet that we were served in almost every classroom party we were given.  Tonight, after my conversation, I decided to see if I might be able to find some easy recipes for these things.

God bless Pinterest.  I think everything is there.  I did a quick search, and I found the things I was looking for.  Next week, I am going to attempt the feijoada.  I didn't get to bring home the proper stone pot, but I will substitute my crockpot instead.

I don't know if my plans for getting back to any of the places that are special in my heart will succeed.  Until such time as they do, I will keep my memories of it all alive through my photos, the assorted bits and pieces I brought back, and my kitchen.

The Hard Part

I haven't felt much like writing lately.  Or really, like doing much of anything.  No reading.  Little internet.  No cleaning.  Less contact even than usual for me with others.  It has been far easier to blank my mind with trivial TV or absolute stillness and quiet.  Finally, though, reality intruded.  Yesterday, we loaded up early and headed north to Kosciusko for the very last time.  We needed to go and clean out my uncle's room at the VA nursing home.

On the way, we were all fairly calm, cheerful even.  There was sun, something all too rare these days when you have to dash out and do everything between rain storms.  Everybody had gotten rest.  We chatted amicably in the vehicle as the miles passed.

The closer we got to Kosciusko, the more the tension built.  When we pulled into the parking lot, I could feel it like rope sliding through a slipknot, tightening everything inside me.

We were met in the lobby by the facility's social worker.  She had been working to close everything out and help us get things together on that end.  She and others in the office told us how much he'd come to mean to them in the 10 years he'd been living there.  Whether it was simply kindness or genuinely meant (the latter is what it felt like), it was appreciated.

Going down that hall toward his wing was when it really started to hit me.  I knew that he would not be there.  He was not going to be sitting in the cafeteria as he so often was when we arrived.  He was not going to be in the smoking room waiting for a cigarette break.  He was not going to be in his room waiting for them to come and get him out of his bed.  He simply wasn't going to be there at all.

We went into his room, and his stuff had already been mostly sorted and boxed by the facility staff.  We spent the next two hours deciding what to keep, how to pack it, how to get it in the van.  It was possible to turn off the mind about it to a great degree, to retreat into the movement of it.  Sometimes, though, an item would just shatter everything, a collection of his beloved baseball caps, the inexplicably vast quantity of packaged Spam in the refrigerator, a shirt with a giant Halloween pumpkin on it.

We didn't take a lot.  Most of it will be donated to whoever needs it at the facility's discretion.  The wheelchair - specially designed and the last in a long line - we left.  We left the clothing, the medical supplies.  It was good to think that maybe someone else could get use from them.

After we loaded up the few items we decided to keep, we went back inside to finish things up.  The social worker had told us that some of his closest friends there had asked to see us before we left.  One gentleman had been so sad that he wasn't eating well.  I let Mom and Dad talk with them.  I just could not have those conversations.  I sat down quiet and still on the big sofa in the lobby and waited for it all to be done.

Dad and I had been asking each other at various times, "Are you okay?  Are you going to be okay?"  Both of us, I think are good at "containment."  As I sat there on that too-soft sectional working to compress it all and keep it manageable, though, I kept thinking, "This is the last.  This is the last time I will sit on this sofa.  This is the last time I will look down that sunny corridor and the last time I will see all those flags from all the branches of military service blaze with color as I walk under them.  This is the last time I will sit here and watch this aquarium of fish.  This is the last."  And it was painful and I wanted to run because of course, none of those things were the point at all.  Not at all.

This was the only memorial, really, that we would have of him.  By his own very strong wishes, there was not to be another.  He had donated his body to medical research, and so we did not even see him after everything was done.  There was only this horrible absence.

My parents had decided that they wanted to provide for a big pizza night to be given to his friends.  They apparently used to love to order lots of pizza and have a good time talking and carrying on before he got so sick.  This way, there will be one more celebration of him.  He was always so generous with everyone, and I know that he would have been happy with this idea.

When the last of the protocol had been attended to, we set off.  We were quiet as we rolled past the huge metal sculpture they erected earlier this year to honor the Veterans, POWs, and MIAs.  The black steel soldiers stared back from their abstract eyes as we left the grounds.  We left them and the seals of the various branches behind along with the gazebo where we used to sit beside the pond and talk with him.  I cannot speak for the others, but I did not look back as we left it all behind us.  I could not.

What I Will Remember

We got a call from the VA today. My uncle had developed an arrhythmia, and they were trying to handle it. Mom told them we were coming this afternoon anyway and asked if we needed to come on then. We were told "time is of the essence" and "decisions would have to be made." We were preparing to leave and another call came saying he was gone.

Just like that. Gone.

It doesn't seem possible that life is both as tenacious and as fragile as it is. My uncle had fought so long and so hard against so many things: diabetes, a stroke, blood pressure, two amputations caused by infection and poor circulation. The list goes on and on and on. Yet he continued to fight it and deal with all those issues until just an hour ago. Then, the thing he couldn't fight came.

I don't want to remember him the way I saw him last, although in truth that is never going to leave me. I don't want to remember the dim grey light of the hospital room, the window that looked out onto the massive flag flying outside, the vast array of equipment and medicine he was hooked up to, the way he tried to wake up from the sedation because he could hear our voices. I don't want to remember the way he was struggling for every breath.

Instead, I am going somehow to perform a feat of mental deception. I will remember how he was years ago instead. I will remember his quirky sense of humor, that he liked Diet Dr. Pepper and Mexican food. I will remember that he had the same wanderlust that plagues me, went everywhere, did incredible things. I will remember that he was a nurse, a chef, an expert marksman.

I'm going to remember the uncle who used to say "flutterby" to me to make me laugh when I was just a little kid. The one who loved the Fourth of July because he loved to do fireworks in a huge display as well as set off bottlerockets as much as or maybe even more than we did. The one who took care of my Nana and my PeePaw during their illnesses.

This is the man he was before all the other began, before the long fight with his own body began. Even wheelchair-bound, this is who he remained until very recently. I choose to keep that picture with me, and as much as it is possible, I am going to try to lay the other aside. He will be much missed.

Transitional

Everything is transitional right now.

My house is transitioning into a place I'm not ashamed of.  We took two vehicles' worth of stuff from here and donated it to the Salvation Army today.  I also filled up the back of my Dad's big truck with trash that will go out on collection day tomorrow.  I think there are something like 14 bags....  This is a good transition.  It feels better every time a load of stuff leaves.

The summer is transitioning into the school year.  I took three large bags of stuff to my classroom today as part of the "cleaning out" process here at home, and I took the time to arrange my desks after the floor waxing, to put my trash cans back in place.  Then I made myself leave.  Next week, I'll need to go put in a day or two fixing things, prepping bulletin boards, putting away everything that I took today.  I got an email today for the first big PD I'm going to be a part of for the new year.

My uncle remains in the limbo of ICU.  We're waiting to hear back from the test results, waiting to know what happens next with him.

Things for me will solidify somewhat when the new year school year begins, but even there, in that place where I am most comfortable, unknown variables exist.  New co-workers.  New style.  New classes on a totally new schedule.  New textbooks.  New feeling about what I do as a whole because of the brutal stupidity of last year and also because of the wonder of Brazil.  Newly edited three-year plan which includes going back to Brazil again.

I always think that I'm getting to a place where everything is settling down, establishing patterns that will be peaceful and calm.  The truth is, I don't think this ever really happens.  Maybe it's not supposed to.  Maybe what we think of as a comfortable groove is only a deceptive rut and we have no real business being in it anyway if we want a good life.  I don't know.

More of the Same

If you're wondering where I've been, the answer is mostly on the road between here and Jackson.  My uncle is not really improving.  He remains in the VA MICU, and we don't really know when that will change.  Friday, Mom and I went over to see him.  Yesterday, it was a family trip.  When we don't go over, we call to get updates.  There is little change.  He's still on the ventilator and sedated.  

When we're not headed to Jackson, Mom and I work on my house.  It's been a full week as of today that we've been trying to get all the "big jobs" done as far as cleaning, and we're almost done now.  It's amazing how much stuff has piled up to take care of.  The two storage rooms in the back are in better shape than they probably ever have been since I have been living here.  My pantry has been cleaned out, and tremendous amounts of food from as far back as 1994 (what the actual....) have been discarded leaving only that which is usable.  My craft room has a new set of industrial metal shelves and massive organization.  My kitchen cabinets are rearranged, emptied out, and made useful.  My guest room is actually ready for guests instead of only being vacuum and luggage storage.  It's so fabulous to open a cabinet or go through a door and see order where previously there was only chaos.

There are still small pockets of clutter and jobs left to do.  It will all finish up with a massive housecleaning.  I guess it will get done about the time school starts, which, perhaps, is as it should be.  I can't tell you what a relief it is to me already to know that these messes won't be waiting for me at the end of a long day.  

It also gives me something to do instead of think of my uncle.  The busier I am, the less time I have to think about the "what ifs."  I guess I can keep finding tasks to take care of.  I don't really know what else to do.

...and Back

Crises always come when everything is calm.  I don't think they give advance warning.  I think they lurk around corners and look for the least-suspecting individual to walk by before they pounce.  One struck us today, and it certainly came in a time of clear sailing and peaceful waters.

Mom called me this morning, and I knew from the tone of her voice that whatever it was would be bad.  She has a tone that I have come to think of as "holding it together" or "carefully handling something that will go off."  At no time that I have heard her use it have things been good.

The news was about my uncle.  His health is poor anyway, and the doctors thought he was having a heart attack, that perhaps he'd been having it for hours.  They were sending him to Jackson for special care.  We loaded up and headed out for the hour-plus drive.

When we got there, it was time for the waiting game.  Hospital waiting rooms, whether they are large or small, are excruciating.  Everyone there is filled with dread, fear, grief, or pain.  No matter how cheerful or soothing the decor, there is always the sensation of the imminent disaster, the doctor who appears in the door with the expression that speaks louder than the nondescript wording.

A lot of people want to chat in the waiting room with everyone who is around, share the common burden with even the strangers near them.  I just don't.  I cannot.  I try not to be rude, but I just need to hold on, maintain.  It does not help me to share miseries.  I need to concentrate on keeping it all locked down, held in.  The conversations comparing statuses, illnesses, prognoses only serve to escalate what is usually near panic in me.

When we got to see my uncle briefly, it was horrible.  I am fairly sure he didn't even know we were there.  I hope not, anyway, because if he knew we were there, then he knew far too much of the world, far too much of his pain.

We sat and waited for a timeless time in the dim grey light of the ICU waiting room, and finally, the doctors came for us.  We were escorted to a private consultation room, and we waited to hear the news.  I hate those spaces, too, couches in which you sink too far, Kleenex everywhere because they will be needed, the doors with the blinds that protect your private moment of fear.

The news we got was mixed, but essentially he didn't have a heart attack.  He has a lung that isn't working and that put his heart under pressure.  They are going to be giving him massive medicines and treatments to try to restore his ability to breathe on his own.  While he is still in critical condition, there is hope, hope we didn't really have when we left the house this morning.

I don't know if he will recover from this, but for the moment, the panic is over.  He is being sedated as long as he is on the breathing tube, but the word "stable" has been used.  When you have been in hell, this is nothing to take lightly.

Hell

...is the ICU waiting room and no amount of coffee or semi-soft institutional furnishing will fix that.

...is seeing somebody you love suffering and not being able to do anything. Not anything.

...is all the other sorrows that all the other people around you are carrying, that sensation that hangs like a wet mist in the air wrapping around you until you cannot breathe.

...is trying to "be strong" when you are really broken.

...is here.

Organizing, Day 2

Today, we started early on "the project" of my house.  For awhile, I was focused on moving out the things that had already been sorted, loading my car, taking stuff to other storage, sacking up MORE garbage.  Then things got considerably less focused.

Somehow, we went from working on the back of the house to working on my guest room.  Three hours later, we had moved all my luggage to the back of the house, totally reorganized the closet, and reclaimed that room for its intended purpose.  It was a really good feeling to have that space clean and functional again.

Tomorrow morning, I have to get all those millions of bags of trash down to the pickup.  I also need to get what is in my car to the Salvation Army.  After that, there is probably one more day of work, and then, hopefully, this phase of the project will be done.

Then I can get back to Pinterest.  (ha)

Uncovered Objects

Today, I spent about six hours working on the cleanout of the two back rooms here at the house.  Mom came and helped me, and we dug in to the small room.  It was the worst off, and I had a new set of huge shelves to help take care of the problem.

I had to sit down and go through box after box of miscellaneous crap that had accumulated.  I found items going all the way back to my undergrad, old course catalogs, papers from grad school, and the millions of tiny objects that get swept into boxes rapidly and without thought when somebody moves.  So much of it was just stuff to throw away.  Who needs instructions for the voicemail system at my old university some 16 years after the fact?

Other items, though, made me stop and smile.  I uncovered several things I thought were lost today, things I'd made, things I'd been given.  I found old poetry, old diaries.  Resources I'd been looking for emerged.

Then there were the things that made me sad.  Much of what was there was stuff of my grandparents that has been sitting since I moved here, things I had either no time or no interest in hand sorting.  Today, I went through lots of that, and just seeing my grandmother's careful notetaking and writing in old files made me miss her.  Piles of things about me and my cousin that she'd saved to scrapbook made me smile.  I could see her clipping, copying, preparing to preserve those events for us.  Finding the copper bracelet and old road atlas that were my grandfather's brought back memories of him in his overalls, reading anything he could get his hands on, coming in at the end of the day in whatever incarnation of banged-up tan Chevy truck he happened to be driving from whichever of the pieces of land he'd been on.

There were also pictures and artifacts of people I don't see anymore, including D. and T.  I haven't even seen their faces in a long time, and unfolding a sheet of paper with a poem (that was crap) written on it and them hiding out inside was the sort of nostalgia I could do without.  I don't miss them; I just felt sort of mildly distasteful that I had ever written such drivel.  At least the drivel I write now is of a different kind...

So much of what I sorted was just junk, things I neither need nor want.  Massive amounts of it are going to the Salvation Army.  My little car is already crammed full, and there is at least one more day of work before both rooms are complete.  The trash bags are piling up.  The trash guys are probably going to boycott me when I finally get everything down to the road on pickup day.

Even though there is still a huge mess in the big room, the little room is actually quiet, clean, and useful now.  It's amazing to be able to walk in and see all my decorations and stuff for different events neatly binned and on the shelves.  It's a relief to know that if I need a giftbag and some tissue paper for a present, I can actually get to it without feats of gymnastic prowess.  I am looking forward to the end of this process when both rooms are something that I can be proud of again instead of praying nobody but the exterminator has to go in them for any reason.

And when they're done it will be time to move out into the rest of the house.  Pinterest and my own start at purging are inspiring me.  By the time I go back to school, I'd like my house to be as free of non-essential and unused items as I can get it.  It feels good to "simplify, simplify," just as good old Thoreau said.

Despite the heat and the tedium of the work, I am very satisfied with what we accomplished today.  I cooked supper for the family, and the simple peaceful action was refreshing in its way.  I hope that I feel the same tomorrow, tired but happy with the new environment I am creating for myself.