Thoughts on Women

I needed some quotes for something I'm writing, so I headed over to my best resource for that, QuoteGarden.com.  I love them, have been using them for years for research and general entertainment since I love quotes.

Tonight, I was looking for something interesting about strong women for a story I'm doing, and, while these aren't quite ones that fit the thing I'm working on, they are good ones nonetheless.

There is no such thing as an ugly woman.  ~Vincent Van Gogh
Oh, Vincent.  Just one more reason to love, love, love you.  As if I needed another....

Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman's toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace.  ~Marianne Williamson, "A Woman's Worth"
Exactly.  I don't think that needs commentary from me other than that.

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.  ~Author Unknown

Hmm.  Maybe.  Definitely the last part is true.  I am not sure about the first.  I have brains but no beauty (although Vincent thinks otherwise), and I don't think I'd trade.

Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

I have this one on my desk.  I've always thought that guys who don't like girls with brains are really just looking for a mirror or a toy....

They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.  ~Oliver Goldsmith

Oh, Goldsmith.  You old flirt.  I like the idea that he liked the idea of a woman being modest.  That quality certainly doesn't seem to be in high appreciation today.

That's probably enough.  I do have something else I'm doing, after all.  

Not Kyoto

- Written while listening to the soundtrack Suleyman the Magnificent, which you can find here.

For years, when the deepest longing to be somewhere else has struck me, Kyoto or Nara has always been the destination.  The little place in my heart that stores up treasures would tune its shamisen and play me memories of Todaiji, of the Philosopher's Path.

Tonight, I'm longing for the other end of the Silk Road, and it's not the crowded, graceful, grey-tiled roofs and reserved buddha-gazes of those ancient places that I want.  Another imperial city calls to me instead.

Ah, God, to be in Istanbul with the light fading from the sky, to see the Bosphorus changing from blue-green to watered silver silk under the light of a waxing moon.  To be able to look up and see the minarets piercing the growing night like needles occupied with stitching the heavens to the earth.  To be able to hear the muezzins of Sultanahmet and Ayasofya calling the azan, that incredible moment when the accidental harmonies inevitably occur, stopping the breath and the heart with only sound.

To stumble over rough cobblestones in cool air to a place where a meal as simple or as complicated as the palate can stand is waiting.  To be with friends who complement, contrast, embrace without questions, even if you've only known them for days that have somehow become lifetimes.

To feel History (very much with a capital H) surround you like an embroidered garment of many silken layers that flutter in the wind, showing now this embellishment, now this flaw in the pattern.  To be surrounded constantly by faded empires, to see the still-glorious monuments of world-rulers now returned to dust.

I yearn for Byzantium, for Constantinople, for Istanbul. Tonight I will sleep and walk there again, feel the cold marble of Ayasofya trail beneath my dreaming fingers, watch the crowds surge like the steady tides.  No distance can keep all of it from me.  One tiny corner I have managed to carry away for myself for the times - like now - when I have the most need.

The Gap

Have you ever been somewhere you just don't fit?  Maybe it used to be a place that made sense for you or maybe you used to be different.  Now, though, just the thought of having to be there makes you uneasy.

I have one of those places, and the dread of encountering it on a regular basis gets worse as time goes by.

When I'm at work or when I'm with my friends, I'm comfortable.  I feel like the people I am around know me on at least some type of basic functional level.  I am an individual with some sort of value.  Maybe they love me.  Maybe they hate my guts.  Whatever it is, they are basing those decisions on current knowledge of me as a person, not the offspring of so-and-so, not the assumption that all people everywhere do the same things in the same ways.

When I'm at this other place, I feel like people neither know who I really am nor very much care.  They know I'm not like them, and that's good enough.  I haven't followed the paths they have.  For a lot of reasons, I have wound up doing some fundamentally different things from most of them.   I didn't go to school here.  I don't work around here.  I am not married.  I'm not dating.  I don't have small children.  I like to travel mostly alone to places most of them consider bizarre, and I would love to live in most of those places as well.  I'm not passing any kind of value judgement here, that my way or their way is better.  I'm just saying they're not the same, and it causes problems.  Sometimes, I think maybe they might not know what to say to me.  And I suppose that's fair enough, since mostly I can say that's true from my side, too.  There is no commonality, and they're content to watch me from the corners of their eyes.

For my part, I endure and run.

It's all well and good to say, "Well, if it makes you that uncomfortable, why don't you stop going there?"  Reality tends to be a great deal less clear-cut and precise.  There are ties that bind, ties that become bonds in the strongest sense of that word.  I don't know how to get out of them.  I just know that every time I am there, I want to be away a little more and a little faster.

Variation on a Theme

In the past two days, I have found myself enthusing over Chris Thile's new Bach album (more about that later) and the YouTube video series Thug Notes.  My first reaction to these in juxtaposition was that they were very different things.  After a little thought, though, I'm not so sure.

What I appreciate about both of them is that they're taking things I traditionally enjoy (Bach, literature) and putting a distinctive personal touch on them (mandolin, thugness).  You have to be very clever and very good at what you do to pull reinterpretation of a masterwork off correctly.  You can take do pale imitations all day long, but to make a genuine new version of something already great means you have to understand the work in question thoroughly.

I think of it like Picasso's art.  Everyone associates him with Cubism and abstraction.  How many people remember that before he found his own new style that he made sure he was a master of traditional techniques?  He admonished people to "[l]earn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist."  It's not that he couldn't paint in the more traditional way; it's that he had mastered and surpassed it.

Even though it may seem odd to put a YouTube series in the same category with Thile and maybe both of them with Picasso to some people, I can't help but see their relationship to one another.  True interpretation leads to a new invention all of its own.

The Great Game

It's been a long time since I was in a country where I could use my haggling skills.  I know some people hate it, but I sort of love it.  It's a game.  How low can I get you to go?  The price you receive depends directly on the skills you bring.  It's like competitive shopping.

I always come armed to the teeth.  One thing about growing up in the Deep South, I know how to manipulate the male ego.  It's not something I do often.  I find it almost distatefully easy when it doesn't matter to me.  It's not something we're taught.  It's something we sort of absorb, I suppose.

Like all fine arts, there is a procedure for it.  I find something I want and ask its price.  Then I get all sweet and Southern.  I smile a lot. My accent becomes a little more pronounced.  I start my end of the game at half of whatever the asked me for in the first place.  Every Southern man knows that underneath that little butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth smile is a straight razor.  These guys know it, too, I'm sure.  Maybe all men recognize that steel under the sweet.  God help them if they don't.  After all, it's all a part of the game.  Whether they see it or not, I must say that the straight razor never seems to bother them....

I got a marriage proposal today.  I wanted a scarf, and I could have come away with a husband.  This is another part of the game.  "You're so beautiful.  You're so fascinating.  Won't you give me a little more money if I tell you this?"  Perhaps this is their version of the straight-razor.

Again, Southern woman training comes in handy for that.  We grow up surrounded by gallant men who are so full of crap that hip boots are commonly required.  I know how to smile and say, "Aw.  Thank you, honey," and walk off to the next challenge.

And really, everybody is happy at the end of it.   Somehow the items I get this way mean more to me.  I have a ring I got in Costa Rica that was my best ever haggle. I paid less than half of his asking price. Every time I put it on, I think about it and smile to myself.  That was a good day.

Today was, too. Today I was sweetheart, darling, and I think even precious one time.  That's fine.  I got good prices on everything I purchased, and I felt like I won a State Championship.  They got what was undoubtedly a good profit on me, since that is the way of these things, and they also got to feel all manly and stuff.  Win-win.  Totally win-win.  I wish we did this back home.  I would probably shop more if we did.

Getting Ready

Tomorrow my journey to Turkey begins.  I've been waiting for it so long that it hardly seems possible that I will finally get on a plane and start the long, long process of getting there.

Today was dedicated to packing.  I got out my new bag and loaded it.  I love that thing.  It was some of the best money I've ever spent.  While I was trying not to have to carry a rolling carry-on, I still have one for my camera gear and so forth.  Everything else, and I do mean EVERYTHING else fit inside that new back and I'm almost ten pounds under the weight limit.  It's surreal.

Every trip is the beginning of a new way of looking at the world.  Every journey opens up a new perspective.  I feel as if this one is going to truly momentous, though.  Maybe it's because of how long it is.  Maybe it's the distance I'm going.  I don't know.  It just feels like I'm on the edge of a big cliff waiting for the courage to leap.  How thrilling.

That Was Unexpected

I went on a trip recently.  I wasn't expecting much from it.  In fact, I had totally negative expectations.  I was grumpy.  I stomped my feet.  I did not want to go.

Shows what I know.

I had a great trip.  Unexpectedly, I found myself with lots of people whose company I really enjoyed.  Some of them were old friends rediscovered.  Some of them were brand new acquaintances I hope to know better.  We had meals, saw the sights, talked together, and it was refreshing in a way I really needed.

Additionally, we got lots of new information and ideas to bring back to our school.  We had conversations with administration at the school and district level.  That hasn't happened in a long time.  I feel more positive about the upcoming school year than I have in a long, long time.

The most unexpected thing was meeting someone who caught my attention.  He's cute.  He's smart.  He's interesting.  Of course, I did what I always do in such prime situations.  I ran like hell, couldn't even talk much to him, he unnerved me so much.  (Sigh.)  I don't know if I'll see him again, but it's likely.  We're both "local," so I imagine we'll run into each other at some point.  Another chance to run away on another day....

Despite my general lack of sense and courage, the trip I was dreading turned into something quite refreshing.  It's nice when that happens.  Hopeful, sort of....

Preparing for Travel

I have a couple of trips coming up, and although I like to travel once I'm on the road, the process leading up to that moment is always mixed for me.  There is such a mixture of anticipation and dread that comes with heading out the door.

I think part of it is the million things that have to be taken care of before I can leave.  There's the laundry, the cleaning, the shopping, the packing.  Just the packing itself is enough to be discouraging.  There are money matters and last-minute crises.  It gets overwhelming.

There's also the leaving of the animals.  Yoda especially has been through this enough with me to know that when suitcases are spotted, separation is imminent.  She hates my suitcases and goes back and forth between packing herself inside them, refusing to get out or be removed and clawing the outside with those discrete sabers she keeps at the ends of her paws.

A strange immobility engulfs me.  There are things I know I need to do.  Minutes click away, and still I wait.  Since this action (or inaction) actually causes more stress and last-minute problems, I can't for the life of me figure out why I do it.  But I do.  Every single time.

Even this blog is just a form of it.  Soon the trip will be on, and I will be involved in it.  I just have to find a way to start the ball rolling to begin with.

Things I'd Rather Not Consider

Today, my mother came down to go through the storage building behind my house.  There's not much space in it, so only one person can fit between the stacks of stuff at a time.  She was going through to weed out things she knew were old and of no use.  Later on, I'll go through and purge my own stuff.

Most of what was thrown out today goes all the way back to my grandmother and grandfather.  We threw out old empty boxes, broken items, and all those other types of debris that collects in storage spaces.  One of the last things I helped with was pulling down a huge box of my grandmother's clothes that had been put there when I first came to live here and cleaned out the closets.

It's been there for years.  When I moved in, my mother was not able to handle going through all the stuff, so we just boxed and stored it.  Today, she sorted, and although I could tell that she was remembering Granny, she was able to get through it.

Late this afternoon, she called me from home to talk about something, and the stuff in storage came up as a topic.  I was talking about things I plan to move into the empty space that is slowly emerging, and she laughed.  "I don't know who's going to clean all that stuff out when you're gone," she said.  I made some kind of non-committal noise to which she replied, "I guess that's not really your problem at that point, though, is it?"

It's one of two things that hit me hard today.  The other, stupidly enough, was a set of Star Wars onesies from ThinkGeek.  Both of them revolve around the same thing.  I am getting too old to have someone to clean up after me when I'm gone. I'm getting too old to find someone to grow old with.  I'm just getting too old.

Yesterday, in my course readings for Turkey, I read about Evliya Chelebi, a travel writer in the late 17th century.  He considered his life dedicated to wanderlust, wanting to see and record every possible thing.  He deliberately chose not to pursue marriage and a family so he would have every possible opportunity to go.  There are certainly significant benefits to being single and childless - I can pick up and go wherever I wish, whenever I wish, stay as long as I wish (or at least as long as I can afford) - but I'm not sure I really believe that these outweigh the drawbacks.  Who is there to share it all with?  Who can I leave any of it to?

Most of the time, I'm happy.  Most of the time, I'm okay.  (And before I start sounding too much like a Bob Dylan song, I'll quit that.) Just sometimes, just today, though, I'm not.

Travel Companion

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where –" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
~ Alice and the Cheshire Cat, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
____________

For a long time, I have wanted to have something to take pictures with on my travels.  I suspect this started when I saw Amalie.  I (and the rest of the entire universe) loved it when she sent her father's gnome travelling.

As a part of the Teachers for Global Classrooms program, I met people who had been doing this for years.  One of them has a sock monkey who actually has his own Facebook page.  Another has a laminated cut out of her high school's mascot.  I started thinking about it again when I saw theirs, but I couldn't find anything that was small enough not to be a nuisance.  I know enough about myself as a traveler to know that if it's a hassle, I'm not going to fool with it.  I considered several items - a small beanie of our school mascot, an exceedingly tiny and grumpy sock monkey, a small blue owl someone gave me - but none of them seemed right.

A couple of weeks ago, a teacher buddy of mine started putting up pictures of a tiny finger puppet of Vincent Van Gogh she'd gotten at a museum.  I had a forehead-smacking moment when I saw it.  I actually have the William Shakespeare from that same series.  I bought it at the Frazier Museum in Louisville the first year I read for the AP test.  It's been guarding my Diet Mt. Dew in my classroom since that summer.

However, I didn't want to travel with Will.  I have so many things that are Shakespeare.  I love him.  I just didn't want to travel with him.  I looked over the line of the puppets from the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild for another option. They're all so cute and funny that the kid in me wanted all of them.  The adult in charge of the checkbook managed to limit that other aspect to purchasing two:  the Cheshire Cat and Emily Dickinson.

I got Chessy today.  I am pretty positive that he will be the one I travel with.  The quote at the top is most of the reason why, but there are other quotes that fit every long journey I've ever been on.  The one that springs to mind is the famous:

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "otherwise you wouldn't have come here."

As anybody who has ever traveled knows, there comes a point (maybe the exact moment you break out the suitcases) that this quote becomes painfully true....

I also like Chessy because he's a cat. That fits in with many things, the real-life furry beasts sleeping on my furniture that I miss when I'm travelling, the mankei neko I collected in Japan, the mascot of my school.  Cats are also good travel buddies because they remind you to be curious, to dress simply but with elegance, to enjoy any and all luxuries that come your way, and to sniff at unfamiliar things (possibly also while smacking them lightly with your paw) before accepting them.

It's a silly little thing, but I am looking forward to taking Chessie with me to Turkey.  If I can get a picture of him inside the Hagia Sofia, then that's going to be a very good thing.

Ah. So That's What That's All About.....

Gifts from Furry Children

Yesterday, I had a migraine of the "hammer of God" variety that is always such fun.  I don't really know what caused it, but I suspect it has something to do with the upcoming "supermoon" we're expecting tonight.  My headaches seem tied to the phases of the moon as well as the phases of my body and the vagaries of the weather.  Since there was no supermegastorm destroying the world yesterday, I am guessing it was lunar pull.  Me and the ocean, I guess. The headache hit me hard and early, I took a Maxalt, and the rest of the day melted away into a hazy blur.

My cats and dogs hovered around me all day.  I suppose it was their way of checking on me.  I'm pretty sure they know when I'm sick.  Chewie spent most of his day sprawled out next to the couch.  Dillon, my little cat, stayed on me or beside me all day and on into the night.  It was nice to feel loved.

Other contributions from members of my furry family were less appreciated.  I got up this morning and stumbled for the shower without turning the light on.  The day after a migraine that bad my eyes tend to be fairly light sensitive.  I got clean and returned to my bedroom to dress, and when I finally turned the light on, the last of the critters' kindnesses was neatly laid across the foot of my bed:  a dead mouse.

It was bloodless and quite still.  This undoubtedly means that in the night while I was sleeping, either Dillon or Pearl brought me a mouse.  I know it wasn't Yoda; her Imperial Majesty doesn't lower herself to pursue food unless it's the canned kind.  Probably it was my big grey fluffy lioncat, Pearl.  She is the household huntress.  I keep thinking about her thought processes.  I imagine it went something like this.  "Mama has been sick all day.  There has been an absence of patting and love for me, even though I am furry and gorgeous.  Food will make her better.  I will bring her food.  I will provide.  She will be happy again, and patting and love will fall from the skies."  And voila, mouse.

This isn't the first time this has happened.  Despite all the efforts of me and my pest control guy, the occasional little brown field mouse finds its way in the house.  I saw Pearl stalking one last night in the laundry area.  I can always tell when she's scented something. She stares into odd nooks and crannies. She has a specific noise she makes when the is on the hunt, and her level of complete dedication to it is a little frightening.  There has been at least one other time when I woke up to find a mouse-present at the foot of my bed.

My grandmother's Siamese, Sammy, used to do that all the time.  He was twenty-something pounds of muscle, and when he was young, he'd go hunting in the field behind their house and bring her big field rats.  He'd lay them neatly on the back door mat, and since Nana hated all forms of mice, every time she'd look out the back door and see it, she'd scream.  I suppose Sammy thought she was screaming in joy.  He probably thought, "Yes.  I have made my human loudly happy.  Success."

As for my mouse gift, I removed and disposed of it.  The comforter is even now in the washer.  While I would really like not to wake up to another gift of this kind, I will take it in the feline spirit in which it was given.  It's nice to have something love you enough that it wishes to care for you, I suppose, even if it does come in the form of a dead rodent.

Coming Apart at the Seams

Today, during the process of getting my daily dose of stomach acid reading about Turkey, I came across an article about Brazil.  I suppose the news service I use just decided to lump all the protests together.  The whole damn world is falling apart and the governments thereof are sitting in a corner covering their eyes and ears and pretending it's all okay.

I was in Brazil last summer at this very time.  It is surreal for me to think back over the oddly empty and quiet government buildings that we toured in Brasilia as now being the center of a protest movement.  I look at the pictures of the senate building, all clean lines and Niemeyer angles, and I'm trying to imagine that people overran it and are standing on top of it, that the government ran away.  It's either pure insanity or the beginning of hope.  God knows I'm not wise enough to know which.  Maybe it's both.  Maybe change is made of both.

Some of the protests that have happened lately are very specific.  People have a clear message for their government.  You're spending too much of our money.  You're stealing a bunch of our resources and running away.  You're sticking your fingers into our privacy, our choices.   You're destroying our freedom. We don't like it.  You should quit.

Some of them are not.  People are just generally pissed and gathered.  There is an unnamed sense of unhappiness that spreads or a small thing that touches off a deep-seated pocket of explosive issues.

What's happening to us all?  I used to think that it was just our government here in the States that was fairly out of touch with its constituents.  We always have some scandal or ridiculous sneaky crap going on.  If the people running our nation used half as much passionate ingenuity in solving problems and bettering their country as they do trying to line their own pockets, accrue power, clandestinely pursue illegal activities, and sink the "other guy," we'd probably all live in solid-platinum houses on Mars.  (I'm just saying.)   It's probably been that way since 1776.  Maybe there were times when it abated, but maybe it's always there when governments are more worried about their own power than they are about the good of the people they represent.  Right now seems to be one of those moments where everyone everywhere is just tired of it.

What will happen to us all?  What's coming next?  As always, that old Yeats poem is sneaking around in the back of my head.  Clearly, the center is not holding.  What now?  I'm afraid we are living in what that ancient Chinese proverb calls "interesting times," and you know all about that.....

Turkey Again

I am keeping up with the news on Turkey daily.  What I see makes me more and more concerned.  Something that started as a protest over a public space has turned into an issue big enough to rend a nation.

I do not really feel qualified to comment much on the events I see there.  I am at best an interested outsider.  I can't understand some of the things I see, though, and feel compelled to ask a question.  How do leaders get so out of touch that they refuse to hear the voices of those who put them in power?  If unrest suddenly breaks out in large sections of a nation, I'm not sure I think an elected official should use threats and force to keep themselves in power.

I can't form absolute opinions about Turkey's current situation because everything I'm getting about it is from a few sources, and, of course, both sides are accusing each other of editing for greatest political currency.  As I scroll through images of tear gas, emergency hospitals, water cannons, and the like, though, I wonder if it looks the same to us on the outside as it does to the people affected.  I throw my mind back to the Occupy Wall Street protests, and I remember how divided my own nation was about that.  All I guess I can say with any certainty is that it looks an awful lot like a situation that will end in many more people being wounded or killed.

In addition to thinking about the situation in general, I am also concerned about my upcoming trip. I don't mean to be selfish.  Surely the events that are unfolding are so much more important than just one trip for one group of foreign tourists.  However, I have been excited about this trip for a long time now, and as I have come to know more about this country, so too has my eagerness to see and experience it all increased. I can't help but wonder if we will even get to go at all, if all this will just wind up being a place I yearn to see and never have access to.  I also have to say that I sometimes wonder if we do go if we'll wind up caught in the riptide of this particular moment in history.  I wonder if, once again, being an American will be an uncomfortable thing abroad.

Mostly, though, I am just wondering if Turkey will manage to find a middle way or if it will collapse into the same sort of partisan turmoil that devours the land to its south.  I can only hope that the different groups can come together and somehow find peace.

Flying Roadtrip

Thursday, my best friend and I took a flying roadtrip west.  We started in Port Gibson to see the giant golden hand on the top of First Presbyterian.  From there, we went on the back road that never ends to see Windsor Ruins.  Finally, we finished up in Natchez where we ate at Mammy's Cupboard and toured Longwood before we had to turn back home.

I'd been on mostly this same trip last year and shot a ton of pictures.  It was so different having my friend along.  We talked in that way that people who have known each other forever can do as we traveled, and it wasn't necessarily that anything earthshattering was said.  It was just nice to have someone to say something to.

For both of us, this was sort of an abbreviated version of a long trip we took in 5th grade, the Mississippi Trip.  Both of us remember bits and pieces of that tour of our state.  My friend had a Polaroid camera, and she took pictures everywhere we went.  On this trip, she had her husband's good Nikon instead.  There was a gentle echo of that other trip so long ago as we traveled.

The sites themselves were much as I saw them last time.  Windsor didn't have a carload of thugs napping under the shade trees this time, and part of the single-strand wire fence built to keep people out of the structure was down, but everything else was just like it was before.  The big gold hand in Port Gibson was still large and golden.  Longwood was still frozen in time, silent, majestic, dreaming.

Of them all, Longwood always moves me most.  I don't know why I keep going back there.  There's something about the innovation and the forethought that Haller Nutt put into the design of that house that makes the unfinished part so much more poignant. The potential for wonder that is revealed in all the existing details is tantalizing and somehow saddening as well.  What would it have been if it could have been finished?  Would it still stand today, or would it have been torn down, burned up, forgotten and discarded?

Every tour I've had through the house has been a bit different depending on the docent.   The only thing I don't like about any of these tours is that the guides don't give you enough time inside simply to absorb the history and the feeling of the place.  It deserves a moment of quiet contemplation, of silence, of listening to the wind through the oaks outside.  It deserves a moment for the mind to paint the red brick walls with lustrous plaster, to create the missing statues in the domed niches, to remove the planks that hide the interior or the onion dome and add the mirrors that would have lit the whole house with their reflection.  Instead, there is sort of a brief patter, a quick "run-through," and next thing you know, you're being ushered politely, gently out the graceful front doors and into the nuclear heat of a Mississippi summer where, quite frankly, it is not possible to imagine much of anything that doesn't involve glacial cold.

It feels like there are a million untold stories in Longwood.  I am sure this is true of every house, past and present.  There is just something lingering in the air and the objects there, though, that invites imagination to embroider details.  There are paintings of those who lived there through time, and there are the very beds and books they used and loved.  The hand-drawn plans of what was to be created line the walls.  Tools and packing crates with hand-written address labels sit as though workers will return to tidy up soon.  Objects picked with care to provide comfort and beauty remain.  It feels like a place that lives in a half-life, wanting to be more but knowing that somnolent state is all that it will ever know.

Today is the 149th anniversary of Haller Nutt's death.  Heartbroken by the way his fates fell during the Civil War, he contracted pneumonia and succumbed.  I can't help but think that when he died, he must have been so worried about everything, his failing fortunes, his family and what would become of them after he was gone, the treatment he'd received at the hands of a government he had not defied.  He was a brilliant man by all accounts, and that shattered half-finished magnificent experiment of a house is terribly, terribly sad.  I wondered how often he stood in the center of that main floor or roamed the upper levels forbidden to modern tourists, worrying and hoping about the future, seeking some way, any way to bring some level of control and sanity back to his world.

I don't know if I'll make this same trip again, and if I do, I don't know that I will  go back to Longwood.  Likely, at some point, I will travel that way again.  There is so much in Natchez to see that I wouldn't have to go there to have something to do.  I am pretty sure I will make my way up that curving and treelined drive again, though.  The sad majesty of what awaits at the end seems to demand it.

Alif the Unseen

“A girl he loved had decided she did not love him--at least, not enough. How was such a problem usually addressed? Surely not with the clandestine exchange of books and computer surveillance and recourse to the jinn.” 
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
_____________________

I saw this book mentioned on Twitter or Facebook by one of the NPR book bloggers, and I was curious enough based upon what they said to go find it on Amazon.  Once I read the full premise, I got a sample on my Kindle.  From that point I was pretty much hooked.

I've never read anything like Alif.  It's the story of a young man of Indian-Arab heritage who lives in an unnamed totalitarian Gulf emirate.  He has created a separate online life for himself.  He works as a programmer/hacker whose programs serve any organization fighting the restrictions of the government.

He has fallen in love with a beautiful, intelligent woman from a rich family.  When that relationship falls apart, he decides to use his computing skills to grant her last request of him, that she should never see him again.  What comes of his fit of anger and sadness is unexpected.  It will lead him into the world of the jinn, a world that has always lain side by side with his everyday world without his knowledge.

Alif is part political protest, part fairy tale.  Some of the events feel very current since it seems that hardly a week goes by without mention of some government who is seeking to control their people by controlling their access to the Internet.  The world of the jinn creeps up on the reader in the same way it creeps up on Alif and his companions.  By the time he's immersed in the deepest part of it, their city and way of living seems entirely possible.  Different, but possible.

I guess this book fits most neatly into the category of fantasy with a side-order of sci-fi.  That label is a bit misleading, though.  It spans other genres; bildungsroman, political theory, and philosophy are all there, too. There is a muted but still moving love story.  Issues of gender and cross-cultural communication are explored.

Then there's the hero himself.  Alif, like most of us, thinks his actions and his motivations are fairly good ones.    Even though he is selfish, careless with those who care for him, and self-isolated from the world around him, he thinks the way he's chosen to live is the right path. What he discovers is that reality has a way of stripping away illusion, even the ones we keep about ourselves.  This, then, is a story of a person becoming attuned to the real told through the profoundly imaginary.  It's lovely.

One of the most important things this book addresses is what it means to be free.  How can we keep ourselves free?  What should we do with freedom when we have it?  What is the price of freedom?  While this may seem trite, the way Alif deals with it is thought-provoking, especially in a time in which government surveillance of our online lives has been confirmed.  (Hi, PRISM.  Scan me.  Go ahead.  Scan me.)

This book is probably the best thing I've read this summer.  In fact, it's one of the best books I've read in quite awhile, period.  I would love to see some kind of sequel with more of the world of the jinn in it.  I think the possibility for that exists in a couple of ways.  I don't know if Ms. Wilson will pursue this storyline or not. What I do know is that as it stands, Alif the Unseen was a profoundly original work in a sea of copycat fiction.  It is very much worth your time.

First Blackberrying of the Year

After walking the dogs this afternoon, I walked over to the blackberry bramble at the edge of my pasture and looked over the current crop.  I picked a few, just a small handful, and came back inside.  Chewie, being Chewie, watched me pick the berries and eat them, and he started nibbling them off the bushes.  I laughed at him, and he stopped long enough to give me a giant toothy grin before returning to his efforts.  He's a strange dog, but he's all mine.

After dinner, I kept thinking about the blackberries. I decided that I would go up to our country place tomorrow and see if the brambles there were bearing yet.  Then I looked up some recipes on Pinterest.  This led to combing through my Granny's recipe box looking for her cobbler recipe.  I realized that I had to have more and that I didn't want to wait.

The beauty of summer is that the days linger gloriously.  Even though it was fairly late, the tops of the trees were still golden. Grabbing a leash and Chewie, I headed out to our place in the country and the tons and tons of blackberries that grow there. Chewie loves it there.  I had the windows down, and as soon as we came around the last curve before the gate to the property, he sniffed the air and started woofing softly.  We made our way down to the brambles, and I picked until it got too dark to ensure I wasn't about to step in the middle of a snake. Chewie and I found our way back to the car in the last blue-purple light of sunset and the dim glow of a fingernail moon.

Blackberries are tricky and imperious little devils.  They are not a "something for nothing" fruit.  There is nothing docile or generous about them.  They're primadonnas.    If you go to pick what they have produced, they are going to take from you as well.  Usually I get hung on one of the vines and cut my arm or hand open. I have always thought of it as the "blood sacrifice" required to complete the picking. Today, as I carefully reached around the thorns and plucked the ripe berries, I felt the waving tendrils of green grab at my shorts, tenaciously hook my tshirt, and finally one reached out and snagged a handful of my hair. It was surprisingly strong, and it required a little careful finesse to free myself.  If you flail once a bramble captures you, it's kind of like that plant Devil's Snare from Harry Potter - more and more of them grab hold making the situation worse. Once I managed to extricate myself, I apparently had paid my tithe.  Nothing else attacked me.

Chewie watched the whole thing from a safe distance.  He ran careful circles around the reach of the brambles, caused a large wild turkey to explode upwards into the treetops with a sound like a localized hurricane, rolled rapturously in the tall grass, and wore his nose off chasing scents.  Eventually, he flopped down and watched me, moving only when I went to another section of the bramble.  I offered him a berry I'd picked, but he apparently had his fill earlier.  He sniffed it, mouthed it, and spit it out before looking up at me with a hopeful wagging tail.  Apparently, he's decided he'd rather have his bacon treats instead.

In a fairly short time, I managed to fill a quarter of the gallon-sized ziplock bag I'd taken with me.  I brought the berries home, washed them, and put them in the refrigerator.  I don't know what I'll do with them.  I might indulge in one of the recipes I found.  I might make a mini-cobbler.  Probably, though, I'll just nibble them whole and savor that special taste of summer and home and deep woods pasture land.  That is probably special enough a recipe all on its own.

My Name Is Red

I've been working on My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk for about a week now in my continuing effort to learn more about the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in general.  Pamuk, a Nobel Prize winner, was recommended by one of the leaders of our trip, and My Name is Red in particular was specified as a good starting place for his work.  I got it on Kindle and headed into it.

I wasn't prepared for the journey that awaited me.  For general information, you can click through to the Wikipedia page. The novel deals with a community of artists in 16th century Istanbul, the miniaturists.  Each chapter is told by a different voice, but the main characters repeat throughout.  This reminded me a lot of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.  (I know.  I see links where there probably are none, the the similarities are remarkable.)  The chapters are short and intricate, like the very miniatures the characters are commissioned with creating.  At first, I had no idea what was going on and who was involved.  It starts very much in medias res, and the first voice you hear is actually the voice of a dead man.  Once I got used to the flow of the novel and started to figure out who was linked to whom, it was charming.

The work has so much to enjoy.  First of all, there is all the historical research that must have been involved.  The time period is described so clearly.  That, however, pales when compared to the technical aspect of its creation. I cannot imagine the difficulty of maintaining no fewer than twelve narrative voices, one of which is actually the "split personality" of another.  Each character has a distinct and realistic voice and view on the world. It's an amazing accomplishment to see the world through so many eyes.

Woven into the plot of murder and intrigue is a healthy dose of folklore, custom, and even costuming.  It was a perfect choice for me to read just now because it perfectly accompanied the course text and readings we had.  So many of the things the text described were humanized and made accessible through the story.  Stories about famous characters from folk tales, poetry, songs, patterns of behavior, even architecture is presented in such glorious detail.  Every chapter really was a little picture.

I have another book by Pamuk, his Istanbul, which is quite different, a set of memoirs of the city he grew up in and still lives in today.  I have a few other things I want to read first, but it's in my near future.  It will be interesting to see how he continues to reveal this place I am becoming increasingly more and more fascinated with.

Lightning (Bug and Other)

As I came home tonight, the sky was full of stars.  Suddenly, though, everything flickered.  The sky itself was green for seconds, parts of seconds, and then it plunged back into the deepest blue.  Lightning from the oncoming storm had ripped away the illusion of calm.

We're still too far away from whatever is coming to hear the thunder, but everything has that horrible stillness that happens right before a big rain, and the last two days, I've been sick in the bed with a migraine, so I am guessing that something epic is marching towards us.

I took the dogs out for a late evening stroll, and as we made our way through the pasture, thousands of little tiny flashes of light filled the low tree limbs and the underbrush.  The lightning bugs, usually to be found at the tops of the trees, were low because of the atmospheric pressure.  It looked like the edges of the woods had been strung with countless fairy lights, but even that beauty managed to be ominous because of the reason for its presence.

There are so many other things that rumble in the distance, flash and then are gone, before sweeping over us.  Of course, I've been reading about the protests in Turkey almost ceaselessly.  It started with a flash, a sudden moment of the people together, and now it has escalated into something widespread and lasting, a storm of some duration.  It's amazing.  I pray that it won't turn any bloodier than it already is.

I am so impressed by the way the protesters are behaving.  The news articles I've read say that everything is kept clean by the protesters themselves even though there are massive (and growing) numbers of them present, that they are sharing supplies and protection with each other, that they have the support of the people in the shops and in the police to the point that stores are opening to them for places of refuge and police are not reporting to work because they refuse to be a part of confronting them.  Even while the Prime Minister calls these protests "undemocratic," even his vice secretary is apologizing for the way they protests have been handled.  It seems that everyone except one is on the same side.  I've never seen anything like it.

The more I read and study of the past, the more fascinated I am with this present.  I pray that we still get to go.  I have to see this remarkable place and these remarkable people for myself.

Not Politics. Just Hope.

I've been watching the news on Turkey carefully the past couple of days.  I also follow some people on Instagram who are there in the protests, and I see things on Tumblr from them, too.  The images have been both profoundly distressing, police in riot gear, water cannons, clouds of tear gas,  people being carried away on stretchers, blood streaming down faces. The situation, something that began over saving a public park from allegedly corrupt development, has acted as a spark to an apparently vast powder keg of other issues and has spread all over the country.  The seams are coming apart in Turkey.

And yet, there have been other images that somehow give a kind of hope in the grimness, pictures of peaceful protesters holding up books to the police who stand behind them in riot gear, groups that normally do not have much to do with each other standing shoulder to shoulder.  These immediately pulled me back to what I've been reading in my course texts.  The great strength of the Ottoman Empire was in its tolerance and acceptance of "the other," according to the book we have been required to read.  Unlike most of the rest of medieval Europe, at its height, the Empire based worth on what you could do as much as where you were from or whom you worshipped.  Different did not have to mean evil or marked for destruction under their rule.  Instead, "different" mean exactly that, not the same, but not unworthy.  Even the "big three" religions managed to find a way to coexist there in what, when compared to the rest of the world at that time, can be considered to be mostly peaceful.  Not total equality or total freedom, but mostly peacful. It was not any sort of democratic or Utopian paradise, but it was something beyond the Inquisition and the pogroms.

That same idea of tolerance and unity seems to be showing up in these protesters.  One news article I read talked about how people from different ethnic groups, people from different regions, even people from rival soccer teams are coming together in these protests against the increasing strictness of the current government.  Even though the violence and the injuries that are accompanying them are terrible, there is something remarkable about that unification of differences.

As the readings for this course have made me more aware of the history of the Ottoman Empire, I have realized suddenly just how much the lands it used to control are still in flux, still searching for themselves in the wake of its decline.  Surely most of us probably think of nations as something permanent, something always there, even those of us living in a nation as new as this one.  The truth of it is that the people of Turkey (and everywhere else that the Ottomans once governed) are less than ninety years out of the rule of a government that held some of them, for better or for worse, for more than six centuries.  The powers of the West that carved the dead empire up into pieces and parcels for themselves after its demise have only prolonged the process of growth, of a necessary forging of identity.  Therefore, even though they are standing on ancient foundations, they are new construction, and probably we should not be surprised that they change as that process continues.

I very much hope that the protests in Turkey come to some form of peaceful and...well...right...resolution.  That may sound very naive.  It may actually be so.  I do not pretend to be wise enough to know what "right" is in this case.  It's not my land; they aren't my issues, even though one of the sources of unrest is the NATO presence on the Syrian border.  However, Turkey has been making great strides economically and a time of seemingly slow renaissance for its place in the world has started.  I think it would be terrible if that forward motion and self-definition were damaged by the usual suspects:  selfishness, powermongering, and pride.  Again, I will say that I don't know who is right and who needs to change in this moment.   I hope that, even as controversial as it might be, the legacy of that seven-hundred-year old empire can give all that was good and wise of unity and coexistence to its children and allow its darkness and bloodshed to fall away.

Summer

...and the incredible need to get out of here.  Summer.  The season where I'm rested enough to be restless.  Summer.  The time when I'm still enough to feel the lack of motion most acutely.

My parents are watching me out of the corners of their eyes again.  I don't know exactly what has brought on this new phase of my life.  They seem...I don't know...scared of what I'm going to do.  I am carrying on like I always do.  I don't perceive that I am acting any differently than usual, except of course for the fact that I'm not stressed out of my mind and I'm getting plenty of sleep.

I'm not sure what it is that they're scared I'm going to do.  Quit my job?  Purchase a big-engined fast-moving car and take off?  Shack up with somebody?  Get a giant dragon tattoo that covers my entire back? Leave and never come back?

Ah.  That last one. Maybe it's that last one.

I have a streak of pure Gypsy in my feet, that need to travel, get out, see "other where," see "other who"; they're absolutely happy if they don't even have to go in to town to Wal-Mart regularly. Maybe this is where the problem lies.

I don't know.  I just feel nervous, like I've somehow broken some kind of code I was unaware even existed, and now I must be, as Emily Dickinson said, "handled with a chain."  I hate that feeling of walking on eggshells, especially when I don't know how they got underfoot to start with.

Walking

The walls started to close in on me this afternoon.  I've been working on my book for the Ottoman Cultures seminar for the past two days, and even though it's been fascinating, I needed to get out.  I finished the text, got out my sneakers, and headed outside.

In addition to the need to get out of the chair and do something, I needed to clear my head.  Right now, it's going around and around in useless circles over an issue about which I can do nothing.  It's one of those things that I'm just going to have to accept, but it's hard for me to do that right now.  I'm assuming time will do what it always does, give me perspective and some relief (although this might be one of those Edna St. Vincent Millay "Time Does Not Bring Relief" moments...).

I haven't gone out walking in a long time.  In the afternoons when I've come home from school, I have felt too tired to care.  Today, though, it seemed like the right thing to do.

I didn't walk far, maybe a mile or so, but it is amazing how much peace can be found in movement.  As I walked, I focused on the simple act of putting feet down and picking them up.  I noticed the traffic, the various plants blooming, the red-tailed hawk that glided lazily from its hunting perch on the powerline in the pasture to the edge of the woods and disappeared.  I was able to put away the unsolvable thing as long as I was moving.

Now I'm back, and after a long hot shower, I am watching TV.  Maybe if I do this often enough, I can subjugate everything else and keep that red-tailed hawk calm instead.

A Million Little Things

It's amazing to me how much stuff slips through the cracks during the school year.  Today, I vacuumed, steam cleaned, washed all my bedding down to the mattress and sunned the feather mattress, threw out enough junk and old mail to half fill a giant trash bag (this may be the week the trash men lynch me), rearranged my living room, put slip covers back on my couches, swapped out a small bookcase for a much larger one, and renewed two magazine subscriptions that had lapsed.

The sad part is that I'm only about halfway done with all the things I need to take care of urgently.  Before I can get to the things that can wait but need to be done (like my closet.  oh my god.  my closet....), I have to get the house to a place where I wouldn't be ashamed if somebody came into it.  I probably have one more day of heavy cleaning before it will come to that point.  Then I'll just be sorting through the piles I try so HARD not to make during the school year but that always seem to accumulate on the flat surfaces anyway.

At some point, I have to stop and do a lot of reading for Turkey.  Hey, you know what?  This is feeling a LOT like the school year, after all.  (sigh)  Well, I have a pile of clean sheets I need to get out of the dryer so I can reassemble my bed.

Basic Research

"Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." ~ Wernher von Braun

This amused the heck out of me.  I think I must do craploads of "basic research."

Little Red Blooms

I saw them when I got out of the car at Wal-Mart.  Their blue vests and hats marked them as did their gesture of trying to hand something to the people passing by.  I could see the little flickering of red in their hands.  I felt something inside me tighten up, and I reached for my wallet, gritted my teeth.  It was Memorial Day, and the Buddy Poppies were out again.

As you can see from the picture, I do not object to the Buddy Poppies.  I buy at least one every year.  Whenever I see the American Legion or the DAV handing them out, I always contribute.  The thing that made that little spring inside my clockwork heart wind tighter was what these tiny red blossoms mean to me.

Almost every male member of my family has served in the military.  Both my grandfathers were WWII veterans, one almost freezing to death in Italy while the other went all over the place loading bombs onto planes.  My dad was sent to Vietnam while he was in the Coast Guard. My uncles were Vietnam-era Marines; one of them also served in the Coast Guard after his tour with the Corps ended.

It has been just a little less than a year since I lost the uncle who served in both branches, my Uncle Gary.  He spent the last years of his life in a veterans' care facility in Kosciusko after having a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed on one side.  For whatever reason, even though there are so many veterans in my life, those little red flowers always make me think of him.

I miss him.  Even though at the end, his condition and his medication kept him from being mentally sharp, I miss going to see him and talking with him.  Today, seeing those little flowers again brought the end of it back, the long hours in the hospital waiting room, the last time I saw him.

I believe in donating to the men who hand the poppies out.  They are men who served our country and who continue to serve it still by making sure our veterans are taken care of.  They are men like my grandfathers, like my dad, like my uncle, like my friends, like my students, like all those men and women who have left behind comfort and safety to do what was needed.  Their sacrifices deserve to be remembered, whether those sacrifices were physical on the field of combat or those much-harder-to-spot renderings of psychological health, family closeness, peaceful dreams at night.  I cannot do much about most of these things.  I can, however, do this one little thing, show my respect in this one way.  Maybe it means something.

Through Linoleum

"They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze.  They should photograph me through linoleum." ~ Tallulah Bankhead

Exactly.

Weary, Stale, Flat, and Unprofitable

O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
~ Hamlet I.ii. 132-134.
____________

There's sun this afternoon, but the greyness I woke up to better suited my mood.  I can't shake this bone deep sadness. Everything seems totally useless.  As always, Hamlet says it better than I can.

I wish I could just put my dogs in my car and drive until there was no more road left.  Maybe somewhere along the way, there would be something to take it all away.  Maybe if I drove fast enough, I could leave it behind, chasing after me like an old dog snapping at my rear wheels.

Or maybe I will just sink into Istanbul, dissolve there, turn into a section of a golden-tiled mosaic.  I feel as old, as trapped, as fragile, as unreal as any Byzantine wall.  Maybe if I was frozen there, then this feeling currently gnashing its pointed teeth on my soul would no longer be able to rip me apart.

They say as you get older, wisdom and perspective are supposed to come.  I wish that a lessening of feeling came with it, too.  I wish my heart was marble, cold, hard, and unalterable, requiring the strike of a hammer and a chisel to harm it.  As it stands, it's too easily damaged, too easily hurt.

Clean

One of my favorite sensations in the world is to slip between cool cotton sheets, clean and dry after taking a long, hot shower.  It earns double-wonder points if the bed has a freshly sunned and fluffed feather mattress on it and if the sheets are right out of the dryer and still fragrant with fabric softener.  This seems like a little thing, I'm sure, but sometimes the little things are the best things.

I still remember after Katrina when I had no power for two weeks.  Although I had running water, the hot summer and the hard work of trying to clear all the downed trees from my yard covered me in sweat constantly.  In the evenings when the sun had gone down and things cooled off somewhat, I would stumble into my bathroom and take a cold shower by the light of a kerosene lantern.  The tepid water did get me clean, did help bring down the infernal temperature somewhat, but every time I slid under it, I felt a little horrible.  When my parents got their power back, we had a meal that wasn't from a can and then I took a long shower at their house.  I think I cried.

I also remember my first chaotic night in Costa Rica, the delayed flight, the drunk host family who came to get me in a car too small for two people (there were five of us in it), the breakdown and walking, and then, finally, after all of that, a really scary electric showerhead designed to heat the water as it came through that I did not know how to operate.  I tried and tried to get hot water out of it, and I finally just jumped under the freezing cold stream enough to wash the day of travel off me before burrowing in beneath insufficient covers to shiver the rest of the night away.

In many cultures, bathing is a ritual, an important part of daily life.  Japan was wonderful for this.  I still want one of the gas water heaters like I had there, one that heated as much water as you wanted on demand.  I could literally have showered forever there if I had the money to pay the bills....  This isn't even bringing in the happiness of a bathtub with enough hot water to fill it up to my chin.

More than any of these, though, is a happier memory of Costa Rica from my second trip there.  After a tremendously long day painting, digging septic fields, and pushing large trucks out of deep mud, we were taken to the Tabacon Spa whose hot springs were heated and enriched by Arenal, one of the most active volcanoes in the world.  I remember they had pools and miniature water falls where you could sit and stare up at the almost full moon while the hot water pounded down on your aching back and shoulders.  It was beyond wonderful.

I'm looking forward to trying the culture of the hamam while I'm in Turkey.  I did the community baths in Japan a couple of times, and it was very nice, very relaxing.  I have been reading up on etiquette for this, and  while I have no idea if I want to go be the big, odd foreigner again (sometimes that gets really old), it sounds like something I'll enjoy.  Maybe it will be another memory to add to this rather odd collection of cleanliness.

Orphaned Pencils

Like most people, I have a lot of little idiosyncrasies.  I look for four-leaf clovers every time I walk through a patch while I'm walking my dogs.  I collect bobbleheads when I travel.  My favorite clothing is a literary tshirt.  I always carry a fancy vintage handkerchief.  Added to all these other oddities, I am also a rescuer of orphaned pencils.  

There is something heartbreaking about an abandoned pencil.  I find them frequently on the floor of my classroom, sometimes almost used up, sometimes barely sharpened.  I always scoop them up and put them in a brown ceramic cylinder some student made in Ceramics and left in my room one year.  I call it the lost pencil cup.  Students know to look there for something to write with before they ask me about it.

I think the sadness for me comes from seeing a tool so closely related to all the things my heart holds most dear simply cast aside.  There's power in a pencil, power to change the world, power to change someone's mind, power to change oneself.

When a student comes to class and has no pencil every day, there is a kind of hopelessness to it.  It's like seeing someone who needs to put out a destructive blaze but who has no bucket or hose.  They simply lack the right equipment to save themselves.

A pencil lets a person draw a picture to clarify, solve a math problem, make a list.  It allows a poem to be created, things done or cast aside to be crossed off, dots to be connected.  There is a universe encased in a slim wooden or plastic sheath, infinitely malleable and portable.

There's a quote in You've Got Mail about bouquets of freshly-sharpened pencils.  I always smile when I see that part because I know that feeling.  There really *is* something about a brand new pencil.  They're among my favorite school supplies.

There's something to be said about the old ones, too, though.  When you see a pencil that is only as long as your little finger, that has its eraser gone, even one with the indentations made by teeth or the impact against the edge of a desk or table, you're looking at a battle-scarred veteran of the war against idiocy and ignorance.  It deserves the chance to continue its service.

Today after the last bell, I walked around my room and tidied everything up as I always do.  Under one of the desks in the back, I found one of these forlorn instruments.  Except for its eraser, it had almost no use.  I picked it up, carried it over to the turn-in table, placed it next to the others in the cup.  I gathered all my belongings and headed down the stairs to my car.  On the way, another pencil was sitting on the end of our wide wooden banisters, almost as though it was just waiting for me.  I smiled, tucked it in the back pocket of my school work bag.  Monday, it can join the assembly of orphaned pencils waiting a second chance at usefulness.

Bonfire

You got a lot of lovers with star-crossed wrists

They keep a candle burning on the corner you kissed.

One day I might die, until then there's too much to do

But I'll keep a bonfire for you.

I've seen the pretty boys that you're keeping around

I know how it goes, I've got a girl in town.

And she likes me enough to do what I like to do.

But, I'll keep a bonfire for you.

Let the other lovers talk about who carries the torch

Let them talk about the beauty that they carry it for

Let the other lovers talk about who got what

And who got burned and who got cut

I'll be in the orchard when you get tired

Day after day of the shouts from the choir

Eating the apples and eating the peaches, too

And waiting by my bonfire for you.

In the dark anybody will do for love

But you're the only one I want when the sun comes up

No burning ball of fire set in the sky will do

Next to my bonfire for you.

Let the other lovers talk about who carries the torch

Let them talk about the beauty that they carry it for

Let the other lovers talk about who got what

And who got burned and who got cut

I need a little motion, need a little relief

I get a little lonely at the end of the week

And I want it so bad and if you want it so bad, too

I'll be over here with my bonfire for you.

You got a lot of lovers with star-crossed wrists

They keep a candle burning on the corner you kissed.

One day I might die, until then there's too much to do

But I'll keep a bonfire for you.

~ "Bonfire" - Josh Ritter

________

I love just about everything I've heard by Ritter, but there are certain songs of his that always feel like they were more or less stolen right out of my own thoughts.  (Of course, if this is the case, he's dressing them up in prettier clothing than they had when they were with me.  Heh.)

This song, "Bonfire," is one of those I identify with closely.  Switch some genders here and there, and it's just about the situation I find myself in.  I like the fact that he's not pining and following. Others might thrive on the drama of "star-crossed wrists," but I, like the speaker in the song, am just much more comfortable taking care of life, hanging out in the orchard.

 There is tremendous personal truth for me in the line "One day I might die, until then there's too much to do."  I'm busy.  I have a ridiculous schedule and probably will for the rest of my life.  It's not conducive to marriage or happy homelife.  I've known that for a long time.  Who would put up with me leaving early in the morning and not coming home until after 6:00 most nights?  Who would willingly suffer the slings and arrows of being married to a teacher?  I'm not sure that I really expect anybody to.

That doesn't really prevent me from keeping that bonfire going.  Just because I don't think it will work out doesn't seem to be a deterrent to feeling.  I understand that "bonfire" level of desire all too well.  Candles are all well and good; they give some light and a certain aura of romance, I suppose. However, a candle's lifespan is limited before the match ever touches the wick.  I think a lot of relationships have that same quality. When you think about love, which would you really rather have - the temporary glamor, beauty of limited use and duration, or the permanent that provides on so many different levels?  

Bonfires may require work to make and work to keep them going but they give more heat, more light, more protection from all those things that hunt in the night. They are actually functional rather than decorative.  The metaphor is perfect, then.  Who wants a purely decorative love?  Is it really love at all? The speaker says no.  He has a girl whom he likes and who likes him well enough to "do what [he] likes to do," but this is presented as a necessity, a place-holder.  It's not the real deal, and he's not pretending that it is. He knows good and well he's only got a candle at the present.

This is the place the speaker and I diverge.  I'm not interested in candles.  I don't have the time for them.  I'm only interested in bonfires, I guess.  In fact, that metaphor can go right next to the Sonnet 116 ones as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway....  As you can tell, I've English Teachered this song more than once in my head.  This is probably a lot more thought than it was ever intended to evoke.  (Sorry for beating your song to death, Josh Ritter.)  This is almost certainly more thought than you really wanted to read.  For some reason, though, this was the thing I needed to say just now, so, as always, caveat emptor.  And now, I have some papers to grade and a bonfire to tend.

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

I bought my tickets for Turkey yesterday.   I shopped around, tried to use my SkyMiles to defray the cost of the ticket, and finally just clicked "Purchase" with no small amount of both trepidation and relief.  It's done.  When you click the big green button, it's done.

I still can't believe it, though.  The more I read and discover, the more fantastic it all seems.  I got my main course textbook from Primary Source last week, and I looked at it some last night.  I also got on our course Moodle and started meeting the people I'm going to be traveling with.  As usual, I'm the only person from the Deep South.  Well.  Every trip needs a token chick from MS, right?  In all seriousness, it looks like it will be a good mix of disciplines, grade levels, and parts of the country.

I also started digging through the list of "extras" one of the course instructors put up.  I ordered a couple of used copies of some books about Istanbul/Ottoman Turkey from Amazon, and I got one of Orham Pamuk's novels on my Kindle.  I can see that what I'm supposed to be doing and what I want to be doing are going to be at war with each other for the next few weeks.  (So what else is new, right?)

One of my last purchases, a whim I indulged after somebody else brought it up again on FB, was the They Might Be Giants song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."  I remember that song from a million years ago.  C. and I laughed about it when we were in Venice and I was still waiting to find out whether or not I had gotten in for this institute.  It's a very silly song, but somehow it was the perfect thing to celebrate.  It feels very, very good to have this ticket, something to hold on to in the rough week ahead of me.

I'm now running very late to start my day, but it's worth it.  If you haven't heard this song or heard it in a long time, I leave it here to get stuck in your head, too.  Enjoy.

Lost Day

Yesterday was so beautiful.  Shame I missed most of it.

I woke up, took the dogs out, settled in for a little breakfast reading on the couch.  I had big plans to get much done.  I had phone calls to make, jeans to wash, floors to vacuum.  Not one bit of that got done.

My head started slamming me early, and I ignored it because I'm sick and tired of it.  I've done nothing but hurt all week.  I know it's been due to stress and weather, but I'm really, really worn out from it.  I know that ignoring it was not the best response, but I could not stand the thought of taking a Maxalt.  Since it was not to a level that was making me scream yet, I also thought it might back off.

You think after all this time, I would have learned....

I took a nap in an effort to shake it, intending to get up refreshed and pain-free and take care of my list.  No dice.  When I woke up, I was disoriented and sick.  Two hours later, I *was* screaming.

I took a Maxalt, and when that didn't work, I took the phenergan.  That, of course, was the game-ender.  Nothing happens after phenergan takes the field.  Even it, though, didn't kill the pain.  Every time I woke up, my head was hurting.  I would just roll over and wait for unconsciousness to slide back over me again.  The only thing I had to deal with while I was asleep was the Hell of Dreams from all the things kicking up sediment in my mind.  I won't even go into the details here.  I am still hoping that they will fade soon so I can forget them.

I'm better today.  I still can't tell if it's going to come back or not.  If it does, and if it won't stop hurting me, I think I'm going to have to call my doctor.  Probably this is just what I think it is, too much stress and weather shifting too fast, but I can't take much more of it.

The thing that makes me so mad about all of it is that I just lost a day.  It happens so much lately.  I have plans, I have things I need to do, and WHAM, suddenly I'm incapacitated.  There has to be something better than this.  I hate it.

Things They Don't Tell Teachers to Get in Education Classes

I was in OfficeThing Friday night making a last-minute, last-of-the-year provisioning run.  As I threw things in my cart and ran through the inventory of frequently-used supplies mentally to see if I was forgetting anything, I thought to myself, "This is just another one of those things they don't tell preservice teachers:  Friday nights involve trips to OfficeThing."

And then I started thinking of all the things I have that are "outside of the usual" that make life easier. Consider this blog a public service message.

1.  A small personal heat-seal laminator - You can get one for about $30 if you pay attention.  Mine came from Wal-Mart and was on sale.  I use it for tons of things from making ID cards for my National Honor Society Officers to protecting bell schedules and labels for things.  I still have my large posters done in the library because of size, but for all the little stuff, I do that myself.

2.  Self-adhesive magnet discs - You can buy them from Wal-Mart or a craft store, but I find the best value to be online.  I use them for countless things.  They turn anything into something easily hung and easily removed.  I hang notices, labels, posters, the term cards that compose my word wall, instruction signs, everything really.  I don't have to fight stick-tac (which only sticks SOMETIMES or FOREVER), and it makes it easy and fast to change things out.

3.  Ceiling Hanglars - (yes.  that is their real name.)  Almost every classroom now has drop in "grid" ceilings. If your doesn't, these are of no use to you.  If it DOES, then these are a display/decoration dream-come-true.  I use them to suspend artifacts from my travels, mobiles, and tons and tons of student projects.  Again, this is about easy-up, easy-down with no damage to the fixtures.  Everybody loves the fact that I've used student work to decorate, too.

4.  Command Velcro Strips - I'm not sure that this is the right name for these.  They have a plastic surface that meshes with and holds to another similar surface, so I am calling them that.  They might be picture-hanger strips.  Again, no-damage hanging is the goal.  I found these and tried them for some things I wanted to put on my plastered walls.  They work like a charm.  No nails.  No mess.  They go right up and come right down perfectly.  They hold fairly heavy frames, too.

5.  A small plastic box each of Sharpies, Post-its, pens of a different color (green/purple), and highlighters - My students use these all the time, but some of them either cannot keep up with them or can't seem to get around to getting them.  It's easier to have them on-hand and easy-to-access than to fuss or hold up an activity because of their lack.  I use fliptop plastic boxes that I think were actually made for cds or something.  They hold a lot of each thing. I put them out when we need to use them, and the students (with the exception of one particular class awhile back) have always been very good to use what's needed and return it at the end of class.  No fuss, no hassle.

6.  Index cards - millions and millions of them.  I use all sizes.  The 3X5 blanks are fabulous for quick notes/passes/etc and also exit slips.  4X6 is what I put my word wall elements on.  5X8 is what I use for instructions, labels, and my "quote wall" of interesting student sentences from their papers, etc.

7.  Endless plastic baskets from Dollar Tree - I prefer the ones that are colored vinyl with a metal frame.  I use them for every kind of thing.  If we need to draw strips to choose something, I cut them up and put them in a basket.  If I need to put candy out for Parent-Teacher Conferences, I put it in a basket.  I have one for completed exit slips, one to collect the pieces of a bulletin board my students are creating and one to hold extra blanks.  I use one to hold student project CDs as they're turned in.  They're just good for organization.

8.  A small bookshelf stereo system - I have my laptop hooked up to mine, and whenever we watch movies or listen to Hamlet, the sound is crisp and clear.  I show YouTube videos.  We do a version of "musical chairs" involving walking until the music stops and picking a poem taped to a chair.  I have my students do multimedia projects often, and even if the recording wasn't the best in the world, we still hear.  I use it to play music while they write and to play textbook supplemental CDs of professional readers or original authors presenting the work we're dealing with.  During my planning period and after school, I use it just for me.  I don't see how anybody manages with just a pair of computer speakers.    

9. A scented wax warmer - You have to be careful with this one, but classrooms can be stinky places.  Since science has proven that smell influences mood, I think this is something important to deal with.  I said that you have to be careful with it, and I mean that, because if the fragrance is heavy or cloying, it can give those with allergies or asthma big problems.  I always stick with things that are clean (citrus or lavender) or at least non-floral (apple cinnamon, vanilla, sandalwood), and I have never had a problem with it.  The students seem to like coming in to it, too.

10.  A tape dispenser, a stapler, and a 3-hole punch for at least two "stations" in your room - unless you want kids constantly at your desk for stuff, put it out for them elsewhere.  I have two sets of the basics out on two sides of my room.  When not in use, it sits neatly on a Dollar Tree silver serving tray.  One set is near the printer.  One set is next to the turn-in baskets.  This works really well.

11.  A pass just for the bathroom - I fabricated mine from a cheap unpainted wooden door hanger, painted it black, and put a tiny silver cutout of a man (like the standard men's room icon) on one side and a tiny silver cut out of a woman on the other.  I don't like to let the "big pass" our school issues us out of my sight very often since sometimes students just wander around with them.  With the bathroom pass, it's really obvious they're not supposed to be anywhere but the restroom.

12.  A laser printer - I actually have two now because I have a laptop cart in my room.  Mine is not a $400 job; it's a fairly inexpensive Brother.  It was some of the best money I've ever spent because where I used to go through two or three ink jet cartridges a month, I now go through toner about every other month for about the same money.  It also duplexes, meaning that if I get in a bind to print something off in the morning, I don't have to fight my way to the copying machine.  I love it.  The extra for the laptop cart can't be praised enough, either.  It's set up wirelessly, and so everybody can print to it from the laptops, no muss (as long as our network is up), no fuss.

13.  Plastic shower curtains and small "cafe" rods - A shower curtain can hide a multitude of sins on a big bookshelf.  Just saying.  I put mine up with small extendable cafe rods that are supported by a Command hook on either end.  They keep all my supply and book shelves looking neat even when they are really not and give my classroom the illusion of neatness when it's just not possible to have the reality.

Yeah.  Well, if you're not a teacher, this probably bored the crap out of you.  However, I've been thinking about this list for awhile, and I wanted to share it.  I probably have left off some things that others consider to be essential.  That just means they get to make lists of their own.