AngrySadTired -- You Probaby Don't Want to Read This

And yet words are necessary to deal with it for me. You might just want to skip this one. Go read another post.

Recently, I was in a gathering of friends and the commentary turned Mardi Gras. A friend of mine is going to a party that requires costumes, and the person he's going with apparently has a costume that displays her rather nice figure rather nicely. Although I don't think he's dating this person, the combination of costume and pulchritude was apparently enough to get his mind going in that direction.

His comment and his awe over her figure just touched a nerve in me that's always raw, but never more than at this time of the year. I swear to God that I am so sick and tired of men and their inability to see beyond T and A that I cannot stand it anymore. I am tired of watching stick figures prance around half clothed on TV. I am tired of watching men ogle every pair of breasts that happens to shape themselves under a shirt. More than any of this, though, I am tired of the physical being the end-all, be-all measuring stick of a woman's worth.

Is there really not one single one of them who isn't looking for a Barbie doll? I mean, really? I am nobody's Barbie doll. I'm built more along the Amazon warrior lines, and stick figure is not a label that could ever have been stuck on me, not even when I was playing basketball in high school and running line drills, laps, and bleachers everyday. I'm really tall, and my body curves. Why can't that be okay, too, with somebody? I have a fierce mind, a strong body, and a brave heart. Why can't that be good, too? Why should I have to have D cup breasts, blond hair, and be the size of a freaking porcelain doll to be attractive?

As of that conversation, I officially give up. I have heard it all too many times now. I have also heard all the palliatives (The right man will find you beautiful; Different people find different things attractive), and I think they're all crap. All the men of my acquaintance chase the same old stereotypes although they may put a different hair color on top. Screw it. In a way, maybe it will be a relief to quit looking. I know my own value, and if they can't see it, then to hell with them all.

Wishing

I haven't felt much like writing lately, and I've been busy, too, so the posts have been pretty sparse. Sooner or later, I'm going to post about Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, but I'm still in the middle of it. It's emotionally a very hard read for me, and I don't know yet how long it's going to take me to finish it.

Mostly, lately I just wish I could spend some time away. I need a trip out of country where nobody knows me. Sometimes, just being here where everywhere I go there's I teach or have taught absolutely wears me out. I have to be "Teacher Woman" all the time. While I know that is a part of the responsibility, and probably "Teacher Woman" isn't really all that different from any other aspect of my personality, sometimes I miss being a totally private citizen who can go to the bookstore in shleppy jeans and no makeup without having to worry about running into little Mary Sue and her Eager Parents.

Maybe I'll go out of town this coming weekend and enjoy being unknown somewhere else. It would be nice to have a change, just for a little while anyway. I'm just tired.

Wrap Your Mind Around This One

The truth is more important than the facts.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Part of me, when I first saw this quote, instinctively went, "Yeah. Deep, man." Of course, I've been up something like seventeen hours at this point, and I really, really need to go to bed. When next I looked at it, I began to say, "But wait, can one divorce the truth from the facts? What is truth? How does it relate to the facts?" Then, I decided that what I need to do most right now is stop surfing and blogging and get some rest before I hit that Zen state in which one begins to ponder whether or not one's personal reality is true for everyone around one, a state found most commonly in dorm rooms late the night before major papers are due but nevertheless dangerously near anytime it's late and the brain is tired. I leave it to you gentle reader to tangle with good old FLW.

Mississippi Snow

We had one of those rare Mississippi snowstorms this past weekend. It dropped about three inches of snow, and we all headed outdoors to gawk in wonder. Mom, Dad, and I loaded up in Dad's huge, battered brown four-wheel drive Dodge and drove up to the Old Place to look at the snow on the pastures there. It was beautiful. I took a lot of pictures and fought to breathe, but it was worth it to see the trees wearing their rare mantle of white.

All up and down the roads, hastily-assembled snowmen could be seen. Every one I passed made me smile, even the ones that had more leaves than snow in the the bases. I guess people in states that get a lot of snow can afford to wait for a good depth or be blase about it, but we here in Mississippi have to take it like we can get it if we intend to get any snowmen at all.

After our recent bout of rain, the last lingering vestiges that had been sheltered are gone, but the memories of our recent whitening remain. It may be several years before we see that much snow again and all the snow people reemerge. Maybe we stored up enough enjoyment until it comes again.

Headed for Thirty-two

As I dragged my aching, coughing, barely-functional body back and forth from the library Friday while my classes were doing credit checks, I noticed that the teachers downstairs have already put up Valentine's Day bulletin boards. Although usually I am the first teacher on board the overboard holiday decor train, there is not one scrap of pink or red anywhere near my door yet, nor will there be for at least a few more days. You see, as we get closer to the day of the stupid blind flying infant we also get closer to the anniversary of my thirty-second year on this earth.

I have heard all sorts of people complain about having their birthdays coupled with a major holiday. I have relatives and friends whose birthdays get lost in the shuffle with Christmas and Thanksgiving. I put forth to them, however, that there is no double-whammy as crappy as the one barreling down on me in less than four weeks. Soon, every place I look will be festooned with a nauseating amount of red, pink, lace, glitter, and reminders that roses, candy, and affection will rain down from the heavens all around me, sort of a reverse Charlie Brown black rain cloud effect. Only in my little spot will it be dry. Add to this, then, the merry nudge from Father Time that another year has come and gone, and you've got a recipe fit for all sorts of glee.

I wish I could build a sort of bunker somewhere and just hide out in it from New Year's Eve until the end of February. Every person I know has "big plans" to treat their special someone well (more power to them), or somehow miraculously manages to dig up a special someone for the duration of the holidays. I'd settle for a good friend to go to dinner with. It's not even safe to go to the store to buy groceries. One has to run the gauntlet through aisles filled to the top of twenty-foot ceilings with giant stuffed animals, overly-cute knickknacks, and chocolate, the soul salve of lonely like me.

Just for once, just for once, I'd like to be able to look forward to my birthday. I'd like to have a great guy, or at least a great guyfriend, and be going to do something interesting. I don't want diamonds and pearls. I don't expect a man to break the bank with roses and trinkets. Oh how wonderful it would be, though, if thirty-two didn't have to loom in the distance a monolith carved out of black stone.....

Matters of Trust

I have been sick lately, the usual sinus crud, but it's been making me wish I could find a quiet corner to curl up and die in. I have stubbornly and foolishly been dragging myself through my regular routine, so by yesterday evening, I was to the point of shaking weakness and tears. Why, oh why, don't I just take the kind of advice I would give others? Go home and rest....

Anyway, sometime during the past few days, I was with a gathering of friends, and listening to a conversation about how men should treat women. One of the guys was talking about how to treat a woman, and his ideas included wine, firelight, and poetry. The other women at the table were pretty much astounded that any man could come up with something like that on his own since so many men seem to have no idea whatsoever that fire can be used for anything but destruction or food preparation and that poetry exists outside required and loathed coursework long forgotten. Even in my weakened and sickened state, I thought his ideas were pretty good, too. The guy in question is a real sweetheart. He's recently been treated about as badly as you can be by a woman, and yet he still manages to come up with something like this, so that's another gold star in the plus column for him.

At that moment, though, everything froze. A ghost entered the room, at least for me. I could practically see T., my ex, standing in the doorway smirking. He, too, knew about the value of poetry, wine, and firelight. He knew all kinds of things about what women like and how we work. In fact, he'd made it sort of his life's passionate study. He prided himself on it. The great downside to this, of course, is that he couldn't be bothered to please only one woman. There were far too many of us in the world who needed his tender ministrations....

The ghost was only there for me. Nobody else noticed, and since I was sick and largely just sort of sitting in the corner suffering anyway, I doubt my expression actually changed much. I just wonder if there's ever going to come a time when I don't have to look at guys and not think of the ghosts of the past.

All Things Jane, and, Soapbox, Here I Come

Jane Austen, my hero, is much in the media these days with PBS's Masterpiece Theater (or are the Theatre sort? I can never remember...) makeover. Maybe she's never out of the media. I keep thinking back to the movie that came out last year (or was it two? Ah, Topamax...) with the Horrid Stick Figure cast as Lizzy. I still haven't seen it. I should bite the proverbial bullet and get it through Netflix just to see how bad a thing can be, but each time I think of the Stick Insect trying to be one of the most wonderfully bright and independent women in literature, I feel a little queasy.

I read a blog called AustenBlog that keeps up with "all things Jane". Their tagline is "one lump of snark or two?", so you can sort of tell what tone the site has. I love it. They had a brief bit recently about a company that was going to publish dumbed-down editions of the big six Austen novels for children and busy adults. I know I felt more than a bit queasy at that.

What's the point? Why even bother to read it? Also, why do adults always assume that children can't handle the real thing? I was reading the real thing when I was in about the fifth grade, thank you very much. I can't see that it did me much harm not to have watered-down pap packaged and forced down my throat instead of trusting that my brain could stretch to meet the challenge. Maybe I had to ask my parents what a word meant. Maybe I had to, God forbid, go get a dictionary off a shelf.

It all goes back to the great contradiction so present in everything else. We pretend and pretend that we want our children/students/selves to reach for high goals and lofty ideals, but when it comes right down to it, instead of giving them the real Jane Austen and a dictionary, we give them the faux Austen and tell them that's all they're capable of handling. What a crappy cheat. I hope that the kids who get stuck with the pseudo-Austen find out that there's something missing and seek it for themselves. It's too sad to contemplate otherwise. She's lasted this long and been this popular for a good reason.

Good Old Ernest.....

Never mistake motion for action.
Ernest Hemingway

Early Morning Dog Story

So this morning, I let the dogs out early and went about the business of getting ready to head to school as I usually do. When I was putting food out for them a bit later, I could hear the high-pitched strident barks from Roux that mean she's into something "good" coming from across the road. At first, I thought the noise was dogfight noise, and my fear was that the horrible brown stray had wandered back into my yard. Then I listened more carefully, and I recognized the yips of frustration which come whenever Roux can't quite get to whatever it is that she wants. I went back inside after calling her for a few minutes to finish getting ready.

When I drove down the driveway, I stopped and walked across the road to the woods where the dogs were. I found them dancing around the base of a sapling about as thick as my upper arm. At the top of that sapling, swaying precariously, was a very large opossum who was doing its level best to appear invisible. Yelldo came to me, and I picked his little yellow butt up and put him in the car. Roux, though, just ran close enough to wag her tail at me and give me a big toothy pit bull grin and ran away again.

She would dash up to the trunk of the tree, lean against it causing it to sway, stand under the swinging possum, and then, when there was no falling mammal, she would go take a few bites out of the trunk of the tree. I have never seen any dog do this. She was literally chewing down the stupid tree. By the time I got to the scene, she had removed long strips of the trunk of the sapling, and about half its trunk was gone.

I called her and tried to entice, coerce, and finally berate her for about fifteen minutes to no avail. She was in a place I could not get to, and I had to go to school ultimately. I don't know what happened with the possum. I asked my dad to go down and check on her when he got off work, and when he got there, Roux was hale and healthy, so I don't think she caught the possum. As big as it was, there would be tell-tale signs. I haven't had a chance to go across the road to see if she finally managed to fell the tree. I think I'll save that adventure for tomorrow.

Knowledge

Tonight was the first night of one of my new night classes, and I learned something completely unknown. I now know what was regained when the Renaissance came in. Before tonight, I had always been taught that it was just the "rebirth of knowledge" or the "rediscovery of Greek and Latin classical texts." My professor tonight taught me that in the West, the last scholars of Greek, actually, the very last, had been killed off by his students, and the reading and speaking knowledge of the language had died. For a couple of hundred years, nobody could read Homer or Plato or Socrates. Nobody could get to the stories of the Iliad or the Odyssey or Medea or Antigone, and oh, how they wanted to... The Italians, heirs to the legacy of Rome, understood that the Romans had based much of their culture on the foundations that Greece had painstakingly laid, but those texts were mute since the language in which they were written was a dead one for them.

Can you imagine it? We take it for granted that we can walk into a bookstore and lay hands on volume after volume of knowledge in our own language. I watch school kids casually discard or groan under the study of these same stories that were almost completely lost forever during the time after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I didn't know that until tonight. I didn't know how close we came to losing them forever. I always assumed that when the textbooks said they were rediscovered during the Renaissance, that the real meaning was that people finally had enough time to stop worrying about disease, war, and famine carrying them away long enough to pick up something extraneous to survival again, and that was indeed part of it. More to the point, though, is that until they found the Greek-speaking-and-reading refugees from Constantinople's Orthodox churches, there was nobody who could begin the process of unlocking the rich wonders within those ancient texts for them.

No wonder the Renaissance authors were so crazy about translations and getting their hands on every ancient text they could. They probably wanted to make sure the same thing could never happen again as well as feeding that deep hunger for knowledge. Who can read a little of the Odyssey and not want more? Who can start the Oedipus cycle and not want to know how it turns out for the poor, fate-doomed man?

It was a good night of class, and to be honest, I'm looking forward to going back despite the huge amount of work this class is going to be (a play a week). If I can pick up something this monumental every week, it will be time well spent. Maybe this is something everybody else in the world already knew, but I missed it somehow. I'm glad to know it now.

Selfish Days

Every once in a great while, I feel worn thin by things that I normally very much enjoy doing. Right now is one of those moments. It's not that I had a really stressful day. There was no drama today. In fact, there's been a minimum of drama lately, a fact for which I am profoundly grateful. It's more a case of having too much to do and that load increasing gradually, sort of like the old Puritan torture of pressing, I guess, where they keep laying one stone after another on top of a person. I am overcommitted in the highest possible degree, and this afternoon, I found another thing that "needs doing", but I cannot possibly fit it into my schedule, and I'm frustrated and ill with myself and the situation.

As I'm listening to the rain on the roof and getting ready to go take a shower and have an early bedtime in order to face tomorrow, my first day with night classes in the new semester, I am having a selfish day. I want to have a childish tantrum in which I put my fingers in my ears and refuse to listen to the voices that are asking me to do all these various and sundry things I've been asked to do. I want to run as fast as I can away from my obligations and find a big playground with a swing set and a slide. I want to close my door and turn off my light and pretend like there's nobody home.

None of this will actually help anything. It will truly only make me feel worse for having done it. I guess this miniature rebellion is probably a warning sign that I need to take a step back and assess my load, and that I need to be cautious about making sure I add in some time for less juvenile release valves. Maybe I need to budget the funds for Civ IV this month after all....

January

I'm heading into my January slump. I can feel it creeping up like a slow mist rolling across an open field. January stinks. Even though I try not to judge it based on previous editions, there's just something about the month that's fundamentally grey and gloomy. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the end of the sparkly wonder of Christmas. Maybe it's the poverty or the impending crapfest double-whammy of Valentine's Day and my birthday hovering right around the corner. It just always seems that the sunless and cloudy skies creep into the corners of my heart during January, and I have a hard time shaking them out again. If there are fewer posts here for awhile, just chalk it up my not wanting to inflict my January blues on the rest of the world.

What We Believe About Ourselves

I was watching What Not to Wear tonight, and they had a sort of "best of" show on tonight with clips from some of their favorite cases/episodes. I watched the shortened versions of episodes, many of which I'd already seen, and I was struck by the almost universal theme running under the different bad outfits and hairdos: a belief, conscious or unconscious, that the woman was fundamentally unattractive. Once Stacy and Clinton had done their work, which basically consists of pointing the person away from things the person probably knew weren't a good idea anyway, and the hair and makeup artists come in, the person is able to see the fundamental truth that there is beauty in every human being. This is probably my favorite thing about the show, that moment when the woman suddenly realizes that, whether she is carrying more weight than the gurus say is proper or is smaller than supermodels in the magazines, she is lovely.

Why is it that we all seem to believe that we're ugly? When I think about my own circle of girl friends and indeed over most of the women I have known in my lifetime, all but a handful have had some secret belief that some portion of their anatomy, if not their whole anatomy, is hideous. Why do we believe this? Where does this come from? If this is true, it means that every woman I know is ugly. That just can't be true. My friends are beautiful people. They have husbands who love them and think they are the centers of the known universe. Where does this inner whisper come from?

I am familiar with the voice myself. I know its insidious voice. I even know some of the reasons why I hear it. Knowing why it's there doesn't really make it easier to combat sometimes. Even though I strive to accept myself as I am, some days, I find myself fighting that same old image in the mirror.

I so wish that we could all, even in our analysis of ourselves, get past the external or just embrace the external that is there and learn to love it. There is so much beauty under that surface and so much potential. Isn't a shame that we bind ourselves to so much less than we're capable of and lose the chance to know so many people as they truly are because of this?

Back to the Real World

I had to force myself to get up this morning when the alarm went off. We're having a stretch of bitterly cold weather, so crawling out from under the covers and cats before dawn was not high on my list of priorities.

It's always so hard to return to routine after a holiday. Even though I eventually get bored and restless during a long break (I wasn't quite there yet, however), I hate getting up so early. That's really my least favorite part of my whole job, when I think about it. If I could sleep one more hour every morning and still get to school on time, my job satisfaction would go up about 40%. How sad is that?

I've always wondered why school has to start at some ungodly early hour. I think I know most of the reasons, including the fact that kids, especially little ones need to be "babysat" during their parents' working hours and that originally in rural areas students would become working members of their families upon their return home with chores on the farm. I wish now, though, that we'd revisit the issue and start school at 9:00. Not going to happen, but I can still dream.

Well, tomorrow the kids will be back, so I had better go fortify myself mentally....

An Interesting Notion for the New Year

Through another blog I read, I found a link to this blog and this list, the Daily Decalogue of Pope John XXIII. I made a copy of it to print off and put on my desk because the ideas here are really appealing to me, mostly because it seems that it's based on focusing on day at a time. You might see if any of them are useful to you. Happy New Year, everyone.

The End Approaches

As the year draws to a close, two things are certain to happen in my life. First, I will definitely have the mad and uncontrollable urge to clean my house, even the dark and secret rooms to which the doors are never opened when others are present. Second, I will begin to review the year past and go over it with the proverbial and cliched finetoothed comb to see how my life has changed for better and for worse in the year coming to an end. I suppose that both processes are actually two different expressions of the same need to set all things in order, as it were, before one things ends and a new thing begins.

New Year's Day is an arbitrary, manmade date on a calendar. It doesn't even line up with anything astronomically significant as once it did. That's why the power it has to make a person, well me anyway, stop and take stock of things never ceases to surprise me. Sitting up late and watching the old year die and the new year be born, even though I know it's sort of a created thing is moving. Every year, I say that I will simply go to bed early (tired out from all the manic housework, you see) and just let the old year go in peace, but year after year, I find myself staring at the clock at 11:59 with everybody else in this part of the world waiting for 200_ to dissolve into 200_.

I don't go out and party on New Years. I never have been a big partygoer. (Those of you who know me are shocked beyond all knowledge, I know.) I've often thought that the purpose of New Year's parties might be to help people not reflect so much, but rather to focus on the fact that regardless of what happened, it's over, everybody present survived in some form or another, and life marches on. Despite the fact that I'm not really a big fan of drunken revelry and the inevitable regretfest that follows it, (I mean, be an idiot if you want to, but live to remember it, and how much fun is it really if you have to pray nobody took any pictures of it?) there is something to be said in joining together with your friends in celebration of having made it through another long year and in defiance of whatever might be hurled at you by the Fates in the year to come.

I suppose however we choose to meet the New Year, in solitary reflection or group defiance and celebration, the point is that we are here to meet it at all. That's something to be grateful for. No matter what scars we may have earned in the year past, we survived. May we be stronger and wiser for it in the year to come.

Good Quote

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.
Saint Thomas Aquinas

Dell Yeah

Okay, so it's well known that I'm not Dell's biggest fan, but I had to do something. My school-sponsored Gateway laptop has become capricious at best and downright irritating-bordering-on-suicidal at worst, so I needed a machine that was both mine and capable. I was planning on getting one myself, but my parents decided that they would get me something "big" this year for Christmas, and, voila, I have a new Dell. I won't get into all the gruesome specs other than to say it runs Vista and it's a dual-core machine which makes it so much faster than anything else I've used before that it's usually sitting and tapping its fingers waiting for me rather than the other way round. That's a nice change.

I did get a 19" monitor to go with it, and the sheer joy of having a screen that I don't have to peer down into my lap to look at is amazing. When I was working on our church bulletin a little while ago, the page actually was big enough to see. Wow.

My only big computing ambition now that I finally found the "hidden" application data folder so I could move my address book from one machine to the other is to purchase Civ IV so I can come home, feed my cats/dogs, and disappear into my office for the evening. I have noble goals, I think, sure to help me get lots and lots of productive work done around the house and for school.....

Sick for the Holidays

I don't know what it is but it stinks. I have a headache, a fever, and I'm nauseous beyond belief. I have been mostly debilitated for the past two days, but I spent the whole day today in bed. I hope tomorrow is better. I don't want the rest of my holiday to be spent having to recover from some mystery illness.

Christmas Dinner

It's the end of Christmas day, and it's been a good one here in Podunk. I got up fairly early and finished up some housecleaning in preparation for having my family over for Christmas dinner. This is the first time that I've done the whole Christmas dinner thing myself, so I wanted everything to be just so.

I've done a potluck Thanksgiving for my friends, and I usually do a brunch for my family on Christmas, but for too long now, my family hasn't had a big meal for Christmas or Thanksgiving. We always seem to have some major crisis, personal or physical, come up right at Thanksgiving or Christmas, and the whole holiday gets sort of preempted. The holidays just seem to get lost in the shuffle, and I miss them terribly.

Despite my best intentions to the contrary, it happened at Thanksgiving this year. I had a big family meal planned, and I had sworn that come heck or high water, we were going to have the full-on turkey dinner at my house. I had even gone so far as to buy a very lovely tablecloth for the occasion, but then my mom got sick, and the whole thing just sort of fell apart. We had a small meal, but nobody felt much like going to the effort involved to do a big dinner.

About a week after Thanksgiving, though, Dad got a ten-pound turkey, already seasoned and cooked, from work as a part of his Christmas bonus this year, and that was the centerpiece of the meal. This time, the hard part was already done, and I knew that I could do the rest if that killer part of it was already done for me.

I dealt with the remaining preparations for the turkey and about half of what was left of the rest of the meal and my mom brought the other half. I used the beautiful red linen tablecloth I got on sale a few years ago and have never had an occasion to use and put one of my favorite 1940's luncheonette cloths over it, one with Shiny Brites and holly on it. I used my good white Southern Living dishes and pulled out candles, too. It was no Martha Stewart production, but I was proud enough of it to have taken a picture of it.


We all sat down and had a meal at the table, not in front of the TV, not sitting on the couch, and it was wonderful. We should do it more often. Although there were far fewer of us than there were when this was my Granny's house, it reminded me of those Christmas dinners we had then. I think this house has missed being a place where people come for those together times. I know I have missed those times being held here. It's so hard to make those times happen with schedules being what they are, but as I was smoothing my hands over the tablecloths, laying them out and enjoying their colorful patterns, I kept thinking to myself, "Why isn't this a priority, too? Isn't this time just as important, just as vital as the other things that I do?"

The best gift I got today wasn't in a box or an envelope, although I am grateful for those things, too. The best gift I got was having my family with me around my table spending time together. Even after everyone was gone and I was washing up in the kitchen, I still felt the glow of it like a candle flame. What a beautiful thing to have been given for Christmas.