I should not let myself lapse like this. It’s an unsurprising phenomenon that the farther away you get from writing the harder it is to return to it—just like going back to school after summer, back to exercise after laziness, back to the waking world after a nap. I suppose it’s been three weeks now, and while I have some shiny new (and rather good, I must say) excuses, I know that this is exactly how I let my writing go last time and then didn’t write again for two years. So thanks to JDM for the wrist-slap, and also for trying to ruffle my feathers by espousing journaling as a superior form of writing. Here’s what I have to say about that: your mom goes to college. And writes in a journal. Hah.
So my excuses range from birthday getaways, to fires, to work—all last weekend I was camping with my students, and you can tell this is a good excuse because it’s one where if I had been given the choice whether to write or to be camping, I am absolutely certain I would have chosen writing. Mostly, though, because of being sick, which somehow always creeps up on me right before these trips. Sunday and Monday were my worst days, the kind of days where you remember that you should never wish to be sick so you can get out of work, because being sick SUCKS. And these are the days, my friends, to not have to sleep outside in the cold where you can’t prop your head up. But the trip was a success, and we managed to hike, play on the beach, cook, read Oedipus Rex (the study of literature must not be sacrificed to the great outdoors, must it? And at least now there are 7 more young people who know that “Sophocles” rhymes with “Hercules” and not with “bifocals”), and challenge our greatest fears on a high ropes course. In which yours truly climbed 3/4 of a climbing wall. I never thought I’d see the day. Still, I don’t imagine I’d be any more successful if you placed me in front of the Half Dome cables again. I heard the World’s Greatest Rock Climber on NPR, talking about how the rock communicates with you when you find a handhold, a foothold. You reach for it, and it bites back. I prefer a bit more sophistication in my communication. With any luck, Pam and Oscar will let me into the Finer Things Club. I know I’m behind, but I’ve read Angela’s Ashes, and I would happily prepare an extra credit report on Oedipus Rex. If you couldn’t tell, I’ve discovered that The Office comes on one of the few channels that comes through on our rabbit ears. Oh Frabjous Day!
But I digress (can you digress from a topic that is yet to be established? I’m sure I can, anyway). Ladies and gentlemen, today’s topic is The Future. Having spent the ENTIRE weekend (minus a couple of hours of blissful West Wing escape) writing a transcript and recommendation for my one senior student who has a November 15 deadline for his first college application, the topic is fresh in my mind. Or rather, no other topic can really infiltrate my mind because I have been holed up at home, in front of the computer, all weekend. Except for four hours yesterday in Target, the 99 Cent store, and Trader Joe’s. I’m sure my purchasing behavior would make a vibrant topic for a future post. But as this is the present, we must speak of the future.
I have been trying to counsel Gorby on his next move, trying to stay one step ahead of the college game, oscillating between being so jealous that he gets to go to college, and so thankful that I don’t have to deal with all the pressure and uncertainty of one’s senior year of high school. It is sobering, though, because enough thinking about someone’s future and you begin to realize that the future he’s planning for is the present I’m living in. And what am I doing with it? Spending every waking hour preparing other people for their futures. I’m not resentful…but I find myself craving a break from the…constancy of it, trying to steal precious minutes for self-reflection from the ever-mounting hours of obligation, and when I do find those minutes it seems so much easier to spend them in the West Wing. But am I living in the present? I’m not pining…at least not actively…for the golden days of yore (although I’d love the daylight hours back, thanks—Daylight Savings is my friend), but nor am I doing much that I enjoy outside of work. And I do enjoy much of work. But…it’s work. So what kind of person am I to counsel someone on the future? It’s too depressing to say “don’t be like me, whatever you do,” and I wouldn’t mean that anyway. But I see these kids, and they’re all in that phase where they’re still convinced their lives will not be ordinary.
I remember that. I remember believing that I might very well become famous, find the perfect relationship completely devoid of problems, change the world for the better and travel to every country in the world and, oh, maybe win the lottery or something. I think I believed it all through college. And in college, as it was ending, as it was slipping away like the memories in Eternal Sunshine, we made promises to each other that we would all go in for a ranch in Montana that we’d split 10 ways and all live there and have babies together and write and think and party and watch the sunrise. And it’s not that I wish that’s what I were doing, not most of the time anyway, but I wish it were possible to go through life without splintering your heart into a million pieces and necessarily blunting some of them so that you don’t feel the pain of ordinariness, and of obligation, so harshly. Should I tell Gorby to enjoy college because soon enough he’ll have to start choosing which of his loves to indulge and have to suffer the splintering of friends to the four corners of the globe (if that’s a contradiction in terms, why does it happen so easily?)? Should I tell him to enjoy high school because it’s the last time all the people who are most important to you are within 20 miles of you at all times? Should I tell him he’s embarking on the last four years of his life that are reserved for his own self-discovery? Or refrain from depressing old-person-speak and hope that he just doesn’t discover it for himself too late? Aggh. This is what comes, my friends, of being 26. This second quarter of a century is a doozy.
When I was 17, I wanted to act. I wanted to go to college, demostrate my laudable intelligence to all the world, and then act anyway—be the next Jodie Foster, Claire Danes. Have a funky apartment in the Village and only go to LA when I had to; my real passion was for off-Broadway. I yearned to love myself enough to think that others would love me, to be wanted, to have relationships to write novels about in one’s old age (not journals—novels). I wanted to be skinny. I wanted to be memorable without being slutty, edgy without being a poser, I wanted to travel, to dance, to have it all. But that was just my so-called life. This is my real one.
Reading The Odyssey and Oedipus, the question of prophecies, self-fulfilling and otherwise, is bound to come up. We’ve discussed whether we would want to know what was in store for us, if we had five minutes with Teiresias. And although for some reason the notion of prophecy is quite romantic, I’ve never bought in. Inevitability is so…ordinary. I’d much prefer a version of destiny in which I shape the events, even if that means that I am to blame for them not turning out exactly as I want. I’d rather have five minutes with Doris Day, to lull me with the comfort that whatever will be, will be.
I was asked by a student last week whether I actually like teaching. I still feel guilty that she had to ask. My answer was long-winded, with a bunch of yes-buts: yes, it’s incredibly rewarding, but also incredibly exhausting, draining, work-intensive. Yes, but I never envisioned that this is what I would do. Yes, but I would like it better if I didn’t have to get up early (although nor would I want to stay later than I do). And although I don’t lie, I feel quite uncomfortable telling kids that this was not something I aspired to. I don’t want them to think I don’t want to be there with them, and I don’t want them to think that teaching is not something to be aspired to. I don’t want them to worry that they won’t achieve their dreams, and most of all I don’t want them to see me as someone who hasn’t. Partly because of pride. But partly because it’s more complicated than it was back when our biggest fear was to be ordinary. A substitution of dreams is not the same as their squashing. Taking the good with the bad is not a compromise; it’s the way life is. And 26, though it rounds up to 30 (so did 25, for that matter, but that seems so arbitrary), is not too old to still do some of the things you always hoped you might. I lived to write another day. Anything’s possible.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Monday, October 15, 2007
The Intelligentsia
I had promised before last week’s post that I would contrast being a teacher with being a student, and then I forgot. That right there, although I am a teacher, is typical behavior of a student. Just so we are clear on that. But one thing that might help clarify why I might make such a studentish error is that I am currently taking an online class, delving into the depths of my experience to try to find that erstwhile student within myself once again (10 points, Katherine, for the use of “erstwhile.”) (An interesting turn of events here: the use of “erstwhile” is more typical of student than teacher, at least brown-nosing poser wannabe-comp-lit-grad-student students, whereas awarding myself points for its use is much more of a teacher behavior).
My online class is called “The Holocaust and Human Behavior” and is given by Facing History and Ourselves, a wonderful yet sneaky organization that will not allow you access to its online educational resources unless you take one of their classes. We read readings, watch videos, and reply to discussion board postings on an array of topics from identity to inhumanity. I am mostly taking it in order to get access to their online resources, indicating yet another typical student-ism: students take classes for the credit, prestige, or reward they will get from them, but often accidentally learn something in the process. Anyway, from my unique vantage point of both student and teacher—teacher by day, student by night—I can offer the following insights about the foibles and graces of each role:
1. Teachers LOVE LOVE LOVE to assign Journal Entries. Students hate them.
Every teacher’s edition of any textbook that you pick up will tell you to have students create a reading journal, or a history journal, or a vocabulary journal, an Algebra II journal,or a you-name-it kind of journal. How many journals are kids supposed to keep? I always hated journaling, whether in my own journal or in school assignments, because of the problem of audience. Who on earth IS the audience of a journal, anyway? God? Yourself at 80 years of age? Your snooping mother or boyfriend? And if it’s a school journal, there’s that whole privacy-vs.-teacher-reading it thing that is weird and only really works in The Freedom Writers.
As a teacher, I would TOTALLY ask students to journal about their goals for a course at the beginning. But as a student, I think it’s bullshit.
2. Students ALWAYS think they have more work to do than the teacher, and are always wrong.
I know my students are convinced that I go home and drink wine and eat chocolate covered cherries in a steamy bathtub, of which time about 5 minutes is spent absentmindedly devising lengthy, time-consuming assignments for them that will burn up their entire weekends, when really I spend almost every waking hour either at, working on, or thinking about school, and when they don’t do their homework I want to bash their heads in for having the nerve to think they simply “don’t have enough time” for everything.
Our online facilitator for this class sends us one email a week and poses a discussion question and a brief response to our responses. I mean, come ON. (Just kidding, Mark, if you ever read this, I hope you can see this is almost all for rhetorical effect. Isn’t the page literally dripping with sarcasm? It might not come across as well on Internet Explorer, but try Firefox and I’m sure you’ll see it. I know you do work. And I’m not just saying that as your student because I want you to like me. But I do want you to like me. You like me, right?).
3. Both students and teachers are excellent at the art of bullshitting. The difference is that teachers can usually tell when students are doing it.
It’s so funny to me to read/listen to some of the things students say when they’re bullshitting. I know EXACTLY what they’re doing, and A) I could have done it so much better, even just done the bullshit so much better, not even the real thought, although I could have done that so much better too, obvi, and B) I feel kind of ashamed and uncool for giving them an assignment that they would have wanted to bullshit.
That’s one thing I think students really don’t know. Is that their teachers still want them to think they (the teachers) are cool. And if they (the students) don’t, it can bring us right back to being the 4th-grade outcast all over again (on the inside, where it counts).
4. Student homework is SO MUCH MORE FUN and easier than teacher homework.
GOD, it’s easy. And at least you get to espouse new ideas and sometimes be creative (at least you do if I’m your teacher, I like to think). It gets old just looking for Constructive Ways to Improve things. It’s like being the editor of a magazine that’s cool and a little edgy, but just not quite top-tier enough to get the already-polished Updikes and Hertzbergs, although if YOU, the editor, put in enough work, maybe someday those writers you groom will go on to publish in The New Yorker and forget about you.
5. The only parts of online discussion I read extremely carefully are the responses to stuff I wrote.
I suppose this is a student-confession. Teachers tend to think online discussion is SO VALUABLE but for us insecure students, it’s just another venue for people to [hopefully] tell us how awesome and smart we are and how much they love our opinions.
6. Both teachers and students learn things. Lots of things. Whether they expect to or not, and whether they think they ARE learning anything or not.
The class has dredged up a lot of memories for me thus far, and conflicts within myself that often lay hidden, but something about being in a student-role again is making it easier to access them (I’m sure the subject matter of the class helps just a bit, steeped as it is in identity, awareness, questions of we-and-they, stereotypes, choices, insecurity, belonging, etc.). It’s always chastening to realize that as enlightened as I think I am, I still sometimes behave in craven ways. As open-minded as I am, I still unfairly judge others. As intelligent as I am, I still say stupid things. As secure as I am, I still subtly put others down to make myself feel better. Or at least more powerful. As cognizant of white privilege as I am, I still take advantage of it every day.
We had to make “identity charts” in our first week of class, with our names in the middle of the page and a web of traits that describe us attached to the center. I did it with a certain amount of begrudging acquiescence usually reserved for education classes that make you do elementary-style activities to model elementary-level strategies. Among the “identities” I put on my chart were female, lesbian, Southern, daughter, sister, Libra…but not white. We could look at the charts of everyone in the class, and as soon as I saw someone who listed their race I felt ashamed. Not of being white, really, but of allowing myself the luxury of forgetting about race as a factor of identity, a luxury I have ONLY because I’m white. The ways in which I am a member of a minority or a historically-oppressed group were quite salient—but I put my ZODIAC SIGN and forgot about my race. Wow.
So it’s chastening to be on the student side of things again, for a little while. And comforting to realize how much I still have to learn.
Also, as an unrelated PS, GAWD, this is funny.
My online class is called “The Holocaust and Human Behavior” and is given by Facing History and Ourselves, a wonderful yet sneaky organization that will not allow you access to its online educational resources unless you take one of their classes. We read readings, watch videos, and reply to discussion board postings on an array of topics from identity to inhumanity. I am mostly taking it in order to get access to their online resources, indicating yet another typical student-ism: students take classes for the credit, prestige, or reward they will get from them, but often accidentally learn something in the process. Anyway, from my unique vantage point of both student and teacher—teacher by day, student by night—I can offer the following insights about the foibles and graces of each role:
1. Teachers LOVE LOVE LOVE to assign Journal Entries. Students hate them.
Every teacher’s edition of any textbook that you pick up will tell you to have students create a reading journal, or a history journal, or a vocabulary journal, an Algebra II journal,or a you-name-it kind of journal. How many journals are kids supposed to keep? I always hated journaling, whether in my own journal or in school assignments, because of the problem of audience. Who on earth IS the audience of a journal, anyway? God? Yourself at 80 years of age? Your snooping mother or boyfriend? And if it’s a school journal, there’s that whole privacy-vs.-teacher-reading it thing that is weird and only really works in The Freedom Writers.
As a teacher, I would TOTALLY ask students to journal about their goals for a course at the beginning. But as a student, I think it’s bullshit.
2. Students ALWAYS think they have more work to do than the teacher, and are always wrong.
I know my students are convinced that I go home and drink wine and eat chocolate covered cherries in a steamy bathtub, of which time about 5 minutes is spent absentmindedly devising lengthy, time-consuming assignments for them that will burn up their entire weekends, when really I spend almost every waking hour either at, working on, or thinking about school, and when they don’t do their homework I want to bash their heads in for having the nerve to think they simply “don’t have enough time” for everything.
Our online facilitator for this class sends us one email a week and poses a discussion question and a brief response to our responses. I mean, come ON. (Just kidding, Mark, if you ever read this, I hope you can see this is almost all for rhetorical effect. Isn’t the page literally dripping with sarcasm? It might not come across as well on Internet Explorer, but try Firefox and I’m sure you’ll see it. I know you do work. And I’m not just saying that as your student because I want you to like me. But I do want you to like me. You like me, right?).
3. Both students and teachers are excellent at the art of bullshitting. The difference is that teachers can usually tell when students are doing it.
It’s so funny to me to read/listen to some of the things students say when they’re bullshitting. I know EXACTLY what they’re doing, and A) I could have done it so much better, even just done the bullshit so much better, not even the real thought, although I could have done that so much better too, obvi, and B) I feel kind of ashamed and uncool for giving them an assignment that they would have wanted to bullshit.
That’s one thing I think students really don’t know. Is that their teachers still want them to think they (the teachers) are cool. And if they (the students) don’t, it can bring us right back to being the 4th-grade outcast all over again (on the inside, where it counts).
4. Student homework is SO MUCH MORE FUN and easier than teacher homework.
GOD, it’s easy. And at least you get to espouse new ideas and sometimes be creative (at least you do if I’m your teacher, I like to think). It gets old just looking for Constructive Ways to Improve things. It’s like being the editor of a magazine that’s cool and a little edgy, but just not quite top-tier enough to get the already-polished Updikes and Hertzbergs, although if YOU, the editor, put in enough work, maybe someday those writers you groom will go on to publish in The New Yorker and forget about you.
5. The only parts of online discussion I read extremely carefully are the responses to stuff I wrote.
I suppose this is a student-confession. Teachers tend to think online discussion is SO VALUABLE but for us insecure students, it’s just another venue for people to [hopefully] tell us how awesome and smart we are and how much they love our opinions.
6. Both teachers and students learn things. Lots of things. Whether they expect to or not, and whether they think they ARE learning anything or not.
The class has dredged up a lot of memories for me thus far, and conflicts within myself that often lay hidden, but something about being in a student-role again is making it easier to access them (I’m sure the subject matter of the class helps just a bit, steeped as it is in identity, awareness, questions of we-and-they, stereotypes, choices, insecurity, belonging, etc.). It’s always chastening to realize that as enlightened as I think I am, I still sometimes behave in craven ways. As open-minded as I am, I still unfairly judge others. As intelligent as I am, I still say stupid things. As secure as I am, I still subtly put others down to make myself feel better. Or at least more powerful. As cognizant of white privilege as I am, I still take advantage of it every day.
We had to make “identity charts” in our first week of class, with our names in the middle of the page and a web of traits that describe us attached to the center. I did it with a certain amount of begrudging acquiescence usually reserved for education classes that make you do elementary-style activities to model elementary-level strategies. Among the “identities” I put on my chart were female, lesbian, Southern, daughter, sister, Libra…but not white. We could look at the charts of everyone in the class, and as soon as I saw someone who listed their race I felt ashamed. Not of being white, really, but of allowing myself the luxury of forgetting about race as a factor of identity, a luxury I have ONLY because I’m white. The ways in which I am a member of a minority or a historically-oppressed group were quite salient—but I put my ZODIAC SIGN and forgot about my race. Wow.
So it’s chastening to be on the student side of things again, for a little while. And comforting to realize how much I still have to learn.
Also, as an unrelated PS, GAWD, this is funny.
Monday, October 08, 2007
The Agony and the Ecstasy
The good news of the week was as follows:
1. First and foremost, drumroll drumroll, WE GOT OUR TICKETS TO SOUTH AFRICA! This is the ecstasy part. And I cannot mention it without effusive, prostrating thanks to the benefactors who made it possible, B & B. However, nothing good comes easily, and the process of booking the tickets came with much frustration—see the bad news below. But I will have retribution. In response to my negative customer service experience, I have written a 3-page, single-spaced, angry letter to not only Continental Airlines Customer Care, but the president of the company (possibly at his home address, thank you WhitePages.com), and the customer relations departments of their competing airlines.
2. I got almost everything checked off my to-do list. Except sending REF and JDM emails that they deserve. Said items have been carried over to this week’s to-do list.
3. We had a successful gathering at our house. It bordered on party status, I would have to say, but remains a gathering based on the relatively small number of people and the fact that it was on a Thursday. But, as we have never really had such a thing before, I would call it a success.
4. I put the CBEST behind me—now I can move toward being certified in multiple states! Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day. Certified to teach, that is, not to be confused with certifiable…. It reminded me how standardized tests are LAME. That notwithstanding, I think I wrote a damn good timed essay on why arts and athletics should not be cut to reduce school spending. I managed, within the confines of my five paragraphs, to display my verbal agility and prowess in all its glory—as when the lion is so beautiful one does not notice the bars of the cage….yeah.
5. I took a hike with my students through my old stomping ground, Hollywood, and rode LA mass transit for the first time. It cost $5 per person for the day, and driving would have cost at most 1/4 tank of gas for all 7 people…it is sad when public transit is just not worth it. There’s something wrong there.
6. Jodi got back an art project and an English paper, and passed both with flying colors! That is, an A. What color is a flying A? Questions to ponder. But we both celebrated to the max the fact that her hard work is paying off.
7. I revisited a couple of recipes I hadn’t made in a while and had a hearty week of cooking—I made Vietnamese fresh rolls, turkey-and-veggie-stuffed cabbage rolls, and a yummy pasta dish. We still had our requisite Thursday turkey burgers, but at least we changed it up a bit.
8. I wrote a poem! That I actually kinda sorta like! I gave the kids an hour to write in their journals and actually wrote in mine too! And although it’s not just right yet, I haven’t written anything that I liked at the outset in a long time. So. Wow. I feel a weight lifted.
The Notsogood News of the Week:
1. Again in the number one spot, the process of booking my ticket, which I will spare you, but the process consisted, in short, of a shit-ton of frequent flyer miles and also a shit-ton of hours spent on the phone trying to use said former shit-ton. In the process, I was heavily shit on. Shat. But did you see how I used that double entendre? I kill myself. They kept unconfirming flights I had on hold and then wanting to charge me more to get them back, not leaving things on hold that they said they would, and contradicting the previous agent I had spoken with, no matter what the situation. But it’s over, it’s behind us now, and I can look toward the future…
2. The lack of sleep is generally not good. I remember when I was little and could never sleep, and I HATED sleep, and Mom would be exhausted and would want to take a nap, and I asked her WHY she would ever want to nap; it was so BORING. And she told me sleep was something she craved, looked forward to, couldn’t get enough of…and I did not understand. Well, I do now. Sleep, glorious sleep. Oh, sweet small semblance of death and rebirth. It actually comforts me to think of death like sleep…I know that’s a common comparison, but if you feel half the relief once you’re dead as you do while you’re asleep, it might not be all that bad. Not that I’m considering it. But it is a nice thought.
3. The kids claim I walk too fast when we’re hiking, and Jodi claims I walk too slow. I can’t win. Or maybe I’m surrounded by whiners. Poll: which is more likely?
4. The days are getting shorter. Although one thing CA has going for it is that the long cold descent into winter is not very long or cold or wintry. But still dark. I find this gradual plunge into darkness very hard to deal with. It gives me a sense of impending doom, of hunkering down, of waiting out the worst of things. I know it won’t be that bad. But I like having hours of afternoon to spend in light.
That’s all, folks, for this week…sorry, I’m a little uninspired. But I guess it’s good to play ketchup once in a while. Next week, maybe the muse will be with me.
1. First and foremost, drumroll drumroll, WE GOT OUR TICKETS TO SOUTH AFRICA! This is the ecstasy part. And I cannot mention it without effusive, prostrating thanks to the benefactors who made it possible, B & B. However, nothing good comes easily, and the process of booking the tickets came with much frustration—see the bad news below. But I will have retribution. In response to my negative customer service experience, I have written a 3-page, single-spaced, angry letter to not only Continental Airlines Customer Care, but the president of the company (possibly at his home address, thank you WhitePages.com), and the customer relations departments of their competing airlines.
2. I got almost everything checked off my to-do list. Except sending REF and JDM emails that they deserve. Said items have been carried over to this week’s to-do list.
3. We had a successful gathering at our house. It bordered on party status, I would have to say, but remains a gathering based on the relatively small number of people and the fact that it was on a Thursday. But, as we have never really had such a thing before, I would call it a success.
4. I put the CBEST behind me—now I can move toward being certified in multiple states! Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day. Certified to teach, that is, not to be confused with certifiable…. It reminded me how standardized tests are LAME. That notwithstanding, I think I wrote a damn good timed essay on why arts and athletics should not be cut to reduce school spending. I managed, within the confines of my five paragraphs, to display my verbal agility and prowess in all its glory—as when the lion is so beautiful one does not notice the bars of the cage….yeah.
5. I took a hike with my students through my old stomping ground, Hollywood, and rode LA mass transit for the first time. It cost $5 per person for the day, and driving would have cost at most 1/4 tank of gas for all 7 people…it is sad when public transit is just not worth it. There’s something wrong there.
6. Jodi got back an art project and an English paper, and passed both with flying colors! That is, an A. What color is a flying A? Questions to ponder. But we both celebrated to the max the fact that her hard work is paying off.
7. I revisited a couple of recipes I hadn’t made in a while and had a hearty week of cooking—I made Vietnamese fresh rolls, turkey-and-veggie-stuffed cabbage rolls, and a yummy pasta dish. We still had our requisite Thursday turkey burgers, but at least we changed it up a bit.
8. I wrote a poem! That I actually kinda sorta like! I gave the kids an hour to write in their journals and actually wrote in mine too! And although it’s not just right yet, I haven’t written anything that I liked at the outset in a long time. So. Wow. I feel a weight lifted.
The Notsogood News of the Week:
1. Again in the number one spot, the process of booking my ticket, which I will spare you, but the process consisted, in short, of a shit-ton of frequent flyer miles and also a shit-ton of hours spent on the phone trying to use said former shit-ton. In the process, I was heavily shit on. Shat. But did you see how I used that double entendre? I kill myself. They kept unconfirming flights I had on hold and then wanting to charge me more to get them back, not leaving things on hold that they said they would, and contradicting the previous agent I had spoken with, no matter what the situation. But it’s over, it’s behind us now, and I can look toward the future…
2. The lack of sleep is generally not good. I remember when I was little and could never sleep, and I HATED sleep, and Mom would be exhausted and would want to take a nap, and I asked her WHY she would ever want to nap; it was so BORING. And she told me sleep was something she craved, looked forward to, couldn’t get enough of…and I did not understand. Well, I do now. Sleep, glorious sleep. Oh, sweet small semblance of death and rebirth. It actually comforts me to think of death like sleep…I know that’s a common comparison, but if you feel half the relief once you’re dead as you do while you’re asleep, it might not be all that bad. Not that I’m considering it. But it is a nice thought.
3. The kids claim I walk too fast when we’re hiking, and Jodi claims I walk too slow. I can’t win. Or maybe I’m surrounded by whiners. Poll: which is more likely?
4. The days are getting shorter. Although one thing CA has going for it is that the long cold descent into winter is not very long or cold or wintry. But still dark. I find this gradual plunge into darkness very hard to deal with. It gives me a sense of impending doom, of hunkering down, of waiting out the worst of things. I know it won’t be that bad. But I like having hours of afternoon to spend in light.
That’s all, folks, for this week…sorry, I’m a little uninspired. But I guess it’s good to play ketchup once in a while. Next week, maybe the muse will be with me.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Californians are Flaky
or, The Characters on The West Wing are my Best Friends.
I know it’s wrong to succumb to stereotypes. My generation is supposed to be above that. But people ask me, surprisingly frequently, if there is a significant difference in the cultures of the East and West coasts. And OMG, like, there totally is.
My mom says it takes 2 years to feel at home in a place. I’m sure that at least that much is true. I don’t know how you feel at home in a place where you have no history. No one who knows you or where you come from, no one who has any concept of you from before you were exactly who you are today, in the role they see you in today. It is ideas like this that I try to impart to my students when they wonder why history is relevant to them.
Ah, the relevance of history. I KNOW it’s important, but still when I stay up till midnight trying to design a series of questions and activities based on the British Museum’s interactive website on Ancient Mesopotamia, which I can then see the kids are bored with after 20 minutes, it’s hard to remember this. What I keep coming back to is, A) Wow, all this stuff happened in what is now Iraq—the home of the oldest written epic is being slowly slaughtered—and B)No wonder God sent a flood to wipe out all the filth from the earth. If ancient Mesopotamian filth was as filthy as modern American filth.
But I digress. The subject is flakiness. I realize that I have been flaky in the keeping of my promise to upkeep this repository of writing of a Sunday—don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me. And that in doing so the people I am letting down are my closest friends, my 3 gentle readers (the allusion is to Miss Manners, JDM; it might be time to brush up on your cotillion etiquette. Oh PS, I saw a license plate that said “I Heart
Um, so yeah. Jodi and I have been watching The West Wing, which luckily our local library has all but one of—season 4 disc 4 to be exact, which was, according to Asif, my favorite librarian, who gives me teacher liberties like checking out Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet for 2 weeks instead of the usual 2 days, THROWN AWAY BECAUSE IT WAS DAMAGED. Luckily, trusty Asif found one at another branch and had it sent to me. I told him I was desperate. He understood. He understands me. Although I describe Asif as “trusty,” he is not immune from CA flakiness in that when I finally asked him his name, he held out his ID tag and said “As IF,” in perfect Clueless fashion.
No, The West Wing is fiction, most people who know me are thousands of miles away, and on a daily basis I have to deal with students who didn’t do their homework over the weekend because they have much more vibrant social lives than I (and who can blame them? well, I can, I guess), also people with absolutely no sense of time to whom lateness is the water in which they swim, also people who cannot make, much less keep, social commitments that would, in theory, help us get closer as friends and make them actually seem more real than my beloved West Wing characters. But hey, there are perks. I’m around kind and generous people (just how generous may be revealed next week, but for now I’m not counting any chickens), the sunsets are pretty, and Jodi and I both swear we have seen Rachel Griffiths powerwalking down our street on numerous occasions. So I’m sure we’re going to be best friends soon. And we are still wooing the cat, whom I call Clementine and Jodi calls Humpy-Butt. I’m sure we’ll settle on a name any day.
I have written far too many subordinate clauses for one sitting, so I will sign off. It’s getting late, and Season 5 Disc 3 is waiting.
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