Blather on Bad Habits

I don’t really feel like writing today, but I’m trying to make myself. So I’ll be brief. I spent $92 at the used bookstore on Saturday and all I want to do is read. Today I finished Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and lord, let me tell you, there is nothing better than fiction for reluctant young adult readers. I’m eager to move on to The Count of Monte Cristo (which is, I think, 1844’s answer to fiction for reluctant young adult readers—people didn’t live to be much older than 30 anyway, right?), so I’ll be brief with the following:

A Meditation on The Number One Activity I Do When I Sit Down to Write: Nail Biting

It’s amazing how satisfying biting my nails is. And time-consuming. And complicated. Nails that did not previously need shortening suddenly begin SCREAMING for the knife…or the tooth…when I sit down to write. I know it’s kind of gross. I don’t bite them to the quick or anything, just the tiny half-moons that are ready, well-clear of the skin. I started biting my nails as a conscious decision. Precocious 8-year-old that I was, I knew that all interesting people had bad habits, and I didn’t have one. I guess I didn’t consider reading too much or preferring the company of adults to that of children a bad habit. This meant only one thing: If I didn’t have a bad habit, I needed to adopt one. But what were my options? Nose-picking was just nasty—at times, a practical necessity, I’ll admit, but definitely not a cool bad habit or one you could do in front of others and get the fascinating-points I was hoping for. And of course all the adult bad habits—drinking, smoking, passive-aggression, serial monogamy, soap operas—were still a bit beyond the pale.

The characters in books who bit their nails always had exciting lives. They bit their nails from nervousness, yes, but this meant they were the kind of people who had things to be nervous about! Which meant their lives were exciting! Full of passion and scandal! Which meant people were fascinated with them. And that they were well-rounded. If I started biting my nails, I would be all of these things too.

It was a little weird at first, and harmless enough. I suppose it still is. I don’t like having my nails long anyway because I feel like my hands are unusable—like Edward Scissorhands or something (Katherine Nailhands…hmm. Not the same ring to it…). Or too delicate, like the porcelain hands they use to display rings. So if it’s a matter of having short nails, it doesn’t make TOO much difference whether they’re short from cutting or from biting. Although duh, they look worse when you bite them. And I never wear nail polish on my fingernails either, partly because I hate how it feels (it makes my fingertips feel like they’re wearing a mouthguard) but also, admittedly, because as dubious as the health and hygiene of biting one’s nails is, it is grosser to bite painted nails than non-painted nails. But I totally don’t understand how people keep fingernail polish pristine. I only know one person personally who does this as a matter of course, and that’s Cari. That means it must be a myth that such things are possible for ordinary people.

Speaking of nail polish, an interesting tangent: long before I ever used it for its intended purposes on a regular basis (toes only, of course), as far as I was concerned its primary uses were medicinal (curing chigger bites) and practical (nipping runs in your stockings in the bud). It seems like half the world (or rather, half the people who even know what the heck chiggers are) firmly believes that chiggers burrow inside your skin and stay there till you suffocate them—with nail polish, of course—and the other half believes this is hogwash and they just bite you like normal beasts. What is the truth? Mythbusters should do a show on this. While the former does sound a bit alarmist and like something that only happens in the southern hemisphere, I am here to tell you that nail polish works. Maybe it just keeps you from scratching, or maybe it actually suffocates the microscopic parasitic invaders. But it works. And then, of course, the pantyhose use = brilliance. Just be sure to use clear if the run is in a visible place, or else you risk looking slightly mutilated.

Another tangent: hangnails. And why the bejesus do they hurt so much? How can something this big: , hurt SO MUCH? And where do they come from, and what purpose do they serve? Rarely do I experience such satisfaction followed immediately by deep regret as I do when I just yank one out. ‘Cause you know, when you don’t have nail clippers with you, and it’s just hangin’ there, hangin’ out it true hangnail fashion, whispering like the devil on your shoulder, “You know you want to. You want to so bad. Just pull me. Forget the week of inflammation you will suffer. Forget the blood on your hands that will make perfect strangers think you forgot to wash your hands after changing your tampon. Just yank. Like you’ve never yanked before.”

So…wow. Gross. Three pages on nailbiting, hangnails, and chiggers. These seem like things that only an overly-talkative teenager could blather for so much time on. Perhaps I do have a future in young-adult fiction, after all…

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

The last time my whole family went to the beach together was, I believe, in 2004. As always, we chose the small stretch of beach in the Alabama panhandle (what? Alabama has a panhandle? Indeed, a little-known fact that may prove quite useful at cocktail parties). We used to come here every year during my childhood, but there had been a hiatus for several years due to my grandfather’s illness and everyone’s mismatched schedules. So on this, the Thompson Beach Reunion Tour ’04, after my grandfather’s death, we revisited old haunts by staying at Vista del Mar, a vintage relic that evokes all the charm of 50’s Pleasantville perfection, though now of course with a coating of decaying grandeur. It’s not a bad place, and, although a high-rise, it’s the last of the strip, so that walking down the beach east of the building there is soon nothing but dunes, seagrass, and the big blue sea.

I don’t remember too much about this particular trip. I remember trying to walk all the way to the end of the beach, but never quite making it. I remember playing stupid games with Robin in the pool and laughing so hysterically that the other poolside guests had to have been made quite uncomfortable. I remember heading to the highest level of the building to try to get phone service in order to talk to Jodi. There was my cousin Margaux’s wedding, which is the subject of another story for another time. As usual, there was the overabundance of seafood and the dread of the blast of air conditioning as you walked inside while soaking wet. Other than that, the trip blurs together in a montage of blonde and blue, sand and sky—except for one evening, which began like any other but ended in something akin to the final scene of Lord of the Flies.

So, among our age-old beach traditions is that of buying a Florida lottery ticket. When we started going to the beach, Florida was the only state in the southeast that had a lottery, so we saw it as a once-a-year opportunity to squander a hard-earned dollar or two on a raffle with impossible odds. We always stayed in Alabama, as previously noted, but being only a few miles from the Florida border, we would drive into Pensacola on occasion and usually stop for a lottery ticket at the Florabama—a dive bar that straddles the border (read about their legendary Mullet Toss). During the week before purchasing the ticket, we would all put our best efforts into channeling the supernatural forces that would cause us to win, and write down numbers that revealed themselves to us through divine intervention—the number 27 appeared to us in a dream; we saw 43 on 3 different license plates in a span of ten minutes, the numerology behind my birthdate was 3, etc. We would choose our six fateful numbers this way, and wait. It was always exciting, especially when I was really little. I knew that we faced impossible odds, yet to a child (who thinks $100 is a sum akin to the riches of King Midas), impossible odds still seem just possible enough that it’s worth waiting with bated breath as the numbers are drawn.

So, again, in 2004 it had been several years since we had last played the lottery. By then, I think Georgia had its own, but we never played it, having the irrational (yet fortunate) attitude that the lottery was something only to be done in Florida, and only on special occasions, one week a year while vacationing and channeling numbers through divine inspiration. For some reason, I suppose disinterest or disillusionment, we did not buy separate tickets—one for my family, one for my aunt and uncle, one for my grandmother—but my grandmother, instead, bought one ticket and casually declared that if it won anything we could all share it. I think we all contributed our special numbers, reasoning that the force would be stronger if everyone’s paranormal prophetic abilities were pooled.

We bought the ticket, and, with the drawing the next day, began to playfully imagine what we would do with the winnings.

It began as idle dinner conversation. Simple hypotheticals. The eternal question, what would you do with a million dollars? I believe we began this way, not considering practicalities but simply dreaming, desiring—my parents would fix their fallingdown house that is currently caught in a race between their retirement and its own decay. My grandmother would travel to Paris again, or Sweden, or be set in the event of a medical situation. Robin could pay for school, I could travel, get Jodi a green card, my aunt and uncle could settle the legal dispute over their land and finally have time to finish their house. How wonderful, how perfect, how problemless our lives would be if we could have these simple things! But then, someone, and I don’t remember with 100% certainty who (although I could guess), asked the fateful question: Well, wait—how are we going to split the winnings, anyway?

I am of the opinion that it was not the question itself but the semantics that screwed us: note the certainty of the future tense, the rhetorical step that took us from the realm of the hypothetical, the conditional, to the certain. Talking about money you might win (when really you don’t have a chance in hell) is a different beast than talking about money you have won. That was the mistake. But words are so small, their complexities so hard to notice sometimes, so easy to spit out and so impossible to retract. So we all continued the conversation, oblivious to the deadly turn it had taken, discussing how we were going to split our millions.

I think everyone in my immediate family just assumed we were splitting it seven ways—one for each of the people involved. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be another way to split it—I mean, it should all rightfully go to my grandmother, since she bought the ticket, but if she chose to share, and, I mean, since I had contributed my divine number to the ticket, surely I was entitled to something? But another party objected to that, claiming it wasn’t fair for our “household” to get 4/7 of the earnings when both the other “households” would get less just because there were less people in them. I thought it was rather fair, because more people cost more money, and my sister and I don’t technically even belong to my parents’ household anymore. Well, maybe Robin does/did, as an eligible dependent, but I certainly didn’t. Yeah, so maybe Robin shouldn’t get her share, but I should (haha, more for me!!). But my grandmother sided with that faction, saying it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t have children. Which is true, but not the issue at hand—it’s not like Robin and I would be sharing our millions with our parents, and it definitely wasn’t the case that my mom and my aunt would share theirs with their parents. Parent. Why would we share with those who shed their blood, sweat, tears, and, well, yes, money, on us anyway? It’s not like we asked to be born. They got themselves into this pickle. Just thinking about it sends me into a frenzy a la Finding Nemo, “Mine! Mine! Mine!.”

My mom made a halfhearted attempt to stick up for us, saying that we were people too who should be included in the group we’ll call, for these purposes, “family.” We were over 18 (well, I was), and therefore—but the opposition was too strong, and, while I value my personhood and would have valued my cut of the winnings, after a point it wasn’t worth the fight. My memory of how it ended is unclear. I’m sure someone sullenly did the dishes, plodded through putting away the food. I think I gave up and said that however they chose to split things would be fine. But we went to bed, if not angry, then miffed, disgruntled, off-kilter, wronged, betrayed, misunderstood. As my mom and I were getting ready for bed, we looked at each other with the eyes of doomed puppies. “Oh, my God,” Mom said, “I sure hope we don’t win.”

Do you remember the story by Shirley Jackson called “The Lottery,” which you undoubtedly read in high school? If not, I won’t give it away, but you should read it here. Someone undoubtedly knew something about the macabre dynamics of chance—or, more to the point, of human nature. But we proved, that night, like the best of the deceptive psychological experiments on the demonic nature of humanity (the Stanford Prison experiment, the Milgram obedience experiments, Jane Elliott’s blue-eyes v. brown-eyes shenanigans—don’t tell me the IRB approved that shit!), not to mention Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada, that love is a logical fallacy based on the premise that altruism exists. Maybe I’m being harsh. But even without being quite that harsh, I can say with certainty that money (read: greed) will ruin people. You don’t even have to have the money, you just have to pretend you have it for about half an hour to start seeing the effects.

The next day we looked at the paper, or watched TV (I can’t remember now how we heard the news), with dread, for once praying—I was, at least—that we would not win the lottery. Suffice it to say, we didn’t. We breathed a sigh of relief and moved on, stuffing the uncomfortable dynamics under a rug for the time being.

As an epilogue, I should note that following that debacle, my grandmother supposedly (I’m going on hearsay) reapportioned her will so that both her children are considered equally, rather than taking into account the children (i.e. Robin and me) of one of her children. It doesn’t matter. I think in some way she’s trying to level the playing field—my aunt was supposed to have a baby once, but a terrible twist of fate prevented it. Even after a quarter of a century, some wounds are still too fresh to be written, and so I won’t go further, but I think my grandmother is doing all she knows how to make my aunt feel valued and validated as a woman in her own right, with or without having provided grandchildren. If money would provide any consolation for pain, I would give my hypothetical lottery winnings to her in a heartbeat. And my inheritance. Because I suspect she, in a heartbeat, would give all of hers to have her child.

New Year's Resolutions

A few summers back, a certain couple who shall remain nameless were fond of somewhat aggressively praying before meals in the dining hall. Although not overt proselytes, the aggression lay in the fact that if you were sitting near them, it was unignorable. For one thing, they had to sit directly across from one another in order to hold hands. If such facing seats were not available, the two would either ask someone already seated at the table to move, or, more often than not, take the more passive-aggressive approach of sighing, exchanging meaning-laden glances, and ultimately reaching ACROSS other diners in order to hold hands while they prayed, for what felt like a small eternity. Perhaps it was only a mere 20 seconds or so, but such awkwardness can feel like minutes, and in those minutes the reached-across person would be left to contemplate A) whether such breaches of manners are permissible in matters of faith, B) why the handholding part was really necessary in such circumstances, C) how her food was getting cold because, as gauche as it is to reach across someone to pray, surely it must be even moreso to reach around that supplicating arm for a tater tot and gobble it up, not to mention the risk of embarrassing ketchup drippage, and D) the fact that she, the reached-across person, was not praying, but instead spending the same amount of time and energy scheming about how to circumvent the obstacle of said pious appendage and get a tater tot from her plate to her mouth, including ketchup.

It was that lattermost point that nagged at me, long after the annoyance of the situation had morphed into nostalgic hilarity. Because as annoying as it was, the reason why it felt so uncomfortable was that, though they seemed self-important and absurdly serious, next to their devotions I felt shallow and superficial. The rest of us complained about the terrible food (and it was quite terrible), but these two thanked Jesus for it. For, like, minutes at a time. The rest of us made mashed-potato volcanoes and wrote crude words with our sandwich-crusts, and these two stopped to appreciate the bounty of heaven, in silence, three times a day.

I tried to think whether I stopped to appreciate anything in the course of an average day. Whether I had three moments of purposeful (rather than circumstantial) silence in a day. Whether I observed any sort of ritual at all (aside from toothbrushing) (which I take rather seriously). The results were not impressive. I’ll marvel at a nice sunset or a full moon, if I happen to see one, but only if it strikes me as marvelous—I don’t often, anymore, search for the beauty in ordinary things—like a cloudy day, an unfull moon, a twisted tree. I never stop in purposeful silence to catalogue the things around me, and I am certainly unpracticed in the art of gratitude. Even the nicest meals I have ever eaten have gone sans a moment of appreciation (I’ll thank someone who paid for a meal, but forget to thank the circumstances that provided it), so I would never have stopped to thank the world for the bland slop served up in the Refectory. And for that I am ashamed.

So it has only taken me a year and a half to come around to the fact that, much like divesting from Halliburton, I need to appreciate my food in order to feel myself a moral person. Not so much savor its taste, but actually nurture a sense of gratitude for the fact of it, the abundance of it, and the beings that gave their lives for it, both animal and vegetable. To acknowledge that to eat is sacred, precious, is the way I participate in the circle of life until I become ashes. It’s the least I can do. And also the most.

******

It should be noted that, for all my resolve, I still have trouble remembering to do it. I have written it and my other resolutions on the large blackboard in our kitchen in order to try to abide by them. And my other resolutions are to WRITE and to proactively pursue my own happiness; i.e. stop my kvetching and try to enjoy my life, rather than focus on the frustration and isolation that so overwhelmed my autumn. It’s actually going well so far. Here’s hopin’.

Que Será Será

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.

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.

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.

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 JDM” the other day. I was like, me too! Wow.) My closest REAL friends, not to be confused with the people with whom I spend most of my time. Which would be A) my students, who are sweet but in a different category, 2)Jodi, a friend but also in a different category, and it should be mentioned that I have determined I spend more awake hours with my students than with her—sad—and C) the staff of Bartlet’s White House.

Oh, CJ, you are so tall and stunning in your all-too-occasional Donna Karan gowns bought specially for state dinners. Josh, you are a little too hot-tempered, but the righteous must also wield swords, must they not, and anyway, any friend of Mary-Louise Parker’s is a friend of mine. If you get my drift. When she took off her shoes in your office…HOTT. But Donna, don't give up hope. Your radiant idealism and trim organizational prowess will win him in the end. Charlie, don’t worry, Zoey will be a better actress someday and will then be worthy of your love. Toby, you bear the tender angst of a word-wielding gentleman with the fortitude of Atlas. And Sam?! Where is the beautiful boy when I need him most? Supposedly campaigning in the OC, which would be great if you were REAL; we could meet occasionally for lunch, I would drive you to the airport when you really needed it, because that’s what friends are for, but alas, like all the aforementioned members of Category C, you are not real. You are but a figment, albeit a beautiful figment, in whose dreamy eyes I was lost during seasons 1-4 but now in season 5 I have to reevaluate what’s most important to me….


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.

Thumbelina

Jodi and I are having discussions over what to name our cat. Well, not our cat. We are having discussions over whether we have a cat. Whether to have a cat. Are we adult enough? Do we want the responsibility? Can we get around the provision from our landlords that we are not, technically, allowed to have one? What happens at Christmas? Can we afford it? Who will let it out at 7:00 AM? To which I answer yes, yes, yes, we’ll see, sure why not, and me, if it means we can have one.

I have wanted a cat for a long time. Ever since we shared a blissful abode with The Kitten in New York. Oh, and Katie. Lest we forget Katie, the owner of The Kitten and my dearest friend. But do I have videos of Katie playing not just fetch, but catch, with a bell toy? I think not.


When we left that sweet sweet closet on the Upper East Side, I was bereft of satisfying cat presence in my life. I would relish the days at home when I could see Sara. Sara, light of my life…I’m tempted to make a Lolita reference here, syntactically of course, not because she WAS the fire of my loins, it’s just how can you write “light of my life” without “fire of my loins” after it and not sound like a CBS Dean Martin special? But “Sara” doesn’t really roll off the tongue like “Lolita,” not a paragraph’s worth of linguistic musings anyway. But I digress. Sara was the best thing about my childhood, she was its fire and constancy and softness and excitement. By which I mean, as sweet as she might be, you always knew she could rip your face off if she wanted to. It was that element of surprise that kept things interesting.

I remember getting Sara from our neighbors whose cat had kittens. I was seven and Robin was two and we walked up the block to where the kittens were nestled in a box and we chose from among the female ones (the one male had been claimed) and she was just a wriggling baby and we stole her from her mother. I mean, I guess she was old enough and everything because I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have let us take her if she wasn’t “of age,” but it still seems such a cruel thing to steal babies from their mothers, for all parties involved, and to expect the baby to adapt to a new family of oh, say, a different species. I remember holding her on the way home, how small she was, how light. How sharp her little claws, how like small suns her flashing eyes. She was not Sara then, oh no, she was a victim of the nameless limbo of a feuding human family, taken hostage from her feline roots. My parents had given me the opportunity to name her. With the depth and breadth of childhood imagination I had narrowed it down to “Midnight” (she was black), and “Tulip” (why, you ask? I have no answer). My dad told me I would regret these choices and we should go with either Sara, Grace, or Rebecca, which were names he had put in the running for when his daughters were born but which had lost to the ever-popular Katherine and Robin. At least the ever-popular Katherine, which when I wrote the phrase “ever-popular” I expected to see in the top-ten lists of female baby names for most birth years and was astounded to find that I rank 39th in top names of 1981, only two places ahead of “Brandy.” And this according to the Social Security Administration. So there you go.

Well, it sucks when your parents are right, but look what happened. Somehow my dad won, but I recall that it was on a trial basis, under which we agreed to try “Sara” for the time being and see if it worked. I realize now with my full adult mental faculties that I may have been duped—how would we have known if it wasn’t “working”? Would there have been signs, shadows, wonders? Torn curtains, kitten piss on our pillows, yowling in the night? But time went by, and Sara was Sara, and pretty soon it became clear that she was not really Tulip material. Midnight…maybe, but I bet if the SSA had a list of top ten black cat names, that would rank highly and then we would just be another set of uncreative WASPs. We showed them. We made Sara, the number-4 ranked female name of 1988, the name for not our baby, but our CAT. Hah.

Sara was the best cat ever. Yes, she was a teenage pregnancy (or, what are cat years? Maybe she was the equivalent of a mere 7 human years when she got pregnant at the ripe young age of 1), and yes, she ran away sometimes, and yes, she had no qualms about clawing your face off. But she was tiny, beautiful, feisty, frank, and individualistic, but would give you love when YOU needed it most. It was never what she needed, at least overtly, but she could tell when you were weak and required it of her. She was always gentle and kind to my grandfather in his ancient fragility. She loved to “make biscuits” on feather pillows while you were trying to fall asleep. When she had kittens, she would lose count of them (there were 5) and take 3 to the next hiding place she had devised (usually among my mom’s clean undergarments), leaving the last two mewling in their box while she contentedly nursed the others. Once, she had hidden (sans kittens, thank god) inside the car engine, and we drove several blocks before we heard her howl as we slammed on the brakes, and then saw her jump from off the tire onto the road, and then followed the railroad tracks home. Or maybe my dad had to come get her. My childhood memory fails me, except I couldn’t believe she had been under the hood and survived. Once she jumped out of the second story window in pursuit of a squirrel. Once (and this is the worst), she had been gone for a few days. I had to tutor this dumb jock boy in math. This is 4th grade. He said “You seem sad, what’s wrong?” and I said, “My cat is missing.” You can imagine the rest. In case you can’t:
“Oh, that’s too bad. What kind of cat is it?”
“Black. She’s small.”
“Ooh. Where do you live?”
“Central Ave.”
“Oh, God. I saw a black cat smushed on the side of the road this morning, on Central.”
At which point, I think I started bawling. Naivete yet again rearing its ugly head, preventing me from realizing that he had garnered all the necessary information from me before stating his fatal conclusion. Luckily, when I got home that day, Sara had returned, and although she would never kiss-and-tell of her adventures away, one could only imagine the things she had done and seen in her travels, free from her clumsy human appendages.

Sara died in 2005. I found out she was sick during a peace march. We were in Winston, had just walked a couple of blustery miles with several hundred other anti-warriors, and were standing at the five points brandishing signs when my mom called. It was like war had broken out in my heart, and all that marching meant nothing. I guess it’s callous, to feel that so much more acutely than the casualties of war, but I think it’s also natural. I drove home the next day to visit her, to say goodbye. She lay quietly but her breath was shallow. Something had ruptured. Something had been done that could not be undone. She was 17, but she would have had plenty of good years left if only…if only…

When I found out she had died, it was the only day I missed school that whole year. I didn’t think I would ever be able to go back. But somehow I did. Somehow, we do. How is it? How do we do that?

So now here I am, back at school again, and this cat has presented itself at our door. Well, two cats, but one is such a scaredy-cat that it seems unlikely to succumb to our taming in the near future. We think they are related because they both have thumbs. Yes, thumbs. When they walk, their front paws look like little hands, which upon extensive research I have found out is a rare and desirous characteristic of “polydactyl cats,” or Hemingway cats, so-called because Hemingway’s son had one. I love that. The one we think is the mother wears a hideous hot-pink collar but otherwise is beautiful. For awhile, we thought the collar meant she was someone else’s, but through rumors that we choose to believe we have determined that she used to belong to someone who moved away from the neighborhood and left her. I think she was once tame, but her kitten never was and so he is the slinky, nervous one of the two. For a few days, they both sat on our porch and yowled, until, driven to distraction, Jodi gave them some milk. In telling this story to our grandchildren, she will certainly blame me for initiating the taming, but I assure you it was she. Gradually, the mother, whom I’ve taken to calling Thumbs, or Thumbelina, came further and further in. We gave her solid food. On an impulse buy at Target, I bought catfood. So we stop feeding her expensive human food, I told myself. But really so that we could feed her more easily and more often. Then one day she let us pet her. Then one day she let us hold her. Then she sat with us on the sofa. Then she found our bed. And the rest…is history.

She’s up there now, curled up on the bed. Last night she slept there with us. Jodi said if I was going to let her do that, I had to let her out in the middle of the night or else clean up her pee from wherever it was in the morning. But when I woke, she was where she had been the night before. Awake before me, of course, much more in tune with nature than needful of alarms, and staring out across the mountains from the window by the bed.

Do animals appreciate a view? I’ve never thought about this before, one way or another, but I have today quite a bit. What was she looking at, what was she thinking, as she stared across the mountains in the early hours of light? Do they look different inside her golden eyes? How can she be so calm, face the day with such serenity?

There are lessons I can learn from this cat. I think she knows it, and she is going to stick with me till I do. I’m not sure what to do about the landlords. I’m not sure what to do about Christmas. But she found me. This, according to my dad, is the only way one is supposed to procure cats. In the back of my mind, I hear the Little Prince: “One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets oneself be tamed.”

I don’t know who is taming and who is being tamed in this situation. But somehow, I think it’s worth the risk.


*A note to my readers: thank you, THANK YOU for the guilt. It's what keeps me going. Also, the photo at the top of this post, of the paw, is not actually our cat. You can probably tell this from the human hand if nothing else. It's from Google images, but the resemblance is quite striking.

The Indiscriminate Universe

Cancer cells grow in an uncontrolled manner. They forget to die and therefore the diseased cells accumulate…Under the microscope, normal cells look uniform, with similar sizes and orderly organization. Cancer cells look less orderly, with varying sizes and without apparent organization.
—The Mayo Clinic Cancer Basics

So was it the end of dread? I’m sure you’re all anxiously wondering. Well. I began the week not, shall we say, at my physical or emotional peak. You may ask, when is a Monday morning ever one’s physical or emotional peak? And you would be right to ask this. But this particular Monday, I was suffering from a bout of ailments such as the first day of my period, utter exhaustion, AND the worst sunburn I have had in the last several years. After I left you last week, we went to the beach to spend the Last Day swooning in the sun. It was cool, one of those days where the weather is a manipulative sumbitch and you cannot FEEL the fact that your skin is being slowly broiled, due to the sweet salt air and the rush of the waves and the cries of happy children. We stayed out for hours. Jodi promptly feel asleep reading her art history book, and I was reading The Power of One and got quite carried away, forgetting that the bottle of sunscreen had run out halfway through my lathering process and that my legs had never gotten done. I didn’t even rotate, so I was literally toasting the backs of my legs. I got up once to go swimming, and it felt so good, I stayed in for a long time, happy the way you are when you’re a kid at the pool and you could stay forever, you are just so happy and diverted. I floated on my back trying to only see sky and nothing else, I swam underwater trying to use my whole body, feel all my muscles, dive like a dolphin, ride the waves. I felt my scalp tingle from the water smoothing my hair flat on my head (my flat head), and not once did my legs feel sunburned. But oh, they were. They still hurt, too, a week later, and I curse myself for my stupidity. Which makes me wonder:

Why are there some lessons you have to learn every few years? Like not to buy scotch tape from the dollar store (you KNOW it’s too shiny and it doesn’t tear right, and yet you do it anyway. It’s so tempting. It’s only a dollar! All the other tape is like $2.50! How can something that seems so right be so wrong?), or not to eat Cup-O-Noodles (it will never taste as delectable as it did when we were five), or not to buy $3 bottles of wine. Ever. No matter how pretty the packaging. Or Boone’s Farm. Or Andre. The list goes on. Or that crazy drunken college parties are not fun. Not really. Not unless you’re really smashed on one of the above fine spirits, in which case, you are already about to learn one of those crucial lessons all over again. Putting on sunscreen even when it’s not hot is one of those lessons. You think the worst that can happen is that you’ll get a little pink—so what? Soon it will turn into a lovely, luscious bronze. Not so, young friend, not so.

Which brings me to cancer. Which, I think we’ll all agree, is the worst that can happen from staying too long in the sun. I have been thinking about cancer lately. It seems like the invisible circle of Being Unaffected by Cancer that used to surround me like a shield is weakening. It’s like the ozone layer—it still basically exists, but there is plenty of room for evil to slip through the cracks. A fence with a hole in it is still mostly a fence, but a coyote can still get through and kill your cat, so you might as well have no fence. (Watch me use California-related metaphors with agility and grace. Anyone would think I had always been here).

I was trying to explain this to my students, and I still don’t think I’ve found a way to do it exactly right, but I always think about the health reports on the news, and how when I was a kid, and even to some extent now, when they talk about some exciting new drug they’ve developed or some breakthrough research in Lou Gehrig’s disease or some way to give people new hearts or eyes or hips, I listen to them but I don’t really hear. I think it’s because there are so many things in the world to worry about that when something so specific as a certain ailment comes along, I compartmentalize it. I think, “Maybe someday I will have to deal with that, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” and if I think about it much harder, I get scared or sad or convinced that I have it. Like head lice. You know how whenever anyone mentions head lice your scalp starts to crawl? I know fatal diseases are not like head lice, but when I think about them too much, my soul starts to crawl. So I tuck them away into the little pantry in my brain that I will never open unless I have to, where ominous eventualities are stored, the kinds of things you don’t want to think about because even if you could think about them rationally, without freaking yourself out, there is always the fear that the Law of Attraction will suddenly start actually existing and you will make these things happen just by thinking about them.

That’s where Cancer (specifically Breast) has been for most of my life. It’s also where I keep the Death of Close Family and Friends, Getting Blinded/Deafened/Lamed in a Freak Accident, Terrorism, and Kidney Stones. Every now and then something forces me to open the closet and face those things, but usually from a distance, across the dim musty light to which the closet is accustomed. Lately it seems like I’m getting closer and closer to having to take something out of the closet and really examine it.

First it was Dana, on The L Word. I should state that A) I know she’s not real and B) I realize this may be a silly way to begin to illustrate my point. But it felt like I had known her for three years. Known her from afar, maybe, in that…fictional sort of way, but when you think about how many women’s first true love is Mr. Darcy, it doesn’t seem so hard to imagine.

Actually, I lied. First, it was Justin’s mom. In college, when we were all so young and beautiful and busy and self-obsessed, we all quietly ignored the fact that Justin was losing his mother. Not ignored-ignored, I mean, we gave him hugs and everything, and tried to “be there for him,” whatever that means, but there was the terrible silence in which we knew that we all still had our mothers, maybe even complained about them or, hell, complained about anything, and while we knew that most of us would probably have to face that kind of pain someday, hopefully when we’re older and wiser and readier (yeah, right), Justin was having to do it now. And no matter how sympathetic we were, we could not possibly know what that was like.

Then it was Dana. And now, suddenly, there seem to be so many more. Sue, the mother of a boy I knew growing up, and whom I haven’t seen for years. My aunt gave me her son’s email address so that I could get back in touch, but I haven’t yet because I don’t know quite how or what to say. Jenn’s mom, to whom everything random and unfair in the world seems to have happened, now, on top of everything, has breast cancer. And Katherine, my mom’s best friend after whom I was named, after a sad divorce years earlier, finally became engaged to a good man she loved and then found out she had breast cancer. They still got married, this summer, but soon after that she had surgery, chemo, the works…which begs several questions. Why is life not fair??? And even if life is going to be not fair, why does it have to happen like that? Finally find happiness, and then bang, life plops in front of you a potentially fatal obstacle course.

There is a picture of my mom and Katherine where they’re both laughing so hard, the kind of laughing that completely distorts your face but you don’t know it because it’s too funny, whatever it is, so you lose all inhibition and just laugh. It’s in black and white, they are teenagers, and when my friends from college saw the picture at my house, they asked who it was in the photo with me. I didn’t understand at first, and then I realized that they thought my mom was me. I didn’t see how they could, but if I close my eyes and then open them on the picture expecting to see myself instead of my mom, it works. It looks exactly like me.

They were once as young and carefree as me. Once, they had something to laugh so hard about that their faces, morphed with mirth, transformed into the faces of their unborn children. And one day I will not be as young as I am now, and it could be, might be, hell, probably will be me and my friend from a longago, faraway picture having to negotiate a new and scary world. Will it be me, or will it be my friend? Why was it Katherine and not my mom? Why is it anybody? What’s weird is that, evidenced by the quotation that serves as epigraph to this essay, cancer itself, the cells themselves, mirror the randomness and unfairness with which they strike. They “forget to die” and so you must. Talk about life not being fair. And if breast cancer strikes one in eight women, which of my closest eight will it be? And if I think about this much more, will I draw this future negativity to me like a poisonous moon caught in my gravitational pull?

I tried to explain this to my students as we were preparing to go to volunteer for the day at the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. I told them I had no idea what we would be doing, and it might be menial and it might not seem like we were helping much in the grand scheme of things, but if it started to seem like that, they should think about One in Eight, they should think about the picture of my mom and Katherine, they cultivate empathy for perfect strangers so that when there comes a time when they need perfect strangers to have empathy for them, maybe life will decide to be just a little bit fair.

We had a beautiful day. It was a wonderful place to volunteer, because it was so well-organized they had plenty for us to do and everyone was genuinely friendly and positive and working in pursuit of a common goal. We spent the whole morning preparing to welcome the walkers to registration, and when we finally opened the doors to them, they came in droves and we were all cheering for them and they were so fierce and proud and determined (they had each raised a minimum of $1,800 in order to walk). And I watched my students, who, like me, had been bleary-eyed when we met at 7:00 AM, no doubt wondering why it was again that we were doing this and was it really going to look so good on a college application that it was worth such exhaustion. They worked so hard, with such enthusiasm, whether they were welcoming participants with pom-poms or putting together shelves or directing traffic or cutting off the long ends of participants’ wristbands. One of them was riding separately and got terribly lost, and when he arrived over an hour late he rushed in and said desperately, “Katherine, I’m here, how can I help?”

Simple words. “How can I help?”

How can I help feeling scared, how can I help my cowardice, how can I help the randomness and unfairness of life, how can I help when I am so small, how can any of us help?

But hearing those words, and seeing that work pour forth from kids who are so often shy or just caught up in their idyllic bubble of youth, I felt that dark and awful brain-closet become just a little bit less scary.

How can I help but feel a little better?

The History of Pirates

I have been spending a lot of time in bookstores. Most recently, I have been trying to find a book to teach me a very concise version of world history, so that I can teach my students an even conciser one. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. I mean, why they don’t have a short and sweet, riveting and yet simple summary of a few thousand years of human history, with plenty of pictures, that doesn’t relegate Africa, Asia, Latin America, and women to the sidelines and provides a variety of perspectives without being complicated is just beyond me. I think such a thing could easily fit in under 300 pages, and the print wouldn’t even have to be too small. I read some good reviews on Amazon of a German book from the early 20th century aimed at younger readers called A Little History of the World, which it said was appropriate for all ages, but when I browsed through it at Barnes and Noble it began something like, “Once upon a time, life on earth began as something very small, even smaller than you! Too small to even sit in your lap!.” And I didn’t think I’d be able to stand the next 299 pages.

However, where the bookstores (and probably the historical canon) lack such a book as I require, I discovered one thing they have myriad plethoras of. Yes. Myriad plethoras. That many. Guess. No, really. You’ll never guess. Books about pirates. Not just Johnny Depp as a pirate, but historical books about pirates. And we’re talking the section designated “World History” in both Borders and Barnes and Noble. It’s not a large section, considering what it should hold, and I would say as many as 40% of the books in it were about pirates. There was even, I kid you not, The History of Pirates for Dummies. There were first-person accounts of pirates, broad surveys of pirate history, geographical focuses such as the Caribbean or the South Atlantic. So many that now, in relating this to you, I have gotten to the point with the word “pirate” where it starts to lose all sense and form and begins to sound like gibberish. You know? Say it about 10 more times: pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate pirate. Yep. Total gibberish.

It was as though I had gone to the education section looking to brush up on the foundations of educational theory and had not found any such books but instead found an abundance about Hogwarts and the “magical educational approach that made Harry who he is today,” including one entitled How to Pass Your N.E.W.T.s and O.W.L.s for Dummies. I mean, right? Or if I went into the art history or religion section and all I could find were “historical” spinoffs of The Da Vinci Code. Oh wait…

It’s interesting to me though, what it says about the correlation between pop culture and history. Pirates are fascinating, I guess, in the dangerous way that natural disasters and the wreck of the Titanic are fascinating, and in the transgressive, we-all-wannabe-outlaws kind of way that Robin Hood is fascinating. But would there be so many history books about them without Johnny Depp and his sweet sweet eyeliner? Is it good when movies, or any such pop-culture element, incite a temporary boom of historical exploration, which then becomes what people interested in history read and what bookstores carry? I’m all for the argument, when it comes to a literate public, that reading anything (like Sweet Valley High or car magazines or even the dreaded Left Behind series) is better than reading nothing at all. But if what we read about history becomes all we know about history, at the expense of learning about the influences of what brought us to where we are today (all the influences except piracy, that is), and at the expense of learning from our forefathers’ mistakes when it comes to thinks like, oh, say genocide or tyrrany, are we in the process of rewriting history for the worse? Will such tunnely knowledge of history infiltrate the collective memory of humanity like poison into an aquifer making this generation one step closer to 1984 where once you lack the words for a concept you lack the concept?

Probably, books about pirates are not the most important thing to worry about. But it makes ya think, huh?

In other news, the countdown to school starting is rapidly depleting. My mom says this is good because it can’t be as bad as I’m building it up to be. But I don’t even think it will be bad, it’s more…this unexplained dread, not the dread of it being bad, but the dread of it being. Like, the responsibility of it. The endlessness of it. The always-being-or-at-least-trying-to-be-one-step-ahead-of-the-gameiness of it. I doubt my students read this blog, but if they do, hi darlings! It’s not you, it’s me. I’ll be fine. Really. I used to dread going back to school as a student—not so much in college, but definitely in high school and oh god, definitely in middle school. But all you students out there, my dad and I can tell you that nothing compares to the dread of going back to school as a teacher.

But even though it’s the end of sleeping in day after day (not that I’ve done much of that), the end of waning afternoons at the beach, the end of doughnuts and optional seminars and whitewater rafting and the Orgasmic Spider Hair Tickler Thingy (it really is called the Orgasmatron, no joke, and even comes from the land down under), the end of MSCL, the gayest-themed-show ever, the end of “you are beautiful” and the hairy baby fan club, the end of being in one home in exchange for another that doesn’t quite fit yet, the end of sunlight that lingers past 9:00, the end of reading books for pleasure and the end of reading everybody’s tarot cards at 2am, even though all of that, perhaps my mom is right and it will also mean the end of dread.

And there is so much to learn about pirates, how can I help but be excited?

Of Hairy Babies and Halliburton

After years of searching for get-rich-quick schemes, I have finally found the key to success. I ask you, gentle reader, what is your reaction to the following image?



I expect that after your initial revulsion came the following thought: The only thing better than seeing this hairiest-of-babies on Katherine's blog would be to have it on a t-shirt. And you know what? Everything is possible. This is America.

Exhibit B:

From whence this revelation, you ask? Well, credit must be given where credit is due. Primarily to a Mr. B. Wynia, who was responsible for both the concept and the design of the Hairy Baby. You see, this summer we became intimately acquainted with the stages of fetal gestation, thanks to the pregnancy of our office compadre Robyn, and learned such gems as the fact that fetuses have TAILS which do not disappear until about 15 weeks (tails, people!) and that at about 21 weeks, a fine hair, called lanugo, begins to grow all over the baby's body AND FACE, and is usually shed before birth. Into the uterus. Your unborn baby, once rid of its TAIL, sheds hair into your uterus. And these creatures aren't considered parasites? Anyway.

Robin (my sister, not to be confused with Robyn, who is pregnant) was quite disgusted to learn this. We learned it right before a delicious Refectory lunch one day, and at lunch, Robin shared our newfound knowledge with all those sitting at the table, including Blake, who, as a second-year med student, is the closest GSW comes to having a doctor on staff. "Oh yeah," he says, laden with nonchalance, "you didn't know that? And that's why you can only have a limited number of babies in your life--with each baby, the hair gradually builds up in your uterus so there's finally no more room. That's part of why it's harder to lose weight, too."

As smart as all of us employees are at that haven of NC's best and brightest, some of us are also quite gullible, and Robin, bless her heart, believed this preposterous tale, and now, even after realizing her error, has sworn off baby-having for the foreseeable future. Which is good, since she's a mere wisp of a 20-year-old herself and since this is what they look like at 8 weeks. Parasites. Or aliens. But all's I know is, it ain't natural.


Still, natural or not, the hairy baby t-shirts have caused quite a stir among all who have seen them, an audience which now spans at least 4 states and 2 countries, thanks to the modeling efforts of Robin, Jodi, and Alexis. The best reactions are the simple ones, like from Jodi's kids at camp, whose jaws dropped as they ogled her shirt: "That's a HAIRY BABY." Because that's exactly what it is. I can see the shirts also coming in very handy as abstinence-promotion tools. Maybe we can sell them to public-school health classes and Christian fundamentalist camps across the country. The possibilities are truly mind-blowing, no? So keep the checks coming in, only $19.95 plus shipping. As seen on TV. Or at least the internet. I think I have a future in finance....

The other financial revelation I have had recently came about while perusing the prospectus for the mutual fund that will support me in my retirement. I have saved a grand total of about $3,000 to last me from age 65 onward. Oh, but don't worry, the Social Security Administration's got my back in case that's not enough. And I have the feeling that $3,000 is going to multiply exponentially given that there are over 6 billion people in the world to exploit and the U.S. Government and its favorite pet corporations have only gotten to maybe half of them so far. Let me explain.

So I'm looking at the prospectus for the "Cornerstone Strategy Fund," a name that holds just the appropriate amount of enigma for the average facile investor. I chose this fund because I was talking to the USAA mutual fund analyst and he said it was a good, stable choice with little-to-moderate risk, a variety of investments in a variety of companies, and great growth potential. How can you lose, right? I've had it for about two years, it grows steadily, I don't feel there's much risk involved, and so basically I'm getting exactly what was promised. So I'm reading the prospectus, which I have never done before, but after discovering that my grandmother has thriving stakeholdings in Monsanto (knowing only that she makes money off of them and probably totally unaware that it's blood money), I was a little worried about what I might find. As well I should have been. Because...drumroll...little old me, whose Facebook profile proclaims her to be "Very Liberal," who espouses progressivism, feminism, regime change, equality, love for one's fellow humans and planet, etc, has stock in the following companies:

Wal-Mart, the root of all evil
Halliburton (and about 50 other oil companies), the spawn of all evil
Lockheed-Martin, the perpetuators of evil
Procter & Gamble, the evil animal-testers
Altria and Loews (tobacco companies)/cancer manufacturers
Abercrombie & Fitch, sweatshoppers and damaging-advertising purveyors extraordinaire
A bunch of mining companies
A bunch of biotech, "healthcare," and pharmaceutical companies with sinister names like "Salix Pharaceuticals," "Viropharma, Inc.," "Immucor Corp.," and "Haemonetics Corp."

to name a few.

Now, I was listening to an interview with Dolly Parton in which she spoke of her songs as being like children to her, because they were going to support her in her old age. I think you see where I'm going with this. By this count, my children are Wal-Mart, Halliburton and friends. I now know what Shakespeare meant by "from forth the fatal loins...." I think I had better commit to abstinence before anything bad happens (o guide me, hairy baby). Or at least start looking for a green mutual fund. Or else in my next life, I might come back as a citizen of a third-world country at the mercy of my own evil children.

Back in the Land of the Living

An apology to my readers, who probably are not my readers anymore. I don't have a good excuse for two years of absence, although I do regret it. First it was grad school, then I was just busy, then I never stopped being busy, and somewhere around the year-and-a-half mark, it just seemed impossible to show my blogalicious face again because what could possibly be good enough? How could I start again, what post could possibly encapsulate so much time, absence, distance? Why should I assume anyone cares? Why would anyone care? When I was a consummate traveler, it was one thing. Death-defying feats, the risk of malaria, smallpox, petty theft, or at the very least a funny story involving the language barrier. But a normal life? A frustrating life populated primarily by high school students, The West Wing, getting stuck in traffic, buying whatever's on sale at the grocery store? Why, indeed?

Of course I knew all along that it was a pitiful excuse, a sign of my inherent weakness and lack of work ethic, a slumping away from the creative genesis that was at its height in college and in my post-baccalaureate foibles and travels, and worst of all it was a falling-out-of-touch. And if there's one thing I have learned this summer, in that Edenic land known under an alias here, for its own protection, the alias of, oh, let's just say, the Head-Honcho-of-North-Carolina's School West (HHNCSW), it's that keeping in touch with those I love is the key to my happiness. When you don't hear from me, I don't exist. Or might as well not, to you. And so, might as well I exist just for my own enjoyment, and the enjoyment of those in my immediate vicinity? Probably not, because not that many people are generally in my immediate vicinity, which is the nether-regions of the Santa Monica Mountains north of Los Angeles. So sharing myself with you is more important to me than ever.

I hope that I'm able to rekindle that flair for, and love of, words that once flowed so naturally. I hope that I'm able to make my life and my musings on its existence, and the existences of other works of art and life, interesting enough for you to keep reading.
I hope that you give me another chance to be a reliable communicator.
I hope I don't let you down.

My goal is to post at least once a week, on Sunday, like PostSecret, so that when those of you who read PostSecret read it, you will remember to read mine as well, and also so that if I don't write something I can deny myself the chance to look at PostSecret until I've written something, and maybe that will be a good incentive. Because I am a product of public education, and I'm here to tell you that rewards work. Intrinsic motivation = BS. Is all I'm sayin'. If I don't post on Sunday, please send me nasty emails about how disappointed in me you are. Because guilt is another excellent motivator.

I'll be writing again soon. Thanks for reading, and take it light.

In lieu of my words...

I have not been a reliable blogger of late, as many of you have reminded me. Unfortunately, this post will not atone for that. I'm incredibly busy with school right now, and it (and J) have been consuming me since late September. I will be back in mid-December, though. Until then, please read/savor:
Photo-A-Day
Beating Bush
PostSecret
Cam Jansen's Protege

listen to:
The Everybodyfields

and, for a rough idea of what I've been up to, or at least what's going on around me, check out Jodi's blog and photos.

and go in peace until I can write again.

This American Life

Terry has convinced me, leading by example, that I should listen to one episode of This American Life per day until I finish their archives. Now, I had known that the internet was a beautiful thing for awhile. You can get textbooks--well, any books--cheap, people will pay to look at my feet, I can send mass emails and self-publish the scattered noise in my brain and feel like I'm keeping in touch with everyone I hold dear. Movie times, weather, eBay--so much to be grateful for. And now this--Ira Glass and, on a lucky day, David Sedaris or Anne Lamott to tell me stories and keep me company. I recommend it to anyone who, like me, can't afford therapy.

In other news, I took a much needed adventure last weekend to Sin City--not the one you're thinking of, but perhaps equally deserving: our nation's Capitol. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was visiting from Oz, Sarah the Leepfrog from South Africa, and the beautiful people who live in DC were in town to ice the cake. The weekend was wonderful, but in my School of Education we emphasize process over product as much as The Man will let us, so I mustn't get ahead of myself. Getting there proved half the battle.

I cringed as I bought the Greyhound ticket, my memories of South American buses functioning in much the same way as the memory of what you were drinking when you drank so much you threw up. Not one to waste days, I booked an overnight bus with two changes. I left Winston at 11:40 PM (mad props to John for waiting at the station with me to discourage rape-and-pillaging) and, blatantly judging books by their covers, took a seat next to the person closest to the front who looked like she didn't smell bad.

Her name was Sarah. She was 17, traveling alone for the first time to visit her fiance, a Marine stationed in Jacksonville, NC. She had been on the bus for about 20 hours, having started in Ohio. No one had sat next to her the whole time, so she was eager to talk. She works at Burger King, which is better than KFC but her manager is a bitch. She graduated from high school a year early so she could get married. She has three younger siblings, she can't wait to move from her parents' house. She met her fiance when she was 15, and only wishes she could have met him earlier so she could have been spared several bad experiences with men. He is 19, and enlisted earlier this year, despite her pleading him not to. Despite her hatred of the war. He has been gone since February, first in boot camp and now in further training. He may or may not be deployed within the next few months. If he is deployed, they'll get married first, "because he wants to take care of me," she said.

She was so young. It was evident in her false bravado: sure there were sketchy people on the bus, but she would beat up anybody who tried anything with her. But it wasn't so evident in how she spoke of love. Whenever our conversation turned to Josh (her betrothed), she softened, and spoke simply but never trite-ly about him. Inadvertent smiles would dance over her otherwise plain face (her description as much as mine: Sarah, Plain and Tall is her favorite book, because that's what she is), she never wavered in her certainty of their destiny together, which impressed me in one so young who has spent the last 7 months far from the one she loves. She spoke simply, truly. For much of it, she could have been describing my relationship. She was, in a word, wise.

We rode together to Raleigh, where we waited for 3 hours (2 more than we had bargained for, as is the way with Greyhound) for the buses to come that would take us our separate ways. A guy with a Nascar T-shirt and a huge hole in the crotch of his jeans bummed a cigarette from Sarah and proceeded to tell us a story, of which about 15% was at all intelligible (he was very Southern and spoke very fast), of why he had had a bad day.

Let's call him Bo. I never caught his name, but calling him Bo will communicate more about him to you than description ever could. Apparently, Bo's bad day had started 2 weeks ago when he was wrongly arrested in Virginia. I didn't catch what for--but he was definitely innocent, of course. He had to sleep on a concrete floor because they were out of beds, and his woman back in Fayetteville wouldn't answer the phone. So when he gets back there she will probably have moved out because she'll have thought he was gettin' busy behind her back. Meanwhile, during his jail time, his truck got impounded, so his brother picked it up and made off with it and all his stuff, which is why he had to hitchhike and then take the Greyhound from Virginia to Fayetteville and why, apparently, he didn't have a cigarette. He asked where I went to school. I told him. He whooped, and congratulated me, because their hospital is the only one worth its salt and he wouldn't have nobody pokin' around inside him unless they worked at Duke. I felt strangely validated.

By the end of our 3-hour layover, he had some woman with a ratty perm and scrunchie and a few missing teeth sitting on his knee bouncing up and down playing horsey.

Sarah's bus left before mine, and boarded as soon as it was called, so she hurried over. "It was nice to meet you," she said, and before I could say anything, she was gone. Strangely, I felt as though we hadn't had proper closure. No words of well-wishing or advice. No knowing looks of sympathy for the hard road ahead (I had told her all about Jodi as well). She should have gotten back to Ohio sometime today. I can imagine her sadness, but I can't decide whether I'm glad I'll never know if Josh gets deployed or not, if she goes on to nursing school (as was her dream) or works at Burger King for all her life. Because this way, I'll never know they made it, if they do.

So here I am, faced with the Little-Prince-paradox. In one universe, the stars are laughing, in another, they are crying. I guess having both is something to be thankful for--and may be better than knowing the truth.