Happy New Year (I'm still celebrating)

"Another year, lots of new dreams."
Unknown

Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

I didn't eat food until 7 p.m. today.

I had to reprimand students for playing a game of "let's hit each other in the junk" during class.

I paper cut my finger while grading on the bus because my skin hates winter.

I had to put pressure on the same finger for over 10 minutes before the bleeding would stop.

I traveled downtown for a free happy hour only to find out it is next Thursday.

I then traveled back up to my apartment during rush hour.

When finally home, I reopened the paper cut attempting to put my pajamas on.

That's when the crying happened. Luckily, Rocious was there to snuggle me or else the crying may have never stopped.

An hour later I realized I had put the pajamas on inside out.

I'm calling it. I forfeit today. Chalk this one up as a loss.

"I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there's gum in my hair."
Judith Viorst

I'm having this problem...shocker

I'm having this problem with reading lately and I can't tell whether the books aren't worth reading or if teaching has turned my brain.

And I'm a little worried it's the latter.

Back in the day. Way back in time when I had time - and room in my brain - for reading, I looked down my book snob nose at people who read fluffy books. My grandmother, for example - who worked two jobs and had nine kids - read a lot of romance novels. I never understood it.

With age comes stress and possibly a little wisdom.

I see that for her - and now for me - reading couldn't be something she put her full heart into. I don't have the luxury right now to run away with reading. And when I try to read books that will make me think? I find my eyes glazing over and all of a sudden I'm lesson planning instead of reading and thinking.

Example? OK.

Chad - from Fiction is So Overrated and I decided (if decided means I stalked him down, emailed him, and made him agree because I think he's cool) to read some books together. He chose our first selection: The Tiger's Wife.

While Chad is awesome, I did not find The Tiger's Wife to be as awesome. It was kind of like when my young adult book club read an adult book and I picked Claire Messud's latest because I love her and she is fabulous and then I hated the book. Sad.

Now. Get ready. I'm about to get scientific, because I really need to figure out why I didn't like this book.

Later - post reading - I found out Tiger's Wife is the new hotness book that everyone thinks people should read. We know I hate those books on priciple. However, Chad and I had a pact not to research our book selections. So I didn't know, which means I wasn't tainted by my snobbery against books Oprah and Amazon and my feminist book store tell me I should read.

It wasn't my snobbery. But was it my teaching brain?

I tried to like it. I really did. Parts were beautifully written and poignant, but I couldn't stay focused. It was the kind of book where you are reading along and all of a sudden you are on a tangent, which is followed by tangent off of the tangent, and by the time you look up you're like: I don't care in the slightest why this town only has one gun and who brought it here - shoot the stupid tiger already.

And I love tigers.

It reminded me of A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book. And I hated that book before I started teaching.

Perhaps there are remnants of my brain left intact. Perhaps I can still find joy in books that don't have fighting sequences to keep me awake.

There's hope for me yet.

"Is your heart a sponge or a fist?"
Tea Obreht

Life hangover

Life Hangover (n.): Symptoms of a hangover caused not by alcohol, but by life.

It's a thing. Tell your friends.

The first week of school is over and I am in pajamas. Perhaps tonight I will be able to do the thing I've been missing all week: read. That is if I can read before I pass out around 8 p.m.

Fingers crossed.

"Wine is bottled poetry."
Robert Louis Stevenson

Watcher of the dead

Don't be fooled. As much smack as I talk about love and emotions, I am as soft and sentimental as a Cadbury Egg on the inside.

My reading tastes have not escaped my gooey center.

Fantasy has always rated high on my rose colored memories list. Reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series out loud with the family gathered around when we were on our own great journey cemented Fantasy (and Jordan) as part of my all-time-favorite reading memories list.

Kind of like how the padre and I went to see True Grit on the same day (even though we are far apart). To pay homage to it being the first real book we read aloud together.


J. V. Jones holds a similar place. I've been reading her since high school. Her tales of clans and journeys and heroes and feisty female characters and magic and family and evil and sword fights have followed me as I've grown into my own feisty female character.

Watcher of the Dead is the fourth book in the Sword of Shadows series. Think of it like a fantastical story of good and evil and all the gray shades between. It is like the best soap opera ever.

The story is epic. Each chapter follows a different main character. Through them you see different struggles against the ever present super evil which is trying to escape and is almost succeeding. On occasion, I get annoyed by series. Like, ummm, get on with it. But with Sword of Shadows I'm liking the slow plodding towards oblivion, and I keep hoping against hope that evil doesn't win.

I could mire you down with details (like how Raif totally hates the Sull now for good reason and how I really hope Angus Lok finds his daughter and I wonder where Effie is headed and is Ash going to reach again and who is her baby daddy and I hope evil Mace dies on the field knowing Raina has taken over the chiefdom and is Bram really going to become an assassin and I hope Vaylo stays alive long enough to reunite his clan and what is the deal with Marafice), but I will just say this is a series about destiny and responsibility and growing up.

Kind of like life.

"Fantasy opens the door to experiencing the magic that is in the world around us and more importantly the magic in ourselves."
T.A. Barron

Love funeral makers

Excuse my brief-ness.

Hurt a tendon in my finger.

Apparently right hand staging a protest against the gym.

Makes typing difficult, among other things (button up pants...).

This may mean I have to live in the world, sans computer.

Silver lining: sweatpants don't have buttons.

Have to say one thing though: I LOVE CATHIE PELLETIER.

Finished Funeral Makers last night. After playing around in young ad. lit and nonfiction, it felt amazing to get back to serious fiction. Her characters are real and tragic and hilarious. I can't speak for all her books, but I can say I loved this one. LOVE.

I found that I couldn't wait to cradle my out of commission hand and read about life. Full of mess. Full of pain. Full of love.

"...will go on with its cycles of life. There will be husbands lying down in the wrong beds. Wives caught in the wrong arms at the wrong time. There will be hasty weddings. The dying will die and move aside for the living to die, and the patterns of life will continue..."
Cathie Pelletier

Forbes house: meeeemories

Nothing stays the same. Someone said that once. Even memories we want to remain impervious shift and mold with time into something new and foreign. What I want to remain locked in my memory is our family house on Forbes Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

As a child I found the house to be monstrous. I could run in a circle around the downstairs, laughing while my cat nipped my heels. It is in that kitchen I pouted when I didn’t get my way. In the living room I pushed down my brother when he was attempting to crawl. This was my house. This was my kingdom.

In the dining room I celebrated my fourth birthday wearing nothing but my curly golden hair and a Rainbow Bright belt. In my bedroom I smiled as my mom sang Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game” each night before bed. On the front porch I roller skated naked. On that same front porch I sat on the swing and witnessed thunderstorms. I spit watermelon seeds on the steps leading to our house to ensure I wouldn’t grow watermelons in my stomach. During the summer, my brother and I frolicked in our turtle sandbox. I once sat in that sandbox as my brother came home from the hospital. He was upset because an ant was on him. I thought he was silly; ants were no big deal to me then.

In the winter we mounded snow and for a jubilant two seconds sledded down it. My parents pulled us in our sled through the city cemetery behind our house. The sereneness of the snow took away any perceived ghouls that lurked there. This feeling stretched into summer making the cemetery my playground. Next to the cemetery wall I ate mushrooms with a friend. A short while later, my dad on the phone with poison control, I threw up those mushrooms in our bathroom thanks to a dose of Ipecac. It was down the street I attended pre-school, a place I never wanted to come home from. It was on Christmas Eve we came home to a thief cutting our backdoor screen. On our couch, waiting for the police, I thought, what if we had been a half hour later?

Year after year, no matter where we had moved to, whenever I was in Kalamazoo I pilgrimaged to the Forbes House, the monument of my youth. Just driving by, pausing in front of the driveway brought me back to myself. I used to wonder if the family that lived there now appreciated my special place. Looking at the house with adult eyes, the porch isn’t as big, the swing is missing, the driveway isn’t as steep, the garage door hangs at a slant, and the cemetery isn’t as majestic. The neighborhood isn’t stately, although it never was. I’ve stopped going back, as if the dilapidation would somehow manipulate my memories. But that’s not true. My memories aren’t exaggerated or aggrandized. My childhood took place in that kitchen, that porch, that yard. I just don’t need the actual place anymore to revel in the memories.

"Memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen."
Edward de Bono

That's what you get when you read dracula

I don't like scary things in general. I ripped my shirt during a haunted house once because I was running away from I don't even know what in sheer terror. Over Thanksgiving the fam and I were having a Flash Forward marathon. They all went upstairs to bed and I was left...the only one downstairs...to turn off the lights. Who do you think ran up the stairs two at a time? 26 year old me.

I don't even usually read scary books. When I read The Shining I could only read it during the day. And I didn't read it by choice. It was for school.

And so, when I decided to read Dacre Stoker's Dracula sequel I made the decision of reading it out loud to the madre.

Last night we were reading. We had just gotten to a part where we were wondering...is X a vampire...when something EXPLODED outside our window, all the lights went out, and several more explosion-like sounds reverberated.

In the moments after dismissing the possibility of a vampire attack and prior to realizing the probability of a blown transformer(s) the madre and I roamed shocked and shaking around my apartment listening to the many many many sirens.

Our power was only out for a couple of hours. Long enough to take quick showers before the hot water ran out, play cards by candlelight, and huddle under covers because the apartment was cold from having the window open too long in order to hear electrician discussions.


I was also listening to what the universe was telling me.

No more Dracula at night. Lesson learned.

I grok fullness

While I love fiction, I also like to dabble in the fantasy and science fiction genres.

Growing up moving around the country in a car meant my family had a lot of time for readathons. We were in the car so much we were able to read Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series out loud.


If you need surmising help...we were in the car A LOT.

Then, of course there were the consecutive years Face gave me Dune for Christmas until I read it. If you don't think the following is funny/awesome then you haven't read Dune.


So stop here and go read Dune.

My most recent foray into science fiction has been Stranger in a Strange Land. I have previously called it the book about martians. Both Dune and Stranger as science fiction are able to not only comment on our society but to offer an alternative process and philosophy. If you don't dig science fiction I would say these two books are engaging in similar activities such as Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

So there is this martian. Only he is a human who happened to be raised on Mars. And now he is back on Earth. Causing a raucous. For martians, there is this thing called grokking. Generally it could be translated as to know...only more so. To grok is to drink.

Stick with me.

So you can grok ideas. Or places. Or people. Well now we are getting somewhere. So the martian is rolling around grokking all over the place and starts to open people's eyes to this new way of thinking. Through the book Heinlein opens the reader's eyes to their own notions of propriety and the structure of society. If you ever wanted religion (read spirituality) and sex to do a mashup you should read this book. I am God. You are God. Orgies are God.

You grok that?

"A prude is a person who thinks his own rules of propriety are natural laws."
Robert Heinlein