come home to homelessness

memoir, an addendum

2012-01-13T14:52:00.000-08:00

I feel a little bad about my mean-spirited response to Dederer's Poser. I've kept reading and got to a couple of parts that are actually pretty good. She describes a bit of her own research in to the roots of yoga and discovers that it isn't all about asana, after all. She also discusses the rise of women-instigated divorce in the late sixties and seventies and what it was like to be a child of that era when women began to discover they didn't have to stay and could do whatever they wanted to do. If she could have gotten to the good parts just a bit more quickly maybe then my negative review would not have been so hasty.

I think some of my negative reaction to the book arose because I wanted to write this book. I wanted to delve into the history and relevance of yoga and write about my experience with yoga, damn it. I know I still can, but has she cornered the market on yoga memoir? Maybe. I'm still a little irritated with her as a narrator but I thoroughly enjoy the parts that are about yoga. By the end of the yesterday, I couldn't put the book down. I do like parts of it and it does get better as it goes. She also talks about taking a certain yoga class with a certain teacher for a long time, and in that class the students would slowly work toward harder poses, like scorpion and side crow. I'd like to try this approach. Much of the yoga I've been doing lately is vinyasa, which can be challenging in that it is strengthening, but I would like to spend time working more on doing poses I never thought I could do, rather than recycling the same poses I know I can do. So that is my intention: move past my own preconceived limitations.

I'm considering sharing much of what I write in my yoga journal on this main page because that's all I'm blogging about these days, and mostly all I'm writing about. I'm revising some old essays to send out, but other than that, I'm writing about yoga and doing teacher training. So, be on the lookout for more yoga words on this page.

hating on a memoir

2012-01-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

I recently started reading Poser: my life in twenty-three yoga poses by Claire Dederer, the first memoir I've read in a while. I want to keep reading the book but I find myself entirely irritated at the narrator, the real or constructed persona of the author herself. When I read a memoir, I expect that the author is going through some trouble or has a problem to overcome. That problem is usually apparent in the first few pages--drug addiction, alcoholic parents, illness, whatever. But, Dederer has no problems at all and seems to manufacture problems just so she can have some sort of narrative thread that leads the reader, I'm assuming, to a breakthrough or an enlightening moment in her yoga class. Her problems, so far: she has a baby, is a nearly full-time mother with a husband who works, and she's tired. She feels like she needs to be a good liberal mom and willingly goes through the actions she claims to despise: she wears Danskos, nurses her daughter, joins the baby co-op--which seems to be a playgroup for babies that parents pay for that includes a teacher who doesn't actually teach anything, and shops at a health food store. She's middle class, at least, and works from home. I gather she doesn't actually work much at all. Her husband is supportive and she's got best friends that she hangs out with regularly. But still, she's got problems. Her parents aren't together. She's in her thirties. And, that seems to be about it. She likes yoga. She likes her baby. I'm not sure how this book was actually published, given that I've read much worthier manuscripts in graduate school that have yet to be published, not for lack of trying.

Immediately, I didn't like this book. The prose is sloppy, and it feels like something I would have written because yes, my prose can be sloppy. So, why do I keep reading it? I want to see what happens. Maybe, deep down, I want to hate on this over-privileged narrator just a bit. Also, after not reading memoirs in a while, I can see why people think those who write them are narcissistic with little to say. Not all memoirs are this way, for sure, but ones like this are.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T06:02:00.000-08:00

January 2, and we got our first real snow of the season, if only a dusting. My son is exited, and outside right now in full winter gear: snowpants, snowboots, and all, if only for a half an inch.

I haven't been updating this blog too often, but I have been updating the yoga practice journal, so if you're interested, check it out (tab on upper right corner of this page). I've also been writing a bit more lately and plan on sticking with it. Here is a link from Jennifer Lauck's blog about finding time to write. She says that writers, or would-be writers, writers-in-name-only often say that they don't have time to write, so much so that it becomes a mantra, and we all know how powerful mantras can be. She borrows advice about how it is a good idea to document the use of your time for one week, to see where the time goes and if in fact you do have time to write. And, she's betting you do, and I'm betting I do.

I have a lot I like to do: a daily yoga and meditation practice, running, and writing. I could spend three or more hours per day just doing these things. Then comes work (I go back tomorrow. I've loved Christmas break so much.) and parenting, and keeping the house moderately clean, and I find that my days are quite full.

Resolutions:
Write daily, for at least a half hour. Preferably an hour.
Go camping at least three times this summer.
Learn to be cool in a messy house.
Start a garden.

and others......

notes on the cleanse

2011-12-08T10:17:00.001-08:00

It is day three of my juice/soup fast. I'm following instructions given by Adina Niemerow, who "has worked as a personal chef for movie stars, fashion designers, recording artists, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies" (this should have been a tip off right there), in her book Super Cleanse. I'm following the "Winter Wake Up" cleanse that consists of drinking fresh juices and eating soup. I've also been drinking tea. Day three, and I feel fine, but more than anything I am HUNGRY. Granted, Niemerow did caution that one should not try the Winter Wake Up if one is new to detox diets/fast because it is intense. But, well, I decided I should go for it. What is it about the word "hard" that makes me want to do something?

The cleanse is supposed to last 5 to 7 days, but I think this will be my last. I will make it through today. Benefits of the cleanse, according to Niemerow:

"This cleanse will fuel new levels of energy, clarity and lightness into your life. You'll feel rejuvenated on every level--in fact, many of my clients report feeling euphoric. In addition, the boost in hydration and nutrients will easy the dry skin and lips so common in the wintertime and get you glowing again."

Last night, I read a very funny article on juice cleansing by Judith Newman in which she chronicles her own three-day juice cleanse, and has this to say:

"The next three days could be summed up thus: 1. I need food. 2. Hey, this isn’t bad! 3. Kill me now.

"Let me rephrase that. By the third day I felt great in the way I’m told that the imminently drowning feel great right before they give up and inhale that last mouthful of water. My juice-aficionado friend Gilly told me I was on an endorphin high. Later, Dr. David Colbert, the New York internist, dermatologist and author of 'The High School Reunion Diet,' told me I was in ketosis. 'That giddy feeling you get is what diabetics get when your body runs out of sugar and starts using other products for energy,' he said. 'I had a model come in recently, clutching the furniture, explaining to me that she’d been juicing for a week. Your sugar metabolism is completely out of whack.'"

So there you go. I can relate to the "I need food" and the "this isn't bad" reaction, but I've yet to reach the "kill me now" stage. Day one was relatively easy, though I was led to expect that I would be going through some severe detox and would be experiencing serious symptoms. The only real symptom was a headache from not drinking coffee. I felt good, for the most part. I drank a few glasses of various green juices made from spinach, kale, celery, cucumber, and apple, and with the addition of the apple they tasted pretty good. In the evening, I made one of Niemerov's soups, lots of well-cooked, pureed veggies, which with a lot of salt, didn't taste bad.

By day two, my headache subsided, but by the afternoon I began feeling intensely hungry. I wanted to talk about food, and my sense of smell got stronger and stronger. I drank about 8 cups of tea, three big glasses of juice (one with beets in it, which I will never love. Beets taste like dirt. I know they are healthy but I've never been able to tolerate them), and about four bowls of soup. In all, I probably got a decent number of calories, so I don't think I'm starving. Just hungry. Unlike the first day, I taught on the second day, and by my second class, I was feeling pretty spacey and hoped that the students didn't notice.

Now, day three, and the hunger continues. I've wanted to get off this thing and have thought of food all morning. I tutored this morning and another tutor had a sandwich and the smell of it just about knocked me over the edge with its deliciousness. My sense of smell is so much stronger now. Emotionally, I feel pretty even. Physically, my body feels good. I look in the mirror trying to discern some change in my appearance but I can't really tell. The only thing I notice is that my eyes seem bigger but maybe that's because of the low-calorie aspect of this fast and I'm losing fat from my face. I haven't lost weight but am at the bottom of the give or take five pound range where I usually reside.

I feel the biggest change mentally. They (experts, I suppose) say that a good bit of blood and oxygen usually goes toward digestion, and without dealing with digestion, that blood is going to my brain, which is pretty awesome. I've come to some conclusions about some things in my life that I need to change and have overall been productive, well, except for the spaciness while teaching. Just as long as I have a steady stream of liquids, I'm okay.

Still, though, this is my last day. I don't want to jeopardize my own health or metabolism, and, honestly, I don't think there is a huge point to this exercise beyond what I've already gotten. Sure, if I continue to not eat solid food my perception will change, kind of like when I run more than 12 or so miles--things change. I'm just not sure this is a necessary or even healthful change of perception. I do plan to continue to incorporate juices into my regular diet and am going to eat better, and not as much.

And in a sense, I might have needed this experience. I tend to overeat and this experience shows me that I don't have to, that hunger is an okay experience. Would I recommend it? Not really.

Yoga practice journal

2011-12-06T11:08:00.001-08:00

I've been contemplating starting a new blog devoted to the yoga teacher training I am attending, but then I found this handy page option, so I started blogging here, on this very blog, about it. See the tab on the right side of the page.

The impetus: I started yoga teacher training a couple of weeks ago through the college where I teach in collaboration with a local yoga studio. One of our assignments is to keep a journal about our practice, and well, being sort of writerly, I decided to post my journal online. I don't want it to be part of my regular blog but a side blog, if you will, all about yoga and my experience in this teacher training program.

Some background: I've been doing yoga for a good while but not too seriously. I practice on my own semi-regularly and go to classes when time and money allow. I took my first yoga class as a senior in college in 1999 (wow! 12 years ago!) and have been doing it ever since. However, I would never have considered myself a yogi by any means (and what does that even mean?). The reading that I'm doing for teacher training is showing me that yoga is more than the one hour asana (the movements) practice, but is part of something deeper and bigger. So, we'll see.

The training program is, in all, about 27 weeks, so I should complete it in late spring/ early summer. For now, what I've started doing is practicing and then writing about it. So if you are interested, take a look at the tab on the right side of the page. I'll be updating it a good bit.

December ramble

2011-12-05T17:07:00.001-08:00

I've tentatively planned to start a cleanse/juice and soup fast tomorrow. Admitting that to the world makes me feel a little strange. But, I have a refrigerator full of veggies to juice.

I'll say this: I've been wanting to do a cleanse like this for a while but have usually been too busy to do so. Now, I have time to focus on "cleansing" (I need a better word) before the holidays. So we'll see. I'm anticipating being very hungry. The hardest part, I think, will be giving up coffee. And cigarettes, even though I haven't had one in days and haven't been smoking much at all lately. (Yes, I know I reported on this very same blog that I quit but I started again, and quit again, etc. etc.) So coffee will be the hardest. I read that it isn't all that wise to start a cleanse in the winter but at the same time, I don't have to hibernate and I have access to heat and electricity. The cleanse is called "Winter Warm Up" and is supposed to be 5-7 days long. I'll go with a tentative 5, ending on Saturday. I sort of started today by eating less and drinking a couple of glasses of fresh juice. But, I did have coffee. I love coffee.

I haven't blogged in a while and haven't written in a while, so much so that it feels awkward. In the past I've written about starting things, things like marathon training and now yoga teacher training and even something as shortlived as a juice fast--these are all actions/activities with some certain purpose, mainly to be healthy, physically, emotionally, and mentally. But at the same time, I wonder if it is all just a distraction? Like, instead of writing, what I need to be doing, or working on making a better living, I am doing all of these other things. And sure these other things are good, really great (well, I'm not sure about this cleanse business, but the marathon and yoga are good) but are they some kind of sidetrack?

To answer my question, I don't think so. I know myself well enough to know that I can't just sit and write and work all day, or else I'd be smoking a lot of cigarettes and gaining a lot of weight and going a whole lot of crazy. But perhaps in the feeling-good quest, I've lost sight of my original intentions. And there is a little fear in there: that I am flaky in my pursuits, which to anyone who knows me might consider this complete common knowledge and I'm just now realizing it....I do sometimes tend to jump from pursuit to pursuit, dabbling just a bit and then moving onto the next thing, but I can temper that by sticking with writing just a bit, which I haven't lately at all. It's such an old ball and chain.

Back in either 2004 or 2005, I committed myself to writing--I married it. That was before grad school when I was living in Asheville, writing at a big old computer, starting to publish little articles, taking writing workshops, and applying to graduate school. I was an infant in terms of writing back then, but I was all in. I devoted time to it, time I don't devote these days because of work and distractions like facebook and the feeling of being completely tired out. And, as I've written before, writing doesn't go to well with my healthy lifestyle. It requires wine and cigarettes and I like to give it what it needs. But I miss it. I miss feeding that part of me, the part that totally disregarded my body and was completely in the mind.

The reluctant observer/commentator would say, my dear, it is all about balance, and I'd say, tell me something I don't already know. Balance between being "good" and being just bad enough to make it fun. Because sometimes being good is kind of boring. And a juice fast with either be a)really boring or b) just another thing to do, or c) something else entirely.

courthouse in variable points of view

2011-11-07T08:13:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to firsts: first funeral at 29 and first visit to a courthouse at age 34. On Friday, I received a subpoena to appear at the Hamilton County Courthouse as a witness for the prosecution against the man who stole my bike. Impressions:

The court is its own organism. It supports a whole range of professions, judges, lawyers, clerks, police, etc., kind of like how Foucault says that the court serves the prison, in a sense it seems the court serves itself. It is where the perennial underclass meets those in authority.

I have a writing idea. You take a cross section of humanity, the type you'd find in line at the post office, or better, in line to go through the metal detector at the courthouse, or at an Amtrak station in central California, or even at an airport, waiting in line for security. You lock all of the people in together a la Breakfast Club or some sort of reality or television show, and see what happens.

The man who stole my bike is tall and thin and black. He showed up to court today, which isn't like it seems on television or in John Grisham novels, in black pants, white shirt, and a tie, his hair back, and when he came into the tiny courthouse he and I immediately locked eyes.

For the entire half hour I was there, I felt self-conscious. Was I wearing the right thing? There is a clear divide at the courthouse, those that are on the right side and those that are on the wrong side. On the wrong side you are poor, you are being tried with something, you are pleading in front of the judge saying that you've been good, that you'll only drive to and from work and that's it, and the judge'll tell you that if the sheriff pulls you over for a headlight being out, and you've stopped on your way home from work for a bite to eat, the sheriff will lock you up and you'll spend at least four days in jail. Yes, your honor, I'll be good. I promise. You're on probation, you're trying to get a job, ma'am, and when you make some money you'll pay the fees and the fines but you just got out of jail and couldn't work in jail. On that side, on the wrong side, is the girlfriend, she's older, late thirties, but dresses like a teenager, like she did back in the early nineties with her white k-swiss, gelled back hair, bootcut faded jeans and clean white sweater. She sits watching while the judge calls her boyfriend up, says a few words, a continuance, and on and on, and they go downstairs out the door and sit out by the curb smoking a cigarette and then getting ready to go to work. Or, you appear before the judge, a girl with blond hair and a stout body, cleaned up good, don't you know we always clean up good? We try to look like we are on the right side, the side where those that prosecute us sit, those that have never had to explain to anyone about good behavior or bad behavior or had to pee in a cup or been on probation, those in suits, in ties, who look clean like money pouring off of them. Yes, we try to look like them, but there's something we can't scrub off, the matter of who we are, the matter of a yellow toothache, the matter of my shoes aren't leather, the matter of there's a bicycle out on the curb that I'm riding home, the matter of I try to get on that side but I can't because I can't wash it off, I can't wash away those dark circles, I can't wash away the smell of cooking and stale cigarette smoke from my collar, I can't wash away the lines on my face and the walking on the floor in my regulation uniform black pants, red polo shirt, black shoes, I can't say that I was ever on your side, the right side. I appear before a judge more times than I'd ever like to admit or even care or it doesn't even matter. That and the bill collector is calling, that and I wish all of you would just fuck off.

You look at people and you know where they stand, who they are. The middle age white man wearing clean white sneakers, a blue sweatshirt, and jeans is laughing with the police officer, sitting on a hard bench in the hallway is not on the right side. The young man in a v-neck sweater, tie, and white shirt, glasses and blond hair is on the right side. Others walk around lost, hoping that the wrongsidedness like some sort of viral infection doesn't rub off on them, doesn't take them down along with the big girl sitting on the bench in the hallway, her breasts and belly hanging out from her tiny red top, talking on her cell phone, that whatever she has doesn't rub off on me, that it isn't contagious.

In the end, the man who stole my bike or received stolen property plead guilty and said he would pay me restitution by January, because by then, said the defense attorney who had a million cases like this today, he'd have a job, and they all said okay, and we walked out, five minutes time. I got six dollars for being a witness. Outside, I saw him walking ahead of me, and then as I drove around a corner, there he was, on a bike, talking to some other men on the corner. I kept turning and driving around blocks, making my way out of downtown, and I'd keep seeing him in front of me, and I wonder what he thought of me.

And I could write a story, a story about his life and mine, and it would be part of a big complex novel and our two stories would briefly intersect and then we would go on, but somehow something would be different.

99 percent

2011-10-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

I've not been following the protest in NYC much (all these actions going on! can't keep up!), but I am for the most part familiar with the issues as embodied by one of the main slogans, that goes something like "we are the 99 percent", the non-millionaires among us. I recently came across this blog We Are the 99 Percent that contains handwritten letters by folks who are, as you could say, down on their luck. What is interesting is the sheer number of people posting their stories.

Later this week, I'll be teaching division and classification as a rhetorical mode. So, I'll wager my own very flawed division of human outlooks and then attempt to state my conflicted point of view on this outlook. On one hand, you have the stories shared on We Are the 99 Percent. Sad stories about being a college graduate but working minimum wage and having massive health problems but not having a way to pay for medicine or medical services because of a lack of insurance or high deductibles, etc. Perhaps the purpose of this website is to give voice to everyone who is struggling because so often there is no voice for them and we tend to forget. I could probably add something to this page, but after reading the posts, I feel very fortunate.

But a part of me wants to say that a BFA is not a ticket to a good job. A part of me wants to say look for a job that pays more than minimum wage. A part of me wants to say screw health insurance, it's overpriced and there's no guarantee that Western medicine is going to do you any actual good in the long run (but I am aware that serious injuries and health problems do occur and that health care is necessary). A part of me wants to say get over it and do something about it. That is the other outlook: you are responsible for your own life and destiny and if you want a better life, make it a better life. If you don't make enough money, get another job, get a second job, hustle, sell stuff, do whatever it takes. You can make it happen.

I don't necessarily want to simplify the equation by calling one viewpoint the victim mentality and the other the bootstrap mentality, but perhaps that is a good analogy. Maybe, by putting their stories out there the folks on the 99 percent blog are doing something about their situation, and maybe, by the protests in NYC, and now elsewhere, people are doing something about this situation.

I kind of forgot where I was going with this. This morning, I was listening to NPR while driving to work, and heard a story that just about made me cry about a soldier who reenlisted in 2009 because his family needed the money, went back to Iraq, had a psychotic break, was discharged, and is now going to school to become a dental hygienist. I'm not sure if he ever really wanted to be a dental hygienist or if that is a stable field that he can now go into--and because there aren't many other jobs out there.

Part of me wants to say that nobody is ever going to give anyone a job out of the goodness of their heart. That jobs just aren't out there for the picking. We can protest and get political and fight for fairer practices by making sure that unions don't lose their say and even expand unions and fight for those things that are in the interest of the working person. Those are good things to do, but to sit around and think that a good job is going to come around is ludicrous or to think that just because you go to college and get any kind of degree that you are going to get a job is ludicrous. You've got to do something, and if your doing something is raising hell that's a good thing. If it is looking at the dominant economic paradigm and saying that it is an empty promise and then setting about creating a more local economy or becoming more self sufficient, that is a good thing too. Or if it it means busting your ass to make the money that you and your family need to live on, that is all good as well.

rumblings @ Cincinnati State

2011-09-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article on the necessity of forming an adjunct union (excerpt posted below). The article reflects so much of the shame that many adjuncts feel about their situation, that if they were better-published or better instructors then they would no longer be adjunct faculty but would be full-time faculty. So therefore, coming out as an adjunct feels a little like admitting a deficiency.

But that isn't the case. I wrote a previous post on the full-time faculty strike at Cincinnati State, where I teach part time. Forty percent of classes are taught by full-time faculty and the rest are taught by adjuncts, who are not allowed to have a union and do not have any guarantee that they will have a job in six months. These numbers are high and the majority of higher education institutions may not employ such a large percentage of adjuncts, but still. There are always classes to teach, and I can pick up classes all over town if I want to. There is no shortage of demand for adjunct labor, and colleges and universities are increasingly relying on this cheap labor rather than the more expensive, unionized full-time faculty member. This trend is similar to trends all across America in the public and private sector. Every one is feeling it, and that is why some are going after unionized labor because at least they still have some voice and some security, while the rest of us do not.

Since the strike, the rift or rather divide--because rift implies animosity and I have not felt it--between full-time and part-time folks have widened. A fellow part-timer said at lunch today that "now there would really be chaos around here if we went on strike" in response to a full-time faculty member's assertion that there was chaos in the halls because the full-timers weren't there (I didn't see chaos). But, full-time faculty teach the minority of classes and receive the highest pay and benefits. I'm all for them receiving what they deserve, but then there are the rest of us that are being called in some circles The New Faculty Majority. Kind of like the illegal immigrants of academia with no rights at all.

This points to a problem. What is kind of repugnant is that nowhere in this discussion of faculty pay and hours has their been any real legitimate discussion of adjunct pay, hours, and benefits and of actually treating the majority of a workforce with respect. If the administration and full-time faculty believe that adjuncts are not as qualified (and therefore do not deserve parity in earnings) then why are we educating the majority of the student body at Cincinnati State?

If I, and many of my part-time colleagues, are not good instructors, then I encourage the faculty chairs and administration to let us go and make sure that the student body get the best education possible. I will bow down. If full-time faculty do a better job, then I encourage them to fight for only full-time faculty employment and to get rid of adjuncts, if this will lead to a better student education. But, I don' believe this is the case.

From "We Need an Adjunct Union" by Keith Hoeller published in late 2010 in Inside Higher Ed:

There can be no solidarity in any union that adopts and supports a two-tiered system. Virtually all faculty unions in the U.S. have bargained — and continue to bargain — entirely separate and completely unequal contracts for their tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty. ....
The tenure-stream faculty are paid much more than the adjuncts; the tenure-track faculty are eligible for regular raises and promotions, which the adjuncts are routinely denied; the tenure-track faculty receive much better health care, retirement, sick leave, and professional leave benefits, along with sabbaticals; the tenure-track faculty have their pick of classes and classrooms, as well as private offices; the tenure-track faculty have tenure and they are the last to be laid off, while the adjuncts have no job security and they are the first to go. The only time the word “equal” appears in the union vocabulary is when they bargain an equal percentage cost of living raise for both groups, which means that the tenure-track faculty receive four times as much money as the adjuncts since they earn four times as much. The academic system is especially abusive because the adjuncts have been denied the job security they need in order to confront the tenured faculty.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/12/09/hoeller

thoughts on Cincinnati State faculty strike

2011-09-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

Nearly 200 Cincinnati State Community and Technical College full-time professors are now on strike over an increased workload proposal that would have them working more than professors at other comparable institutions statewide. According to a local news source, they only plan to strike for one week, and the college has hired additional adjunct faculty to teach the full time professors’ classes while they are out. The college has also stated that they can staff the faculty’s courses through the remainder of the year if the faculty chooses to strike that long.
I fully support the faculty’s efforts in this situation. I work as an adjunct instructor at Cincinnati State and totally respect full-time faculty and think they are very good at what they do. I don’t (like some folks) think they are overpaid but I know that like most professors at the community college level, adjunct or full-time, they are probably just a tad bit over worked.

I find it interesting that the administration has hired adjunct instructors to take the faculty’s place during this time. I also find it interesting that 10,500 students attend Cincinnati State and there are so few full-time faculty. I don’t have hard numbers on the percentage of classes taught by full-time vs. adjunct faculty, but I’m wagering that the majority of classes are taught by adjunct faculty, especially since the college’s website reports that there are 180 full-time faculty and 486 part-time faculty (http://www.cincinnatistate.edu/about-cs/facts-and-more). As an adjunct, I teach four courses per term and am paid a modest amount per credit hour. I get some retirement, but no other benefits. At many institutions, full-time is four courses (I’m not sure at Cincinnati State) but there is no way I could live off what I make at Cincinnati State, so I teach elsewhere as well. I am good at time management, you could say. In addition, adjuncts don’t have offices but have a shared (and cramped) office space. To students, they must think that these part-timers are not legitimate instructors because the administration does not treat them as such. They fill in the gaps but it turns out that they teach a lot of the courses offered (I wish I had those numbers!), so therefore students are primarily being educated by underpaid part-time instructors.

Don’t get me wrong; I love what I do and somehow it works for me to teach part-time at two schools. I work the hours I want to work and make enough to support a modest, middle-class lifestyle. It is a decent living, especially given these rough economic times. But, I definitely just do my job. I don’t go above and beyond because then I would really be struggling. I give my all in the classroom, grade my stacks of papers, but I’m not all that available outside of class, which probably affects the quality of student education. But at the same time, college and university administrators send a clear message to students and adjunct faculty by the working conditions and paltry pay. They send the message that the education provided by an adjunct is not as good as that provided by a full-timer, and at the same time, they seem to be fine with it because, as evidenced in the Cincinnati State strike, the college feels that it would be just fine without those full-timers anyway.

I’ve read so much about the adjunct vs. full time debate and talked it into the ground as well. I support the faculty strike, but I also think that attention needs to be paid to those that do the bulk of the teaching at colleges like Cincinnati State. I don’t foresee any big or small raises or benefits in the future, given the anti-government, anti-fair pay political and economic climate we live in. The ability of an individual to support a family working one full-time job and retire somewhat comfortably today is on the decline in the private sector, and with the anti-union measures proposed in Ohio and elsewhere throughout the country, the ability of a public sector employee to do the same thing is also on the chopping block.

So what does this mean? It means it is time to hustle, to freelance, to gather up the part-time gigs to somehow cobble together a rickety, unstable whole. Maybe it means it is time to get politically active. Maybe it means that given that we pay so much lip-service to education, we should pay ALL of our faculty, full or part-time, fairly.

Running the marathon

2011-08-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

I’ve not yet written about actually running the marathon last May, which is odd, or maybe not, considering that I haven’t been writing about anything. Eric Weiner wrote in The Geography of Bliss that one of the things that make the folks of Thailand (Thailanders?) so happy is that they don’t think much. You are unhappy? Well, the problem could be that you think too much. Don’t think so much and you will be happy. It is a simplistic measure for sure, but there are clichés to help enforce the concept. Ignorance is bliss. Stupid and happy or smart and sad? I think there is some truth to the measure. Starting last spring, I began not thinking as much. It wasn’t any kind of conscious decision, but I stopped writing the morning pages and stopped thinking about writing almost all together. Occasionally, I’d think that I should write, should get back to it. After all, I went to grad school for creative writing, sunk three years of my life into the program and also not an insignificant amount of money, so it is what I should be doing. Yet writing held with it a dead-weight ambition at the same time. Along with writing came the obsession/need to publish and with it all the perks that come with dreaming of a writing career—mainly money. Get rich and famous with a masterpiece. Ambition like that can lead to all sorts of trouble, not to mention a crushing headspace. Thus, writers are depressive. Sitting around in their minds, coming up with some impressive string of thoughts to put on the page that would lead to money and fame. The overreliance on thought and the inherent fallacy of the dream itself combine to make not a happy writer be. Because once you dig in deep enough you come to understand that the dream of recognition and love is just a dream and not something easily fulfilled. Thus, writing, for me, was a compulsion, something I loved to do at the same time—and therein lies the paradox—but not something that would ever make me happy.

But going back to the idea of excess thought leading to unhappiness and the testing of that hypothesis, this spring I stopped thinking so much. I came to embody the physical by way of marathon training, yoga, and getting my groove back, so to speak, in the physical realm. All three of those things combined to create a happiness that I hadn’t felt on a consistent basis for a long time. And it continues as a lifestyle up to the present. And overall, it is a good thing. Before this point I’d always tended to be somewhat melancholic. Early on, when I first embarked on making writing into some sort of career and was writing little articles for the local alternative weekly while working and taking care of a young child, I’d find myself crying out of stress, the amount of work I had to do and the little amount of time to do it in. That work was intensely mental, getting words to flow correctly on the page, to be okayed by someone else, was stressful, even though it was something I’d wanted so badly, to see my name in print. Later, in graduate school, I had my first, full blown depressive episode, if that’s what it could be called. I was in the second year of grad school, working three part time jobs while trying, once again, to get those words to flow right and I just kind of snapped. I cried all the time and seriously considered giving it all up and go waste away on some mountaintop somewhere. I wrote a piece about that experience, and my subsequent short-lived foray into the world of antidepressants, and brought it to one of my creative nonfiction workshops. The piece was well received and the professor, a widely published and well-respected author in his own right, said he’d dealt with similar feelings. He said there were times where he wanted to run away from his life and work in a grocery store. Live in a simple little house and work in that grocery store, and yes, that did sound nice, the simplicity of it. The other students got it to. Why are writers depressed? Were they that way before or did the action of extracting the words from the mind and putting them on the page create the struggle? I’m guessing that this is not an uncommon phenomenon, but I also want to add a bit. Perhaps it is the bit of adding writing, or rather, ambition-laden writing to an already busy life, that pushed me, and maybe others, over the edge. Perhaps the yearning for a grocery store job is the yearning for a life not divided three ways. Home and work. Not, home and work, and art. That is just a hypothesis though, and I’m bound to change my mind about it tomorrow.

That is the nature of thought though, changeable. They don’t seem to work out in the long run. I’m not saying thinking is bad, but—and I am parroting other thinkers here—it is a tool, a means to an end but not the end unto itself. We can’t sit around and think about who we are, we don’t get anywhere. Who we are changes and who we are isn’t recognizable by thought alone.

Thinking is a tool, and once the mind, with its round and round (or at least mine) is no longer the dominant force, then other opportunities for being in the world arise, other less complicated, and dare I say, happier, opportunities arise. Running is one of those opportunities. I am such a hard core runner that anytime I see depictions of human existence, on a screen for instance, that involve living the good life by sitting down and enjoying good music and good food, I think, yes, but without running, I would go crazy. It is a way of being. And it doesn’t just mean running, it means long walks and bike rides as well, or instead of. It means living in the physical plane, in the body. That is imperative to my own happiness, and I think to the happiness of some, if not all, others.

That depressive incident in grad school eventually ended when I took a summer job at a museum’s sculpture park. My job was to walk the three miles of trails and make sure nothing was out of order. It involved looking at art and walking around in nature. On many hot afternoons, it involved spending what seemed like hours sitting on a bench in the shade to avoid the scorching afternoon North Carolina heat. Once I started that job, I stopped taking antidepressants. I worked all day, went for bike rides after work, and developed a heated crush on one of my coworkers. I also spent hours after work drinking wine and listening to music, so I’m not sure how that fits into the healthy living aspect, but to say that wine itself seems to be conducive to happiness as well. I also took lots of yoga classes.

This past spring wasn’t much different, other than I didn’t work in a park—though I’d still love a job like that—but rather taught freshman English, a job that though mentally challenging and frustrating at times also allows for time on my feet and interaction with a whole host of people that I wouldn’t interact with otherwise. Or, it involves more than sitting in front of a screen pulling words out of my brain and trying to formulate good thoughts. This past winter and spring, I delved into heavy marathon training, working my way up to running 26 miles on the weekends and going for several runs during the week. Those runs brought me through the winter, and though I cursed running in the snow and ice I always felt better once I came back inside. I wouldn’t say that I run for the physical benefit alone, and I wouldn’t say that my weight has gone down since embarking on this journey, but the mental and emotional benefits alone have been astounding. It is impossible, I think, to be depressed while training for a marathon. I’m sure there is some physiological explanation for all of this, and I think it would be wise for doctors to prescribe heavy physical activity rather than antidepressants to patients. But, we’re not talking studies here, we’re talking personal experience. While training, I also did yoga regularly and dated a good bit. All of these things combined to bring me a sense of real contentment.

Not to say that bad things don’t and didn’t happen, they did. But they always will. I won’t be blithe here, nothing terrible happened that could really debilitate someone, those things that you wouldn’t wish on anyone, and I owe a lot to good fortune at the same time, because those things do happen, and if I experienced say, a death of a loved one or an intense health scare, I might be saying something different now. But I didn’t. And overall, life is good.

Every time, well, this is the second time, I sit down to write about running the marathon, I never actually get around to the experience itself. So here goes. It began outside of Monterrey, California sometime around six am. I was there with my good friend from high school, who with not too much pressure—I was an easy cave—convinced me to run the race. We’d run together in high school, and even back then running was a big part of my life and helped me through some tumultuous adolescent years. So, my son met her and her boyfriend in California, and we ran the marathon. The day before, we went to the expo and listened to a talk by the coach Jeff Galloway, who emphasized that a run-walk plan of running the marathon is good for all runners, basically run a bit then take a walk break, run, walk, etc. So, I tried that, mainly because I didn’t want to be so incredibly sore that I couldn’t enjoy the rest of the vacation we had planned.

Today, I was reminded of the marathon while out on my afternoon run and a song, Deadmaus’s “Chlulhu Speaks”, came on my mp3, and it took me back to mile 22 of the Big Sur marathon, a truly surreal moment in time. I listened to music during the marathon, and some people eschew doing that but I think it makes the experience all the better, and at mile 22, that song came on, which I never particularly liked much to begin with, but resonated with me right then. It was nearly over, the hills and miles had passed and I was running more distance than I’d ever run, in virgin territory. I’d run 20 miles at the most at one time previously, but by mile 22, I was out there in new territory. Finally, at this point , there was a soft shoulder along highway 1, littered with pine needles, soft and dry. I ran along the shoulder, in the shade of some marvelously tall evergreens, and looking to my left, I could see the blue Pacific below the Carmel Highlands. A certain point in the song came on, it could be called the middle interlude, a soft section, and I felt just so alive and there’s no other word for it, surreal, whatever. My dead legs took a hiatus, and the endorphins had taken over this point and I was in awe of the ocean beside me and all of the runners around me, all of us embarking on this endeavor that would do us no good in the long run, but we all gathered together to complete the arbitrary 26 miles, to complete this experience, to partake in something that can only be described as mystical, and a euphoric feeling washed over me for that mile or two, one that I will remember for the rest of my life.

The entirety of the race, beside that moment, was a mashup of hot/cold, pain and exhilaration, the feeling of knowing that my body could do something extraordinary, of communion with the thousands of others doing the same thing, the landscape around us and the Pacific to our west, the cows grazing happily along the ocean hillsides, and it was a complete contradiction of exhilaration and exhaustion. And then it was over. I got my medal and felt like I was dying as I crossed the finished line. I felt such exhaustion (excuse the repetition) that I wanted to cry, wanted to pass out, wanted to curl up, something. But there was food and shade and hesitant walking to follow, and then more hesitant walking and eventual recovery. It was harder than having a baby and right afterward I said I’d never run another one but now I have reconsidered.

dating

2011-07-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't really write about this topic much because it is such a minefield, especially for me, and it can be very personal, unless you write about it in a distant, third-personish point of view. But, for this post, I'm going to break the rules. I'm going to switch between first, second, and third point of view.

Some things of note:
There are so many guides out there for people that are broken up with but there are far fewer for people that do the breaking up. In fact, I'd say there are zero that I've come across. Perhaps all of those victim dumpees out there deserve their victim status and they deserve to mourn and grieve, but not the ones who do the breaking up because a)they are scumbags, at least that is what the dumped tell themselves, b)they're probably seeing someone else or out having a good time anyway, at least that's what the dumped tell themselves, or c) they are cold and empty hearted, at least that's what the dumped tell themselves.
Lately, in my relationship-life, I've been doing the breaking up. Good old Helen Fisher, who seems to be the go-to popular relationship advice lady because she's a biological anthropologist, tells us that breaking up is no good because it is severing ties that we shouldn't break lightly because severing those ties may leave our survival in jeopardy, at least back in the hunter-gatherer days that was the case.

It seems to be the trend in modern pop psychology to refer back to those blindingly good, simple times, when love wasn't a big deal because we were too concerned about survival and procreation, and avoiding procreation, etc. etc. However, I think we do ourselves a disservice by only looking back to the distant past, to looking at the human as animal only. Sure, animals, we think, aren't concerned with love, they don't feel love. They may mate, they may mate for life, they may be polyamorous or whatever, but they do whatever they do for the sake of survival and procreation.

That idea has been passed along to humans as well, especially in our pop-mythology. In our pop-mythology, marriage and partnership were completely about survival and procreation: the woman had to survive and the man had to know that those kids she has are really his. We all know this. Love, and that is a whole big multifaceted variable in itself, was not necessarily part of the equation. Your parents might choose who you wed or you might just wed whatever boy lived in the same village that was about your age. Love wasn't part of it. You had sex with him and cooked his dinner and had his children and he provided you a place to live. That's the popular mythology.

I read an essay recently by Laura Kipnis called "Love's Labors", actually it was a chapter out of her book Against Love. (Come to think of it now, I might want to actually read the whole book.) She writes that love-- the passionate kind, the kind that makes you crazy--didn't take place in these household and childbearing arrangements (isn't that what we should call them?) but was ephemeral and flighty. It would strike at any time, with the married neighbor, with the wandering cowboy, whoever. Love took place outside the confines of the household. She has a great line in the essay that goes something like "desire is the wild card in human life". She says it better than that. But, desire is the flame that erupts and we have all kinds of metaphors that we use to talk about it. It has been the subject of novels, plays, songs, and sad drunken soliloquies on bar stools or around some primordial campfire since the beginning of recorded modern history, and even before that. That passion commits its own crimes, it catches people completely off guard, and according to Kipnis, isn't usually in agreeance with the marriage bonds that are set up in our society.

What about Fisher's primal man and woman? Did they feel love? No, Fisher would probably tell us that they only felt lust and the chemical desire to procreate with the certain partner that would give them the offspring with the greatest chances of survival. That, I think, is the fundamental flaw in all of Fisher's arguments. She explains away human passions in a solely evolutionary and biological way. In her framework, the little parts of us that we call the heart and mind aren't really anything else but points leading us to our own survival and the survival of our here and future offspring. Good genes are the goal. This same argument leads us to the conclusion that depression (and what does that even mean?) is a solely chemical phenomenon, as are such generalized and clinicalized emotions such as anxiety. Instead of, say, I'm scared and sad because my lover left me.

Anyway, I forgot where I was going with this, but I want to argue that love is not a biological phenomenon. Though I'm all about nature and being in nature, there is something that differentiates us from the animals, and hopefully something in us that isn't solely focused on our own survival and procreation. Take art, take this rambling, take any rambling, take any story teller, take any non-necessity that we devote our lives to. And what does that have to do with dating, with breaking up? It means that I can't explain away my feelings biologically. That there is something more to it, that we live in a culture, and our lives aren't tied up in survival. That I am sick of "biological anthropology" and its explanations of human behavior. We have agency. And I'm also saying that it is difficult to navigate love and relationships in this modern world. (well, duh). Really difficult.

to be continued....

Who says SWE is better?

2011-07-24T10:26:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking lately about power and language, or more generally power and anything. A lot of this thought comes from recently reading and teaching Foucault, who I am not an expert in, and don't want to get too deep into right now. I've also recently read an essay by the late David Foster Wallace--I love his writing so much. He is a master of language--that got me thinking about this issue and the notion of discourse, discourse communities, and the dominant discourse.

The dominant discourse in this country is Standard Written English and the rules that I teach in my writing classes, all of the corrections that I make on student papers, all of the things I tell them to do comes from the rules regarding SWE. So a student can't write "everybody know" rather than "everyone knows" or "come out the house" or "he be". I "have" to go in and correct it. But really, in truth (if I can even say that, even proclaim any knowledge or use of truth) SWE is no better than what we call SBE, standard Black English, which is a lot of the language correcting that I do in my classes. Wallace wrote in the essay "Authority and American Usage" that he told his literature students the following:

"I don't know whether anybody's told you this or not, but when you're in a college English class you're basically studying a foreign dialect. This dialect is Standard Written English...In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE....you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call 'Standard White English' because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated powerful white people."

But do you? Is it possible to operate outside of the discourse/the system? To just say no, in a sense. Because could language just be like any other point of power, any other accepted way of doing things? Here's what we'll teach you at community college: pull your pants up and use proper grammar. Don't tattoo your face. Here's how to write a resume. Hopefully, by the time we are through, you learn how to act (Standard White Behavior) and you can too reach the middle class (which isn't necessarily the case).

Lately I've been wanting to live outside of the system/laws/discourse but I feel thoroughly indebted to it, in a literal sense. And is there an alternative anyway? I used to think so, and maybe still do. I used to think that living out in a rural area in some kind of community would equate living outside of the system, and maybe it still does.

Last night, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (yes, I know), and it was actually an enjoyable movie. I like how the pirates, comical and as unreal as they may be, live outside of the law and operate solely in self interest, and in Depp's Jack Sparrow character's case, live completely in the now with no regard to belongings or the future. I think the movies are set in the late 1700s, when there was still a bit of lawlessness in the new world, some unexplored territories, and a different disciplinary system (Foucault. They still hung folks). It was the beginning of liberal democracy and the dominant European powers were still out grabbing what they could. Not all was conquered, though it would soon become so. And there came the pirates, taking from the dominant powers like the dominant powers took from those they conquered. So, I want to be a pirate and live under lawlessness. I know I am being incredibly naive, that I am some middle America white woman that is thoroughly entrenched with internalized rules and regulations, who knows how to act right, and who has thoroughly bought into the idea of work/pay/buy. But not thoroughly. I kind of feel like throwing off the mantle, the saddle, whatever you want to call it. I kind of want to tell my students that sure, learn the dominant discourse, learn how to dress right, act right, talk right, write right, learn how to establish your credit and buy a house on credit, a car on credit, tonight's dinner on credit, but it isn't going to get you anywhere. Slave all day for money that you then turn around and spend every last penny of just to live, just to keep up appearances, just to make sure you have some semblance of a lifestyle so you are not a complete outcast in this late capitalist society. That's all fine and good, and someday you will wake up with debt up to your eye balls and you can't sell the house because the market's tanked and you are stuck working a job that you got just to make the money and you can't get out without ruining your credibility with the powers that be (but so what, you may just ruin your credibility anyway, and good for you).

excerpt

2011-03-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt from "Capitalism's Dismal Future" posted on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website (http://chronicle.com/article/Capitalisms-Dismal-Future/126659/). The article is worth reading. Here's a bit:

The biggest unknown in contemplating the future of capitalism is the tolerance of the world's population for the havoc that this social system's difficulties will inflict on their lives. That people are able to react constructively in the face of the breakdown of normal patterns of social life, improvising solutions to immediate problems of physical and emotional survival, is amply demonstrated by their behavior in the face of disasters like earthquakes, floods, and wartime devastation, as well as in earlier periods of economic distress. That 21st-century people have not lost the capacity to confront social authorities in defense of their interests has been demonstrated by protesting young people in Athens, striking government workers in Johannesburg, and most recently and spectacularly by the Egyptians who, at least for the moment, destroyed a long-lived police state.

People are, in any case, going to have adequate opportunity to explore such possibilities in the near future, if they wish to better their conditions of life in the concrete ways an unraveling economy will require. While at present they are still awaiting the promised return of prosperity, at some point the newly homeless millions, like many of their predecessors in the 1930s, may well look at newly foreclosed, empty houses, unsaleable consumer goods, and stockpiled government foodstuffs and see the materials they need to sustain life. The simple taking and using of housing, food, and other goods, however, by breaking the rules of an economic system based on the exchange of goods for money, in itself implies a radically new mode of social existence.

The social relation between employers and wage earners, one that joins mutual dependence to inherent conflict, has become basic to all the world's nations. It will decisively shape the ways the future is experienced and responded to. No doubt, as in the past, workers will demand that industry or governments provide them with jobs, but if the former could profitably employ more people, they would already be doing so, while the latter are even now coming up against the limits of sovereign debt. As unemployment continues to expand, perhaps it will occur to workers with and without jobs that factories, offices, farms, schools, and other workplaces will still exist, even if they cannot be run profitably, and can be set into motion to produce goods and services that people need. Even if there are not enough jobs—paid employment, working for business or the state—there is plenty of work to be done if people organize production and distribution for themselves, outside the constraints of the business economy. This would mean, of course, constructing a new form of society.

number ten

2011-03-14T19:27:00.000-07:00

in no particular order:

1. I ran 18 miles yesterday in my marathon-training quest. It does feel good to do this, my sometimes-complaining aside. I'm amazed that my body can actually run 18 miles and that it is enjoyable.

2. On the twelfth mile said run, I ate a tropical fruit tart (or something like that) flavored Larabar, and damn, that was the best thing I've ever, ever eaten. Ingredients: just five or so. A big improvement over the corn-sugar energy gels I've been downing.

3. I want time. There never seems to be enough of it.

4. Dinner: coconut curry and dark chocolate for desert. mmmm. Ate a lot.

5. Be careful of how you raise your children. Mine has a fierce environmental ethic, which I have cultivated within him, but sometimes it comes back to smack me in the face as I sit here in my house brought to us by coal fired Duke Po'wer, discussing the dangers of nuclear energy and the nastiness of coal mining with a straight face as my son says, we humans need to just live closer to nature. What's wrong with us?
6. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout and Dill are out talking to Dolphus Raymond, the white man who crossed the color line and faked drinking whiskey so the white folks would feel more comfortable with it. Anyway, Dill's all upset about how Tom Robinson's being treated in the court room and was crying about it. Raymond says about Dill: "Things haven't caught up with that one's instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won't get sick and cry. Maybe things'll strike him as being--not quite right, say, but he won't cry, not when he gets a few years on him."

Then Dill says: "Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?"

The he replies: "Cry about the simple hell people give other people--without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored people, without even stopping to thing that they're colored people too."

I love that book. That said, I feel like a sell out, like an average American, paying the bills, working too much, without the time or energy to actually ponder where my energy comes from and the wherewithal, money, time, etc. to do anything with it. Kids. so good. Then they become adults.

7. I'd like to start a new blog. I'd like to do a lot of things. A new favorite blog http://www.neverhomemaker.com/. Lots of stuff about running and good recipes.

8. Nonsmoker now! I can't very well run a marathon and smoke, so the smoke had to go. I don't miss it even.

9. Running is good for the mind, heart, and body.

10. New music. Lately I've been listening to music I put aside a few years ago, saying it wasn't for me when my then significant other listened to it. Now, it is about all I listen to.

possible titles: misanthrope, breaking, sabbatical, none really apply

2011-03-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

Like I've written recently, I have been on a self-imposed break from NPR and all other news. It isn't a conscious decision, it wasn't like one day I just decided I didn't want to know the news anymore, it just happened. I got some more music or something, and audiobooks for the car. And I don't watch TV anyway, nor would I watch any of the news channels if I could. The news makes me angry. NPR makes me angry, especially with their pandering to the Tea Party and right-wing activists who are taking things way further than a measured, thoughtful conservative point of view. That it is a big story that their chief fundraiser had the audacity to say something nasty about the Tea Party, as if. I know that NPR gets a small portion of their funding from the federal government, but still. It isn't as if the Tea Party is golden, beyond rebuke.

So, I reemerged into the world of news. Take the most recent example of Representative Peter King's congressional hearing on home-grown Muslim fundamentalism, and his notion that the Muslim community in this country isn't doing enough to stop fundamentalism that could lead to terrorist attacks here within this country. And why? Why now? Some have called these hearings witch hunts, and that's not too far off. Or more likely, it is a distraction, a focusing on a problem that isn't real, demonizing a group of people who had no hand in 9-11 because of their religion and identity, while things are getting worse for the average person, i.e. those of us who are not millionaires or billionaires. Which is why I don't understand why anyone besides the owning class subscribes to the Tea Party ideology when it is not in their best interest at all. And to say the problem is just on the right is a lie because Democrats are taking us down the same road, caving to the same interests all in the attempt to not sound too liberal and to appeal to the mythical centrists among us.

I feel like I'm not justified to comment on these happenings because I don't know what is exactly going on. I don't have enough information--but do we ever? I'm always telling my students to not make claims that they can't back up with evidence and to shy away from making hasty generalizations, but I may be doing the same thing. The point is, I don't know because I don't have enough information, and I never will.

But there are some good folks out there. The People's Boycott seems to be doing good work. Here's their website http://www.thepeoplesboycott.com/ and they're also on facebook.

unschooling

2011-02-27T20:31:00.000-08:00

I came across the term unschooling many years ago and read a book about it by Grace Llewellyn called The Teenage Liberation Handbook that is written to teenagers who do not want to go to school but would rather self-direct their learning. Now, my son is 11 and he goes to a private Waldorf school that for the most part I feel like is a good situation for him. There are really good things about the school: the emphasis on founding myths, whether biblical, Greek, Egyptian, Indian, or Norse. There is less of an academic focus it seems and more of a focus on art, music, making things, and movement. I like the notion of head, heart, hands, teaching to all three, not just to the mind but to the child as a social creature.

Waldorf has gotten a lot of flack for not teaching children to read until third grade, and though I have mixed feelings about it and think that a kid should learn and will learn easily when he or she is ready (an average kid), there are benefits to delaying reading, mainly that the child will continue to interact with the world as is, not through the veil of words and symbols, but directly. David Abrams wrote in the Spell of the Sensuous that "by linguistically defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies." Allowing children to live in that space of encountering the world without definition is perhaps what childhood is.

And it becomes all the more complicated today as our technology changes. Jennifer Egan wrote about a future only about ten minutes from now at the end of A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is fiction, but she writes about the infant/young child interaction with devices like iphones. In the book, these young children came to be known as "pointers" who by pointing to what they like on a screen dictate pop culture and pop music. It's "likes" which so often seem to make up who we are as people. Who are you? What do you like might be a better question. What do you consume? I am Louis Vutton. I am indie rock. I am smart because I like x,y, and z. Anyway, I digress. One of the tenets of Waldorf education though, that I like, is keeping kids away from these screen interactions which have within the last ten years or so turned into screen identity. Not that I keep my son away from technology entirely. He has a Nintendo DS and we watch movies and he watches too many silly videos on youtube (Lego prank call, anyone? Edd's World?). But we don't watch television, though that isn't to say if given the opportunity he won't devour it, and he doesn't play a ton of video games. That has been an issue, though. Late last year, he was feeling jealous of other boys in boy scouts, who constantly talked about playing black ops and other video games, and then my sister and her husband were around the same time selling their old xbox 360. I told him that he could buy it if he saved the 50 dollars, which is about two months allowance, totally doable. But he decided not to because he said he thought he would get addicted to it. When he was still wanting it he said that if he got it, we should have a rule that he'd only play on weekends, and I said I was fine with that. He said he didn't want to be a kid who played all the time. So when he decided not to buy it I was happy for him. He made the choice on his own and he made an independent choice. If you want it, you buy it, and you are responsible for it.

This growth has got me thinking about the teen years. When I think back to my own, I think about what a monumental waste of time middle and high school were. I don't remember a thing that I learned. Socially, it was awkward. It was 7 years of being babysat. Those are really important years though. Like I wrote earlier a long time ago I read The Teenage Liberation Handbook about unschooling and a lot of the ideas make a lot of sense. Learn what you want to learn. You don't need to go to pre-cal every day for 165 days of the school year to learn math that you hate and you sleep through anyway. When I think of my son, I think of someone who is articulate, a voracious reader, a budding musician and songwriter, a bit of a hedonist (life is to have fun! Why do we have to go to school and then go to work?), and a very social kid. He's good at math but doesn't like it. He's smart and so I never worry about him academically.

He's also a kid who has never liked school. He went to public school for kindergarten and grades 1-2, and came home crying many nights. Kindergarten was sit down, learn how to read, do your work, head on the desk. First grade was the same. Second grade was good because of a good teacher but then bad when the teacher left because of a long term illness. Then, along came a long-term substitute who called one of the kids a cry baby to his face and told me privately that some of the kids need a good whipping. In third grade we moved and he started going to Waldorf School where the kids worked on a farm and learned bible stories. He's very much a story-based learner, but maybe we all are? After school we would take walks and he'd tell me the story of Jacob and Joseph, and the next year in fourth grade we'd take walks and he'd tell me about the much more complex Norse mythology. This year, I'd hear about Indian mythology, Shiva being his favorite.

But sometimes he still doesn't like school. He doesn't like how he has to do handwork and gets phenomenally frustrated with knitting, and if his learning were more self directed he would not be learning how to knit. But overall, it is a good education. He doesn't take tests. He has had the same teacher and same classmates since third grade, which I think builds a good continuum. The pedagogy isn't perfect and is based on Rudolph Steiner's teachings, which I'm on the fence about, but for the most part, it is good stuff. That said, I'm not above letting him stay home from school every once in a while, or taking a vacation during the school year.

Yet as he gets older, I'm not opposed to taking him out of school, though he wants to stay because of the social aspect. There are a lot of options for high schoolers as opposed to traditional high school. Where I teach college there are many high school students enrolled who take classes and receive their associates degree by the time they graduate from high school, or earlier, and for free. Then they can go onto college and spend two rather than four years, and grad school if they want. Or not. There are apprenticeships, there are libraries, and there are books. There is traveling. I can see myself taking time to teach abroad in the next few years and taking my son with me, and he probably won't be in regular school per say but what better education?

And who knows, he'll probably want to stay in regular school, but I let him know now that he doesn't have to. There are so many options. There are much better ways of getting an education. Think about it. How much did you really learn in high school? Or middle school? You learned if you were smart or not; you were graded and rated.

2011-02-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

a poem by Denise Levertov:

WITNESS

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

2011-02-26T12:22:00.000-08:00

I consistently read Cary Tennis's advice column on Salon.com and sometimes the pages of comments that follow. I don't know if it is voyeurism or what, but I love reading about other people's problems and reading Tennis's sometimes good and sometimes spacey advice. This quote is from his column and he's quoting, and I quote: "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions," the Alcoholics Anonymous guide to how to work the AA program, the chapter on Step 10 ("Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it"):

"It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong also. ... A spot-check inventory taken in the midst of such disturbances can be of very great help in quieting stormy emotions. ... We must avoid quick-tempered criticism and furious, power-driven argument. The same goes for sulking or silent scorn. These are emotional booby traps baited with pride and vengefulness. ... We can try to stop making unreasonable demands upon those we love. We can show kindness where we had shown none. With those we dislike we can begin to practice justice and courtesy, perhaps going out of our way to understand and help them. Whenever we fail any of these people, we can promptly admit it -- to ourselves always, and to them also, when the admission would be helpful. Courtesy, kindness, justice, and love are the keynotes by which we may come into harmony with practically anybody."

So, seems like good advice. And to go further, and this is one of my favorites from the Yoga Sutras:

Cultivate "an attitude of friendliness toward those who are happy, compassion toward those who are suffering, pleasure and delight at those who are doing good deeds in the world, and an attitude of nonjudgmental watchfulness toward those who do harmful deeds."

Now that is good advice. Sometimes I think we need to focus on how we act, not how we feel.

I'm working on writing a longer post, sorting things out, trying to make words even work right now, so in lieu of that hard work, I quote someone else's hard work.

12 miles

2011-02-24T19:15:00.000-08:00

old stuff.

In marathon training, each week contains a long run, usually on the weekend. Each run is one mile or so longer than the last, except for every third week, which is a drop down week to give the body a rest. Last weekend I ran 11; this weekend I ran 12. I'm skirting dangerously close to passing the 13 mile mark, the longest I've ever ran.

Last weekend, I wrote a post about running 11 miles that was a little out there. This week, my 12 mile run felt ho-hum, hum-drum, a long slog through the woods. The weather was warm at a balmy 40 degrees and the snow was melting. It was a beautiful day and a good run.

I think these mile markers are a good way to check in for the week. Tonight I am so tired. I ran yesterday and didn't get too much sleep last night. I'm working on writing a cover letter and teaching philosophy for a full-time teaching job, and I am hating every minute of it. I don't get it. I love to write, but I despise writing cover letters, anything job related, and I always have. Is it because I have applied to many jobs and haven't gotten them? Probably so, but that's life, and life, I hear, is full of rejection. But being a writer (in name only sometimes) one of the first things I learned is that rejection is the name of the game. You haven't really written or really submitted anything or really even tried until you have pasted your walls with rejection letters. And I suppose the same goes for applying for academic positions, or anything writing-related that offers benefits. Actually, I know for a fact that the same thing goes for applying for academic positions. So, its not that I'm procrastinating, but I found out about the position on Friday and the deadline is Monday. Tomorrow. And I have a cover letter and statement of teaching philosophy to write. I've been working on it, but something about these types of tasks makes me want to do everything else in the world, like go to the dentist, clean the house, go grocery shopping, scrub the bathtub with a toothbrush, anything but sit down and craft a fake-ass letter telling someone why he or she should hire me. Basically, I know I can do the job because I already am doing the job, and I do it pretty well, but somehow annunciating that on the page is terribly difficult.

I think because I already expect that I'm not going to get the position, so there isn't any point in trying.

But I will. Applying for jobs, writing cover letters and teaching philosophy especially at the last minute, sucks. And I drag it out like it is torture. Tell you what: rough draft of both tonight. Final draft tomorrow.
I am not all light and airy and happy with my peaceful world. I validate negative emotions and give them a voice here and there. Lots of love,

11 miles

2011-01-24T19:03:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I went to Mesa Verde. We took a tour of the cliff dwellings and learned about the ancient Pueblo people (ne' Anasazi). They had a rough time of it; their average life expectancy was in the mid-thirties. They'd have babies at say fifteen and live to see their grandchildren born, and then die. Before dying, they would climb up to the top of the plateau and farm, and then sleep under the cliffs.

It's strange to think of such a short life expectancy; I'd be an old woman. If you only live that long and you live a subsistence lifestyle (calling it a lifestyle implies some kind of choice, and there wasn't one) then your life was about surviving: eating, procreating, finding shelter, along with a dose of spirituality. Of course, I don't know this for sure. This is what the tour guide said.

But still. Now we live until we're 70 or 80 or 90 and don't have to farm all day long, or hunt or gather all day. Most of us don't have a gaggle of children to feed, and most of us don't have to split firewood or hand wash clothes or even make clothes. We work and we buy what we need. Food costs average ten percent of our income, whereas it once averaged 70 to 90 percent of it. So what do we do with all of that free time?

And in that free time, why do we choose to sometimes do hard things? We have it easy. We're like domesticated cats. We can spend our entire evenings and weekends laying on the couch, eating, napping, luxuriating in our restful states.

But then some of us choose hard things. I've always chosen hard things, whether it be a major life choice or just how to spend my free Sunday afternoon. What is the benefit of choosing the hard thing when there is always an easy thing?

I've mentioned it here before that I am running a marathon but that was before I really began training. Now, I'm not so sure. Today I ran eleven miles, I think. I ran for about two and a half hours, but slowly.

Running for over two hours can be a hard thing, more so psychologically than physically. The run began all wrong. It was a beautiful day for running, blue sky, snow covering the ground, twenty two degrees. I put on two pairs of leggings, ski socks, a long-sleeve t-shirt and a fleece, a headband, sunglasses, mp3 player, chapstick, car-door-locker, two sport gels, and a water bottle full of diluted powerade. It was A LOT to carry. Right away, it started out bad. I was pissed that there was snow on the ground, not that it had snowed, that's all fine and I love snow, but why the hell did I decide to train for a marathon in the dead middle of winter when snow covered the ground? I could either trudge along slushy, salty roads or brave it on the trail, which is what I decided to do. Well, I got started and it was slow going. Running on snow, even packed on trails, is a bit like running on a sandy beach, not easy.

I lost it early on. Why the *&#* am I doing this? I yelled out loud. I don't have to do this; I could be at home .This. sucks. so. bad. and soon I was having an A+ meltdown on the trail with all of my running paraphernalia. Crying behind my sunglasses, throwing a fit worthy of (fill in the blank), all alone, on a trail. But I kept going. I didn't want to be there, and the two plus hours of running I had in front of me seemed dreadful. The snow under my feet kept me from really moving and made each step more difficult.

I'd like to say there is a metaphor here. I ran on the trail for a while, then went out on the road, then got hot and cold and got annoyed with all of my gear I was carrying around and considered just dropping it wherever. I kept going, not knowing why I was doing this, other than that I thought it would be fun way back before I started actually training for it in the middle of winter. I love to run and I like snow, but not running and snow together. Skiing or hell, maybe snowshoeing, would be better.

I'd like to say that there is a metaphor here, and that after I run this marathon I will be changed or there will be some purpose to it, but I don't think there will be. It will have been something I have done, a hard thing I have done. It'll make you stronger, some might say. Just like an emotionally hard thing. It'll make you stronger. And what is the point of all that strength?

We do the hard things and they are done. We do something the next day and the next. We have acres of time to consume.

By the second hour, I was better. I ran to a shelter and dropped my water bottle and gel pack and took off down another trail. It felt great not to be carrying anything. The ground was still slippery and slushy at the same time, but I was used to it. I was still going super slow, but it was okay. There comes a point in which the running becomes the state of being, kind of like sitting in a chair. When you sit in a chair you can listen to music, sing, talk, breathe. Same thing when you are running.

Today I think I ran about eleven miles. I've ran 13 before, the most I've done. I've had the runner's high (but not today). Before when I've felt it it has been the euphoric sense that I could keep going forever and I had a lot of energy, before all this training business. Back when I lived in Asheville, NC, and I would run on the mountain trails outside of town I would sometimes feel it. Those weren't "serious" runs in the way these training runs are. I would run out, or walk, and sit on a rock for a while and amble around, and then run back, sometimes feeling that euphoria. Often it was summertime, ah the blessed season.

Now though, it is more like a steady movement, a physical ease with the motion. My breathing is easy, my legs move easily. It is a state that can be sustained for a long time (perhaps through the aid of energy drinks and gels-a different high you could say). But then, toward the end, I noticed my breathing a little more.

I've always had good lungs. I could smoke and run and climb mountains, no problem. Me and air were good partners. I still am thankful for them. I can run for a long time with seemingly minimal effort (not minimal, just build up from lots and lots of training. My lungs are trained. So is my heart).

I've heard runners say that after they have ran for a long time that they begin to feel that they are the act of running, and I didn't feel that, though toward the end I felt that I was the act of breathing. It was pretty wild. But in a sense, we are the act of breathing, just as we are the act of so many things (though we like to define ourselves by the act of thinking, the act of feeling, the act of doing). But at our most basic, we are the act of breathing, it is one dimension. It is pretty cool to be wholly consumed, to wholly be the act of breathing for a little while.

Mystical states. The mystics do all kinds of things to get into trances, states. Teenagers drink cough medicine. Some fast for days. Don't go to sleep. Eat sacred plants. Fast. Chant. Sweat. Walk across the desert. Climb a mountain. Take yourself to the edge of existence to where the seam breaks, splits. So long-distance, endurance running can be similar. I know that there are people that run 100 miles or fifty miles without stopping and I don't know what is in their heads. I know I don't want to be this person. I don't even want to do another marathon after running this one. I don't even know if I want to run this one, but there is a merit to doing this hard thing. Perception changes after the tenth mile. At least for me. I'm not hallucinating or losing it, but it makes sense. Perception changes when you spend all day in front of a computer, so why wouldn't it change when you run in the woods for that long, and longer? Becoming a breathing organism, one that is not identified with thoughts is perhaps one of the goals of yoga of meditation, but can be found another way.

By the end of the run, my legs were pretty tired. I stopped running and walked the last bit to the car. I felt different but the same. My meltdown was long gone, I was past it. I felt more at ease, pleased, and tired.

And maybe that's why we do hard things, to be tired. Stephen Gaskin said that it is no good to be self-conscious, to sit around all day and think about your own head, your own self. That if you're doing that you're not working hard enough. I think that's why I do hard things, like this marathon, because I'm not working hard enough. Because the work I do is so entirely cerebral that self consciousness invades all corners. I become my mind. I am a thought, and is that any stranger than becoming a breath or the act of movement? I do hard things because I need to work to escape from my own head sometimes, to have a meltdown and then go past it, to know that it isn't reality. And there are healthier ways than others to do this.

goodbye 2010

2010-12-30T18:34:00.000-08:00

The week between Christmas and New Year's is usually an odd one for me. Each year I say that I'm going to take a vacation during that time but it doesn't ever work out that way. First off, most vacations available during this time are expensive, skiing during the most expensive time of the year or going way south to some resort or at least a much warmer climate, not something too easy to do on the fly, because I don't tend to get the trip actually planned out, and besides, don't usually have much money left by the end of the year. But, maybe next year because this week is a perfect time for it. I have the week off from teaching, but I still have a stack of papers to grade and a syllabus to put together by Monday. And, it is Thursday night and I've done very little. Procrastination at its finest. Manana, I say, again and again, and the work isn't done. It is weird to be on vacation but still have work to do, but that is the life. Next week, life starts back up in full force. A full teaching load, extra tutoring, and the whole shebang. December has been light on work thus far. I teach at two colleges and have been off from one for much of the month and teaching at the other until early last week. So an easy, but hard month all of the same.

I love December in many ways. It is the best of the winter months. The solstice, Christmas, my birthday, New Year's Eve, winter break, Christmas lights, all of these are good things. At the same time all of these can be not so good things. But, I'll take December over January or February any day. If January is the austere Sunday morning (more like Monday actually), then December is the last Saturday night. Its blowing it, eating it, loving it, sleeping it. It is excess, greed, and sloth, buying, giving, loving, eating. January is fasting and white light in the morning. December is red, yellow, and green. December is night and candlelight. Is too many cookies and ham leftovers. Cyclical. Someday you have to wake up.

I read somewhere that until say the middle ages the new year actually began in March. That may actually make a little more sense, but nevertheless, January 1 is ingrained in our collective psyches as the new beginning. So I take this time to both reflect on the year that has gone by and the one that is to come. I won't pretend to make new year resolutions (which for me, always involve quitting smoking, actually getting a story/essay/book published, and maybe losing weight) and those resolutions usually don't work. I haven't quit smoking for good, I've not gotten anything serious published, I have lost the five pounds but on no account of resolutions, so I don't have much faith in resolutions in my hands. Besides, January looks so busy and I'm not sure I have the resolve or the time to do anything else besides work. But I'll set one intention: to stop procrastinating. I'm not sure how to say it positively: what is the word for non-procrastinating?

But for one thing, by the end of December, I am ready for January. The week of laying around and eating holiday leftovers gets old after a while, though it is a necessity.

So the year gone by. This has been a year of change. Quit a job; started a new job. Moved. Learned to live in a new-old way. Ran a half-marathon. Worked on a novel. Took some short vacations. The biggest thing was leaving my ex and starting a newish life in a town that I moved to be with him in. It is positive; it is negative, it is what is. Changing. Trying to become a better person. Slowly. Going back and forth with that. Procrastinating. Working hard. Living. Getting older. Running more and running again. This year has been a hard one, no lie. So 2011, the artificiality of starting the clock and the calendar over will begin Saturday. I have contradictory notions, to get on with it and to stick with the slow of what is at this moment. To simultaneously welcome in the new and hold fast to the old while being strung along by the present. That's the procrastination. The knowing that the new is ready to begin but waiting on opening that door. So, here's to liminality. Here's to ambivalence. Here's to a long winter's slumber. Here's to dreaming. Here's to Hanuman, making that leap, crossing that threshold, however artificial it may be. After all, this is a construct.

space

2010-12-15T19:33:00.000-08:00

Now, I feel the need to do absolutely nothing, to lay on the couch and look at the Christmas tree with no intention of doing anything else. I like that about Christmas trees, actually I just like Christmas trees in general. This year, ours is big and wide, jutting out into the middle of the room with its wide berth. It announces itself. I love to look at the outline of the branches, the lights, and the silhouettes of the ornaments. I love the decadence of it, an object with no other purpose (though I know there are legendary purposes and ritual meanings that I'm forgetting) than to be aesthetically pleasing. So I lay and look at it, thinking about what I should make for Christmas presents, what few things I should buy, but without hurry.

I need space for nothingness. At my college orientation, back when I was eighteen, the dean of students gave a talk to all incoming freshman about the value of working hard and playing hard. Yes, I thought, but I need time for nothing, to rest, and still do. Even though I often find solace in busy-ness and constantly going, that doesn't last for too long. I've learned to stop before I get burned out, finally. It is also the season, the time of year to hibernate, hunker down, curl under a blanket in a half-dream state, to think, to wonder about what will come. But now, the month is given over to space, to comfort, and finally, celebration for what has come.

heavy like snow

2010-12-04T20:17:00.000-08:00

It snowed today. It was beautiful to wake up to and more beautiful tonight after darkness fell. I love when it gets dark early and then taking a run or walk after dark. Even though it is only six or seven o'clock it feels so late. I love seeing the Christmas lights shining under the snow. I love how quiet and cold it is after dark and being outside in it.

Lately I've been taking my runs or walks after dark, and lately just about all I've been able to do is work, run or walk, and listen to music. And the basics. I've not written much. I'm just coming to feel some deep feelings that I have held off on feeling for a while and running is my drug of choice, well, along with wine and cigarettes, but I'm trying not to smoke too much these days (see old running and smoking post), and drinking just leads me to smoking. So, as I've written here before I went through a break up a few months back and it hit me hardest just about last week, talk about delayed reaction. So. Hence, the running, listening to music, and working. Nothing more, nothing less. Until I am at home, alone, with the hours in front of me. Hence, the running, listening to music, drinking wine, and eventually writing.

It's just so heavy right now, and I would like to get to a point, as I'm sure most of us would, in which I never experience loss or loneliness, though the odds are stacked against me and us. Hey God, I can do without these feelings. I've felt them; I know what they feel like. Can you just make them go away? Thanks. In advance.

Yesterday I bought some oil paints and various oil painting accessories--gesso, linseed oil, turpentine, brushes--because lately I've been wanting to get back into painting. I used to paint a lot in college, when I was an almost-art major, until I switched majors for something I thought would be more financially lucrative. And because I hit a wall. I bought the supplies because I want to paint again and I've lost/gotten rid of/who knows what happened too my old oil paints. I want to be creative and listen to music at the same time, to get out of my left brain for a while. So, we'll see.

I liked painting in college, but I got to a point where I didn't know what to do next, kind of like with writing. I painted, then stopped. Actually, then had a son, then painted in the kitchen for a while then lost/got rid of the paints, and I lost/got rid of the drive to do it any more. In college, I had an art professor, Carlos, who was very talented and also kind of crazy. He would carry on long meandering monologues and was deathly allergic to any kind of commerical shampoo, deodorant, lotion, etc. Before any of his classes, students had to take showers. Once I came to class, and I didn't even think I was wearing any of the offending agents and he told me I almost killed him. Anyway, once Carlos said that he didn't like to mentor women painters because they'd inevitably take at least five years off and end up painting in their garages. They wouldn't couldn't take it seriously.

Later, at my own thesis review when I was finishing up my MFA in creative writing, my reviewers said they were worried about my ability to follow through with it, to actually revise the damn thing and do something with it. And yes, they were right. That thesis, all two years of work put into it, sits on a shelf, unrevised, un-sent-out, just there. Why? Because I'm worried about offending people, because I'm worried that it sucks. And so there it sits. And the reviewers were right, Carlos was right, and I'm not sure if it is a woman thing or a second-rate artist thing, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. I've often said that I'd be all right if I had an editor sitting right here with me. Maybe I'll marry an editor. I'll just write my messy rough drafts and hand them to my loving editor who will fix them right up and send them out for me, while I run, smoke, write, drink wine, and paint in the garage. That would be pretty perfect.

So, I'm facing that. Will I just write rough drafts for the rest of my life and fill up notebook after notebook? I'd rather not. Or maybe it will be a hobby, just like painting can be a hobby, as can running, gardening, cooking, hiking, yoga, etcetera, etcetera. But I don't want to be a person with a lot of hobbies and a job that is just a job. I'd like to actually do something with one of these things.

When I was in fourth grade, I wrote in my Ramona Quimby diary that when I grew up I wanted to be a fashion designer, author, teacher, or architect. I wrote other things in my diary too, that my friend was a bitch and that I loved Jimmy McKinney. I wrote a story that year about two girls who steal money out of a cash register and get caught by the police. I drew clothes straight through eighth grade, along with designs for houses, schools, and office buildings. I had some kind of talent, some kind of drive, and now though I know I still have it, I just haven't done as much as I'd like with it. And to be fair, I have been busy doing other things. Raising an awesome kid for one. And that's no small thing. As much as I wanted to do those other things, I also wanted to be a mom.

So, in all, though I haven't done much more than write a lot of first drafts and painted in the kitchen, I've done some good things too. And what is a measure of a life anyway? I've had an amazing number of experiences, some good and some bad, but I'll say that so far, I've lived life to the fullest, and you have to live to be about to make any art of consequence. Art springs from life, from a million moments, not from only sitting in front of a computer or in front of a canvas. All of that life is its own art, what you do with this one life, how you live it. And though there are the moments of loss, there are also the ecstatic moments and the beautiful ones too. There are the places I've lived, the people I've met, the failures, the successes. So, Carlos.

Other news. National Novel Writing Month, or November, is complete and I didn't finish the novel. I got pretty far into it though. I can't say it will ever be more than a rough draft, but it may be more. I'll finish it. There's always December.

Passage

2010-11-19T19:28:00.000-08:00

The sages, the yogis, the whole entire mystery of the Eastern half of this planet, shrouded in time and language, learned how to sit. They learned how to go in caves and meditate for days and years without food and without moving. They sat on Saturday night while the rest of the world was clinging, grabbing, and feeding; they did it, but that wasn’t a road she wanted to take. To live in this world and to not partake, what was the point? To be born into this world and turn your back on it, what was that? Only a heavy belief in reincarnation could make her stomach that kind of undertaking. No, instead, she looked and grabbed and held onto all that she could get.

NaNoWriMo

2010-11-09T19:48:00.000-08:00

I think I got the acronym right. So, I've been doing it, writing this novel that is branching off into many dendritic layers and I'm finding it centers on sex, which is surprising and not surprising. I'm pausing in a sex scene right now--mid act you could say. So. Maybe I'll write romance novels under a pen name. Maybe the shift will change, but right now I'm going with it. It's a little tentatively embarassing, but I feel like sharing.

So far, I've enjoyed this project. It has gotten me back into the habit of writing, which I haven't been doing with regularity for a couple of years now. I've written nonfiction mostly, but writing fiction is so dream-like and such an experience in itself because I never know exactly where it will take me. I'm not writing according to any plan or reason, just seeing where it leads. Like swimming in a river with its own current. I've gotten less sleep, but that goes with the trade I suppose. More updates to come.

novel

2010-11-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

I've been hearing about this National Novel Writing Month for a couple of years now, and back in June or so I decided I would participate, knowing that I had until November to actually do it. Now, I wake up and it is November 1 and folks are sharing on Facebook (arggg I hate and love you) that they're doing it, reminding me that I wanted to do it back when thinking about doing it didn't actually involve doing anything.

So, I will write a novel this month as part of this National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo---I hate the acronym because it tries too hard; everyone wants to be NoFo, SoHo, BoHo) and there's even a website. Google it. The goal is to write 55,000 words or 175 pages without much thought about craft (don't like that word either) and seemingly without much reflection either. I'm not yet sure what this novel will be about, though I have at least one character in mind. This will be a decent month for writing because I have two breaks from teaching and my son is going to his dad's for Thanksgiving break, and I'll have five or so days to fill. And, I've already been in the habit of writing my epic-confessional-emotional morning pages every day so I can just switch to writing an epic-confessional-emotional-semi-autobiographical novel in the mornings. And at night. I'm not saying this will turn out well, but I've been needing a project to work on besides running and self-improving. I kid.

the race

2010-10-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, this blog will not be about running. As I wrote in an earlier post, I have a hard time writing about running and don't necessarily think reading about running is interesting, unless it is tips for how to run faster. Unless today it is for tips on how to recover from running a half marathon. My legs hurt, rather certain parts of my legs hurt, the Achilles tendons on both sides. I don't think I've sprained them or anything, just over did it. Walking downstairs is painful.

Yesterday I ran my first half marathon and I am proud. Before running the race the most I'd ever run was ten and a half miles and yesterday I ran 13. No wonder my legs are sore. I didn't feel nervous before the race at all. I knew that I could do it, though some part of me questioned whether I could on the surface, but inside I was completely confident. And after running the race, I'm pretty confident that most people could run it if they wanted to. Running is entirely democratic. There were all types of people running, old and young, short and tall, big and small. There were folks that looked to be in their 70s passing me by. It is pretty cool that you can be anyone and through training you can run a race like this.\

I ran a steady pace throughout the race but I once I passed the 12-mile mark I decided to go for it and run the final mile as fast as I could. I did and it felt like a race, not against anyone else but myself, to see what I could do. It felt satisfying and I actually felt happy. An onlooker cheered me on, saying "look at that smile! Way to finish strong!" which was cool because those of you who know me know I tend not to walk around smiling. In fact, a couple of months ago I was walking through the Atlanta airport and some stranger said, "relax, smile. It's not going to be that bad." He came up to me out of nowhere and said this, which I thought was a little invasive of my personal space and also that it was really none of his business what facial expression I wore. Creepy. But, it made me wonder if I walk around scowling all of the time. It also, again, made me consider the notion of personal space. If you are in a public, crowded space you need more internal distance from others, so you are less likely to stop a stranger for a conversation on a crowded sidewalk or say hi for that matter. But if you come from a more rural environment, you do say hi, in fact you wave or nod when you pass another driver on the road.

Last weekend, I went for my last long training run at Mt. Airy, a huge city park with miles of trails. All around me the fall leaves were falling and yellow maple leaves covered the ground. I navigated the trail carefully, watching out for stones and roots hidden under the leaves. I’d been running for over an hour when up ahead an older man walked toward me on the trail. He looked neat: slacks, cardigan, button up shirt, clean shaven, short hair, glasses. He carried a stick. I pulled my dog off of the trail by her collar, as I was breaking the no leash rule (I refuse to call it a law), and said “Oh sorry, she’s friendly” as he approached. He just stared at me, frowning, no real acknowledgement besides I hate you, if that is acknowledgement, and he just walked by. So, on a city street I have no problem with people not acknowledging one another, you need to preserve a bit of personal space and there are just too many people to say hi to each one. I don’t smile at everyone that I walk by, in fact, I avert my eyes many times just because I don’t want to say hi or smile at a ton of people. But, if I am in the woods, passing by another person and we are the only two people in view, then I think it is at least polite or civil or just decent to acknowledge the person, with a nod, a slight wave, a fake smile, a short hello—it doesn’t need to be anything major, but to have someone just walk by, looking at you like he hates you is a lot to take. I’ll admit that some folks don’t like that I let my dog run free in the woods, and usually I bring a leash so that if I see someone coming I will put her on the leash. I understand why some people are scared of dogs because I’m kind of scared of dogs too. I’ve been bitten by one dog and chased by another. So I know. And in truth, I shouldn’t run without the leash in hand, despite how much I don’t want to carry it and how good by dog is.

But that day has passed and the race is complete. The final mile of the race felt good and actually felt like a race. By the end I felt like throwing up though. By the end of the day, I didn't feel like getting up from the couch. Today, I feel a bit better.

In other news, I signed up for a marathon in May that I will run with an old friend who has been mentioned here before. Best of all, it is in Big Sur, California! We'll be running through redwoods and along the Pacific coast. I'm exited. I always told myself that I'd never run a marathon, that I have no desire to do so. But, I think, just once. And to run it in such an incredible location with a good friend is too much to pass up. So, I'll run one marathon.

teachin'

2010-10-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, well sometimes I do like teaching. Today I had one of my best classes ever. This morning I taught a Composition class, and they are writing profiles of someone they know but want to learn more about. In preparation, we've listened to Studs Terkel interviews from This American Life in class (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/368/who-do-you-think-you-are), in which Terkel interviews people who lived through the Depression . We just listened to the audio in class and they were all pretty moved by it. Then we read two profiles by Susan Orlean, "Orchid Fever" and "American Man, Age Ten". Today we discussed the latter and they've really opened up in discussion. Early on in the class only a few people would talk, those same few people all of the time, while the rest of class stayed quiet. So after we read "Orchid Fever", I had everyone make a comment or ask a question. Then today, they were more used to the process and really dug into the text. It was nice to see!

Towards the end of the discussion I read the following quote from "American Man, Age Ten", and mind you this was published in the '90s: "By age 10, according to Nintendo studies, teachers, and psychologists, game prowess becomes a fundamental, essential male social marker and a schoolyard boast." The guys (and we only have a few in class, most students I see are girls) then had a lot to say about the role of videogames in their lives and in the lives of their younger brothers. Much of the lively discussion that ensued was negative: children playing massive amounts of videogames is bad for society, bad for the children, etc. Many of the students had younger siblings that they talked about, a little brother who once played a video game for 28 hours straight, another brother who never does anything else but play video games, never goes outside, anything. On the other hand, one girl shared that her little sister sent 12,000 text messages in one month. It was interesting to see that all of these college freshman believed it was a bad thing, even though some fessed up to loving video games--in moderation. One young man vehemently opposed all things technological and said he'd like to destroy every single last X-box he could find.

Again, there are only a handful of guys in my freshman-level classes, and the majority of students are female. This is a disturbing trend that isn't just happening here at this school but all over.

Yesterday my son (who is 11) came home and said two other boys in his class were talking about how girls are smarter than boys. I immediately said no, they aren't, boys and girls are equal; some girls are really smart and some boys are really smart but neither is smarter than the other, and we ended up having a long conversation about it. When I was a kid, it was the opposite. Society was worried about how the girls were faring, and telling girls that yes you can do anything that boys can do and better. And I wonder if a little girl goes home and says that someone said boys are smarter, then what would her parents, her mother say, especially a generation ago? She would have said, no way! Also, as a young girl, I would have never openly said that boys are smarter--even if I thought they were. It is interesting that boys will actually say that. Either they've been taught that is true or have seen some evidence that makes them believe it is true. And if it is their mothers who shared that tidbit, then I feel bad for the boys.

Hanna Rosin wrote in an insightful article called "Then End of Men" published in the Atlantic this past summer that "earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women."
(here's a link to the article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/)

I don't want my son to grow up thinking that girls are smarter and I hope that colleges don't become the domain of females because we really need both sexes. I worry a bit that many young men are absorbed in video games rather than being in the world, but at the same time there aren't a lot of opportunities in the real world right now. If the manufacturing and construction sectors are in decline and they aren't especially academic then there aren't many options, besides the military. It's a complex issue and I don't have any solutions. I think, though, that boys need support, just like during the 70s and 80s there seemed to be a lot of support for girls and women to rise up and be equal to men. I'd hate to see the boys and men lose their place.

Here's something else: I saw two ads for Target products in two recent magazines. The first featured a man in an apron rolling out dough for cinnamon rolls with his small children. The second featured a man in bed reading to his toddler. Interesting shifts. I tried to find the ads online to post them here but couldn't. If I find them, I'll post them.

Kentucky visit

2010-10-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I drove to Danville, Kentucky for a good friend's mom's funeral. It was sad; it was sudden and unexpected. I never know how to act or what to say at funerals because in cases like this there isn't much you can say to make anyone feel much better. She had been married for 25 years, and it is her widower that I feel the saddest for. That must be awful, there one day, gone the next. I know that is a cliche, but that is the truth in this case. She had fought cancer five times and came out of it. She was feeling good, and then it came.

Sometimes public writing/sharing feels like walking a fine line in trying not to offend while trying to express an ounce of truth or something. Especially on facebook. I think facebook has become somewhat of an addiction for me and I really don't like it any more. I don't want to get rid of it because it is a great way to keep in touch with people, but I don't like it when I think about doing something and then automatically think if I should or will update my status to relate a recent bit of activity. I usually don't, but I think about it. For example, before I left yesterday morning, I considered updating my status "going to Kentucky for a funeral" or something like that. But I chose not to because I started thinking about it way too much (should I say whose funeral? Should I mention my friend's name? What tone should I invoke?) and it is all a bit too ridiculous and not worth the amount of effort I put into it. The status updates have fragmented my brain. So has being friends with people that I barely ever, if ever, talk to. And those acquaintances, what do they need to know about what I am doing with my day? Probably not much. There is also the issue of what to share on facebook. People share way too much sometimes, relationship problems, fights, etc. And that is most definitely taboo and low class.

But then, with the withholding of the bad stuff, facebook becomes this Sunday afternoon wine and cheese party where we take turns complimenting ourselves and others, telling about our fabulous, well-behaved, beautiful children, our super relationships, and our success at our occupations. Or it continues to become more trivial: how can I say something without really saying anything at all but still sound cute, witty, and intelligent? And then if you misspell a word or write in a fit of passion (mess up your Sunday dress) shame on you.

So back to Kentucky. I go to Lexington a good bit but rarely ever make it back to Danville anymore. It is still the same as it was back in high school. I saw a few people that I went to high school with but wasn't close to and it was kind of surreal to think about how old we all are now. Not old, old, but solidly adult whereas we used to be so much more unfinished.

Damn, I really want to smoke.

I visited with my good friend whose mom died. We were close in high school, both of us feeling strange and out of place in the rural, FFA landscape that surrounded us. We weren't that odd really, its just that the mould was narrow and there wasn't much room for identities beyond boy jock, girl cheerleader, boy redneck, boy stoner, girl redneck, girl slut, boy nerd, girl nerd, boy Christian, girl Christian, and then the others that hung around with not much identity at all. (Now I'm worried about offending people.) I didn't know who I was at all. I knew there was something out there to understand, to get, to be, to realize but I had no inkling as to what it was. I thought I would find it in college, getting high, the paisley peacock in Lexington, running (maybe, but that was pretty nerdy too), and my friend was a fellow seeker.

We both looked beyond but to where, I don't know, and I don't know if I've ever found it, or if she has either. I hope we did but sometimes, most of the time, what we are looking for doesn't materialize, we just move onto something else and forget about it. Maybe that's what happened. I've always felt a kinship to her though, even though now we see each other so rarely and we've lived states apart since graduating from high school. Everyone, even yesterday, said that we look and looked alike, and we have similar voices. Even now, when we both have lived separate, radically different lives from one another, we still have similar styles. Her mom's side of the family is originally from some valley(holler) in southwest Virginia, and according to my genealogist grandmother, some branch of our family tree traces back to that same valley, so we could be related after all. So even though I don't see my friend often, I'm glad she's in the world and am glad when I get to see her.

I also visited my grandmother who is fading into a hazy old age. It seems that dementia runs in my family, which freaks me out more than a little, and it is slowly grabbing her. Not so much that she can't live her own life, but that it is difficult to have a conversation with her or for her to follow the lives of others. She remarried at 75 and now spends weekends with him in Lexington and weekdays at her home in Danville. Her house, when she shared it with my grandfather, was the center of family life, the place we went for Christmas and other holidays. Now with him gone and her remarried there isn't the same center. The mantle must be passed on but none of the rest of us have picked it up yet, so our family is without a center. Maybe I'll pick it up, or maybe my sister will. It's a little sad. Looking at old pictures makes it seem like the good days have passed, but in reality all that has happened is change.

Meanwhile, her house collects dust. It is a relic of the pre-internet days. Files and stacks of papers, phone books from Big Sandy, Kentucky, maps of Kentucky from 1979, mimeographs, books about how to repair such ancients as a television antenna fill the basement, her office, and encroach upon the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom. Photographs spanning at least a hundred years fill the house as well, labeled and placed in albums with sticky paper and clear plastic covers. Address books, cookie jars, posterboard, army photos, receipts. I think I know where my lack of organizing skills come from. All of this stuff has taken a lifetime to collect and now she's ready to divest it and now it's out of date.

It was good to see her though; I don't see her enough. She's still fun and she's still sweet and she still worries over everything. Her life has changed, and I'm glad for her.

The moral is change. Sometimes it is hard to accept, sometimes it is easier to look back and think that the better days have passed, but really that is rarely ever the case.

an education, part 2

2010-09-24T18:51:00.000-07:00

Updates and news: it's been almost a week since I've smoked, yeah for me! I'm still, rightly or wrongly, training for a half marathon. In the morning I plan to run 9 miles, the most I have ever run, ever. So far, so good.

As for The Artist's Way, I'm doing the morning pages and a little bit of other stuff, but the only thing I am sticking to is morning pages. I started teaching a couple more classes this week so life is getting busier. I know I've done some bit of complaining on here about adjunct teaching, but now it is working. The schedule, the whole thing, works.

So, below you will find the second half of this long, unwieldy rough draft of a piece on education, Cincinnati, inner city, teaching, et cetera. It is in all measures, a rough draft. It is a little out of date now, as I finished teaching at the proprietary/for profit school that I write about last June. You'll find the first part of it in the previous post. It needs a good brushing, but I can't find the hairbrush.

Part II

Something about this place. Like most places with changes in elevation, the rich live up on the hill and the poor live in the bottom lands. Cincinnati is made of hills and bottom lands and the general trend carries itself here as well. The bottom lands are full of German turn-of-the-century row houses, steep, tall, and narrow. Rows and rows of them at first holding immigrants when the place was booming and now holding poor folk, black and white, as the city falls down. The thing about living at the bottom of the hill is that in time it begins to feel like a trap. The thing about walking out your door and seeing ugliness is that in time that is what you believe the world is like. You can’t believe that you ever had something different. And if you were born into it, well, this is all you’ve known and it is normal and comfortable. Ruby Paine wrote in A Framework for Understanding Poverty that moving from one social class to another usually requires severing, at least temporarily, the ties to the ones you leave behind. And that isn’t easy to do, because when you ain’t got nothing much, you’ve at least got people that you’ve always known and the place where you’ve always lived.

I’ve come to believe that no one likes it here. When I told them, students, that I was new, they said why the hell are you here?

Yet there are places that are worse. I had a student, I’ll call her Cindy. On the first day of class she sat in the front row. She was smiling and talkative. She was cute, and her writing was cute. The first piece she wrote was about the connection she had as a child with her mother and how she was a mama’s girl and didn’t want to go anywhere without her mama. And her mama got cancer later. She wrote about how when she was a little girl, she visited her grandma and cousin for a week or so. It was her first time being away from her mother. One night, she woke up in the night and cried and cried, not knowing why but thinking of her mother. As she watched her mother die, she went back to that time in her mind, connecting the two. Her story was touching. Her journal entries that she’d turn in were thoughtful, but the work was spotty. She’d show up and then not, more often not.

She was a young single mom with three kids. She wouldn’t stand out from the crowd. One day I asked her how things were going for her because she talked about being new to town and having no one to help her, not in a self-serving way but in a matter-of-fact way. She’d moved to Cincinnati from Youngstown, Ohio, which she said was terrible. Her grandma lived in a house that was about to fall down. It was worse than Cincinnati and she came here for a better life. During the month-long class she was in the process of moving from one bad housing project to another hopefully better housing project.

Yet for her it was a step up. With her tax return money she bought herself and her kids beds, something that they hadn’t had in two years. She was moving, taking car loads of her belongings from one apartment to the other with no one to help her. “The people in my old place said they would help me, but I wouldn’t let them. They hang out in the hallway all day drinking and smoking. I don’t want to be around that. My friend said I should just take the help so I can get over there.” I don’t know if she ever took the help but she got all her work in at the end and I passed her.

Usually I can keep my distance from the students; usually I can play the teacher-student game pretty well. I am on the other side of the divide from the rest of you. A distance must be there, or must it? If I came out and told them about me, would they really trust me? If I said, I too know what it’s like to be a single mom, or I too know what it’s like to live in a crappy neighborhood, and I too have struggles, would that make them listen? Or TMI? I know that my role is to help them academically, but I wanted to help Cindy move. I wanted to say, well then, I will help you. But I didn’t. I had work to do, and there was that boundary there that shouldn’t be crossed. That other people have crossed and just gotten burned. But I should have. Maybe just by listening to her and taking an interest in her I helped her. Maybe by hearing her voice and validating it, I helped her. Maybe that’s a copout.

Composition is an unknowable subject. I never took it in college. So naturally I didn’t know how to teach it and the textbook prompts and ideas seemed dull and inconsequential. I was of the mindset that you can’t teach good writing, either you can write or you can’t. You can only encourage and give suggestions but you can’t teach it. Yes of course you can show someone how to put in a thesis statement and how to organize a paragraph but it doesn’t mean your words will be effective. Some days I feel like a good teacher and other days I don’t. But with time I came to teach composition differently, through reading and responding to texts—let the great writing teach you.

This particular proprietary school’s demographics: primarily lower socioeconomic status. Racial profile: a mix of white and black. Sometimes it seems more one way or the other, if anything the school is a little more black than white, though it is hard to tell. Wildly divergent levels of intelligence. Many have suffered terrible tragedies. Some have only suffered losing a job. Some have been abused by their parents, their parents’ partners, boyfriends, husbands, some have been addicted to drugs, some have been to prison, many are on some form of welfare, some spread their sob stories around, but most keep them tucked away. Most of the inner city black students have known someone that has died by a gun. Some have been in the military; a select few—very few—are stay-at-home moms going back to school. Some want to be rappers or recording artists. Some have recording studios. Some are country folks going for vet tech. The majority are not. The majority have children. Sometimes they have children during the month of the class. Many females write about giving birth to their children.

I took the workshop from graduate school and every writing class I’d ever had. I’d tried teaching comp by the book, but the classes were a snoozefest. Teaching composition by the book means assuming that the students are just wild about revision. They aren’t. And the ones that are don’t need lectures on grammar and organization. So I scrapped the book way and began using the workshop model and the reading model. Workshops were sometimes torturous in graduate school and people speak of them as being masochistic rituals. Create something from the depths of your soul and have it ripped to shreds.

But it wasn’t like that in the workshops that I have taught in composition, perhaps because they were novice writers or perhaps because we mostly workshopped narratives, their own stories of events that changed their lives or had formative influences on them. Sometimes the workshops were long and unwieldy. Sometimes we had twenty five people in them and it would take a good long time for everyone to say what they had to say. Sometimes the conversation was spent identifying with the writer. I’ve had that experience, a reader would say, and then go on to his or her personal story. Sometimes people would say that a story was good and that’s it. But somehow an alchemy would sometimes occur. The workshops became a validation of their own stories, stories that were never really heard, and most definitely not heard as told by them. Stories that turned into statistics or that took place in the corridors, tabulated in files at the Department of Job and Family Services. Just having your story read by a number of people and having those people take it seriously and identify with you or tell you what a great writer you were was uplifting. It was if their stories mattered, if only at that moment.

Students got to understand the concept of audience, that words are meant to be shared and that there is power in sharing stories. Sometimes that happened, and when it did everything else in the class was worth it because that is what writing is all about. And by sharing the stories they could feel in some way, a little bit more than before, that their lives mattered.

Yet a corporate institution like this one doesn’t care much about stories and autobiographies, but care about number of students enrolling, paying, and graduating. What happens inside the classrooms is irrelevant, only important in impressing the accrediting bodies.

Teaching at this college is a study in poverty, a contact zone for the faculty and perhaps even the students, as Mary Louise Pratt would say. A zone in which the instructor has no immediate authority over any one, but must win it and, in my case, teach them how to write to the authority, in the dominant English. Make them first believe my authority and then submit to it, though the authority is tenuous and not really legitimate.

Teaching at this college has led me to a curiosity about racial division along class lines. Living in this city has led to more interest in this issue. How and why? A quick internet search led to some reasons: The Great Migration which led millions of African Americans to northern and Midwestern cities, not to mention poor white Appalachians, to cities including Cincinnati, and then the subsequent ongoing decline of the industry that brought folks up here in the first place, these great industrial behemoths that are slowly deteriorating. And then white flight to the suburbs where they were given good mortgages that blacks weren’t given the same good mortgages. Now what? They may say. Here we are, this is life. In a sense this is a rhetorical mode, a cause and effect paper. What caused the ghetto? That I’m trying to answer. How long will we migrate? That’s what I want to know. Why do we believe in heaven? Because we haven’t found it here on earth. That’s what I want to know.

Ralph Ellison wrote that the old religion that worked in the rural south did not hold water in the urban north. Same here. When I am faced with the desolation, the rutted, rotten post- industrial waste of the I 75 corridor my faith in God dies. It was a shaky faith to begin with but faced with such ugliness, with such hopelessness, with the same/same/sameness of everyday, with the notion that nothing much changes, and not in the good way in which you have a nice life and nothing much changes, but in the bad way, nothing much changes.

But I digress. This piece was an attempt at a discussion about proprietary education, yet of course, I rambled. I guess what I am getting at is that I feel what a trap this is (and what the “this” is, is the question), though I am educated and white, it still brings me down.

There is a mantra of positive self talk and optimism among my students. Even if the world is falling down and you are borrowing forty thousand from the government to pay back with interest and your success rate might be low, it pays to hope. It pays to have faith in the abstract notion of an education. I’m getting my education! I’m going to college! I’m going to succeed! I have been skeptical of this talk, but now I think differently.

The federal Department of Education is considering a Gainful Employment Rule which would apply to federal financial aid to career, technical, and for-profit colleges. This rule would limit the amount of money a student could borrow based on a debt to income ratio based on the students’ projected earnings in their field. Career colleges, like the one where I taught, are in an uproar; education stocks are sliding on word that this may eventually become law. According to an article on Nasdac.com schools with high tuition, high default rates, and rates of high student indebtedness would be affected. Hello said college.

I like teaching, but it has changed me. Yes, this is becoming a rant. Confronting the failure of my place of modest employment is also confronting my own failure. It is easier to look at an institution and rail on it rather than look at myself. It is easier to look at a single institution and talk about how bad it is than to really dissect the whole system that makes this predicament a reality.

I finished teaching at this school. The final month was a complete waste, and if I hadn’t quit they may have fired me. Well, no, they probably wouldn’t. When you aren’t feeling it you just aren’t feeling it and it is hard to fake it. There were no goodbyes. I told my boss I was leaving and he looked at me like he couldn’t believe it. “Wait, let me clean out my ears,” he said. Shook his head. “What did you say?” He was only half listening to me anyway before I said I was leaving and then he turned his fat-faced full attention to me. No, he is no bad guy, he’s just not that smart, not smart enough to be chair of any kind of educational department. His eyes got real big, “Why are you quitting? Is it something we did?”

I’m unequivocally a pansy when it comes to speaking my mind. “No, it’s just that the schedule is bad for me.” I could have added many things. But the thing was, I was moving on to teach at another school, that was public, better paying, and had smaller class sizes. The public places, two local two-year schools, have a better feel about them. You could say they have better chi. I'll say it wasn't because of the students that I left, because they were what made me want to stay, made me want to be there. It was the extra-large classes, lack of support (except repeating the mantra "learner-centered student success".

So I left and I didn’t look back. I don’t know how much more there is to say about it. Sometimes jobs are just easy to let go of. But that doesn’t make the fact that for-profit schools are in the business of making money through education, not in it for education’s sake. Sure, the teachers are, we always are, that’s are job and we do it for next to nothing. Its probably because we don’t know how to make money or don’t have the inclination to do those things that make a person money. I am not sure what those things are. I am not sure what all those people who wear suits do all day downtown.

In the meantime, proprietary schools aren’t out of the spotlight. Tamar Lewin reported in the New York Times on June 24 of this year that “At the first in a series of oversight hearings on for-profit colleges, Senator Tom Harkin made it clear on Thursday that he saw a need for new regulation of for-profit colleges, to prevent waste of taxpayer money, and fraudulent practices that harm students.”

And this was a big statement that was all over the news (from the same article): “One witness, Steven Eisman, a hedge-fund manager known for predicting the housing market crash, compared the for-profit colleges to the subprime mortgage industry, describing them as ‘marketing machines masquerading as universities.’ Mr. Eisman told the committee that about half of all for-profit students dropped out.”

It is true that many drop out; most drop out or don’t get a degree from a community college either, but the difference is that their costs are drastically different. When I walk around a community college campus, at least I know that the students were smart enough to get the most value for their money—even if I didn’t do the same thing myself. If it will explode like the subprime lending crisis, then shame on the government for lending out so much money and only doing something when a crisis hits. We always have the warners, the ones that say trouble is coming but we don’t listen. So we’ll see.

In the meantime, the ghetto still exists and is going strong! In the meantime, I’ll still be teaching inner city students and I’m okay with that.

an education

2010-09-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

Am back to the grindstone. I started teaching in early September at one school and now to the other school this Thursday. Adjunct life isn’t glorious but the schedule actually works for me now, and I like it because I don’t have to work 9 to 5, even though sometimes it seems like I am grading papers for 12 hours a day, but then there are the breaks and the mornings or afternoons off that make it worth it. And, I do kind of like teaching—kind of—so I hope none of you student types read this.

I think I am kind of a type A person shrouded in a type B look/persona. I may seem like I am laid back but underneath I am super responsible. Meaning that, even if I don’t totally love teaching I do a good job at it and come prepared. I wouldn’t say that teaching is my calling. I would say I do it to make a living. It isn’t a bad way to make a living. I like the students that I work with a lot. I like reading their papers and writing for the most part. I find it kind of interesting. I like to facilitate, to create an environment where they will learn rather than try to fill up their minds through lecture. I’m a crappy lecturer, I’ll admit. I can do 5-10 minute mini lecture, or if it something interesting 25 minutes. But it isn’t fun for anybody. I can lead a good discussion though.

But again, I don’t love it. Then I say that I want a full time teaching job, and I’ll be honest here, I want it for the other perks. For basically doing what I do now for more pay and office space.

This piece that I have reproduced below is about that, kind of. It is about being an adjunct instructor, race (how dare I even touch that one!!), and for-profit education. I used to teach at a for-profit/proprietary college, and let me tell you, public or private (non profit, traditional private colleges) schools are hands down so much better than corporate schools. The goal of a corporation is to make money, not to serve. This piece is a little different than other stuff I have put on here. It starts out more fact-based and analytical, but I promise later it gets a little crazy. That’s why it’s a rough draft! It’s still frayed ragged and maybe that’s its nature.

It is long, so today I’ll put up part one and tomorrow, part 2, and continue for however many more days I feel like. I wrote it a few months back when I was still teaching at said proprietary school. I won't name names. Here you go!

Part I

If you watch daytime television you may have seen advertisements for this certain proprietary school or other schools like it that offer similar, dubiously-relevant two-year degree programs in fields like business management, healthcare administration, surgical technology, and medical technology. These ads tout that you can get your degree in 18 months or less and be off to a rewarding career in no time.

An article in Fast Company published in December 2009 stated that "for-profit colleges enroll 9% of all students, many of them in online programs. It's safe to assume they'll soon have many more. President Obama has called for the USA to have the world's highest percentage of college graduates by 2020, and for-profits are the only sector significantly expanding enrollment -- up 17% since the start of the recession in 2008. …. These companies, which depend on tuition revenues backed by federal student grants and loans, have been strong performers for stockholders."

See, most of the students fund their studies through government loans (a big chunk of loans) and grants. An expansion of the Pell Grant program means that these programs will get more students. Nearly all of the students where I taught take out financial aid. Therefore, the majority of the dollars this publicly traded company makes comes from government-backed loans and small grants to students who may or may not have the ability once they graduate to pay the loans back. They are a risky investment. Many of the students are single mothers who don’t have a job. They live in public housing, and get food stamps and Medicaid. They get federal dollars to go to school, all in the hopes that once finished, they will move on, into the workforce. It may work for some, especially the nursing students that graduate with about 30 thousand dollars in debt with job prospects of salaries that average 40K per year. Not bad. That will get you your own little house, some pride, and will set a good example for your children.

The majority of students at this college are from the inner city and are generally poor. Before moving to Cincinnati I hadn’t lived in an inner city; I hadn’t seen it up close. I lived in smaller cities with smaller bad neighborhoods, but here vast expanses of the city are urban wastelands. There are empty warehouses and factories, decrepit row houses, and overgrown empty lots. Sometimes I think it would be best to take a wrecking ball to the whole place and knock it down clean.

In 2007, 23.5 percent of Cincinnati residents lived below the poverty line, compared with just 13.1 percent of residents in the entire state of Ohio. Both numbers are high but Cincinnati’s numbers are much higher. This is not even taking into the account the recent recession. (These numbers are from city-data.com.) Also the same data showed that in 2007, 10.9 percent of Cincinnati residents had income below 50 percent of the poverty level, as opposed to 6 percent of residents in the whole state. Cincinnati’s children are also disproportionally poor.

If only we could promise you something. As an adjunct professor sometimes I think it may be worth my while to go back to school and become a nurse.

I’ve heard horror stories about other schools, like Kaplan, that force teachers to pass student. Where I work could be called a diploma mill, but I routinely fail students, sometimes up to thirty or forty percent of each class, yet sometimes there are those that pass who can barely read and write, and that, I feel bad about. If Obama wants the US to have the highest percentage of college graduates what kind of price will there be to pay? Will the value of a college education diminish significantly? And isn’t a two year degree not worth much, so does it really matter if that business management major has a hard time reading and writing? And does it really matter if I am not the only teacher just passing them along? How high should my standards be?

The biggest issue I had teaching at this school are the handful of students, and I can only really think of three, that couldn’t really read and write and yet were passed on anyway. There was one student, I’ll call her Rhonda that is going to school with her mother. She’s a nice, happy girl—though I call her girl with some hesitation—she has to be in her early to mid twenties and she has more than one child. Yet she carries herself as a girl would, giggles as a girl would, holds wonder with the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a girl would. She graduated from high school or got her GED, I can’t remember which, yet she doesn’t read well. Her essays that she turned in must have been plagiarized, and I’ve seen this before. Turn in something that is sort of like the assigned essay but not really, turn in something that is much shorter than the essay assignment should be.

She was in my composition course a few months back. She showed me how to tie my scarf around my neck, a way she learned on Oprah. She wrote a paper about God that we workshopped that made her cry.

For the midterm, I had the class write an in-class essay in response to an article by Dana Gioia entitled “Why Literature Matters”. I got varying responses to this assignment. Let me first say that I had a number of very smart, thoughtful students in each class that I taught. Students that could read a piece and thoughtfully respond to it. I also had a number of students that would skim the title, maybe pull a quote from the article and talk about why literacy matters, and would talk about how it is important to be able to read signs and words in the supermarket. How they should read to their kids. They would write in big bubbly handwriting in run on sentences. Defining terms like literature became difficult as not many students read. There was a divide in the classroom: those that can and those that can’t. And honestly, there wasn't a lot I could do for those that can’t, though I did try.

Rhonda didn’t answer the midterm essay question and she didn’t read “Why Literature Matters”. Instead, she turned in a little paragraph handwritten in child’s English about how she is so sad and wants to cry because she can’t understand this article and doesn’t know how to read.

Twice Rhonda has relayed the story about how she listened to the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on tape as she was reading the book, and how she looked up nearly every word in the text in the dictionary. Once she told the story in class and she was in elementary school. Then she told the story later and she was in high school. When she started telling the story first she cried a little bit.

Maybe she remains a girl because she doesn’t know how to read. Though part of her does have kids and part of her takes the bus and part of her shops at the grocery store, part of her is trapped under glass. The sad thing is that I passed her. She got points for classwork and for participating. She got a C or D, but nevertheless, I’m ashamed of letting her by. But the sad thing is, all of the other professors have let her go by too, and someday she is going to graduate and be so happy with herself and she is going to get a job, hopefully, and she still will have trouble reading. She still won’t “really” be able to read, or at least comprehend what she is reading. In name she will be a college graduate, but not in theory. She has dedication and niceness but not the skills, or perhaps she has a learning disability that hasn’t been diagnosed.

Some students are easy to fail. They don’t show up, and they don’t do their work, or the do a half-assed job. The only students that I fail are the ones that don’t show up and don’t do the work. If you show up and do the work, even if it isn’t that great but you give an effort, I will pass you. A D, maybe, but you will pass. So, hence, degree mills. Obama wants more students to go to college, more students with degrees. But can we say that there are those who shouldn’t go to college?

The ones that were the hardest to fail were the ones that earnestly tried their hardest, believed in themselves, were eager, but still couldn't read and write. My standards weren't too high. Comprehension of basic texts. Actually reading basic texts. Thinking about those texts. Writing with clarity. I want to understand what it is you are saying on paper.

“So,” as Annie Dillard would say in “Living Like Weasels.”

"So why are we reading this stupid story about weasels?” as my students would say.

At first when I began teaching at the college level after the MFA, I felt kind of good doing it, okay, I’m a professor (never mind adjunct, never mind community college. What’s with all of these levels of quality?). First I taught at a community college and then I moved to Cincinnati and took the first job I could get, a part-time gig at a for-profit college that advertises itself on daytime television. Target demographic: people who are regularly home during the day: the jobless, the disabled, the mothers, the kids who wake up at noon.

Recently I went to get gas at an inner city gas station. And yes, I did live in the inner city, which is funny, because I didn’t move to the inner city until I was 32 years old and though I am not above it all I live among it all, even though I like to think I am above it all. My relationship with the inner city is tenuous. I’d always had a from-a-distance fascination with it, but that is just it. Once you look up close it doesn’t work out so well. Drug dealers (or dope boys as my students would say) on the corners, all the windows of the cars getting smashed in one night, teenage girls pushing strollers with one, two three kids in them while they yell and cuss with their high school friends. No, up close it ain’t all that.

Anyway, I was at the gas station and up drove a minivan with a said-school bumper sticker on it and two other big stickers that said “EAT VEG SAVE THE PLANET” and “GO VEGAN SAVE THE EARTH” SUPREME MASTER TELEVISION. I’d seen those same giant bumper stickers on cars at my son’s school. I tried to get a look inside the van but I couldn’t see anyone. A sturdy dreadlocked middle-aged man was getting in the passenger seat as I stared. He looked at me and smiled. I wanted to see if anyone I’d recognize was in the car. Do I see my students around town—inner city town—and not know it? I’ve only ran into one student in a year and a half. I wonder if they see me, if I see them, which is funny because after 18 months of teaching 30 students per month, you would think I would run into one of them from time to time.

From my students, I learned that a pair of shoes with shoelaces tied together and strung over a telephone wire signifies drug trade. I learned that if you are a young black man in my classes, 9 out of 10 times you have been to jail or that you are going to jail sometime in the future. I’ve taught convicted felons, out of prison, who have only gotten in trouble for selling drugs.

One student who had been in prison wrote an essay about how he came to be in prison. He was a young man living in the 1. Hood or 2. Ghetto. He started making money selling drugs. He was happy to be able to go to the mall and get himself new clothes, get himself a nice SUV, and take care of his mom. He’d never held a regular job. Then he got busted and went to prison for a few years. Then he came out and can’t get a job because he’s never had a job and has been in prison. And he’s got a kid to take care of and selling starts looking promising. But he’s holding out. He’s getting a degree in business management, living on grants and loans and something else because he looks good, well-dressed, smooth. He’s not the only one.

So you start to understand these things. That young black men often sell drugs, and though drugs are definitely not good for a person and no one should smoke crack, the guys I’ve met aren’t bad people. It is a way to get by. Or do more than get by. It is fast money and pays a hell of a lot more than your average Mickey-Ds. You start to understand these things. You start to believe that these guys aren’t wrong; that they shouldn’t be put away for selling drugs but the quandary of course is that there is no alternative, no solution and the best I can hope is that they do something with this education. I mean, the first guy I taught that was a dealer and had been to prison told me about watching somebody get shot right outside his door in the most notorious projects in town when he was a child. About his single mom working three jobs. Watching a man die and then starting selling at thirteen. I mean, what can you do? What can you say? No, you’re wrong. You need to get a real job. Sorry, nobody will hire you. I guess it’s your own fault. Too bad. No, I can’t say that, but I can’t offer anything else either.

I am a white woman from Kentucky. I lived in Lexington as a child and I went to an integrated elementary school but then went to high school in the country that was all white, FFA, 4H. Then a nearly all white southern liberal arts college and then on and on in my whiteness until I started this job and moved to Cincinnati.

If you think that poverty is strictly an inner city thing you are wrong. There are millions more poor white people than black, but you don’t see them. Rural poverty is out of sight. We can’t see them because they disgust us more than anyone else. Why should they be poor? They have every advantage they would ever need.

My career path has been varied, and I can say that I fell into teaching because it is one of the few things I am qualified to do with an MFA. I do enjoy it, all of my complaining aside. I enjoy the cammeraderie that builds up over time, the sense that we are working together to create something. I’m not an expert, and the only authority that I have is that placed upon me by my role as teacher. But actually a long time ago I did set out to be a teacher, when I was in high school. Reading Savage Inequalities by Johnathan Kozol set me on that path.

The ghetto. Savage Inequalities was all up in the ghetto. From East Saint Louis to the Bronx. In East Saint Louis the Monsanto [poison] chemical company loomed large over the area, and the soil that the children dug their hands in was rich in lead. The only stores around specialized in cheap liquor and cigarettes. And needless to say, the schools were terrible, and that’s what Savage Inequalities was all about. Juxtaposition: I was a junior, sitting in an English class in Boyle County High School, listening to the teacher saying that at one point in his life he had his face reconstructed, and somehow reading that book, even though it wasn’t on the curriculum. I’d look out the window and see the acres wide lawn of close-mowed grass and beyond that, not much. An old Walmart, a car dealership. Kozol covered many different areas of the country, but I remember East Saint Louis the most. You could call it ghetto porn, getting into the description of really horrible circumstances. Getting riled up by those horrible circumstances! How could it be this way? I’m going to do something! And in my mind that something was go to one of these bad areas, probably East St. Louis because I myself didn’t actually want to live in the ghetto, just maybe have a little farm outside of town, and it would be wonderful. I would teach high school English and coach track. We would run the fields of my farm, taking them out of the city. I would teach them to love the great books. Teach through reading!

It was a noble idea, but one that would have surely jaded me if I had taken that path. I didn’t study education or go into or out of college with any intention of becoming a teacher. Yet I needed a backup plan. Some are better than others, teaching adjunct isn’t the greatest one. I’m fishing and I got a small fish. I didn’t take that path but somehow the fascination with the ghetto kept its hold on me. When I visited Washington DC I wanted to see Anacostia. But the hold wasn’t strong enough to make me feel comfortable or to make me want to move to the inner city. But rather I was curious and I sought understanding.

So stay tuned, there's more. And it will all come together.

smoking and running

2010-09-15T18:07:00.000-07:00

I have two habits that I've held onto on and off since high school, both impressive and sad. I smoke and don't foresee myself quitting though I definitely want to. I run, too. Now I am training for a half marathon and this would be the perfect opportunity to quit smoking. A while back, a man in the neighborhood where I used to live asked me why I was always out exercising all of the time. I told him I was training for a race and that I was doing it so I wouldn't smoke. Which was true, if I have something physical I need to do I am apt to smoke less.

In high school I prided myself that I could both run track and smoke cigarettes. Later at nineteen, I spent a summer at Glacier National Park waiting tables at a lodge right outside of the park. There I met Svetlin, who would tell every table that he served, "Hello, my name is Svetlin, I am from Bulgaria and I live in Oklahoma City where I am studying to become a banker." Svetlin wooed the ladies he served with his accent and dark eyes, and he made a killing in tips. Svetlin and I also became good friends. We took long hikes on our days off with other folks we worked with, and then we prided ourselves on being the fastest hikers while smoking Marlboro Reds along the way. We smoked everyone, you could say, and then ended our days of hiking with nights of drinking at Kips Beer Garden. We were awesome in our own little way.

Now though, it isn't so glamorous (though it never really was so), now it is an addiction. I used to be able to go for weeks or months without smoking, buy a pack, smoke it, and then do it again. Now I am regular. I can pride myself with saying that I smoke just a few a day, or a pack a week, which is true. I'm no heavy pack-a-day smoker, but still.

Both running and smoking bring me satisfaction. Both take the edge off of my irritability when it comes. Its like I need to do something, either run whatever it is out of my system or bring smoke into my system. I know I'll stop smoking someday intellectually, but will it be because I am faced with some sort of health crisis? I hope not. So now I can say as I run more, I smoke less. I run so I won't be as tempted to smoke. Though I still will want one, and will probably have one, after I've finished a run.

On another note, I've attempted many times to write about running but haven't been able to get it right. Sometimes running is agonizing and feels like some compulsion that I don't understand or particularly enjoy. Sometimes it is ecstasy when I get to the mythical runner's high and feel like I could go for miles. Those moments are hard won, but worth it. I like running on trails the best. I like running in new places as exploration. Still though, those experiences don't transfer well into words.

new and old beginnings

2010-09-07T07:01:00.000-07:00

I've had the The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron for at least ten years. I think my mom had a copy and then in college an art professor or two suggested that we all use the book. I read it years ago and have held onto one of Cameron's suggestions: the morning pages, writing three pages of whatever comes to mind as close to getting up as possible. It is a good suggestion, which is perhaps why I've held onto it for so long.

Though today is not technically the first day of fall, culturally it is. Summer is over, even though there is a high of 90 degrees today. I start teaching a new term tomorrow at a local community college. I turned off the air conditioners in the house and hope not to turn them back on. The leaves are changing on the tree in my front yard, but that most likely is from lack of rain rather than fall. It is a time of change. A little over a month ago a relationship that had been my main focus ended. I had hopes that maybe it wasn't over, but it is. So now I've moved into a new place and have a lot of time on my hands.

A little over two years ago I finished an MFA in creative writing. While working toward my MFA, I wrote all of the time. Even before I started the MFA, I wrote all of the time. I'd always kept journals, but I started writing in earnest when I was about 25. My son was young at the time and I was a single mother, so once again, I had time on my hands. I would put him to bed at around 8 pm and have hours to fill. So I started writing, taking writing classes, and taking it seriously. I was alone in those days and somehow all that writing kept me company. For more than two years now though, I haven't been writing very much at all. I tell myself that my psychological space has been occupied, that teaching writing and reading paper after paper has eaten up all that time I used to have. Now, though, I have that time back again. It is bittersweet though. With that time comes loneliness and emptiness.

So now, I am beginning, again, rereading and this time doing it, The Artist's Way. As a motivator--for people who are creatively blocked in some way. I'll note my progression (just a little bit, no psychological mumbo jumbo) on this blog. Another goal I have is to actually post on this blog more than twice a year too!

In 2006, I took my son to a family retreat at Tara Mandala, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center in southern Colorado. We aren't Buddhist, but I was curious and I liked the idea of a retreat for families in Colorado, a vacation that we would share with other people in a beautiful setting. The retreat was ten days long and along with the retreat we stayed in northern New Mexico for a couple of days and visited Mesa Verde National Park for a few days. In all it was a great trip. My plan was to write about it as well, to write about it as a study of alternative communities and groups in the United States. I got a small grant to help cover the costs. I ended up writing about 90 pages about the experience but have never turned it into more than a long, convoluted rough draft. But just like how only one thing from The Artist's Way stuck with me (the morning pages), one idea stuck with me from my time at Tara Mandala, the idea of coming home to homelessness (hence the name of this blog). Here's what I wrote about it then. Tsultrim is a former Tibetan Buddhist nun who started Tara Mandala. She also wrote two great books, Women of Wisdom and Feeding Your Demons.

At Tara Mandala, I was there for a refuge ceremony, what I would equate to being baptised within the Protestant tradition. At the refuge ceremony, people who are ready to take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha lined up in front of Tsultrim and sat down on their knees. She then spoke for a while about how we go looking for “it” “that thing” whatever it is that we are all looking for, but she said we are looking for our Buddha nature, ourselves that we cannot see because of our own dualistic nature and our own not-realizing that we are connected to all of the being in the world, that there is no me and you or us and them, no divisions but that we are all one (like the Asheville hippie bumper sticker: WE ARE ONE), yet at the same time, while we want to realize these great truths, at the same time we want to be saved. We want those truths to make us younger, healthier, more beautiful, more popular, more fun, richer, when really, all it promises is the practice of acceptance. That says you may not be the most beautiful but in moments of a special private life, you feel like it. And it also says that many people will be completely blissed out or at ease in their simple life with a bag of chips, a bottle of gatorade, and some worn out white tennis shoes. And Tsultum said that you won’t find it by being angry, or by being depressed, or by spacing out, or by looking for it in sex or relationship, you will only find it on a spiritual path. I think that is what she said; I am not sure I remember. I think it has to do with seeing things clearly, without illusions and backstory but to really be true and see the world and get all of the old crap off of your Buddha nature. And she said we are all looking for some home, but we can’t find it. And she said that through this practice, through a spiritual practice we will see: there is no home and what you have to do is

Come home to homelessness.

Profound, that hit me. Come home to homelessness. No more looking, but we are the home and we are the homeless. She said that we are refugees, all of us, and we do come home to homelessness. I don’t really understand all of it at all, I think I need to learn a lot more. All of the refugees then took refuge and got new names in Tibetan that had really cool meanings, like lotus flower of wisdom, or pearl of being, and they took vows: not to kill, steal, some other stuff, and not to get intoxicated.

The refuges got their names.Tsultrim cut off a lock of their hair and then they joined the sangha. Everyone went around and introduced themselves with their Buddhist name and their real name, and their Buddhist name’s meaning and a word for the new refugees. I was silly, My name is slingshot, I said, and it is not Buddhist, (ha ha) everyone else said, and it has something to do with home and homelessness and I just want to say Best Wishes. Har har.

Come home to homelessness. Because this life is just long enough to make us forget, to forget that this is all temporary and can actually be pretty fun.

And finally, back to today. A poem by Jack Gilbert:

Failing and Flying

by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Copyright © 2005 Jack Gilbert. From Refusing Heaven, 2005, Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.

on the oil spill--a rant

2010-05-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

I don't usually write such things.

Today while driving home from teaching, I listened to news and analysis of the oil spill in the Gulf on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. I’ve been hearing about it since it happened and have gone in and out of outrage to not being able to care because it is so removed. Constantly hearing about a problem that you can’t do anything about has a numbing effect. But today the enormity of it astounded me. I listened to pieces of Obama’s news conference and a response from James Carville, who is down on the Louisiana coast witnessing first-hand what can only be called massive destruction. Carville was incensed by the lack of response he saw as he looked out at the oil reaching the coast and no one was there doing anything about it. Deserted. He said that the federal government needs to put the hammer down on BP, threaten to take them all to jail for ruining a large, productive piece of the planet. Then someone else, I can’t recall his name, said that BP’s current fix, pumping drilling fluid into the well, is the company’s last resort. There aren’t any other fixes left. If it doesn’t work the flow will not be stopped until August when a relief well should be up and running. If that happens, we are looking at a catastrophe on a scale we have never witnessed before. And if that isn’t enough, NOAA predicts this year’s hurricane season, starting June 1, to be “active to extremely active”, which can only make matters much worse.

The groups that the collective-we believe in the most—and are most definitely the richest—the federal government and an oil company that is one of many, do not know how to fix the situation. We can boycott BP, which we should; we can try to drive less, which we should, but we are powerless to fix a man-made disaster of this magnitude. If those who reach the top of government and international business (who we think of as the highest achievers among us) can’t fix it, if science can’t fix it, if technology can’t fix it, then we have a problem on a scale that we’ve never faced before. This spill is the unintended consequence of massive scientific and technological breakthroughs, the creation of tools that we cannot control.

How did we get here?

Look back to the Enlightement, the birth of ideas in the 18th century that still guide us today. The escalation of reason, scientific principles, and rationalities that brought us good stuff like liberal democracy, the Constitution, the United States of America. It also brought us capitalism. The basic notion of the Enlightenment is that we can understand the world through the scientific pursuit of reason and truth. No longer would our worldview be based in magic, religion, or any other myths. Reason and science. This eventually led to higher standards of living for many people in Europe, America, and other westernized countries. This led to the creation of the eventual middle class. This led to air conditioning, automobiles, trains, indoor plumbing, and electricity. It led to fair government by the people and the eventual end of slavery. This led to equality for women.

The rise of reason at the expense of all else—you could call it heart—led to increasingly complex technological innovations that we eventually lost control of. It led to the creation of tools too powerful to control. We can build an oil rig to drill down a mile below the water’s surface into miles of rock below, yet if that tool breaks we can’t fix it.

Ray Linn, in A Teacher’s Guide to Postmodernism. stated that “developments in science have resulted in consequences which the early rationalists couldn’t have imagined.” Linn goes on to quote Vonnegut as saying “scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable… what actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” Science works until it doesn’t.

I am not completely against progress but against it when it takes precedence over everything else, when it becomes a mechanism with its own force and power independent and uncontrolled by those who originally designed it. When it comes with the demise of the life and health of all of the living creatures on this planet—then I am against it. But at this point, what does that matter anyway? I can be outraged but that does nothing. It means absolutely nothing.

Linn also states that “the advances of the most rational species have been at the expense of the less rational species, and now we are told that there is a limit to how many we can destroy without destroying ourselves.” Is that even true? Humans are adaptable. We can probably wipe out life in the Gulf of Mexico and half of the Atlantic and still survive, but is that the point? We can survive but what is lost?

I almost hate writing about environmental issues. I hate reading about them. So much is lost in the translation. An environmentalist sounds shrill, preachy, and out of touch because he can’t convince people of the value of that which is not utilitarian. He can to a point—save it so you can save yourself—but deep down we know that we can adapt, that every catastrophe that has ever came our way has eventually been overcome. We are unstoppable. We can withstand the basest, most despicable circumstances as long as it takes to turn things around and thrive again. Yet in what world? A changed world that we will someday grow used to and grow to love.

I’m not a fan of apocalyptic thinking because we’ve been predicting the end of the world since the beginning. I’m not going to say that a massive oil spill will spell out the end for us, but it spells out the end for a highly productive, diverse ecosystem, livelihoods, and possibly a region. I hope not, but that’s how it looks now. A dead zone to join up with the many others. Hopefully the spill will also spell the end of blind trust of corporations to fix what they destroy, of the government to be able to fix everything.

We can’t control our own systems. Large scale man-made and natural disasters are still as such and it is futile to pretend that our government and even corporations can fix it. We are trained to do certain things: make money and power, and damage control isn’t on the list. Predicting the adverse outcomes of our actions isn’t one of the qualities of a successful CEO because he’d inevitably be a downer. Oil equals money equals a thriving economy equals a popular government. Raising taxes to pay for potential disasters, cutting profits to ensure safety and functionality do not raise popularity.

two quotes

2010-03-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

"All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen." — Conan O'Brien

"He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need for any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. he who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgement to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. ... It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm's way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it."--John Stuart Mill

Lately I don't have too much extra time to write, though I am working on an essay about my experiences teaching at a for-profit college. I am drowning in student papers to grade. So, for now, I post quotes. I posted the first one because I am sick of all things cool, of the notion of apathy as cool, of nihilism as cool, of cynicism as cool. I think earnestness should be celebrated. But maybe only because I am now nearing my mid-thirties (not there yet) and am finding myself becoming more conservative and focused. The second quote speaks to that, and speaks for women as well.

2009-12-31T11:12:00.000-08:00

Today I listened to the Diane Rehm show. She talked to Wendell Berry. I was driving to the gym to work out when it came on, so I played it on my new mp3 player instead. Listening to his first words brought me to tears because he is an old man, and an old man from Kentucky to boot, that lives close to the land. He reminded me so much of my grandfather, though they really aren’t alike, apart from both being from Kentucky, both growing up on farms, and both being from the same generation. Lately I’ve been missing my grandfather a lot, though he died in 2006. It affected me somewhat then, but lately it has been affecting me more. Maybe it is the knowing that generation is nearly gone and that the younger ones of us, without the connection they had to something like the land and real life, leave the rest of us floating and not sure of anything. I wanted to curl up in Berry’s voice, to go to his farm and tend to it, to cloak myself against this world as it is now. There is something soothing about the voice of the grandfatherly elder that cannot be replaced. He may chide or he may comfort. He is steady, stable, wood or stone, a pillar. He holds to old things.

It felt so ironic listening to Berry talk about the wastefulness of modern times as I listened to the mp3 player while I exercised on a machine looking at a television spewing mundane Kathy Lee Gifford and Hoda talking about the New Year, wearing silly glasses and consoling those that don’t have anyone to kiss. Isn’t this removed, I thought, yet I stayed, staying on the machine until the interview was over.

My grandfather grew up on a farm. It is a mythology: he lived with his mother and father and six sisters; he was the only boy. They raised everything they ate, trading for things they couldn’t grow, like coffee and sugar. Otherwise they were completely self sufficient. It wasn’t an easy or glamorous life but it was one that he looked back on with fondness in his old age, telling us about his mother’s love for God and the simplicity of it all.

Wendell Berry isn’t much like my grandfather but he did grow up on a farm and tends that same land today. My grandfather didn’t write books, instead he worked at a grocery store, eventually tended his own country store, and then retired. He grew a plot of tobacoo and raised a solidly middle class family, something that would be impossible today on a grocer’s salary. He didn’t go to college. He went fishing and fried his own fish for us. He smoked cigarettes and eventually got cancer that he fought for a good ten years before succumbing. Some of his final years were good, some were bad. His health and weight fluctuated greatly. He was stern sometimes, hating what he saw as his daughter and granddaughters flaunting his values and ways, which we did. We didn’t need them. We didn’t need church or traditions. But he was there, representing all that was old, something we never clung to but needed nevertheless.

In a similar way, Berry represents what is old. He will be gone too and then what will we be left with? I feel a deep grief for things that are gone. I am young but have seen so much and have lately seen my mind completely washed out by Us Weekly and other magazines, by machines at a gym, by staring at a computer screen or staring at urban desolation. By a communal commitment to being ironic, by a lack of earnestness, by not believing in anything.
No matter if it is true or not, we hold fast.

I can’t sing a hymm or listen to a preacher. But who’s to say I am better off?

The beauty of the world rests in a Kentucky hillside, on a field, on any well-loved piece of land. With a dog, running through the forest. On a cold winter’s day, the ground crunching beneath our footsteps, the trees barren and restful. It lies in old men who wear big baseball caps and workshirts without irony. It is their old photographs: men clasping shoulders, cigarettes in their mouths, as they prepare to go to war. It is in what is gone and what we can only hope will find its way back someday.

The interview: http://wamu.org/programs/dr/

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.Source: Collected Poems, 1957-1982 (1985)

life these days

2009-06-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

I'm not teaching this week; we have "summer break" for a week. I start a new part-time job on Thursday, waiting tables at a neat restaurant a couple of blocks away called Slims. The guy who owns it, Patrick, lives around the block. He uses a lot next to his house to grow salad greens, watercress, and other vegetables for the restaurant. It's slow food, communal tables, byob. I haven't waited tables for years, and I never thought I would do it again, but it is just part-time, one or two nights a week. I'm looking forward to it--good food and hopefully meeting new people.

On the gardening front, my garden is doing well. The raised beds aren't doing as well as the beds I dug out of the soil--go figure. The raised beds are filled with purchased material--peat, vermiculite, and compost--whereas the ground beds are native dirt and a little compost. The soil is black and fertile. So far, corn's growing, as are beans, squash (three sisters!), tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, basil, and more.

This next part is heavy--read if you dare. I wrote it a couple of weeks ago.

A friend from high school let me know a couple of weeks ago that someone we went to high school with committed suicide. I didn't know him well; he was a year ahead of me and more of an acquaintance. We traveled in the same social circles but were never close. I remember him as being kind of quiet, a little overweight, and a nice guy. I remember him having short brown hair and wearing jeans and faded blue t-shirts. I found out about this soon after I'd finished writing an essay about religion. All of it, along with events in my own life, got me thinking about the purpose of life. Was there really any purpose at all? If so, recently I haven't been able to tell. Why? The sheer number of people on the planet. My own disappointments. Things haven't turned out like I'd wanted them to. If something was "supposed" to happen, I didn't think it had. It is all linked in with the idea of God and fate--fate which I don't believe in, God, which I question at times. But there are definite benefits to believing in a higher power.

I just read a book called A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne. It defines poverty and gives resources for working with students in poverty--which many of the students that I teach are. She defines poverty as "the extent to which an individual does without resources," and those resources include financial, emotional, mental, spiritual, etc. She defines spiritual resources as

the belief that help can be obtained from a higher power, that there is a
purpose for living, and that worth and love are gifts from God. This is a
powerful resource because the individual does not see him/herself as hopeless and
useless, but rather as capable and having worth and value.

And then I thought about something else I'd read recently:

Indeed, it is only since the Enlightenment that faith has been defined as
intellectual submission to a creed. Hitherto, faith had been seen as a virtue
rather than a prerequisite. It meant trust, and was used in rather the same way
as when we say that we have faith in a person or an ideal. Faith was thus a
carefully cultivated conviction that, despite all the tragic and dispiriting
evidence to the contrary, our lives did have some ultimate meaning and value.
You could not possibly arrive at faith in this sense before you had lived a
religious life. Faith was thus the fruit of spirituality, not something that you
had to have at the start of your quest.--- from Karen Armstrong's introduction to Every Eye Beholds You, as reprinted in The Sun.

So, it seems to stand that people have a tendency to lose faith but at the same time need to believe in something. Not all people, but many do, me included, otherwise I wonder why we are doing everything. To continue:

I always imagined my adult life to be very exiting. I would travel the world. I would write a best selling book. I would write for National Geographic, traveling to the remote regions of the Amazon rain forest to document the discovery of new medicinal plants. I would sit at outdoor cafes in Italy. I may or may not get married. I would have children, which I have had. I would climb mountains, which I've climbed some. I would have a beautiful house with a white couch, Oriental rugs, bookcases full of books, and original art on the walls. Now I'm only or already in my early thirties and life is okay, not what I had expected it to be, but not that bad either. Depending on when you ask me.

Zac and I have talked about the meaning of life. A year and a half ago, when I was feeling more optimistic, we were talking on the phone. He asked me what's the purpose of life? I said, to be happy and do something good for the world. And I believed it.

Now, a year and a half later, cynical, I no longer believed that. Do something good for the world? How can you even define that? I got to thinking that there was really no reason to do all of this, the striving and the being "I am." Zac and I began talking about it recently, birthed by the suicide and the religion essay. He said he'd figured it out, Life. It's to survive.

I said that's lame. He said I was just disagreeing because he's saying it.

But if it is just to survive, then why?

I don't remember his answer. But eventually, I came to thinking that life's goal is to live. Life begets life, no matter the cost. Life assaults and triumphs in all forms. It grows up through the cracks in the sidewalk. It reproduces even when it has no means to or resources to. Life can't help itself. It climbs up the sides of buildings. We assault it with nonlife but it keeps on. Life won't stop living. Somewhere, in that will to life is God, or some super life or life force.

Depression stops life. It can and does lead to suicide; indirectly it leads to a lack of reproduction. If we add value and say that life is good--that that trademarked slogan but with a double meaning.

Life wants to be alive. Even if it sucks to be a rat or in jail or in a cubicle, but the majority of beings don't off themselves, which differentiates us from the other animals. Perhaps life can't figure itself out.

I'm not the sunniest person. I tend to be more melancholy. So when I heard about the suicide It jarred me, even though I haven't thought about him in years. Because thinking that life is for nothing is not too far from a walk off the plank. So while I was walking, thinking of his death, and looking at the plants and the crazy people, at the people with jobs and hobbies, I thought this is life. It makes more sense--mentally and emotionally--to believe that there is a reason, even if that reason is the mystery.

yoga

2009-06-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

I posted this, removed it because it's pretty personal, and decided to post it again.

I've been doing yoga for ten years now. I've taken breaks but have always stuck with it. For the last six months, I haven't done much. I've done a little bit on my own, but that isn't the same as doing it with a group and being pushed a bit by a teacher. The thing about yoga is that it is so simple: pay attention to your breathing. If you can watch your breath for the whole session then you are really getting somewhere. I don't, but I try.

I went to a new place here in Cincinnati. In Wilmington, I had found a couple of great teachers that I loved. One in particular taught at the Y and she always had full classes. She provided a mix of spiritual teachings and attention to the poses. Here in Cinci, I hadn't found good teachers, either too easy, too out there (vaginal exercises), too regimented (ashtanga, ashtanga, and more ashtanga), or boring. I tried a new place out this evening. It is a store front shop with just one room. The teacher was good and I felt like I was back in the yoga groove again. It was just challenging enough, but not too demanding. I needed it and will be back.

Lately, I've been living in the past, thinking back to life in Wilmington a lot. I really miss living there. For the first two years that I lived there, I didn't like it, but now, I feel such an attachment to the place. I miss my friends, the beach, the dirty brown Cape Fear River, my old house, Silas's friends, live oaks, the smallness of the town. I miss the old downtown with its big Southern belle houses. When I left Wilmington, I was sad. I thought I would get over it, after all, it was a neighborhood and neighbors that I missed. I didn't miss my job. I came up here to be with the man that I love. But, there is a small truth: love isn't everything. I knew I would miss him if I stayed there, but I knew that I would miss that town deeply. I grew roots there and made connections. I knew a lot of people.

Lately, I've been living in the past and have been sad about it, sad about trying to start over again in a city I don't love. I miss the south. I miss going to the beach at night. The thing about these kinds of feelings is that they aren't socially acceptable to voice. After a while, you technically should stop missing some other place. You should learn how to at least accept a new place. I haven't found my place here yet, and honestly, I'm not sure I want to. So, I've been sad lately, not all the time, but I am definitely missing a sense of unfounded joy-joy about nothing, joy that comes from just being alive. That joy isn't constant but without little glimpses of it..... I read somewhere that humans are animals that are overly prone to despair.

At yoga tonight, I set my intention to feel joy. Throughout the session I didn't exactly feel joyous, but I felt good. I felt sad when I did hip openers, and I've heard that the hips is where a lot of deep-seated emotions reside. During those moments, my mind turned back to moments in Wilmington: the streets, riding bikes with Silas through our old neighborhood. But then, doing yoga brought me a deep sense of peace too, just meditating and listening to music and smelling incense. So, tonight I decided I need to do more yoga because it has been an integral part of all of the good parts of my life. Also: take country drives and bike rides, listen to bluegrass music and Krishna Das, cook dinner.

So, I'm trying to stay in the moment and with the good things here, but not push all those feelings of longing for my old home away and acting like those feelings don't matter--because they do. The years I spent with Silas in Wilmington were good ones. I did my share of complaining about the intense heat, the sprawl, the crowds, the gigantic roaches, but we did have a lot of memories.

When we first moved to Dock Street in Wilmington, we got there a month before school started for both of us--kindergarten for Silas and graduate school for me. We spent that first month reading Harry Potter aloud. First, I would try to go jogging early in the morning before it got too hot and take Silas with me, trying to get him to go along. We never got very far. Then, we would come back, eat breakfast, and sit on the porch until it got too hot while we read Harry Potter. I got into the book too. Then sometimes we would go to the beach, sometimes not. Early on, I felt obligated to go all of the time, but later I went just sometimes. Other good times: all of the times that Silas's best friend Ben slept over, or when he played with kids from the neighborhood, coming in and out of our house and their house, running up and down the street. That's what a childhood should be like.

Riding the ferry to Southport, just doing nothing but sitting in the air conditioned house in the summer, walking downtown at night along the river, walking to the creek near our house, seeing an alligator in that creek, sneaking over to the paintball field, body surfing, learning how to surf on a board, and there were others. Mostly, it was the everyday stuff. It was also stressful. I went to school and worked one or more jobs. Sometimes I had barely enough energy to put a frozen meal--veggie corndogs and fries--in the oven.

Most of all, I miss my old house. I moved there two years after moving to Wilmington. It was perfect, a small bungalow built in the '30s or '40s in a neighborhood full of other little bungalows, most of them fixed up, given the overheated real estate climate in Wilmington. The neighborhood had mature trees and a park. We had a big backyard with a deck, and all of the rooms had their own character. It was the best place I have ever lived. It was expensive, too much really, but worth it.

Looking back, it is easy to make things sound better than they were. But when leaving, I truly knew I would miss Wilmington, or rather miss my neighborhood and house. I felt like I shouldn't get so attached to one place, but I did.So now I am here, trying, futilely it seems, to fit myself into another place, in with other people, in another household. I got rid of a lot of my things when I left Wilmington and a lot of my stuff is still in the garage and I am living in a house full of my boyfriend's and his daughter's things. He says its no big deal, but it is. I don't feel that sense of home, of my home, and I really miss that. He's been good about trying to make me feel comfortable here, but it isn't the same and hasn't quite worked yet. I'd lived on my own for so long with Silas and that feels right to me. To make everything even worse, Silas is with his dad for the summer. The extra time is too much time. I don't feel the same way for my boyfriend's daughter as I do for Silas, nor should I.

Last night I thought that my cat, Fannie, was missing. I hadn't seen her all day and thought that maybe she got out of the house or died in the basement, etc. While I was looking for her, I was imagining her gone and thinking that she was. The point is, I miss my old life. Maybe sometime this will feel like my old life. I'm toying with the idea of going back.Doing yoga should help though. Just that one thing.

2009-04-22T07:25:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been thinking about two things: teaching and communities in decline. I'm teaching composition this month and the theme of the course is community. I've asked students to choose any communities that they are involved with, and to write about those communities. The latest assignment is to address a problem in the community and propose a workable solution.

About teaching: the students I work with are predominantly poor, unprepared, and have many personal issues that contribute to a difficulty making it to school. Not all, but many. Out of a class of thirty students, about 12-15 are dedicated. The rest try or don't try, but regardless, they don't come to class very often and have many excuses. In teaching Composition, I've been reading about how to teach it, and about language in general. Many of my students are black and the language that they speak is very different than the language that they "should" write in. It isn't easy for them. The majority of my students are adults. Even the younger students already have children or have a child or two on the way. One woman is 25, and is the single mother to four children, something I have a hard time understanding. Many are deeply devoted to their churches.

Some of them are extremely ambitious; some of them are there for the financial aid money. Some are bright. There is a girl in my class who is perhaps the most natural writer I have ever seen. Her prose is effortless. I am impressed by the ones who had been in gangs or even in prison for dealing drugs and are now turning their lives around. I don't have a point exactly. The experience of teaching at this college has been eye opening for me. I've been working with people I have been largely removed from for the majority of my life, even though you could say I am or have been one of them.

One issue that we as a class have been dealing with and I have been trying to understand as well is why the inner city is the way it is. Living in Cincinnati is a new experience. There is a large inner city full of older houses in disrepair, vacant buildings, and poverty. Wilmington had its moments and there was a definite line based on race and class, but the scale was much smaller. Here, and perhaps in many Midwestern cities, such as St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, and others, the people who can go, go, and the people who can't, stay. The more affluent move to the suburbs here. We live in the city, but we send our kids to an expensive private school. The schools are mostly failing, and there are not a lot of options. The private school is full of white kids.

But what do we do with these dying urban landscapes? Or do we do anything? How do you deal with systemic poverty? Trying to deal with a problem like this by building community centers or new housing doesn't seem to be the solution. One of my most ambitious, intelligent students says you have to change people on the inside. I said I look forward to hearing about how that can happen. In class yesterday we talked about the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror. The majority of the class came to the conclusion that you can't do much about all three, especially poverty. It will always be around, and it is even worse on a global scale.

Again, I'm not sure what my point is.

Today I read an article in the New York Times about Flint, Michigan and how the city is shrinking. Yesterday I heard on NPR about schools closing in St. Louis and Detroit because there aren't enough students. Now, I'm thinking about ghost towns and a whole swath of the country that may become mostly abandoned.

Many years ago, I wrote a really short story/poem about future evolution and what the world will become when we aren't here, or when we become something else. Vines would take over, mold and moss would cover everything. We would slowly evolve into what we are now: the senses and a loss of physical presence. Animals would burrow in the basements of our homes.

rewriting

2009-04-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

If we were hobos on a train we would look into the faces of the other hobos and there would be this knowing: We all left for one reason or another, no use trying to explain, we know why we left.—Carey Tennis, Since You Asked,

Thinking of hobos somehow calms me. It makes me want to watch He’s Not There again, just to see the beginning, when the young Bob Dylan, played by an even younger black boy, hops the train and rides and talks, all the while the green landscape passes beside him. What I like is seeing the fields passing outside, the knowing that it is midsummer.

In me there is this longing that I always return to in words, whenever I write anything autobiographical I go back to midsummer, to some eastern or southern landscape. I go back to tall grass in a field, to chicory on a fencerow, to Queen Ann’s lace. These memories, if that is what they are, always fill me with a sense of longing that I’ve never been able to displace. I’ve written it again and again. It was Ebeth and David’s house, I believe. Friends of my mother’s who lived out in an old white house out in the country, somewhere in Kentucky. Around their house stood fields and beyond that woods. Inside, the house was falling down, old and dilapidated. There were quilts hanging on the walls. They had two young daughters, about me and my sisters’ ages, one of whom’s name was Jocelyn. There was a baby pool. David did some sort of work, gardening or farming. Ebeth tended to the house. We spent the night. We ate black bean tacos with goat cheese. She was thin and they were living close to the land, and in poverty.

But the them wasn’t and isn’t important. It is that memory of walking in the dirt, of tall grass and those common weeds. I could go back there but there would be no reason to. Maybe it is the house that I was meant to live in, the place where I’m meant to be. But being and living shouldn’t be a puzzle, something you have to spend your life and your money, and the treads on your tires, trying to figure out. But somehow, it is difficult to escape that notion of “where you are supposed to be.” That that certain place does exist, and it exists in a way that you may never find it and in reality, you shouldn’t spend your whole life searching for.

I try to put my finger on it. I rewrite it over and over again.

2009-03-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

I have a new associated blog that contains only links to published work. I am sending links to it to people that I would like to work for/with as examples of my work. The leading post is a little goofy, as it is a link to an article about a sewer upgrade. But you've got to do what you've got to do sometimes. As for this blog, well, we'll see. So visit the other one that you can view via my profile and let me know what you think. It is purely professional.

done gone

2008-10-04T18:44:00.001-07:00

Life always goes to seed if we let it. Here in the South especially, when we let things go mildew creeps in, its black spotted arms riding up your legs, vines, and not just kutzu, big, fat green vines come out of the ground an inch wide already, growing a foot a day with thick, wet spikes, ready to wrap around your chain links. They grow so quickly that if you touch them you get wet, puncture their membranes and you’ll find no substance, just pale green water held up by slipshod cell walls. They take you down to seed with undying roots, that no matter how often you cut them they come back. It is the fairy ring by the bus stop. It is the speck of rotten wood in the floorboard. It is what those of you who live in the cold have no idea about. You don’t know the constant onslaught of life that we fight. You don’t know what kind of shape we’re in when we give into it. You don’t see the insects, the way a sweet potato vine can invade the entire front yard, the way crab grass creeps along the sidewalks, and the way the vinyl turns greed with algae and mold.

But you do know this: something about these days has brought us back. Has made small houses and simple sidewalks seem somehow sufficient. You don’t know this but it has carried us down, removing the power of motivational thinking from our grasp and led us into a collective low, a sleep we’ve all been hoping for.

I’ve wanted to use this quote for ages. Ever since I first read it and upon remembering it later and buying a used copy of the book, The Way of Herbs by Michael Tierra. He writes in the introduction, “It seems that after a while, when people realize that they are alone and nothing will eat them, they begin the often destructive process of letting down their societal inhibitions; then we find the tendency of country folk to spend their free time drinking, getting high and ultimately making themselves sick. Through such ignorance we miss the incredible lesson that nature has to teach us, the lesson of how to just be.”

Back to Kaintuck

2008-09-20T12:33:00.001-07:00

My rant is over. Who can keep that up when researching classic country music? I'm writing an article about country tribute musicians here in Wilmington and thus, to get a feel for the story, I'm listening to a lot of old country. Hear this:

Rock Island Line by Johnny Horton
Truck Drivin Man by Buck Owens
White Lightnin by Waylon Jennings

Yup, I am learning to differentiate between the Nashville Sound and the Bakersfield Sound. I'm learning why people have liked country music, because I never did get it. And I've found this out from a source: everybody's had their heart broken and somebody's always doing somebody wrong, therefore country music will always have an allure. I'm not sure if that's true or not. I've had my heart broken and I didn't turn to country music. Whatever.

Meanwhile, I'm in my office, listening to country music and occasionally getting up to dance around and sing really badly into my fake microphone.

a rant

2008-09-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

okay, I'm making a pot of pinto beans in the Crock Pot. Could it get much worse than this?

I actually like beans and cornbread, but still, the dish has its connotations: Depression Era-poor Southerner, going back into the hills, or in this case, the swamp, to grow beans and corn and wait out the economic downturn. Or stay back there in the hills, eating cornbread, forever. Maybe taking up growing your own tobacco and smoking it in your own hand-carved pipe. And going barefoot when your shoes wear out. And hiding under a false name.

Seriously. I'm feeling a major economic bummer. That is made even worse by the bailout of all these big banks and companies that were doing the wrong thing to begin with. I will admit that I am not economically savvy, but I have some sense. A few years ago, people knew that they shouldn't take out mortgages for more than they could afford. And the banks that were dealing them out were gambling on borrowed money. And everyone knew it would crash, and it has. Surprise! And now, because of all of these mistakes by people who really should have known better and investment bankers who were making loads of cash, the taxpayers, us, have to bail them out.

I know I'm not allowed to say this but here goes: It's just not fair. When you do the right thing and people who don't get their debt erased. Again--I don't know the details. I got a C minus in Economics in college. I'm more right-brained than left brained. But I do know what gambling is and I do know that you shouldn't borrow more than you can afford to. The government is throwing so much money around right now; its scary. I know that a global financial crisis would be bad, but still. When I, and so many people that I know, are working hard and are struggling with the usual litany (gas prices, food, etc), when small business owners are making less, when I'm working as an adjunct professor for too little money for too much work, then it feels like a jab to hear something about the government taking over bad loans and considering lowering the amount that people owe on their mortgages. I didn't take out a loan I couldn't afford, so what then?

I don't want a bailout (student loans? can that be considered bad debt that someone will come take off my hands?), but I would love for people to get in line and recognize and act out this all important concept: personal responsibility.

Okay. Rant over.

"Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worries and your strife, I mean the bare necessities are mother nature's recipes for just the bare necessities of life"
song from the Jungle Book.

2008-07-08T06:14:00.000-07:00

saw Wall-E too. Good NYT Frank Rich op-ed below

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06rich.html?ex=1373169600&en=0c5cd73f115b6e9f&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

my child is my conscious

2008-07-08T05:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I drove the length of Kentucky twice--north to south and back again. I didn't mind it so much because I think well when I drive. Ever since I've been back around these parts for the last couple of weeks I'm reminded how beautiful it is, how the horse farms don't look so stereotypical and how quiet and green the hills are. A country characterized by hills. I don't know how to place it though, how to identify this place. Having grown up here I thought of it as a place to get away from. It has no mountains, no oceans, no cool cities, nothing at all. But then returning there are some things it does have, mainly a pastoral countryside.

Lately I've wanted to get my hands back in the dirt. I've wanted to garden or start a small farm. Maybe this is because I've spent the last three years completely in my head; all of my work has been on a screen, nothing in the physical realm. And I miss it. Just like in a weird way I sometimes miss Kentucky, but different. I miss the ecoregion--the types of flowers that grow in meadow, the certain weeds that grow by roads.

Yesterday I drove Silas from Lexington to Tennessee--a drive I've taken too many times. The rest station on the Tennessee side of the border was closed--tall grass and vacant buildings.

As we drove down 75 through Richmond, I noticed that "they" were building something. Machinery and men churning up the earth into mounds of rock, acres of land scoured and turned over. A big mound of rocks and earth. "I wonder what they are building," I said.

Silas looked up from his Nintendo and practically screamed out that they are destroying the earth. "I want to blow those people up! How can they do that to the earth! Soon there is going to be nothing left but buildings. The whole country is going to be a giant city!" He went on, crying and yelling about what was truly a monstrosity.

"Why can't people just live with what they have?" he asked. "Lets go stop them. We have to stop them from destroying the earth."

"We can't," I said, "Its not our town. The people in that town wanted whatever it is they are building."

"I just hate it!"

Whereas I've raised him to look at such things and care about the planet, I haven't done much of anything to stop new shopping centers because I feel like I can't. And I guess I can't. When you get older your world gets smaller, there are fewer things you can hold your heart out to. I can't hear about genocide in Darfur or earthquakes in China because my heart is right here with a certain few people and I can't stretch it any farther without losing myself. I care about the earth deeply and I don't want to see a new generic subdivision going up or another Kohls and Old Navy going up that no one really needs but I feel powerless to stop anything. Like my circle of influence has gotten smaller.

Silas' anger surprised me but I was glad that he was so mad, because that anger is fuel that can knock me out of my own complacency and back up my own anger about the situation, which has, in the past ten or so years, smoldered as I've focused on my own small life.

2008-01-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

Nuances of a Theme by Williams
by Wallace Stevens

It's a strange courage
You give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!

I
Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II
Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow's bird
Or an old horse.

New Years Day Sun Saluations

2008-01-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

Doing the 108 sun salutations on New Years Day. Larry, our instructor, walked around the room, guiding us. Breath in, breath out, open your heart, surrender, bow to the earth. Let go of something from the last year. I let go of fear, I say, fear that nothing will ever work out—that the writing is for bust, that we will fall apart, that even if it all works out you could die and I will live. Fear of the unknown. How do I do this? I ask myself. Just close your eyes and jump like off of the high dive. Just do it, fall and you will land and whatever happens, you will be okay. The writing will always be here. Even if it is just for you, even if it is your own voice speaking from a place that you could never find without the word. It will be here.

Dedicate this to someone, he said, someone in your past, present, or someone that you want to be in your future. We began our second set of twenty-seven. Rise up to the sky, bend back, bow. Lift your heart. Bow. Float your legs back. Lower yourself to the earth. Breath in, rise to the sky. Lean back. Breath out. In. Out. Rise up. Lift your heart, bow. Rise up to the sky. Open our arms. Meet your hands back at your heart. Center. I can’t name one person. The downs start to feel like up and I’m learning that equilibrium can make its way with you, not just when you are standing like a mountain but when you are bent. Upside down.

Third set of twenty seven. The light outside is falling, filtering through the trees. Our candlelight grows stronger. Everyone’s breath grows louder. Our eyes are closed. Set your intention for something within yourself, Larry says. I remain centered through change. And I realize that this is the whole practice, this is what I have been doing all along. It gets easy. I get lighter.

Final twenty seven. You and the universal self. You and God. Here’s a poem that speaks to it. Here are the movements that I give it. A ritual to meet it all.

I held God in my hands tonight
I searched him out but found
he needed me more—
We try to revive us but he ain’t electric—
I looked down at him, wanted to cry
Like a partner but found someone
that’s been following me, outed,
I need a strong God, I said,
to make the world in my favor. He couldn’t
much respond but mewed
closed his eyes. I held
him falling asleep
and remembered that God once, still,
always a baby somewhere.
He got quiet, I did too and we sat together—
holding fellowship you could say—in the chill
we watched Mars cross the moon
all hazy and he says I’m yours and you’re
mine. I heard a man say god is love,
love is vulnerable
putting himself in the
world’s hands.

2007-11-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

How Not to Finish Your Thesis

Fill up your laptop with bits like these, other little pieces about your sisters, your notebooks. You write, yes you do, just not to anything coherent and large and lasting.
Internalize what other people have to say about your thesis in progress. Problem is, they all say different things.
Let a paper cut prohibit you from typing. Become an insomniac. You can count on being awake at 2 am or 4 am every night. And if you aren’t, feel blessed.
Stop writing your thesis. Instead, draw a picture that you don’t finish. Take a walk that you won’t finish, turning around too soon. Wear running clothes out for that walk but don’t run.
Feel like a failure. That you would have been able to write this thesis in high school or college when you had something, that spark, that made you want to do hard things. You’ve lost that spark now.
Feel like a failure. You had your mind on other projects that didn’t pan out.
This thesis is of last resort anyway, a memoir you’ve cobbled together out of bits. How to make it work? Make the bits more pronounced. Encourage the thing not to make sense. Defy sensible. Turn it in and move on? To what?
Whenever you overhear something, take it personally, even if you don’t even know it is about you. When you overhear your thesis director in the hallway talking about something that he just doesn’t get or just isn’t his thing, assume that he is talking about you and your work. Consider sneaking up on him to see if you can hear your name spoken but don’t.
Get all shy and feel like your work is the bad bomb, not the good bomb.
Read a lot and eat a lot to take up your time and psychic energy. Otherwise. You know, the failure bit steps in. Eat candy and don’t brush your teeth.
Wonder if you have cancer, if it is spreading through your non-insured body right now. Feel like bowing to that cancer if it is there but know if you did, when you are dying of cancer you will have the epiphany that life is worth living and would maybe wish you would have finished that thesis. Or not.
Know that things only mean something to you once you lose them. That you hold more tightly to your losses than any gains. And you know that if you don’t finish that thesis then you can add it to the losses and that will only reinforce what you already know, that you are a loser.
Know that you do the same thing with relationships. Wonder what your preoccupation with loss is. Wonder if it isn’t obvious to everyone but yourself.
Wonder why you want to unravel your soul on a fake, computerized piece of paper. Wonder if this language has even got it in it.
Become uplifted by the nature of language. This big messy thing that we use to compose our thoughts is imperfect, inanimate, and humble. It doesn’t ask anything but is the ultimate gift, something that humanity has created that is the most democratic of all. It cannot be capitalized on, except trade marking some words. It is the free thing, perhaps one of the only free things left in this world. A human creation that has no negative environmental impact, except for some words in some mouths.
Tell yourself that you should be more like language: imperfect and humble, but still get your point across. Even if you do it wrong you can’t help it because, like language, you are imperfect and humble. And free. No charge.
Writing and math are free. And the library is free. Remind yourself that there are still some free things and remark on the double meaning of free: no cost and ability to do what you want, no strings attached. The library is free and the men who spend their days sitting on the benches around the fountain at the library are free. In more ways than one.

what's goin' on

2007-11-18T18:11:00.000-08:00

Shout out to Donna and Ariel who keep their blogs running. I like to look at them sometimes and I really get a good idea of what's happening with them. So hey ladies!

I'm in the thick of the thick--working on my thesis/book along with my new task at my job of "content manager" for a website--the first time I've ever done such a thing. Along with teaching creative writing to both kids and college kids--who really are kids too. And classes of my own. And of course, being a mom, though that really is the easiest thing going right now. I'm doing too much and I know it but like so many of us, I have a hard time saying no and I always think I can do way more than I can actually do. And I actually do it all, but not without some mental and emotional fraying along the way. So here's to finishing much of this work in the next couple of weeks and then sighing.

So, I'll jump on the thankfullness train with Donna and Ariel. Here's to my house, Silas, Fannie cat, new friends, old friends, ladies craft night, fondue, the writers down in the trenches with me, live oaks, my bicycle, the car that keeps its own self going, my job, heat, and there's more....

2007-11-05T09:52:00.000-08:00

I'm back!It's been a long time but now I am back online. Hmmm.

2007-02-15T08:56:00.000-08:00

"you have babied the universe" Gerald Stern

I took Silas to Stern's reading last week. He's an amazing poet and extremely engaging and charismatic. He's like eighty years old and his work, according to my poetry instructor, is still evolving, practically lifting off the page. Amazing. Silas even liked it, but he fell asleep before Stern started riding the fuck and goddamn train. I sometimes feel a little bad about dragging Silas to so many readings, bribing him with lollipops, but then I think that it isn't the worst thing to do to a child, that it might even somehow be beneficial in the long run.

I'm going to the AWP conference in Atlanta in a couple of weeks and I'm kind of dreading it. It is basically a bunch of writing teachers and students getting together to talk about writing. I don't know what it will be like but I think I might get a little anxious and want to run off. I plan to spend half each day at panels, ect, and write the other half. And definitely take a break and go to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens (I'm not sure if that's the official name). It is an amazingly beautiful place. Here's a link to an article about AWP (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=171211
by the poet Kay Ryan. I think she echoes my feelings about it.

This blog is a little distracting, as is the entire internet. When I sit down to write somehow I end up miles away from that goal. I end up here and all over the place. Adult ADD?

2007-02-14T18:27:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this blog is all about writing. I accept that. I finally feel like I know what I'm doing, after four years of taking it seriously. Not that I don't have a helluva long way to go but now I know where I am and I can SEE.

Today is Valentine's Day, not a very serious holiday. I went to the mall today for one reason: to eat a massive cinnamon roll from Cinnabon and it was soooo gooood.

2007-02-13T08:01:00.000-08:00

I'm on a quoting binge. I've been researching for an essay (book?) about depression. This is from an article by Michael Pollan published in the New York Times Magazine some time ago:

"The media are filled with gauzy pharmaceutical ads promising not just relief from pain but also pleasure and even fulfillment; at the same time, Madison Avenue is working equally hard to demonize other substances on behalf of a 'drug-free America.' The more we spend on our worship of the good drugs (twenty billion dollars on psychoactive prescription drugs last year), the more we spend warring the evil ones (seventeen billion dollars the same year). We hate drugs. We love drugs. Or could it be that we hate the fact that we love drugs?"

2007-02-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

The Dalai Lama said, “yes, we work hard in this life, we meditate, we do not sleep, we do not take much luxury, it is hard, hard work we do, but this is okay. When we are enlightened, there is no work. For now, we work hard.” I stole this quote from the writer Jennifer Lauck's blog. She is an awesome woman, personally and as a writer.

2007-02-13T06:00:00.001-08:00

Some good things.

"By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, 'There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.' But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late."

from The World of Pooh by A. A. Milne

I know that this is a children's story but the whole book, 313 pages long, is amazing. I read it to Silas a few years ago and I cried at the end. I want to read it to him again but he is getting older and is more interested in Star Wars and sword fighting than Pooh and Piglet. Here's an excerpt from the end.

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out "Pooh!"
"Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I'm--when--Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.

It's a sad ending. Christopher Robin grows up.

I've also been reading some excerpts of Walt Whitman's Specimen Days. He writes about seeing Abraham Lincoln pass by him nearly every day during a summer in 1863. He says, "I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression.... He bow'd and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and inderect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed." I really love Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln. Here's another Walt excerpt:
"For there is a scent to everything, even the snow, if you can only detect it--no two places, hardly any two hours, anywhere, exactly alike. How different the odor of noon from midnight, or winter from summer or a windy spell from a still one."

And A. L.: Old Abe. His hair is askance in that photograph my grandmother loves. It is sticking out and his bow-tie is crooked. His eyes look small and animal-ish, like an old dog, like someone who is looking at your but not really seeing you, like someone who is maybe about to cry or maybe already cried and now is just sitting there. In my grandmother’s photograph I see a face that I could never understand but I could spend the rest of my life trying to really figure it out.

Here's something else: Free and Easy Wanderer is a formula of Chinese herbs that is about 900 years old. I've been taking it for a while but I'm not sure of its effects. It is based on the following section of the Tao Te Ching (48): "The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering." I've also read something else about this that likens the Taoist wanderer, on which the formula is based, to water. Water moves around obstacles and takes the path of least resistance. That is pretty simplistic. I have been trying to think of water flowing around rocks when I've been dealing with dilemnas lately. For example, I was writing a personal essay last week that needed more scenes in it but whenever I would try to write scenes I wouldn't be able to write a thing. So I decided that I wouldn't try to write scenes, I would write around the scenes and not worry about it. I ended up writing from images and thus coming up with scenic material.

That's quite enough.

2007-02-12T19:25:00.000-08:00

here's something good: Yoplait Passionfruit Yogurt. Oh my god. and this is no paid advertisement.

2007-02-06T08:42:00.000-08:00

short poem.

Take it

but there was this guy, glasses,
he stood upside down drunk and said:

my brother is dying

fuck you duke power

then my brother was dead

I walked to the hospital, we all sat still
and quiet an unintentional audience.

he laid up against the stones where the mice
crawled in the shadows of the kerosene lamp.

2007-02-06T08:29:00.000-08:00

Country Life

Lately they build a subdivision with a nautical theme, pirates in the middle with magnificent doublewide ships. Lately a road leads down from the plateau into that flat depression where the water flows out of the cave’s mouth and in through a hole. We recline on nature’s carpet and purple chicory grows along the fencerows. Turtles rise to the surface with hairy green algae on their shells.

Nature? The hollow strait-lined forest full of “dead voices.”

No trespassing beside the trees tagged with plastic orange ribbon to match the spray paint on the gravel in piles and deep ruts. Lost Cove Hunting Club and “Sparky runs in her sleep.” No fat assing up the mountain you lentil-eaters. We all love tigers and pipelines through the forest, but we all still have our dreams. You’ll be a lost voice in the trees and moss will cover the tables and pink lichen will fill the crack. Bears will move into your mountain house and Shining Rock will crumble like snow in the grass. It all sounds so stupid, like a stoned teenager’s dream.
You can play your flute, you can walk out to the side of the road and turn your binoculars past the beautystrips, you can catch and release, you can eat m&ms on your way up the mountain,

2007-02-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

Jesus has blue eyes and really thin eyebrows, like rainbows, not checkmarks, Silas would say.

2007-02-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

1. This Street Corner

I look out the window
with bars on it and see crumbling
gray asphalt and grass squares.
One-story buildings with flat cardboard
rust coming through white paint
and someone’s swimming lesson starts in an hour.
The sky’s so hot it has turned white.

Listening to the hum
of the cooler, I wait until I can open the door
and meet the heat like a person.
They said that this isn’t the Deep South.
The girl at the counter repeats herself:
I’m not a science person.

Girls smoke cigarettes
out on the sidewalk.
This is a two-part town: here it’s black.
Gold earrings and “meet me after school”
in big pink letters on a tight black t-shirt.
Now the quiet homework girls shuffle
their papers and eat Doritos in slow
quiet bites. Everybody loves this place.

Jesus smiles down from the picture
on the wall. At some point, you have to start
holding on to what you got.
Sometime you’ll just have to say yes.

2007-02-06T08:02:00.000-08:00

another draft:

Lost Cove

Under the yellow cement
with dust over head
in termite and web infested
locker blue shacks,
time came.

Deep water upon limestone and midge soil.
First his ears kept growing
animalish eyes. The floating
smells plowed his earth over his hot
summers over his cracking ground.

Mud suctions our pale pearl kin
down from the cold.
Shallow stretches, beer cans
slick with brown mud
roach clips beneath the swirling
iron ore wash. I suppose you might
say dirt, say broken trash bags
thrown from car windows.

The tight space between
comes tumbling out
and into the car window
and into the stranger’s tape deck
playing green leaves and brambles,
beggar’s lice duck into bear
tracks. Off the boulder into cool
green anemia. I suppose you might
make it part of your yellow atmosphere.

I longed a cougar down
under a gate. Its rich bottom land flowed
loam back to the cat. Send me some
signs for some telegraph, some
signal.

The men carry the chainsaws.
I lay on the planks with moss
on my hair, hitting the dammed surface
with humid greens. Light dust
divides the grass on the turtle’s
rotten shell.

No trespassing: spray paint
and orange stencils
cougars under the planks with lost
voices like vines, spores
on the table melt into water.
Fungus on the window and a song
in the glass.

Catch and release: checking under
the gate at night for tracked
mud and down goats.

2007-02-06T07:03:00.000-08:00

I'm in a poetry workshop now and it's difficult to figure out what a poem is. I'm no sonnet or sestina writer. Here are some hack attempts at prose poetry, some fragments that don't add up to a whole story or essay and that I think may work as poems on there own.

God

And I suppose you might say that if we put all of our collective little heads together we would come to some huge consensus and our hands and heads and hearts could go about creating the world all over again. But could we really even get along and could we all fit into the living room of a modest split-level ranch house? Probably not, so that proves the inexistence of an all-knowing god but rather the existence of a rapidly evolving devolving digressing ever swiftly changing god that doesn’t pound out his name any longer like a holy ass Zeus lightning bolt but spells it backwards in a little kid handwriting trying to look all cool and diminutive and indie rock and no more capital letters and all navy and small and like god.

Facts:

People used to drink their hot coffee out of saucers to cool it down.

I look out the window and see exact winter shadows on the oak tree butchered to make room for power lines. The trees are all bare and reddish brown in the afternoon light, black power lines and white houses intersperse the endless horizon of branches and up goes the mountain and the mansions and sometimes if you look at the world in a certain way, it is so sad it could kill you in one second.

Sometimes you can just look at what’s in front of you and what is behind and think that the future is full of days that are kind of like this. That some of those days will be full of barbeques and labor and new clothes and my socks will wear holes in themselves and the kids will grow up and Glenn Galloway will watch another show on television.

I wonder if he likes reruns because he has been sitting in front of that television for as long as I can remember. I wonder if he will ever stop. The kids will keep growing and get lots of good feedback and some negative images will stick with them forever. And I will go jogging on every second Tuesday and wish for green and red shale under rushing clean water streams and dark dark fir forests and the sun that only shines yet for so long and that’s just another dream.

another something

It’s like dough being kneaded and squeezed by long thin fingers, it slips between the cracks. The trail of devastation finds its way around, passed from person to person. Once you give it away you’re free until it comes back around again. I guess it’s the same with happiness though it carries its own brand of insecurity—fear that it’ll disappear that it’s an illusion that hey, devastation will always come back, we don’t fear its demise but recognize its proximity.

2007-02-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

I am always starting new blogs and forgetting that I have old ones--so, back at meganwrites, which she does, all the damn time.

"Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating...[they] live the poetry [they] cannot write" Oscar Wilde

I'm using this quote in defense of my really kinda boring life. Maybe I only exist on the page, on the screen, in a painting. My body is secondary, my day to day life is secondary. I understand Jack Kerouac to his Neal Cassidy. He's/I'm observing, hanging onto those interesting people, following them and seeing what happens. And then living again, or living only once, in words, on a page. Which is okay when the writing is going well but less cool when it isn't or when I want to live a real life. Today I wished I wasn't a writer, though I know I will always be a writer. I can't help it. But people who don't write are smarter. They win trivial pursuit games. I want to turn every experience that I live into something on the page. It is a disease that I can't get rid of. But I'm staking my life on it, slowly going broke as I write or fuck around each day, no IRA, no 401K, no full time job. School loans. Yikes. Here's to it all paying off. Cheers.

The office window

2006-11-04T06:29:00.000-08:00

Like a painter, I will write about the same scene. The morning light almost fills up the sky, even though it is only 9:30. Early this morning the light only reached the tops of the trees and crows filled up the sky. I was taking the puppy out, this new responsibility that was supposed to be my son's that I am feeling ambivalent about. He's cute, but now I'll start writing about puppies and dogs and that's no good. I don't want to write about pets or be one of those people that lives for their pets. I also run the risk of sounding middle aged, talking about my son and the puppy and the light in the early morning. Well, I'm not.

My grandfather died a couple of months ago and though I wasn't sad now I feel him around sometimes. Whether or not it is actually him or my overactive imagination isn't important. He exhibits this sort of unconditional love, an old-fashioned love embodied in shined dress shoes and combed hair. I feel him when I watch TV, what he did when he wasn't sleeping, eating, or working, and I feel him telling me no, not to sink into that same stupor he did, not to let my life go, which I feel dangerously close to doing. He's there, the strain of the family that passed on aloneness but niceness, love without that many words. I feel closer to him now.

the last friday and the black dog

2006-11-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

I walked across the wide parking lot, the sun alternating hot and the wind alternating cold on my face that felt like not being revealed, that wanted to be left alone. The distance seemed long, the gym far away from the parking lot, and the half hour I spent in there seemed too long, the half hour on the stationary bike reading OK! tabloid magazine, feeling a Friday lunchtime feeling of existential emptiness at the gym, with its monocrome machinery and calories burned per hour, and the celeb weekly, chewing on its wasteful trite, burning my twenty minutes of calories and I could just not stomach lifting weights or doing ab crunches. In the pages of OK! I saw a picture of Maggie Gygenhall and her husband or boyfriend or mate, Peter Sarsgaard, or however you spell it, both of them walking down some East Village street together with a new baby as chill as an accessory, both of them looking hip and shaggy like they just don’t care and I thought that I wanted to be them. That I should have moved to New York instead of Wilmington and that all of my choices somehow end up being the wrong ones and if I could only get it right. Someday. That the puppy I got will just interrupt my writing every thirty minutes at least, that it will just pee and pee and chew electric cords and I would run, I would say screw all of this intellectual bullshit and words and just get a job as a baker, alone at 4 am putting out the bread and putting icing on the cookies, a little bakery where I listen to the radio as the sun comes up and decide to accept poverty as a fact of life and accept smoking as a way of life, and write at night and don’t do it for anyone in a workshop. Wait, am I going back to my old life? Giving up aspirations? Giving up ambitions for some serenity. Giving up on things ever changing.
I got in the car, holding back tears, being in grad school and around all of these undergraduates at the university gym/health center just made me depressed as usual, as any health club or YMCA or exercise facility seems to do. Eventually. Eventually it all leads to depression, or depression lite really, a mid afternoon down session, go home and feel better.
Lately I’ve been giving into the confusion and into knowing that I don’t really know much and that my answers and decisions can often be wrong and knowing that I don’t have that much control.

Outside my office window is the perfect fall scene. I’ve seen all of the seasons change from this window. Now the light is slanting against the little cottage across the street, the flag waving on the porch, the orange leaved crepe myrtles lit up by the sun. It looks like all of the other seasons, except for the few changing leaves and the scarcity, the exactness of the afternoon light.