Friday, 28 December 2007
When I have time off, I use it to process the things that really bother me. I'm not fit to be around on my dark days, but the payoff is that dark days are fewer and farther between. I feel my feelings, think things through, and keep on truckin'. Today I've been thinking about two legendary figures: Jacob and Persephone.
I know, most of you will think these two are unrelated. Jacob is essentially known for being the heel who tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright and later lost a wrestling match with God but refused to yield without a blessing, which he received because of his relentless persistence. I see Jacob as the poster child for the philosophy of "get off your butt and do it."
Persephone, on the other hand, is the poster child for the seasons. Not her fault; she was abducted while picking flowers. She winters with Hades four months of the year, and the rest of the time life is beautiful.
We all have to spend some time in darkness wrestling with our own demons. Jacob reminds me of the importance of enduring through pain, self-inflicted or otherwise, and pursuing our dreams, while Persephone reminds me that, though we all live in hell once in a while, winter is inevitably followed by spring. Call them the odd couple if you like, but they work for me.
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Thursday, 27 December 2007
People write a lot about the stress of the holidays, but there is no time more distressing than the week between Christmas and New Years. The short list:
1. Too much spending. Face it, no matter what your budget, people nearly always spend more than they've planned this time of year, and about two days after Christmas, you pay the month's bills and realize there's a heckuva lot more bills coming due next month.
2. Too much eating. Office parties, dinners out, family dinners, oh my! After a while you begin to wonder if (warning: blasphemy ahead) it is possible to consume too much chocolate.
3. Too many people. They're everywhere: on the roads, at the malls, on the phone, at your house. All those little things that annoy you become GLARINGLY OBVIOUS AND INTOLERABLE.
4. Too many manuals. In too many languages, in tiny and unreadable fonts, saying too much about things you don't need to know and too little about things you do need to know. The rest of the manuals are online, and they don't match your model number, or your model does not work the way the manual says it does.
5. Too much to do, too many commitments, too little time and energy and patience.
6. Too little sleep. See numbers 1-5 above.
Too bad we don't make New Year's lists. All I want is one week in a remote mountain cabin, accessible only by snowshoes.
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Saturday, 22 December 2007
One of the best things about time off is time for reflection. I take the time for what Julia Cameron calls "artist's dates," which loosely translate into creative activities that feed the artist within me. Recently those dates have centered on films, visual art, and music. I've been saturating myself in a sensory exploration of all that moves me, interests me, feeds me.
And there's been a payoff. Closed doors and sealed windows are creaking open, letting air and light into dark and musty places, revealing the monsters I've stuffed into my closet. And I'm discovering, as all children do, that monsters are pathetic creatures in the light of day. They lose their power.
For instance, as a budding poet, I poured myself into one particular poem that meant everything to me. It was my child; I breathed life into it, formed it, and it was a thing of great beauty. And then an award-winning poet took it apart in a workshop and cut out what I perceived to be the heart of the poem. It was published in what I saw as bastardized form, my meaning and intent lost.
Something that happened yesterday made me revisit my poem and that poet. I discovered, through reading, that he is a poet of "gaps." Now, finally, it is clear to me what he was trying to do for me. He recognized that I am a gift-wrapper and was trying to show me that it is the gift that has meaning, not the pretty packages.
You see, I love happy endings. I look for patterns in everything, trying to make sense of a universe that is sane only in moments, in glimpses. I want everyone to be happy, healthy, whole, and I have wasted a lot of energy trying to wrap up all the messy little bits of life into packages of extraordinary beauty, but my finger keeps slipping of the bow as I attempt to tie it.
Because life rarely has happy endings. Even the fact that life always has an ending takes a lot of the happiness out of it. Endings are rarely beautiful, and they seldom make sense. The poet who looked at my work and found value in the ugly little bits that I was trying so hard to dress up told me something I was not ready to hear.
I'm going through a particularly tough time right now, wanting with all my might to tie things up in that pretty package, but the darned lid won't fit on the box. I can't give someone I love more than anything in the world the pretty fiction I've been trying to make of his life since he was born. The messy little bits won't be contained, and they take on gargantuan proportions in my nightmares, which is why I cannot sleep. I have to face the fact that there are no happy endings, just ecstatic moments of great joy amid profound prolonged sadness.
Life does not fit in pretty packages, but there is great beauty in the messy little bits if you just allow them some air and light. At least that is my perception at this point in time. Life may beat some poetry out of me yet, whether I want it to or not.
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Friday, 21 December 2007
I would write a post here, but I can't because I promised myself that I'd mail out my Christmas cards first and then there's the laundry and the floors and the unwritten reports and I have to figure out the last of the hospital bills and begin to wrap the first of the gifts and the gifts I ordered online have not arrived in a timely manner and the car repairs turned out to be extensive and expensive and I forgot to wish two important people happy birthday yesterday and there's been too many medical issues in this family lately and I fall asleep every time I pick up the Christmas Harlequin novel and this belligerent squirrel keeps burying his stupid acorns in my grandmother's angel wing begonia and I'm waking up in the middle of the night again, smacking myself in the head for forgetting really important things and being so far from perfect that there's really no hope left and the 3:2:1 ratio for margaritas did not work for me, not at all, SamIAm.
And we hope your holidays are joyous and that you and yours have a wonderful new year.
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Tuesday, 18 December 2007
To no one's surprise, this year's lengthy newsletter and calendar from the fundamentalists includes a bible tract proclaiming the "good news" and inviting the "wicked" and "unrighteous" to forsake their ways and be adopted as "sons." The big surprise, however, is that this year's tract is sent by none other than "Almighty God" himself. And I do say "him"self, because we all know the God of all bible-thumping, gun-toting fundamentalists is undeniably male.
This year, several sets of relatives on his side have threatened in Christmas letters that they will be visiting us this year, despite the lack of any communication from us in the past nearly 3 years. They "pray" that all is well with us (and that our "Florida hotel" still offers free and available accommodations).
Perhaps if they had prayed for our forgiveness for "forgetting" to even send so much as a postcard when our daughters both got married three years ago, it would have been more effective. Perhaps if there had not been years of taking advantage of our "hotel" and "restaurant," including stealing the bathtowels, we'd have been more receptive.
I sure hope my fish-shaped bumper sticker that is backwards and says "'n chips" lets them know our hearts are in the right place. We have the same level of respect for their god as they do for our family.
I'm sorry...I do sound a bit unchristian, don't I? And it is the season, after all. I guess I'd better forgive and forget...forget who the hell these people are. It's one of the benefits of growing older.
PS: Every now and then, I write something on impulse that reveals something I need to look at, such as why I'm carrying this anger for this long. I'd like to delete the post, but instead I think I'll work on the anger. My daughters have probably gotten over the hurt. I need to shed the anger because it can only cause more hurt.
Writing it down continues to work for me. Motime: confession for resolution rather than absolution.
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Monday, 17 December 2007
Moments with:
* Kids. Everywhere. All at once. Dropping food and spilling drinks in the house, instantly dirtying what took forever to clean. Sticky and sniffly and screaming kids with their mess and their stress and their adorableness. Kids are here to provide chaos, which is necessary to destroy the illusion that we are in control.
* Family. Everywhere. All at once. Dropping not-so-subtle insults and spilling emotional baggage everywhere, instantly messing up what took years of therapy to sort out. Angry and controlling and depressed large children with their agendas and pain and sorrow, which are difficult to hide and even tougher to deal with. Families are here to keep us humble.
* Animals. One of my mom's missing cats came back, and I was so relieved to see this creature who destroyed the paint on my car return. I petted and stroked her. Until she bit me. Welcome home. Animals are here to remind us that life is short and often painful, but there is random joy.
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Friday, 14 December 2007
Grades are done and ready to submit. It takes about 30 minutes to wrap up the work of months. I'm also going to finish the paperwork for my other job today and plan to get in some shopping as well.
We're spending too much money, and it makes me nervous because I'm earning less next term. I feel this increasing need to tighten all the belts, both physically and fiscally, and it's not even January yet, when people traditionally do this. I guess I'm more focused this year.
The students' exit essays were sweet rewards for all the hard work because they measured their growth against their own hard work and were pleased with the results. The essays both confirmed my approach and made me reconsider it.
There's no question I have their respect, and I had no last-minute dramas this term because they all knew it would be a wasted effort. But I think I scared them. I want their respect, not their fear. I went too far. There is a delicate invisible line here, and I'm still learning balance.
But they truly learned, and, for the first time ever, I feel that my students who passed are all fully prepared for the next course. That's a great feeling. I gave them the tools for success, and they now know how to use them.
I'm not completely exhausted this time, and I'm meeting all deadlines. I'm really excited about having three weeks off with Mr. Bluesky, even if we are more busy than we'd like to be.
So TGIF, and TGIVacation, and TGIt'sOver! Woohoo! On to the cards and shopping and wrapping and all the fun stuff! On Dasher, On Dancer...
yeah 
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Thursday, 13 December 2007
My mother told me stories when I was little, and I used them to make sense of life. I still do. Stories, whether short or long, fantasy or reality, transcend. Stories give us beauty and perspective. When life itself ends, our stories remain.
During a quiet moment a couple of evenings ago, Mom told me another story, a true one. It was about my cousin, who's suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for over 35 years. She ran into him, a rare thing, in a store, and she talked to him as always, and he'd looked at her without recognition, unresponsive, as always. My mother is getting older, has lost a lot of loved ones, and is not in the greatest of health herself, so it really mattered to her that she somehow make contact this once, just this once. She's tried and failed so many times. So she reached out her hand to him. He stood there, trying not to look at her or her hand, but she kept it extended. A minute passed, and then, slowly, he extended his hand and clasped hers. A bridge of love across time and illness.
Recently, I've been trying to work something out for myself, something that's changed in me and in my mother, a shift in our general family dynamics. This story put it in perspective. The puzzle piece fit. The love, the family connection, transcend the differences, the hurt, even time itself. That makes all the difference.
There was a moment, late in the afternoon yesterday, as I sat at a table in a sidewalk cafe in a small town on the gulf, feeling the wonderful sunshine on one side and the cooling breeze from the water on the other, that I recognized a strong feeling, one I hadn't felt in some time: contentment, deep contentment. My breathing had slowed. I was simply there, enjoying the day, talking with a friend about films, teaching, literature, life.
I am compelled to write those moments, those feelings and thoughts, those stories. They connect. The stories I've been told and the ones I tell overlap and interweave and make sense of things that defy explanation. They are as beautiful and timeless and intricate as the waves and the sand.
I don't think I've told this story well, but that's okay because this story is still unfolding. It is the telling that is important, not the craft, at least at this moment. Stories that are told, that are written, change from one moment to the next, one teller to the other. Isn't that great?
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Tuesday, 11 December 2007
It often occurs to me, usually upon waking, where we might be today if the amount of money expended on the space race had been spent on studying the brain, which is a far more fascinating frontier with more practical applications, in my humble and unlearned opinion.
Take my mind as an example. Actually, take my mind, please! It's arguably the most annoying part in an aging machine full of defective parts whose warranties are apparently far beyond their expiration dates, and I didn't have the wisdom when I was younger to buy extended warranties.
On any given day, I cannot pull up about a dozen important things from my memory banks, things like what I came into the room for, what I was about to say, where my keys are, and names, to name a few.
I've spent days now updating and coordinating spreadsheets and records to calculate my students' grades. Every semester, when I do this, I think of a better way to do this, which is promptly forgotten. If I write it down, I lose the notes.
However, on the plus side, this morning I woke up when the alarm went off with a brilliant idea for an analogy I can make the first day of classes next semester that just might cement a difficult concept for my students.
On the other hand, this idea's success depends on how their brains work, which is often not at all in the classroom setting.
The thing that interests me is why my brain operates like this, functioning and malfunctioning on so many levels simultaneously.
All I know is, I immediately jumped out of bed and wrote it all down and even saved it in a new folder of ideas for next term, thus proving that you're never too old to learn.
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Monday, 10 December 2007
Jack Nicholson, perennial bad boy, was featured in yesterday's Parade mag. He's one of those men who alternately fascinates and repulses people, like Mick Jagger. They leave a bad taste in our mouths, yet we vicariously enjoy their ability to write their own rules.
Anyway, the essay has a photo of Jack making the old moves and clicking his heels, with a victorious leer pasted on his wrinkled face. The photo makes me think of nothing so much as The Joker, a kind of sad caricature of someone who is near the end and just doesn't know it yet. Nicholson is 70 and still smokes. You do the math.
So how do I relate this to my lesser existence? I've been waking with considerably more joint pain lately than I'm accustomed to. Some nights the pain makes it hard to sleep, but I resist taking a pill for something that seems an inevitable part of aging. I'd rather fight it.
This weekend we bought the latest tool in our war against decline, a scale that measures body fat, hydration, muscle mass, and BMI, as well as weight. I figure something that records that much information will motivate us even more to fight the good fight.
It's easy to get those daily walks in and plan for and prepare healthy meals when there's time. It's much harder to do those things when you work too many hours, and he travels too much for his job.
I've cut back one class for the spring term because I want my teaching and my life to be more enjoyable and healthy. With the extra time I buy, I can do more, and maybe, just maybe, we can stick to a healthier lifestyle.
I no longer wish to do handstands, receive awards, or go skydiving. I just want to feel as well as possible, live a good life as long as possible.
And maybe I'll run with the bulls in Pamplona before I die. You've got to break the rules every now and then, even if you don't know Jack.
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Sunday, 09 December 2007
There is cold comfort in being able to write it out, to take it and spread it out on the table, piece it together, rip it apart, reassemble, over and over and over again. It helps to deal with the sense of powerlessness. I can do nothing but wait and try to mitigate the damage.
Love. Love is all I can give. Love, and patience. I never realized I possessed so much of each, at the very moment I would most like to act without either.
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Friday, 07 December 2007
When you complete a deadline and have a week's worth of mop-up work ahead of you, there's a tendency to remember things forgotten and to notice things missed.
I've just rediscovered a Christmas Tree Grow Kit behind the big-ass monitor and the Kleenex box. I picked it up in one of the dollar bins at the craft store around Thanksgiving, thinking I might give it to someone at work, but then it got lost in the shuffle, and I've vowed not to return to campus until next year (I just love saying that).
I'm not really sure why I bought this useless item, unless it was because of the mystery. And the shiny pail it sits in. I love shiny pails.
It's sealed, and all I can discover about it without opening it is that it was made in China and distributed in Atlanta by a company whose website is www.buzzyseeds.com. A quick peek at the website makes me think that the rattle inside of my pail is probably potting soil and seeds.
If you think I'm going to grow a Christmas tree from that, you've got another think coming.
I'll never be a wildly popular instructor with my students, but yesterday I had the opportunity to observe them relaxing, which is rare. One class created a party. They ate, they ribbed each other mercilessly, they shared music and even danced in the same room that seemed more like a dungeon all semester.
The other classes elected to drop their papers in my office, and at one point there was standing room only and a lot of lively discussion about academics from students who had mostly been obstinately mute in the classroom.
Life is full of little ironies, don't you think?
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Wednesday, 05 December 2007
As I sit here typing, the charcoal sky is lightening relentlessly into slate, which will turn powder blue by the time I post this. Drinking Newman's Own coffee this morning because I'd never tried his beans, and I like that he is trying to make the world a better place. It's an added bonus that his coffee is actually good.
It's chilly here this morning, and I'm wearing flannel pjs with snowflakes and polar bears. My right sleeve is wet at the bottom from washing two days' worth of dishes because, while I will let everything pile up around me while I grade, I will not begin a day's grading in a dirty house if I can help it. It's just too distracting, and besides, the house is decorated for Christmas.
The muted sounds of traffic have become more frequent since I woke at five. People are rushing to work. I will work at home today. That's the good part of my job. Although I still have another week or two of work, tomorrow is hopefully the last day I have to be on campus this term, another bonus.
What really makes me smile, however, is the fact that the first of my classes voted to throw a party tomorrow when they bring in their final papers. The other two chose the drop-and-run formula, which is entirely understandable. Most students, even when they get what I'm trying to do and see their growth as a writer, still do not like my class. It's a lot of work. I'm tough.
But there's always that one class which really comes together, and it's usually the first class. Often it's the most challenging class to teach early in the term, full of type-A's who are bright and personable and love to distract me from my lesson plan and draw attention to themselves. They're witty, and they have attitude, and they pretty much say what they think, probably because they know that I'll give them the grades they've earned no matter what. There really is no point in sucking up to this instructor.
I like that. I like a challenge. I like the give-and-take, the ebb-and-flow of teaching. I like seeing the differences in this last batch of research projects. Yes, some of them will never learn. Some will fail; others will never do more than what it takes to get by. But many more will rise to meet my "impossibly high" standards, which require them to expend some thought and effort and to grow as writers.
For the most part, they got it, and that fact makes me very happy. And, even though I do not want to leave the house today, I will take a break from grading at some point to go out and order sandwiches for the students who want the party tomorrow (they signed up to bring everything else), and buy cookies (what, me bake?) for the others who will drop their papers off at my office.
I will also write and tuck into the remaining project folders that which my students call my "love notes," sticky notes with snowflakes and snowmen, that tell each one of them that I enjoyed having them in my class this term because, for all the grief they gave me, I did.
I bake students, not cookies, the kind that come pre-mixed. I add a few odd extras to the mix, turn up the heat, and, presto! they're done! and I begin to think about the next batch.
Now, however, my sleeve is dry, and I have to get going on this batch of papers. Been nice chatting with you over coffee. See you later.
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Monday, 03 December 2007
December is about romance. I'm a station-hopper, and lately I've heard more oldy moldy romantic songs than usual, stuff from our past. We're trying to decide what we want to do for our upcoming anniversary, and at this stage I realize that it really doesn't matter what we do because all I want is to spend time with him. This, in itself, is remarkable when you're coming up on your 34th anniversary.
I was raised in an orderly house. He's very messy, leaves stuff around everywhere. Often I fuss at him to be more neat, but then he'll point out my own mess, which seems somehow more neat to me. When he's out of town, the house is so orderly that it's sterile and boring.
He tells the most incredibly corny jokes and one-liners, but we've lived together so long now that I often say the anticipated one-liner before he does, or we'll look at each other, neither one saying the line, and laugh. I'm not nearly as funny on my own.
His fiction tends to run fantasy/sci-fi, while mine is more stereotypically relationship-based, but through the years, our tastes have blended, and we laugh and cry at the same points in films and tend to share key moments in reading with each other. When I'm alone, I can't stand to read or watch films because there's no one to share it with.
Recently, we watched "It's a Wonderful Life" again. There's that part in the movie when George finds Mary, as she would have been had he not been born. She's an old spinster, closing up the library, afraid of this passionate stranger who insists she's his wife. I see myself in this character, or what I would have been had I not met Mr. Bluesky so many years ago at the bus stop.
We so very nearly didn't make it. There were lots of turns in the road that could have become dead ends. We're really very different people, but we've merged to become something neither of us would have been on our own. We enhance each other. When one shows up somewhere without the other, everyone asks for the missing partner.
So whether we spend a romantic weekend in a quaint city, splurge on a three-day pass to theme parks, or find ourselves up to our elbows tearing down old, leaky plumbing and building a new bathroom, it really doesn't matter to me. As long as my better half is here.
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Saturday, 01 December 2007
There is something about teaching writing that makes you analyze everything, or is it that overly analytic people become teachers of writing?
Anyway, this morning I've been pondering vacuums. It sure beats pondering these stacks of papers. A year or two ago, Mr. Bluesky, who often reminds me of Tim Taylor, the Tool Man, bought a shop vac. An ordinary wet/dry vacuum would never do; no, he bought the mother of all vacuum cleaners. At the very least, it could suck a pond dry and eat pets; for this reason, our grandchildren run when they see Grandpa bring in the vacuum. I've never had a problem with this tool, however, because he loves using it so much that he has taken over the vacuuming, and he does a great job. Lately, that vacuum has had a lot of use, what with the family traffic and the fake snow in my little village that kids just love to play with.
Which leads me to this morning's thought process. As I stared at the mounds of work stacked all over my office and the mounds of snow drifting all over my floor, I realized that work is on my brain 24/7. No sooner do I finish one task, then five more pop up. I keep paper and pencil on my nightstand so that I can get some sleep because my first and last thoughts are about what I have to remember to do and what I've forgotten to do.
You see, my brain functions like an old vacuum cleaner these days. According to Wikipedia (don't tell my students I use this source), a vacuum cleaner "create[s] a partial vacuum to suck up dust and dirt," but, as we all know, an ancient vacuum blows out about as much dust and dirt as it picks up. At this time of year, my old brain seems to expel as many thoughts as it picks up, wheezing along and helping no one in particular, least of all me.
Which leads me to my next thought: if a vacuum is a "volume of space that is essentially empty of matter," how can a tool that creates a partial vacuum also fill it? Granted, I've never studied quantum anything, but this apparent contradiction puzzles me, probably because my brain is operating in a partial vacuum that has sprung a leak.
Anyone want to help me out here? Have some time on your hands and want to grade some papers? I keep thinking of a friend's suggestion of the stair-step grading method: throw them down the stairs, and the ones that land on the top step are A's, the ones at the bottom F's.
But then Mr. Bluesky would drag out the vacuum to clean up the mess, and I don't think that even this vacuum is equipped to handle that kind of load.
Ah, well, this was entertaining, for me at least. If you've read this far and want to slug me, get in line. A straight line, please, boys and girls. 
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