I will confess this right up front, before anyone gets any illusions to the contrary. I spent Thursday afternoon glued to my best friend's laptop getting and relaying updates on the weirdness in my neighbourhood while she tended to her son, who had a fever. The intensity with which I followed the story unnerved her.
I wasn't always like this. All the way through college I managed to ferret out the New York Times crossword puzzles without looking at any of the headlines. My whole family was like this when I was growing up. At the dinner table, instead of talking politics and current events like "normal" families, we talked about theology and sex (and often not in that order). Then I met Robin. In the fifteen years I've known him, I have become convinced that Robin has a direct uplink to the Reuters newswire in his cranium. It is virtually impossible to have an intelligent conversation with the man without some sort of base knowledge of world events, and even then he usually leaves me in the dust. (There are two rules at Robin's house: no coffee near the prints (he's a photographer), and don't call during "60 Minutes.")
In order to hold my own over dinner, or at least not feel like an uneducated moron, I started paying attention. The first thing I learned, of course, is that what passes for news in this country does not cut it by the rest of the world's standards. If you want to know what's going on, check the BBC, not NBC. Eventually I spent a stint as his research assistant, surprising him with 150 pages of relevant documents during the first week (I promptly got a raise). Occasionally, I'll still beat him to a source, or send a link to an article he hasn't seen....but not usually. He calls me his border collie, in charge of making sure he has all his research, not to mention keeping track of where he left his glasses, his keys, and occasionally his dog.
But there are times when I feel like a vulture. Thursday was one of them. On 9/11, it was understandable that everyone I knew was glued to their TV, or their ISP, or the radio. But after several days, it started to feel voyeuristic. It started to feel like rubbernecking. And I have a problem with that. When does my need to know what's going on in my surroundings turn into a desire to gawk, to watch the horror show? After 9/11, the Red Cross very neatly solved the problem by calling me in to actually work at ground zero, where not only was there no time and energy left over for watching the news, three-quarters of the time they got it wrong anyway. Not to mention, after 8, 12, or a few times 18 hours at the site, when we finally got back to our rooms, images from ground zero were the last thing we wanted to see.
So where does that leave me?
I teach approximately 85 students during any given semester; most of them are between the ages of 17 and 25, though I've had my share of adult learners too. Two-thirds of these students are one step above either ESL or remedial basic English. One of the first lectures I give is why we must read, and why we must write. This inevitably comes up. One of my students will say, "Yo, Miss." (they all call me Miss, even after they learn my name. I've learned to take it as a badge of honour.) "How come I gotta learn to write? Why I gotta read Fahrenheit 451? I'm gonna be a nurse, not a English teacher." Or a chef, or a phys ed teacher, or fill in the blank. Whatever they pick, it's clearly not "a English teacher."
So I tell them. I tell them about how, maybe, if everyone learned to figure out what they thought, what they really thought, about just one thing, then maybe they could learn how to tell someone else what they really think. And that maybe one day we would stop having to blow each other up to tell people what we think. Or having to cap people just because they're wearing the wrong colours. And they get this.
And then, several weeks later, when we're deep into discussing why books have been banned, why they burn your house down if they find a book in it, and how it came to this point in Ray Bradbury's fictional futuristic society (which is frighteningly accurate; read the "Denham's Dentrifice" scene and think about the last time you got onto your crosstown bus and couldn't find one rider who wasn't wearing an iPod and nodding to his own private beat) and why real news is "dangerous," and I ask them: anybody see the news over the weekend? I'll get some general assents; word gets around, even though nobody watches Ed Murrow anymore, god rest his soul. But the news they know isn't the same news that I know. They know who won the ball game, who got booted off American Idol, what Letterman's Top Ten was. (Okay, I know that too if I can stay up late enough.)
This semester, this conversation came up on a big news weekend. A major celebrity death, and a bunch of car bombs in prominent areas around Baghdad. I asked them, "Okay, how many of you heard that Anna Nicole Smith died over the weekend?" Every hand went up. A lively discussion concerning her more famous attributes ensued for several minutes before I was able to quash it by whistling as if I was hailing a cab. "Now. Anybody know how many people died in Iraq over the weekend?"
Dead silence. A couple of people's faces actually registered: Oh, yeah. Iraq. We still over there? Nobody knew. Nobody could venture even a guess. (In writing this article two months later, I had to do a fair bit of digging. The number of deaths that day was roughly 145-150 civilians--but those are just the reported ones. It does, however, include 45 killed in a suspected insurgent safe house that came as a surprise even to me.)
And they only knew about the one with the biggest tits. Something's seriously wrong with that.
More Sunday Scribblings; more on this post.
06 April 2007
Words from My Pagan Friend Hollie
On Good Friday: What is the worse torture I wonder. The things that happened to him on earth or having to watch his message get lost in translation and having to watch the outcome?
On Easter Sunday: I've told my coworkers that I don't believe in Easter, but chocolate is nondenominational and therefore I believe very strongly in easter eggs and bunnies.
She's got some pretty good points, if you ask me.
On Easter Sunday: I've told my coworkers that I don't believe in Easter, but chocolate is nondenominational and therefore I believe very strongly in easter eggs and bunnies.
She's got some pretty good points, if you ask me.
01 April 2007
Because I Had to Look It Up for My Students
May I present to you My Absolute Favourite Poem Ever (So Far):
Married
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
(Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires, Knopf 1996)
Married
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
(Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires, Knopf 1996)
23 March 2007
In the Kitchen of Memory
This is not the easiest thing for me to write about, because when I remember my husband, he is always in the kitchen.
It's true, too, that whenever I imagine my childhood, and my mother, she is always at the sink doing dishes, or at the massive oak table with the lion's feet pedestal, doing her crossword in the southern light, or (altogether too frequently for my taste) on her knees washing and polishing the hardwood floors she always wanted and my dad finally put in a few years ago. I grew up in that big, pre-Victorian farmhouse, and the kitchen takes up the entire back half of the first floor. It may even predate the rest of the house; though at first glance that seems backwards, it's architecturally feasible. The ceiling in the kitchen is lower than anywhere else, and at certain seams and junctures of certain bearing walls, it appears that the kitchen is what's holding up the house, not vice versa.
Obviously, on a sociological level that's symbolically true for everyone. It's true for society as a whole, it's true for all Irish-American immigrants, and it's true for all East Coast farmers in post-colonial America through the 1800s. But in our house, it may well be literally true as well. A pencil, ball bearing, or other round object dropped anywhere in that house will roll towards the kitchen. Similarly, a teenager doing calculus or a father balancing the checkbook would gravitate there.
These many years later, it's still true. In search of better light, my father will spread his photographic proofs across the table to ascertain which half-stop difference in development he likes better. Though it's often distracting as hell, I'll frequently grade student papers there. My mom still does her crossword puzzles there every Sunday afternoon.
But even more nuclear than this: the kitchen is the central focus around which my marriage was built.
My husband wooed me in the kitchen. While most romances happen in bedrooms, along starlit piazzas, city streets, bars, riverbanks, theatres....ours happened in my tiny apartment kitchen. This beloved, funny man is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and cooking for me was his language of love. Through the meals he prepared, and the care he took, I learned his moods, his fears, his secret childhood dreams, and each twist and turn in the endless rooms of his heart. He marked milestones in our courtship through ingredients, and expressed his deepest emotions through spices or garnishes.
What made our marriage real for me, as much as the rings on my finger and the new last name on my mailbox, was the drawer full of CIA-issued knives in the kitchen where my rusty, mismatched paring knives once lay, and his stockpots nestled in among my frying pans. As a single man living first with his parents and then in a cramped, dim studio apartment in Pennsylvania, those F. Dick & Sons travelled with him in a cracked vinyl roll, oiled and sharpened with his pap's steel more regularly and lovingly than I watered my plants, and now they were arrayed carefully in the drawer of his choice, within easy reach of both the stove and the counter workspace, and the knife roll was tucked away behind the seldom-used Bundt pan, gathering dust. More than anything else, this was to me a promise that he was not leaving. He was home.
(More Sunday Scribblings; more about the marriage kitchen.)
It's true, too, that whenever I imagine my childhood, and my mother, she is always at the sink doing dishes, or at the massive oak table with the lion's feet pedestal, doing her crossword in the southern light, or (altogether too frequently for my taste) on her knees washing and polishing the hardwood floors she always wanted and my dad finally put in a few years ago. I grew up in that big, pre-Victorian farmhouse, and the kitchen takes up the entire back half of the first floor. It may even predate the rest of the house; though at first glance that seems backwards, it's architecturally feasible. The ceiling in the kitchen is lower than anywhere else, and at certain seams and junctures of certain bearing walls, it appears that the kitchen is what's holding up the house, not vice versa.
Obviously, on a sociological level that's symbolically true for everyone. It's true for society as a whole, it's true for all Irish-American immigrants, and it's true for all East Coast farmers in post-colonial America through the 1800s. But in our house, it may well be literally true as well. A pencil, ball bearing, or other round object dropped anywhere in that house will roll towards the kitchen. Similarly, a teenager doing calculus or a father balancing the checkbook would gravitate there.
These many years later, it's still true. In search of better light, my father will spread his photographic proofs across the table to ascertain which half-stop difference in development he likes better. Though it's often distracting as hell, I'll frequently grade student papers there. My mom still does her crossword puzzles there every Sunday afternoon.
But even more nuclear than this: the kitchen is the central focus around which my marriage was built.
My husband wooed me in the kitchen. While most romances happen in bedrooms, along starlit piazzas, city streets, bars, riverbanks, theatres....ours happened in my tiny apartment kitchen. This beloved, funny man is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and cooking for me was his language of love. Through the meals he prepared, and the care he took, I learned his moods, his fears, his secret childhood dreams, and each twist and turn in the endless rooms of his heart. He marked milestones in our courtship through ingredients, and expressed his deepest emotions through spices or garnishes.
What made our marriage real for me, as much as the rings on my finger and the new last name on my mailbox, was the drawer full of CIA-issued knives in the kitchen where my rusty, mismatched paring knives once lay, and his stockpots nestled in among my frying pans. As a single man living first with his parents and then in a cramped, dim studio apartment in Pennsylvania, those F. Dick & Sons travelled with him in a cracked vinyl roll, oiled and sharpened with his pap's steel more regularly and lovingly than I watered my plants, and now they were arrayed carefully in the drawer of his choice, within easy reach of both the stove and the counter workspace, and the knife roll was tucked away behind the seldom-used Bundt pan, gathering dust. More than anything else, this was to me a promise that he was not leaving. He was home.
(More Sunday Scribblings; more about the marriage kitchen.)
21 March 2007
There Was No Picture for "Forgot to Get My Widget"
I've seen these on several scribblers' blogs, went and got one, told my friend fiat about them, and proceeded to not post it here.
Le duh.
Le duh.
18 March 2007
Story-Time
My mother only has three rules for story-time at her local library, and she implements them firmly. As a life philosophy, they're not too bad either.
1. If you sit in front, you have to sit flat on your bottom so that others can see.
2. You can't walk up or down the stairs any faster than the person in front of you.
3. You don't have to pay attention, but you have to be quiet.
I mostly have problems with that last one.
1. If you sit in front, you have to sit flat on your bottom so that others can see.
2. You can't walk up or down the stairs any faster than the person in front of you.
3. You don't have to pay attention, but you have to be quiet.
I mostly have problems with that last one.
17 March 2007
Scribbling #51
I often joke to my students about where Inspiration finds me. I call her poem faerie, long-walk faerie, shower faerie, I-just-submerged-myself-nose-deep-in-potting-soil faerie, middle-of-the-lake faerie. Because of poem-faerie's perverse sense of humour, I try to carry a journal with me almost everywhere, to tempt her, or to tease her. Go ahead. Think you can find me unprepared here?
I am also frequently visited by Inspiration's backhanded friend, Goading. Goading peers out at me from other people's writings, from bookstores, from the clean expanse of freshly changed blue floral sheets, from the antique writing desk in my mother's living room. Goading works in tandem with Inspiration, but more often he conjures up a gossamer-thin ghost-image of Inspiration, which disguises the real nature of the beast: Work.
In the literal, though slightly archaic, etymological sense, thus:
in·spire
(a) to take into the lungs in breathing; inhale
(b) to infuse (breath, life, etc.) by breathing
Even in this instance, it's problematic. Either I'm doing the breathing, or someone else is. Did someone inspire me, and now I'm duty-bound to pay it forward, to breathe life into paper, into ink?
One place I am generally incapable of writing is while running. My father finds this inexplicable; he drafts entire sermons in his head while circling the cinder track. Not me. When I'm running, that's all I'm doing. It takes all of my concentration to run--not so I won't fall over, but so I won't stop. And what stops me when I'm running, if I'm not concentrating, is not my legs. It's my lungs. Most people don't like to be out of breath, and I'm no exception. I spent a good deal of my allergic childhood and asthmatic adolescence this way, and now I do this three to four times a week? On purpose? Madness.
Running, for me, has two purposes. The first, which can possibly be only understood by other long-distance runners, is to get rid of the little men who bounce around my thigh muscles. The second, simply, is to breathe. To inspire, and to expire. Literally, every time I run, it is life and death. I breathe in, I live. I breathe out, I die.
Where do I find this life, this inspiration? I don't know. I've never seen the wind. But I know that without it I will stop breathing.
I am also frequently visited by Inspiration's backhanded friend, Goading. Goading peers out at me from other people's writings, from bookstores, from the clean expanse of freshly changed blue floral sheets, from the antique writing desk in my mother's living room. Goading works in tandem with Inspiration, but more often he conjures up a gossamer-thin ghost-image of Inspiration, which disguises the real nature of the beast: Work.
In the literal, though slightly archaic, etymological sense, thus:
in·spire
(a) to take into the lungs in breathing; inhale
(b) to infuse (breath, life, etc.) by breathing
Even in this instance, it's problematic. Either I'm doing the breathing, or someone else is. Did someone inspire me, and now I'm duty-bound to pay it forward, to breathe life into paper, into ink?
One place I am generally incapable of writing is while running. My father finds this inexplicable; he drafts entire sermons in his head while circling the cinder track. Not me. When I'm running, that's all I'm doing. It takes all of my concentration to run--not so I won't fall over, but so I won't stop. And what stops me when I'm running, if I'm not concentrating, is not my legs. It's my lungs. Most people don't like to be out of breath, and I'm no exception. I spent a good deal of my allergic childhood and asthmatic adolescence this way, and now I do this three to four times a week? On purpose? Madness.
Running, for me, has two purposes. The first, which can possibly be only understood by other long-distance runners, is to get rid of the little men who bounce around my thigh muscles. The second, simply, is to breathe. To inspire, and to expire. Literally, every time I run, it is life and death. I breathe in, I live. I breathe out, I die.
Where do I find this life, this inspiration? I don't know. I've never seen the wind. But I know that without it I will stop breathing.
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