Christmas

My family has a rich tradition during th holidays.  Christmas Eve is almost always at my Nanny's (maternal grandmother) and because her four daughters all live in Salina, we have a houseful.  Good food, gifts for the children, great conversation, and the pure peace that comes from being surrounded by people you love.

Since my divorce, I have often felt separate from the joy of family functions.  Not because of anyone or nothing in my family--I am truly blessed to be a part of this wild and wonderful group--but I have felt alone even in the midst of all this joy simply because it is hard to accept that the partnership I was once half of no longer exists, and the older I get the more I need that alliance.  That feeling of it being us against the world.  I see that in my parents's marriage and in the beautiful family my brother and sister in law are building with my nieces Eva Olive and her 15 days old sister Ivy Elane.  

This Christmas, I did not go home.  Instead, I spent the holiday with the man in my life.  I've never had my own Christmas before, one for which I prepared the food, the guests came to my home, etc. And, with the exceptions of a deep cut to my left index finger trying to cut open a pomegranate for the cheesecake I made and a bizarre nosebleed that came on last night, it went off without a hitch.  

What I've realized this year is that being with the person I love makes me feel connected to the world and to the joy of the moment in ways I simply can't feel when we are apart.  I may not have had the houseful of relatives I've come to know over the years, but I am surrounded by love and that is, without hesitation, doubt, or exception, all I could ever ask for.

Love love love one another.  It is the only thing that matters.

Books; Baby; Boy

BOOKS
been reading like crazy over the last few months, in large part because I need to be taken out of my own life a little.  I have good friends, a job I love, people who support me, a wonderful family, but I find myself emotionally tapped out as the semester draws to a close and, to that end, I seek solace and solitude in books.

I've been reading for as long as I can remember, finding new worlds and new lives to prowl through, inhabit, wear.  When I learned to drive I didnt' know how to get anywhere in the town I grew up in because for years my nose had been too deeply buried in books to notice things like landmarks, directions,a nd street signs.

The run down of recent reads (the last 2-3 months) and my grading of them is as follows:

The Paris Wife, Paula McClain: A. Hemingway's 1st marriage ot Hadley Richardson.  Gorgeously written, captures rhythm and style and sadness of one of America's greatest writers while managing to have its own voice.

The Archivist, Martha Cooley: B+. The only reason this novel about an archivist specializing in the letters between Lucy Hale and T.S. E.iot isn't an A is the unnecessary middle third about the archivist's dead wife.  Boo.  His voice was so perfect, there was no need to introduce her story in that way.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern: B-. There were elements of this that I absolutely loved, particulary the second person sections related to engaging with and encountering the circus, but the multiple plot lines and twisting chronology wasn't always compelling, and the love story was given away from the very beginning. 

Silver Linings Playbook, Matthew Quick: D.I hated this whiny man-boy protagonist from beginning to end.  I felt no empathy for him, no interest in his sad little parade towards mental health, and no desire to find out if he wound up okay or not.  Having been through a divorce and therapy myself, I found Quick's treatment of these issues to be superficial and monotone.

Reunion, Alan Lightman: B-.  This book was an A until the last 30 pages and then if fell apart.  Charles goes to his 30th high school reunion at a small men's liberal arts college, waxes philosophical about a girl he loved briefly as an undergrad, and has flashbacks to those days that are brilliant.  When the twist in that old relatopnship are revealed, however, they are neither beautifully written nor believable.  This had such possiblity, but the end of the novel made me want to burn the book.

The Group, Mary McCarthy: C.  I know why this book about 8 female friends from a prestigious women's college was controversial upon publication--frank sexual talk, backbiting, the truth aboutomen's competition with even their closes friends.  But, the scope was too grand the characters too interchangable for me to care.  I actually didn't finish this one.

An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender: B. I love Bender's magical realism, and this story of a 19 year old woman thrown into a classroom as an emergency second grade math teacher is compelling, if not her best work.  The short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is better for my money.  But, this novel did make me want to know what happens next, and her relationships with her young students were dear and honest.

BABY
My sister-in-law is having my second niece today :)  Teryn and Brandon already have the ever fabulous Eva Olive who brought so much light and joy into my laugh it is staggering to imagine, and today baby number two arrives.  Eva has decided her new little sister shall be christened Twilight Sparkle or Sparkle Lipstick.  I am certain none of these names will appear on the birth certificate, but in the interim of knowing the official name: welcome to the world, Twilight Sparkle Lipstick :)

BOY
Well, man, really.  I have a good one. A great one, actually.  I have a lot of baggage from my marriage.  My ex is a good man who didn't know how to talk to me, how to give me the attention and affection I needed, how to love me as I need to be loved.  That doesn't make him a bad guy by any stretch, it just means we couldn't manage forever together.

But, the man I am with now, gives me every reason to believe that love can be the sustaining foundation beneath a person's feet that allows her to feel stronger, need less, and know more.  I am grateful every day, even for the roughest patches between us, because who we are once the storm passes is always so damn beautiful.

Once more unto the breach...

The past nearly five months have been full of down time, sadness, quiet introspection, silence, loneliness, and books.  There have, of course, been joyous moments, but tonight the quiet is creeping in, and I feel the need to settle in to it. The more I run from it, the more it comes back to haunt me anyway, so I'm going to give the beast a few words and hope it sloughs away for a while.

Friends I love have cancer. Women I love don't know they are worth more than the relationships they stay in. The man I love is beyond my reach in many ways. People I love have moved away. Students I believe in have dropped out. Decisions I've made regarding my financial future have blown up in my face. And let's not mention the lack of fitness this frame of mine exhibits.

In the immortal words of a positivity guide I saw on Etsy: shit's fucked.

I cannot think of a worse stretch of years.  I understand that being a human is hard, that life isn't meant to be sunshine and roses, that you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life. The facts of life. I get it. I just can't help but wonder when the good will come back around.

My job is as fulfilling as it is heartbreaking most days, but the crush of work has been nearly unbearable lately, and most of my students have no interest in learning anything. The majority of them want to show up, do the bare minimum, and be handed an A on a silver platter. When I suggest they work, read, learn, they scoff and tell me none of their other teachers cares this much, so what is my problem.  Indeed. What IS my problem?

I guess my problem is that I want the world to be good. I want the people I care for to be happy. I want the minds I encounter to be open and ready for new information. I want to see goodness in the world and to feel a deep sense of gratitude for my part in a universe that allows me to love this much. My problem is that I care more than nearly every one I know about almost everything.

And so at night, surrounded by books that serve as my most frequent companions these days, I am discovering a troubling truth about myself. I don't mind solace in the least, but I am not made for so much isolation. I need to share my life, my heart, my need to care. I need that, and yet I cannot seem to find a way to do it that doesn't potentially break my heart. And there it is, the fact we all want to avoid: vulnerability is the only real road to intimacy and connection, but being vulnerable can terrify us away from the very relationships that yield said intimacy and connection.

Tonight I say a prayer for all of us waiting on the sun, trying to believe in a tomorrow brighter than today, offering our open hands towards the sky that they may be filled with so much hope and promise.

Alas

While I am still reading and trying to be healthy, I have had to abandon my summer project.

My house being on the market for so long and not selling prompted my realtor to suggest I find a new place and go ahead and move so that investors (i.e. people who want to turn my home of the last three years into another shithole rental just like all the other once nice townhomes on this street) are more likely to buy an empty house.

So, the last few weeks have been incredibly busy looking for and finding a great new apartment, packing up the house, and preparing to move.  I get keys tomorrow and will slowly move over the week until I have a moving truck and assistance with big items on Thursday.

I imagine I'll hit 30 books by the end of the summer, but the 25 lbs lost will have to be a goal for a future date.

Hope summer has been treating you well.

25-50-75: Day 32

25 Hit the gym this morning. Hard. I feel good, tired and a little sore, but good. Healthy lunch at 715 today, looking forward to organic free range deliciousness. 50 Finished The Lonely Polygamist. It was too involved, much like the title character. I am finding it hard to concentrate on anything the last few weeks. Probably anxiety about my damn house not selling. I'm officially in the phase of now not ebing ale to pay my mortgage due to my increased student loan debt. Pray for me, universe. I am slowly working my way through shame researcher (yes, that is a real thing ) Brene Brown's book The Gift of Imperfection. I read a friend's copy last year, but now reading my own copy means annotating and internalizing a lot offer brilliant ideas. Like talking about your shame so it doesn't control. Acknowledging tht we all feel shame at some point, that guilt is the notion of having done something bad while shame is the idea that we are inherently bad. Pretty great stuff. I am a work in progress, y'all. Trying every day to accept and love myself so that I may more fully accept and love others. I the words of Jack Black, "being human is hard."

25-50-75: Day 27

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No more progress in terms of pounds, but I am feeling better about my food choices and the way I treat my body.  I've also not gone to the pool in a little while.  It isn't that I don't still love the sun and the easy lull of the water, but even with sunscreen I could see the freckles popping out across my face, and I don't love them.  So, I need a new sunhat (I seem to have lost the cute one I bought at the beginning of the summer).

50
Less progress here than I'd hoped.  I'm still stuck on the Udall.  It's good, but I'm not as interested in finishing it as I am in other things I've been reading.  Working my way through things for school--I can't imagine spending the summer not thinking about what I will teach during the year--has been really good.  I'm teaching a class I've never taught, and I have a good plan for it finally, now I just need to tweak the other courses.

The other book I'm reading is The Gift of Imperfection by Brene Brown.  Self-help?  Maybe, but I am not too proud to admit when I need a little help, and this one is all about the necessity of self-acceptance as the road to pure and unconditional love.  I believe that true and passionate love will be mine, but I want to be whole enough to accept and enjoy it, and for that to happen, I have to be healthy in all forms.

25-50-75: Day 22

25
Lost 4 pounds so far.  Not the marathon weight loss I'd envisioned, but I am happy for progress.  The goal here has never been about becoming thin--I'm never going to be that, I never have been that, and I don't particularly want to be that, I like my curves--but I do want to be healthier.  So, I'm aiming for a healthy weight that makes me feel good.  It's never been about the number on the scale so much as it is about how my body feel and how my clothes fit.  I feel good when I'm a size 12, I'm not now, so that's my goal.  I have an idea of what weight goes with that size, but if I'm off by a little I don't care.  I'm not making health changes to become some fashion-forward bastion of beauty and consumer/capitalism driven style.  And I'm certainly not doing it for a man.  Anyone lucky enough to be with me will love me for who I am, not how I look.

50
Having just completed In the Woods by Tana French, I can say I have read 12 books so far and am into my 13th.  Again, the going is slower than I anticipated, but on the book front part of that is due to choosing 300+ pagers.  If I stuck with smaller books, as a friend told me, I could knock a lot more out.  I quickly thanked him for his foray into the world of the obvious and picked up the 599 page The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall.

First, the French.  As a rule I do not read supermarket fiction.  You know the ones I mean, endcaps at Dillons or Hy-Vee with the "hot" reads of the day, all splashily displayed with the same wanton lust as, say, detangler or white tea and jasmine scented hand lotions.  These are not items you buy the grocery store: they're too expensive and too main stream to be considered luxurious in anyway save for the price.  But, we've all been known to buy ourself a little happy in the form of an over-priced egg shaped lip balm (strawberry flavored) simply because it was too cute to not get us out of our self-indued-why-won't-someone-ever-really-love-me-funk, and so, thus entered French's novel into my life.

Told in first person by an Irish detective with a carefully cultivated British accent to hide his cultural heritage, it's the story of a man looking into the murder and disappearance of a 12 year old girl in the woods in a suburb just out of Dublin.  A wood where three other children disappeared years before, only one of whom returned.  And that boy was our detective.  A little cliche, sure, but the man's mania over not being able to remember the events of that tragic day plays so beautifully against the taut suspense of the current case that you don't get tripped up by the obvious over-reaching of the parallel, or at least I didn't.

This isn't a book that will win any awards for earth-shattering fiction writing, it's not Colum McCann for heaven's sake, but it was gripping and I did enjoy it.  If you need a good summer read, beach or pool or couchside, it's a good one. (Lovers of crime shows will dig it, people with young children may want to steer clear).

The Udall is good so far.  As the title implies, it revolves around a man practicing the principle of plural marriage.  He has 4 wives and 32 children and a failing construction business.  Already the ties to HBOs Big Love--a show I loved until they copped out with the series finale--and it rings with the truth of the memoir I read last week, Escape.  I may have noted before that I have a fascination with Mormons and ploygamy, but in this case I really wanted to read something else by Udall.  I read his Miracle Life of Edgar Mint when it first came out and loved it, so I was eager to see that this had to offer.

Nearly a third of the way in to this challenge, I can say I am proud of myself for sticking with it.  If I want a day off from the healthy eating, I take it.  If I want to watch movies instead of read (as I did today: The Rum Diary, B+ and Love & Other Disasters, C) I do.  The challenge isn't about completion in a lockstep way that keeps me from enjoying it, it's about the journey and trying to push myself.

As a very wise person said to me today, perfection doesn't exist so trying to achieve it is absolutely pointless.  Instead, we have to look for the things that feed our souls.  That's what this summer is about for me.  I hope you are doing the same.

25-50-75: Day 18

25
Dinner: turkey meatballs, whole wheat pasta, homemade pasta sauce: olive oil, Roma tomatoes, green onions and garlic simmered and mashed until sauce-y.  Topped with shaved parmesan.  Yes.

4th day in a row at the pool.  Much quieter today, plenty of time to read.  Got more sun and the hair is FINALLY starting to lighten up after the home dye-job disaster of early 2012.

Lots of water: Pamplemouse.  And my favorite iced tea: Celestial Seasonings Cool Brew-Peach.

50
Hated the ending to Blue Angel.  Seriously.  The guy gets busted for his affair and as he leaves the mock trial on campus realizes he's been set up from the very beginning.  Just then the campus bells, which he has always found annoying until now, begin to chime and he feels liberated from his buttoned-down back East existence.  BOO.

Read two more today: Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons and Mister Posterior & the Genius Child by Emily Jenkins.

Ellen Foster was better when I read it the first time, but it was called Bastard Out of Carolina then and it was written by Dorothy Allison.  Gibbons has a decent voice, but I could never told how old the narrator was supposed to be in the telling and it distracted me from the story.  Also, it was unclear if her father was black or if he just associated with blacks.  This seems small, but the way her grandmother treats Ellen because of the grandmother's disdain for Ellen's father makes the distinction important.  Quick read, but not great.

Mister Posterior etc. was good, but it too has a better corollary.  The Summer of Naked Swim Parties by Jessica Anya Blau does a much better job of capturing early 70s sexual rebellion-post sexual revolution.  I didn't hate Jenkins' book, but I did find the eight going on nine year old narrator's comfort with the naked ass flashing that occurs over a period of months outside her bedroom window to be disingenuous.  I have a hard time any kid, when confronted with a "wiggly, hairy" male ass would be so mellow about it that they'd refer to it as "just a bottom".  Maybe I'm uptight, but I didn't buy it.

 

25-50-75: Day 17

25
New salad obsession has ruled my life yet again.  Spring mix, cherry tomatoes, green onions, goat cheese, almonds, white wine vinegar and olive oil dressing.

Book room work is done.  Gym is on deck for Friday morning--tomorrow I'm typing up inventory--any suggestions for a good workout playlist?

Day three at the pool; oh, sun.  I do love you so.

50
While I was home for the River Festical, I read a book I forgot to write about: Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven.  It's Appalachia before WWII and Velva Jean's mother, just before she dies, tells her daughter to "live out there" as she gestures to the world beyond the windows of their small mountain home.  I was completely transported by this book.  The era fascinates me anyway--prohibition, moonshine--and the setting is brilliantly described.  Having just read the Bondurant novel and watched "Hatfields and McCoys", I was primed for a novel set in that are with a female protagonist, and Velva Jean does not disappoint.

As she grows into a beauty, she becomes fixed on a young revivalist preacher named Harley Bright, the same young man who she used to call the moonshiner's boy when they were young and he was trouble, before he found his way to salvation.  The novel covers her life before him and with him, and throughout its telling there are rich descriptions of land and love, of what it means to want someone so badly you lose yourself in the wanting.  It was beautiful and full of aching hope.

The novel of today is Blue Angel by Francine Prose.  It is a decidedly different beast.  Most everything else I've read would be pretty accessible to most audiences, but I have a hard time imagining everyone would love this.  Set on a small east coast college campus, the protagonist (Swenson) is the novelist in residence and is teaching a particularly diverse writer's work shop including a young Boston Brahmin girl he refers to as Back Bay Barbie. This--among many other things--cracked me up, but if you aren't familiar with the references this book would probably either be a snoozer for you or a plain old irritation.

Case in point: the campus is worrying about sexual harassment in the wake of an incident at a neighboring state school.  The dean throws a dinner party to feel out the English department about the climate on their own campus; one professor talks about his class referring to Poe as a child molester after learning of his marriage to his 13 year old cousin.   Another says a particularly evangelical young lady told him she felt 'unsafe' after a class discussion surrounding possible gay overtones in the relationship between Pip and Magwich in Great Expectations.   Finally, the female poet in residence shares a story about trying to open her students' minds to the notion of what a poem can mean.  To do this, she read them "This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin.  Her students did not respond well, and one of her colleagues tears Larkin apart for being self-pitying and essentially a waste of time.

Now, if you read the above paragraph and laughed because those references all resonate with you, then this is your book.  If not, skip it.  Me, I'm having a ball.  Of course all of this surrounds the central story of the professor who falls for his weird looking but incredibly talented young female student and the havoc it wreaks on his wife.  Not very original, but Prose can write, so I'm eager to finish it.

Next up, either The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacob or I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron.  Any votes?

25-50-75: Day 15

A million pardons for the hiatus, lovely reader(s).  I had a hellacious week last week that included an overview session about Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts--check this out for more info. about what I saw and the guy I heard: Shanahan On Literacy.

For those of you who don't know, I am passionately committed to my job.  So much so that I don't even like to think of it as a job.  It's a calling.  That may sound strange, but there is simply no other word for it.  This is the work I am meant to do in the world.  To teach students to think critically, write coherently, and above all to believe that their individual voice matters, well, the fact that I get paid to do all of that is really just icing on a decadently rich and rewarding cake.

25

That being said, the time I am putting in in the bookroom is hampering the 25 portion of this challenge.  My upper body and legs are stronger without question--hauling books around and moving them from top to bottom shelves, packing and moving boxes weighing anywhere from 3-40 pounds, that's strength training if ever I've done it, but I miss sweating pushing myself to my limit at the gym, so I am trying to work out a schedule that will make that more possible.  The good news is the book room is almost done, and when it is complete, I promise to post pictures so you can revel in the magical wonderland that is the newly organized space.  I should have taken before pictures, but the afters will just have to do.

The good thing about this challenge, though, is that I am being more conscious of what I put in to and how I treat my body.  From my time in the sun at the pool to the way I eat, I'm trying to be more aware and in the moment.  At the pool, I lay and read for much of the time, but I try to take ten minutes out of every hour to watch the clouds, listen to the water lapping, breathe in the chlorinated air, giggle along with the littlest kids who find every new splash to be a revelation.  And when it comes to food, I am realizing more and more that when I eat fast food--and yes, I have fallen off that wagon--I not only feel badly about my choice to eat it, but I also feel physically bad.  So, tonights dinner of a spring mix salad with almonds, peas, cherry tomatoes, goat cheese, and an olive oil/white wine vinegar dressing is the kind of thing I am going to work to include in my diet.  I like to eat healthily, I jut always take the time. But, if I'm not going to care for my body, no one else will, and I want to love myself enough to be good to myself, so here's to me trying.

50

I gave up on the Arsonist's Guide to Homes in New England.  If I can't care about your main character in the first 100 pages, I'm not ever going to care about him, so your book can suck it.  (For other revelatory things that make main characters detestable, check out this great list from novelist Chuck Wendig: 25 Reasons I Hate Your Main Character)

Luckily, the book I picked up after the Arsonist's debacle kept me riveted: Carolyn Jessop's Escape is a 400+ page recounting of her escape, at the age of 34, from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints community in which she was raised.  When she left she had eight children and had been married to a man 30 years her senior for seventeen years.  The book never felt long, never felt like it needed to be edited, it was harrowing and shocking and honestly disgusting in some places.  I just cannot believe that in people can confuse loving God with polygamy, child abuse--physical and sexual--and complete and total domination of women through a patriarchal power structure built around large families that seek to keep women pregnant and silent at all times.  One of the most sickening notions was that of perfect obedience in which a wife will earn favor with God if she completely submits to her husband's will in all ways, even when he is being abusive, neglectful, or psychotic.

The older I get, the more I understand the nature of submission.  Not in the sense that I want to turn my life over to a man, but I believe the Biblical teaching that a wife submits to her husband so long as he loves her to the point of being willing to lay down his life for her.  That's the section of the verse that gets left out when people start talking about male dominance and the Bible.  I am as feminist as they come, but this verse--to me--is about mutual sacrifice and true partnership.  I don't know too many couples that exhibit these behaviors because they are damn hard to comply with.  Isn't our first instinct one of self-preservation?  Why would we lay down our lives for someone else, even someone we love, if it meant losing ourselves?  And why would we give up our position and allow someone else's choices to speak for us if it means silencing our perspective?  But I don't think that's what God calls us to do.  I think we're supposed to try as hard as we can to love one another as fully as we can, to create a union made from perfect love that is forgiving, patient, helpful, and unconditional.  It is not easy.  It means bending when everything in us says to just go ahead and break under the pressure, but if two people really love one another--and I mean ANY TWO PEOPLE, gay, straight, lesbian, what have you--then I believe they should work towards that perfect love all the days of their lives.

Clearly, in the case of Carolyn Jessop--and in the case of my marriage and many others like me--there comes a point when bending is no longer possible.  There are obstacles that cannot be overcome no matter how desperately we may want to hang on.  In Jessop's case, leaving the FLDS meant abandoning the only life she had ever known, renouncing her faith that had instilled in her the belief that she was chosen among God's people to live the principle of plural marriage, and to begin again in a world she knew very little about.  Imagine trying to navigate social services when your only access to money was through the cash your husband gave you when he felt like it.  Yikes.

For the rest of us, often our marriages end because the two people involved weren't ever able to be honest with one another, because we grow apart, because what we need and what the other person can give us are so far apart that we may as well be living on separate planets.  But this book, Escape, made me think deeply about what it means to love someone, what it means to love God, and what it means to love myself.  I never renounced my faith, but I had some years when believing was hard for me.  My mother's cancer took that faith and ran it through every wringer you can imagine.  And I never like the treatment of women in the Bible.  But I found my way back to a faith that works for me, one that is accepting and honest and full of love.  And I've come out of my divorce with the belief that no matter how hard it may be to fall in love again, I'm committed to doing it because I deserve to be happy and to share my life with someone.

But first, I gotta love me. So here's to that.

25-50-75: Day 8

25

Absolutely no progress.  Everything is as it was a week ago.  Better than gaining weight, for sure, but not so joyful on the losing front.

Book room boxing and hauling is giving me more upper body strength, I can feel the muscles working with less pain than they did a week ago, so that is goo, but I haven't made it back to the gym.  I love it there, but I can't get motivated at 5 a.m., and I don't want to go at night, which means I either sacrifice time in the book room or at the pool, and I don't want to do either of those things...I'll figure it out.

50

Started An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England today by Brock Clarke.  It's good so far, funny, a little irritating.  The protagonist/arsonist accidentally burned down Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst and killed two people in the process.  The novel follows him in the aftermath--the way aftermath--after he's served 10 years in prison for the crime and emerges a 28 year old virgin with an inability to tell people he loves the truth about his past.  

I'm definitely engaged, but if he doesn't do something redemptive soon, I'm going to have to decide if reading the whole thing is worth it.

I ran into a dear friend at the pool today who complimented me on my efforts on this little quest--thank you for that affirmation that this isn't just floating in the void.  I don't know who's reading, and I'm not really writing for anyone but me, but come on--we all like to hear feedback once in awhile, right?

***

On another note, my dear ex-husband stayed the night here last night.  The carbon monoxide detector in his apartment went off and it rattled him--me, too--so he crashed on the couch.  It's the first time we've spent the night under the same roof since the month he moved out, June 2010.  It was a little weird at first, his familiar pajama pants and college t-shirt, the tightening in my chest when he played with Zelda, but then that was it.  No pain, no remorse, no sadness.  I didn't once look at him and think we should still be together.  It was just one friend helping another out.  I'm so proud of us that we can be this way.  Our divorce was never about not loving one another.  It was about loving each other too much to stay in an unhappy marriage: we wanted each other to be happy, and it just wasn't going to happen in our marriage.

So, here's to happiness, wherever you can find it, even if--especially if--you have to make really tough decisions to get there.  Joy is worth it, people.  You are worth it.  Always.

25-50-75: Day 7

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No work out, no sweating, some stretches for my aching neck and back and some tylenol.  I slept strangely last night, woke up all splayed out on the bed, covers twisted half way round, from odd fits even odder dreams.  My body, I think, wants water and rest, two things I've been neglecting.  So, I ate healthily today, but gave the lump of flesh that transports me a rest.  I'll weigh myself tomorrow morning to see how much progress I've made and, if I'm feeling brave, I'll let you in on it then.

50
Finished Wettest County and it was everything I thought it would be.  Read George Saunders' Pastoralia and thankfully had no expectations for it to meet.  It wasn't bad, it was just a lot of sardonic skepticism wrapped in wry and clever-for-clever's-sake observations about American life, and I was frankly unimpressed.

I spoke to a friend tonight about this, and what I concluded was that Saunders seems to be at the forefront of American post-modern absurdist fiction, but his take is--for me--ultimately soulless.  He characters don't change or learn anything new, there's no sense of humanity lurking beneath the surface, it's all just vapid commercialism and theme parks designed to poke fun at who we are.  And I just don't need a book to do that for me.  I get that humanity is flawed and that Americans in particular have a pretty deadlock on narcissism and a seemingly endless lack of empathy, but you know what?  I still fundamentally like people.  I like that we are all colossal fuck-ups in the giant bowl of soup that is time.  I like us.  I like that we keep trying, that we keep falling down and screwing up and making really bad choices and hurting people we love and yet we still. keep. trying.  I like that about us as a species, and I guess I need my fiction--even when it's filled with deplorable human beings--to still seem to have been written by someone who deep down likes people.

(Two writers of absurdist post-modern American fiction that get it right, the whole liking people thing, can be found HERE and HERE)

On the advice of the aforementioned good friend, I'm taking a night off from reading.  I have a raging headache and a profound need to sit on my couch and watch season one episodes of Law & Order: SVU on Netflix, so I'm going to feed that need.

I hope your weekend was filled with beautiful things.  This is the face that makes me happiest:

25-50-75: Day 6

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Officially off the wagon when it comes to the no fast food thing.  Why must McDonald's breakfast sing its siren song to me as I drive by in the morning, and why was I not smart enough to eat before I left the house?  Answer: because sometimes you want salt and fat and your body and car take you to it against your will.

I worked up in our school book room again today and loved every second of it.  So far I've packed up 52 boxes to be shipped off to our district office, and I am nowhere near done yet.  As much as I love the life of the mind I have cultivated for myself, there is a real intense pleasure that comes from working a physically strenuous job and being able to see the fruits of your labor at the end of the day.  And my arms are burning like a sonofabitch, so I must be doing something right.

Spent three hours at the pool this afternoon, then home to read and relax.  A good good day.

50
Almost done with The Wettest County in the World, and it is EXCELLENT.  The writer is a Bondurant himself, so he's writing about his own family history here, and while much of the story is embellished, the major events are all rooted in things that actually happened (scroll to the novel and epitaphs on the author's site to see) which makes for a pretty compelling narrative.  Also, I am a sucker for a good Southern voice, and this guy has it.  A bit like Woodrell in the way that the male characters are heartbreakingly flawed, but Bondurant's men are redeemed by their perfectly honorable intentions.  It's their piss poor execution and stubbornness that gets them in over their heads time and again.

I downloaded this song today--it's from the Hatfields & McCoys soundtrack--and it pretty much perfectly accompanies the novel.  You should give it a listen.

Next up is a short story collection by George Saunders called Pastoralia.  A number of my friends have read and loved him, he's actually been on my radar a long time but I've never gotten around to checking him out, so...heeeeeeeere's Georgie.

Finally, I have to note that my unstructured time thing has gotten to me a bit today.  I gave myself things to do, but without a goal or purpose my mind wanders, and it often makes it back to dark corners from days gone by.  I am not in a bad place, no need to fret, but I have discovered a new truth about myself: when given time to do nothing but think, my thinking tends towards the sad and painful.  I have always fancied myself an optimistic person, but I think much of that was the me born of distraction: when you're busy, who has time to be melancholy and reflective?

So the vow is to stay busy.  Not to the point of never relaxing, but busy enough that my time is spent LIVING my life rather than sitting about ruminating on it.

25-50-75: Day 5

It's June 1st and the weather is strange.  More like fall than impending summer.  I'm happy for cool air as it makes working in air-condition-less rooms much easier, but I haven't been to the pool since Monday, and my body aches for sun and water.

Two days of training kept me from the gym, but I got a workout today, though not on an elliptical machine.

25
I spent the morning boxing and moving books in our high school book room.  I've taken on this behemoth task the last couple of summers, and while it is admittedly a lot of work, I love it.  It strains my muscles, makes me curse publishers for putting out crap textbooks that become obsolete within a month of publication, and it requires me to rise early if I want to get in any pool time in the afternoon, but I love it.  Nothing is more rewarding that hauling 40 pound boxes of books around and reorganizing space to be more efficient, right?

I spent a number of years working in bookstores or working in the book sections of bigger stores, so being in three small rooms, attached by doorways, filled with floor to ceiling bookshelves, is a bit like coming home.  Today I moved 18 boxes to a classroom on the first floor, packed up 9 boxes for our district office, moved out 2 empty bookshelves, and came up with a reorganization plan that is pretty genius.  If I do it right there will be an empty room that can become my office and that would be just fan-damn-tastic.

The healthy eating thing has been tragically out of practice.  Why can't I resist the lure of chicken nuggets?  Answer: I'm too lazy to be prepared at home for needing to eat in a hurry.  So the solution is to spend some quality time at the grocery store and in my kitchen this weekend prepping healthy food I can eat on the fly.  No more excuses.

50
It took me a little time to get through the most recent book, not because it was long or involved, but the short stories all had to do with cancer or divorce or relationships in various stages of decline, and those subjects are difficult for me to process.  My mom's rounds of cancer have, over the years, messed me up in ways I am still dealing with.  I just never let myself fully process how I felt when she was sick until last summer--when a major part of my life fell apart for a bit--and I was forced to sit with all my feelings and just. fucking. deal with them.  It was ugly and hard and not something I would wish on my worst enemy, but I am better for having gone through it.

That being said, if you want some cathartic sadness in your life, go pick up a copy of Mary Clyde's Survival Rates.  There is redemption in it, sort of, but you have to be willing to stretch pretty far to find it.  Which is, I suppose, why she won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction when the book came out.  Like O'Connor, nothing is easy for Clyde's characters and, by association, nothing is easier for their readers either.

Next up is Matt Bondurant's The Wettest County in the World.  It's the book the new movie Lawless is based on (which I saw a preview for whilst attending Snow White & the Huntsman today--I LOVED it).  I started this book last summer but never finished it, my head just wasn't in memoir space, but it is now, so it's on deck.

Sidebar: if you haven't seen the History channel's Hatfields & McCoys mininseries, run don't walk.  I have one more part to watch and I am absolutely hooked.  If history had been this interesting in high school, I would have been an infinitely better student.

25-50-75: Day 3

25
No gym for me this morning as I woke up and my entire body was in revolt.  I, apparently, have abs, and they are very very angry with me.  Add that to the riot in my calves and total rebellion in my hamstrings and, well, no gym.  Plus I attended an all day training at our district office to learn how to create iBooks for our classroom, so my time was somewhat limited.  [for anyone thinking the training was lame, you're wrong: it was totally cool.  I'm going again tomorrow to build a book for my American Lit classes, and I am sort of beyond dorkily excited about it.]

Healthy breakfast, lunch out at La Familia where I didn't engage in rice and beans and took advantage of their hot salsa's ability to curb my appetite.  By the time I got home, I was super hungry, but I managed to forage healthily in my own fridge, so it's been a win win in the eating well column.  The hardest thing for me is missing the sun.  I love the pool, and I won't be back there til Friday.  Oh well.  Gym again tomorrow, no soreness as an excuse.

50
Finished Mantel's An Experiment in Love.  Eh.  The pace didn't pick up, though the darkness beneath the surface panned out.  A hidden pregnancy, the narrator wasting away as she denied herself food in an effort to save her limited funds while at boarding school, a couple of abortions.  You know, typical English school girl fodder.  It was alright, but unless you are a fan of watching flies narrowly escape getting stuck to slow drying paint, I wouldn't recommend it.  It's not so much that it was bad as that there was very little at stake ever, and that just drives me crazy in a novel.

Next, I'm going to hit a collection of short stories by Mary Clyde called Survival Rates.  I was completely intrigued by the cover (below) and the author's personal history.  She went to Brigham Young, is a Mormon (Mormons FASCINATE me, I think it's the whole tablets in the desert, magic underwear thing), and she has five kids with her husband, but the descriptions of the stories sounded dark enough that I bet there's a bit more to old Mary than meets the eye.  I'll keep you posted.

25-50-75: Day 2

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Oh how I've missed the gym.  I can't always get the juice up to go, but when I do, I ALWAYS feel better.  Someone should remind me of this when I complain about feeling, well, anything negative.  Being there, my heart rate rising, my body pouring sweat as I push forward, makes me feel in control of this lump of a body I've been given.  [that is not a slam on myself: we're all given lumps, it's up to us to shape them as we choose] Of course, some of us get Charlize Theron lumps and some get Roseanne Barr lumps, but we can all make them into whatever we choose.  Thus, the gym.

To be truly motivated, I need a good playlist.  Today, I had an average heart rate of 124, I went 65 minutes on a Total Body Elliptical machine with a distance of 5.07 miles and 548 calories burned.  This basically means I burned off my breakfast.  Word.  How did I do it?  With this playlist:

The Believer--Common feat. John Legend (Warm Up)
God is a DJ--Pink
Umbrella (workout mix)--Power Music Workout
Independent Women, Pt. 1--Destiny's Child
Lapdance--N.E.R.D.
Womanizer--Britney Spears
Shake Ya Ass--Mystikal
Wind It Up--Gwen Stefani
Right Round--Flo Rida
Fergalicious--Fergie
Move Ya Body--Nina Sky
N**** What, N**** Who--Jay-Z
When I Grow Up--The Pussycat Dolls
Grown Woman--Mary J. Blige feat. Ludacris
Carry Out--Timbaland feat. Justin Timberlake
Everywhere I go--Lissie (Cool Down)
So Are You to Me--Eastmountainsouth (Cool Down)

Are some of these songs ruthlessly offensive?  Yes.  Does the feminist in me cringe at lines like "B**** ride a d*** like she's making a baby"?  Yes.  But I'm not really listening to the lyrics.  I'm pushing myself to the beat, and try as I might, I can't get myself motivated to workout while listening to Nickelback or Creed.  I need something dirty and pulsing and a little bit wrong, but I balance it with my lady-power anthems to feel a little less like a traitor to my gender.

Lunch out with the girls and then healthy dinner on deck--Healthy Choice, actually.  I'm going to add a salad and extra vegetables to it to make it more filling, but I'm not in the mood to cook today.  So thank you frozen food industry for supplying alternatives to bowls of Golden Grahams (my typical go to when I am too lazy to cook).

50
Finished Tomato Red last night as predicted.  I don't want to give anything away for those of you who might want to read it.  Woodrell has a pattern, at least in the three I've read by him so far.  Set up a tragic situation with people who could not possibly be any more flawed, reveal something almost redeeming about them only to have that trait morph into something sinister/evil/just plain MESSED up, insert major tragedy (sometimes more than one), and then watch all the shit hit the spinning-so-slowly-it-barely-disturbs-a-fly-in-the-outhouse fan.  And all of this takes place in the deepest dankest dens of the Ozarks.  It's not pleasant, and it's not always easy to read, but I'll be damned if it isn't well written.

I started a novel last night that I picked up on the dollar clearance shelf at Half Price Books.  I cannot tell you how many gems I've discovered there solely based on an intriguing title or back cover blurb.  I'm not sure yet if this one falls into the gem category, but I'm going to stick with it.  The book, An Experiment in Love, by Hillary Mantel (Brit, raised Catholic, attended a convent, lost her faith and at 18 began studying law at the London School of Economics), focuses on the relationship between three young girls in school in England in 1970.  It's been alternately clever, descriptive, and slow thus far, btu there's something dark beneath the surface that's keeping me interested.  I will most likely finish it tonight, so look for more on it tomorrow.

25-50-75: Day 1

Though our last contract day at school was Friday, so technically this past weekend was the beginning of my summer break, it didn't really feel like break until today.  Why?  Because today, I went to the public pool for the first of many leisurely and sun-drenched afternoons to come.

I should start by saying I woke at seven, read for a bit, had breakfast, played with my dog, and then took myself to Half Price Books in Olathe where I purchased some of the materials I will need for that elusive number up there in the title of this post.  But, again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I was a kid, we went to Kanopolis Lake a lot.  Enough that my brother and I looked like little brown loaves of bread with butter hair--we were both blondey blonde then.  As we aged, we darkened up. Well, our hair did.  While we both still get a little color in summer, it's nothing compared to the lake days.  And we went to the public pool in Salina, too.  I don't remember who we went with, it must have sometimes been a babysitter of some kind since our parents both worked, but there are times I know we went as a family because I remember thinking how beautiful my mom looked in what I think of now as her ultra-80s white one piece--oddly reminiscent of that famous one worn by Liz Taylor--and I remember watching my father execute picture perfect dives off the high board.  Not very many dads can do that.  Mine was a champion diver in high school, so he was skilled in that area, but at the time I didn't think about his training, I just thought he was infinitely cool.

In grade school I took private swimming lessons, lessons at the public pool, and lessons at the YWCA.  I lived for the water.  I was advanced enough to take lifeguard classes by the time I was 12, but you weren't allowed to take them til you were 14, and then we moved, so that whole guarding life thing never panned out for me.  

The point of all of this is that I love the water.  I LOVE the water.  Perhaps it's cliche to mention here that I am also a Cancer, a born water sign, but it's true no matter how silly it seems to say so.  When I am near water, all pressures of the world ease.  I float, I feel the sun, I hear people being obnoxiously loud, sure, but more than that, I hear the lapping of the waves, I smell the lake air or the thick huff of chlorine.  And, a couple of times, I've even been lucky enough to suck down giant lung-fulls of ocean air.  No matter what the water source, when I'm near it, I feel at home.  

Which is why today felt like the start of break: I was near the water.  I packed my bag, grabbed my summer pool pass (a steal during last week's per-season special--at only $60 for the whole summer, it means I'll basically be paying about a buck fifty for each trip versus the cash in had price of four dollars), and headed out.  

As I lay there reading Julie & Julia by Julie Powell, I got this idea.  Her project--to cook all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just 365 days--was daunting, irritating and times, but I have to admit it was also a bit inspiring.  I kept thinking about my summer break.  I will be working in my building to inventory and re-organize our department book room every morning in June, and most mornings in July I will be up there working up course packs, curriculum guides, and lesson plans for the classes I'll teach all year including a new on I'm really excited about, but I will have afternoons and evenings free.  No papers to grade, no school meetings, just me and time.  And me and time have never been good on our own.  We need a buffer.  A plan.  A helpful friendly routine to make one of us pass productively without the other one passing out.

So, I have devised the following plan.  From today, May 28th, through August 10th, I plan to lose 25 pounds and read 50 books in what works out to be 75 days.  Technically classes don't start back up till the 16th, but the 10th is the last free Friday of the summer, and I know I'll spend part of that last weekend up in my room getting ready, so the 8/10 is a good stopping day. 

What do the 25 pounds and the 50 books have to do with the pool?  I'm glad you asked.  I have been planning to start going to the gym again this summer for awhile now.  I like myself, but I could feel better.  Less winded walking up stairs, more energy on long days, etc. and being at the public pool is one helluva motivator.  Every shade and shape of humanity graces that joint, from Skinny Mindy and her nearly concave stomach and abs to Too Tall Tessie with a backside twice the diameter of mine.  I made myself a promise to cut out my occasional fast food habit, to cook more, and to go to the gym at least once for every time I go to the pool.  Since I can't hit the water tomorrow, I've got a date with the elliptical at 7 a.m.  

As for the books, I read voraciously given the time, and there's nothing but time at the pool.  I want to prove to myself I can do, and I want to get at some of the stuff I bought last summer that never made it to my bedside table.

So, here we go world.  Day 1:

25 Pounds

Well, it's day one.  Healthy breakfast.  Last fast food for the next 75 days at lunch--you didn't expect me to not eat fries one last time did you?--dinner is in the works: angel hair with lemon, grape tomatoes, fresh basil, green onions, and goat cheese.  Lots of water all day, evening plan to make a new kick ass gym mix for the iPod.  Don't expect me to tell you how much I weigh today, I'll just give you the total loss at the end.  I may be interested in accountability, but all the hutzpah in the world wouldn't make me post my weight on the interwebs.  I am a lady after all.

50 Books

Started Julie & Julia last night before bed and finished it at the pool today.  It was a good read in that I wanted to see how she came out, but I found the narrator--and book's author as it is a memoir--to be insufferable at times.  If it's so hard to do x, y, or z, then please stop doing it and shut the hell up.  In the end though I did see her point: sometimes throwing yourself into something everyone else says is crazy is the only way you can keep yourself from going that way.

At the pool I started Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red which I'm sure I'll finish before bed.  It's good, less moving than Winter's Bone, but the voice is the same.  You can feel him working out the kinks in his Ozarkian landscapes that ready him for the bigger book.  He's the featured author for this fall's Read Across Lawrence, so I'm boning up on his work.  (Get it?)  

If you made it this far, stay tuned and wish me luck.  I plan to ride this sucker til the wheels fall off.

Mother's Day

Today isn't the only day I celebrate my mom, it's just the nationally set aside day to do so, so I'd better make this good.

My mom didn't have the career dreams that some young women have.  As a kid, she knew she wanted to be a mom--a huge job in an of it self and one she effortless done with grace and endless humor since 1976--but it isn't the kind of thing she's ever going to win public awards for or be given promotions, pay raises, or pats on the back.

My mom has worked my whole life, in a factory, at a make-up counter, and for the past twenty plus years, in an office at a pharmacy. The funny thing is, that's her work, it's how she makes a living, but it's not her passion.  Her passion is, and has always been, my brother and I.  Parenting us and loving us as though she were being evaluated by the great mom administration board in the sky, and she has never failed us.  Not once.

Did we have a perfect childhood?  No.  No one does.  Neither did she, neither did you, neither did anyone who has ever lived or will ever live.  Perfection doesn't exist.  But we always knew we were loved, we always knew she would hug us and tell us everything was going to be okay, when we were upset she would make us talk about it, she advocating literacy and rewarded us for helping her with chores by taking us to the library--the library!  It's still a place I revere because it was never punishment, it was reward.  And the being there wasn't the only reward, being there WITH HER was a huge part of it.

I get my love of reading from my mom, my desire to know more about things, my innate curiosity about the world, my appreciation of art and my passion for poetry.  She is the reason I can recognize beauty in the world--she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

My mom's heart is bigger than other people's.  She cares more, feels more, loves more than others, and i get that from her, too.  It means being a little more sensitive than the rest of the population, but I don't mind at all, I want to love and care and feel and give at least as much as she does.

And in the past two years, when I have struggled so much personally, she hasn't always said what I wanted to hear, but she has always been willing to talk and she has loved me through every single moment of it.  I know she loves me without hesitation or reservation, and that's a gift few of us ever get.    We've been talking a lot lately about things I've learned in therapy, about her childhood and how it affected her and in turn how it affected my brother and I--she is never afraid to talk about this stuff.  She wants to know me as much as I want to know her, she is fearless in her desire to be the best person she can be and that is, probably, the trait I admire most in her.

She knows we can all always be better, but that we are--right now--as perfect as we can be because we are trying, and that is the best any of us can do.

So Happy Birthday, Linda Kathleen Humbarger Draper.  I love you more every day.  This one's for you:

Grandma Olive

My grandmother Olive Caroline Habbart Draper passed away several years ago.  Today was her birthday.  I googled her name to see what I could see and came across this picture--it's from her high school graduation in 1930 in Beverly, KS.  She's the 3rd from the left in the front row--how great is her Mona Lisa smile?

Advice?

As a part of my job--that I love--I am on a committee that helps consider and draft curriculum changes for our district.  Teachers in my discipline from both area high schools serve on this committee under a coordinator who-despite being well intentioned and a genuinely nice person--is a bit out of her element having never been a high school English teacher.  This means the committee members function with an overseer of sorts, but no real person of authority guiding our meetings.  To her credit, our coordinator has acknowledged she knows less than we do and is willing to learn.  I applaud her for that effort.

The other people on the committee are all seasoned teachers with years in the discipline and a vested interest in the curriculum.  The members from my school, including myself, are rabid readers and constantly revise what we do in our own classrooms, excited by the possibility and thrill of change in a profession that can--due to bureaucracy--often feel sadly flat and lackluster.  Our colleagues from the other school, though I have never taught with them, represent themselves as more comfortable with the status quo than with any concept of change.  I understand this stance, it is easy and requires far less effort and has always worked before.  I do not begrudge them their position though I disagree with it.  We all bring something different to the table, and that is the point of a group of people making decision vs. on person: all perspectives must be represented.

The issue of late, however, has been in the way my enthusiasm and passion for my job has been perceived.  I fear my other school colleagues see me as some sort of power hungry strategist intent on pushing my own agenda to the detriment of their positions and/or feelings.  Nothing could be further from the truth, and yet on four separate occasions someone from that side has chastised, corrected when no correction as needed, or verbally attacked me for what I can only describe as the way I communicate.  I become impassioned.  I may speak quickly and loudly, but in a room full of educated adults participating in the conversation with me, I feel this kind of reverence for what we do is warranted and certainly not something that should be condemned.  But, the negativity pours out.

I do not want to change the way I work or present myself, but I do not wish to be attacked either.  I believe wholeheartedly that none of these people would have made similar statements to my male counterparts from my own school which saddens me to no end, that even in a professional setting men are allowed to voice their opinions passionately and women aren't.  My basis for this assumption is that I have seen my male counterparts worked up, near incensed, and no hostility has been directed their way.  I, on the other hand, can't seem to attend a meeting without being attacked.

If you have advice about how to handle this situation, I would appreciate.  I truly respect my colleagues and believe their opinions matter, I do not wish to upset or undermine them in any way, but I simply cannot tolerate their ill treatment any longer nor do I wish to compromise my integrity by being someone I am not.  So,  I guess what I'm saying is...help.

Nicole Krauss

If you haven't read Nicole Krauss, go learn all about her.  This is from her novel, The History of Love:

“The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.


During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go round with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me."

"If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.”

This Too Shall Pass

I didn't intend to stop blogging after last month's post, but here it's five weeks later and I finally have something to say, though it isn't much.

My house is on the market and the school year is almost over. I will spend the summer readying for the classes I'll teach in the fall, revamping lesson plans, putting together things for the new course I am picking up, and if I am lucky I will find a part time job to make some extra money as I wait for the house to sells waaaaay below what I paid for it.

Ging through this process, all these endings, is making me think more and more about my divorce and how hard it still is to be alone. I love that man, but we were not meant to be married. We have talked about it, about how strong our friendship is, how much we love one another, how this was the right decision for us both. But even now, nearly two years since it ws finalized, I find myself aching for the security of someone to rely on. We had our communication problems, big ones if the truth be told, but if I was sad or scared, he was in the house and I could ask him to listen. Now, I can call my friends, I can even call him, but I don't have someone who, no matter what time of day or where they are, they can come running to me. That may seem like a silly thing to want, childish even, but I want to give that to someone, that constant and unwavering attention, and so it is what I hope for in return.

I know every thing is going to work out. The sun will rise tomorrow morning and set tomorrow night as it has for centuries before and as it will continue to do so for centuries after. We will all move forward, and this middle time, sad and lonely as it has been, will fade and I won't even really remember how hard it was, the joyful always trumping the tragic with time.

I didn't mean for this to be a maudlin post. It's just a hard time right now, so much to do on my own. I know there are people built to be alone, who relish that independence, never needing or wanting to rely on someone else. I appreciate that in others, and I respect it. It's just not for me.

So, universe, tonight I ask for the strength to see beyond this moment, to dwell possibility, and to know this too shall pass.

Breath

Remembering to breathe, to take a moment to recenter in the middle of chaos is the most singularly fascinating trick I've ever seen.  Most days our bodies, subconsciously, take in breath, keep us upright, maintain the balance of inhalation and exhalation as simply as trees swaying, no effort, without thought.  And yet, I find myself short of breath, shallow chested, lungs half full of fear and air as I am constricted by the mounting woes that surround me.

Is my life more difficult than countless others?  Certainly not, but this is my one and only life and I must acknowledge the trials so that I can learn from and move through them. 

Fortunately, a dear relative provided some financial assistance that will make the next few months less terrifying.  Asking the universe for help can, in ways you never imagined, yield blessed and beautiful results. 

But now I need to turn my head and heart inward and work on my own reactions, learn to receive and accept the most scary moments, moving through them, rather than exhausting myself on the resistance of them.  It's all happening either way, better to let go and experience it all than to fight and miss what might be breahtaking.

Help

I have a really hard time asking for help. I was raised to be strong and independent, confident and sure of myself, and while those were great lessons, as an adult I find it difficult to say I can't handle something on my own, that I need more than I can give myself.

I believe in turning everything over to God, in asking him to take my fear and make me strong, I believe in the power of prayer and in doing good deeds so that those deeds may come back to me, but I have a helluva hard time asking people to help me. I have this idea that needing help is somehow weak, that if I were stronger/better I could handle everything on my own.

But, I can't. I have to sell my house and my student loan debt is out of control and my personal life is locked in a necessary but painful stasis and I feel like I have about as much control over my life as I do the weather which I guess is true but also scares the living hell out of me.

So, this is my plea to the universe: send me strength. Send me the power to ask for help. Send me the wisdom to know it when it arrives. Send me the ability to receive it with grace. Send me help. I need it.

News

I learned on Wednesday that my little girl dream of being a published writer is coming true.  Blood Lotus, an online journal, accepted my poem "Resurrection" for its May issue. 

As I look into publishing more and more it appears putting poems on blogs is a bad idea for would-be published writers, so I've taken all my poems off this blog and won't be posting new ones.  Which stinks because I love this forum and the feedback I occasionally get, but I want so very much to do this for real, so I am committing to the rules set forth by the industry.

I have a notebook from when I was eleven that says, in hot pink ink, that I will one day be a published writer.  It took 24 years--admittedly I was not dogged in my attempts that entire time--but the day has come.  And I freaked out.  Did you see the video of Kristen Bell losing it on her birthday when her boyfriend arranges for her to meet a sloth--an animal she has loved her whole life?  Her reaction was part joy, part shock, part full blown crazy town panic attack, and I love her for it because that sums up Wednesday for me.

When you want something so much, pray for it, work toward it, convince yourself it probably isn't going to happen, then have renewed hope, then give up again, etc. etc. etc., when the day comes that you get what you want, it can be way. too. much. to. process.  I was wildly excited, proud, scared, anxious, panicky, feeling sorry for myself that all my loved ones were busy so we couldn't rush out and celebrate, afraid to celebrate because then I might jinkx it, and on and on on.

I never really thought it would happen, that I'd be able to say I'm a published writer, but it had and I am still, a couple of days later, reveling.  I probably shouldn't be by most people standards.  I should just sit back, play it cool, pretend like I expected it all along, but that isn't me.  I have wanted this for so long that I am going to allow myself a couple of more days to really enjoy it.  After all, being published for the first time only happens once, and this once belongs to me.

First Love

Tomorrow may be a Hallmark holiday for many, but to me, it's always been proof real love exists.  It's my parents' anniversary, and though their road hasn't always been easy, it has been real, and so have they.


I am learning about real love every day, and trying to understand its myriad twists and turns.  One part of that includes this piece, which I wrote today, as a Definition essay example for my seniors.  Here's to first love, new love, old love, all love.  Happy Valentine's Day, everybody.

First Love

First love, or puppy love as it is often called, is usually defined as an infatuation, a passing attraction, nothing serious.  It is our first experience, as human beings, of being more interested in someone else than we are in ourselves, and those first feelings can be overwhelming.  The first time Allan Gurganus fell in love, it was with a married woman who, at twenty years older than he, seemed exotic and full of promise.  Of course, at eight years old, everything feels exotic and full of promise.  Gurganus, an American novelist from North Carolina, didn’t need to have hit puberty to understand the kind of total obsession associated with first love.  He was in third grade, a smart kid with a beautiful teacher who gave him extra attention, and he knew—all year long—that he was in love. He did not think it was fleeting, something that would pass away with time, and in fact, forty year later, he is still writing about it.  The truth is, no matter how much we pretend it does not matter, our first love shapes our concept of love for the rest of our lives.

Imagine you are a six year old girl.  You come home from school one day and discover a puppy has been adopted by your family.  The puppy is a Golden Retriever, a soft yellow ball of fur and love.  She licks your face when you come home, sleeps curled up in a ball at the foot of your bed, and accompanies you on the walks you take around your block.  As you get older, you start to play sports and train to be a runner.  Your puppy, Goldie, is now a four year old, fully grown dog who wags her tail and smiles at you every time you walk in a room.  There is no one and nothing who loves you as she does.  In high school, you date, you get your heartbroken, but Goldie is always there for you.  You go away to college and miss her so much, it is as though one of your arms has been amputated.  And then, without much fanfare or warning, Goldie dies.  Your first love passes away and with it all of your hopes and dreams for a love that can last forever.

Did you always know Goldie would die?  Of course.  Did you understand she would not live your whole life with you, side by side, laughing and wagging?  Of course.  But the loss of Goldie, the end of your time together, makes you leery of love, and you learn not to give your heart away so completely because it can only end in pain. 

While we do not all grow up with a pet, the scenario outlined above is common.  Be it animal or human, when we attach ourselves to something or someone and then lose them, it can be devastating.  Children learn this lesson and it sticks with us, impacting our future relationships even when we don’t realize it.

Perhaps your first encounter with love was a fairy tale.  There is a common misconception that women are the only ones who buy into the dreams of true love living happily ever after, but many young men ache for that same kind of connection and security.  So what happens when a young man, kind and considerate, compassionate and loving, gives his heart to a girl who throws it in the trash only to stomp it like garbage beneath her slutty boot heels?  Well, that young man is going to be disillusioned and afraid to love again, closing himself off from future love in an effort of self-preservation.

Not all of the examples are negative, of course.  Many of us have happy experiences with our first loves, two people who care deeply for one another, share good moments and make loving memories together only to grow apart, maturely and without any of the drama and pain associated with angsty teenage breakups.  But, the reason there are so many sad stories to tell is that first love can be rough, full of the kind of weepy, angry and devastated moments that make up some of our best love songs.

When we lose the person or object of our affection, we can beat ourselves up, thinking we do not deserve love or that it will never come our way.  We can shut down emotionally and decide never to let anyone in again, or we can decide that our experiences so far have been so bad that they simply have to get better the next time, right?  So we take another shot.

First love, no matter how we encounter it, has an impact that ripples far beyond those initials pangs of joy so sweet it is almost pain.  When you see the person you first fall for and your heart stops, your breath catches in your throat, and you know if you could only get the chance to make that person happy, you would never ask for anything else in this world.

Our world is divided into parts and pieces than any one person could ever list.  We separate ourselves by our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, or religious beliefs, our political affiliations, whether we like Coca-Cola or Pepsi, if we prefer winter or summer, the list goes on and on.  But the thing that unites us, if we can only take a moment to remember it, is love.  So, this Valentine’s Day, think about your first love and how it affects you even now.  And remember people all over the world are thinking about it, too.  In fact, somewhere, someone may even be remembering you.

Steve Earle. 'Nuff said.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ2V9w9W6aY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Lines

There's a fine line between who I want to be and who I am.  Some days, these two ladies meet up and it's like a party you wish you'd been invited to--good music, laughter, delicious food that won't make you fat--but others days it's the sad ass party you threw as a kid that no one, not even your stuffed animals wanted to attend.  The one where everyone was supposed to speak in a foreign accent and sip tea like they liked it even though no one really discovers tea until their twenties.

That line is fine, hard to see, but it trips me again and again.  Just when I think I have a handle on how to be a friend and teacher, a daughter and sister, a woman and still--deep inside where very few people get to look--a little girl, something happens and I am tripping all the hell over that line, mixing those women up into a cocktail of doubt and anxiety and swirling purple strains of sadness.

I read recently, in Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist", that old lilac wood, deep in its center, has streaks of deep purple in it.  I've been obsessed with that image, that heart of color beating inside something that seems outwardly dead, something royal buried in something forgotten.  I feel like there is that in me ("I know not what it is, but I know it is in me"): that same richness is here, but I have to be cracked open to get to it and I'll be damned if I'm not tired of cracking. 

I don't want to have to trace these lines or watch out for them or fill them in with expensive products or color within them.  I want to acknowledge their existence and move the hell on but who ever gets to do that?  It feels like an impossibility, most days, that moving on.  But I'm trying.  I am, forver it seems, trying.

Fishers of Men/The Strength of Fields

Some days, the right words come along and stun me into silence.  I'm headed out to read at church this morning, Psalm 62:5-12 and Mark 1:14-20.  The latter has always been one of my favorite passages--that we can become fishers of men.  I am not one for proselytizing or preaching on street corners; a person's road to God is his or her own personal business.  But I've always loved the notion that behind the fishers of men line, that if we are passionate and honest enough, we can unite people to our cause, give them a sense of their own power, infuse them with the light that shines in us.  I don't think that infusion has to be relegated to faith, though it's clear that was Mark's intention.  I think we can light ourselves as we light others, filling and refilling our own depleted souls through the sharing and telling of stories that brings people always always together.

And that sharing can give us purpose.  Today, James L. Dickey says it better than I ever could.

The Strength of Fields

BY JAMES L. DICKEY

... a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return ... 

Van Gennep: Rites de Passage 

Moth-force a small town always has,   

          Given the night.

                                           What field-forms can be,

         Outlying the small civic light-decisions over

               A man walking near home?

                                                         Men are not where he is   

      Exactly now, but they are around him    around him like the strength

Of fields.    The solar system floats on

    Above him in town-moths.

                                             Tell me, train-sound,

    With all your long-lost grief,

                                             what I can give.   

    Dear Lord of all the fields

                                             what am I going to do?

                                        Street-lights, blue-force and frail

As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how

    To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source   

      Of the power you always had

                                             light as a moth, and rising

       With the level and moonlit expansion

    Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men.

       You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved

       By a secret blooming. Now as I walk

The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity   

   Is close to the source that sleeping men

       Search for in their home-deep beds.

       We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered   

   By moths, in blue home-town air.

          The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under

The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train,

                            When there is no one else

   To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea

         Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts,

          Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar

               Like the profound, unstoppable craving

            Of nations for their wish.

                                                      Hunger, time and the moon:

         The moon lying on the brain

                                                    as on the excited sea    as on

          The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake   

         With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring   

         From tended strength.    Everything is in that.

            That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord

Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start:

         With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less

             Than save every sleeping one

             And night-walking one

         Of us.

                   My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.