Niece Wisdom

The nieces have been keeping us in stitches with their snarky, sarcastic, hilarious witticisms.  Tonight's piece of advice:  If you go to a club and don't know what to do, just spell your name with your butt and you'll be dancing.  (Btw, they are 14, 12, and 10.)  They then proceeded to demonstrate for us.  It was a bedtime stalling tactic, granted, but it worked for five minutes or so while we struggled to control our amusement. 

Mile Markers

Tomorrow is my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary (go, them!). 
Two days ago was my thirty-ninth birthday.  (Meep.)
I weigh approximately two hundred and fifty pounds, more than many players in the National Football League.  (Just...omg.)
I measure just five feet, two inches in height. 
I have clocked ten and a half years as a teacher of high school students. 
POM and I have fifteen years together. 
I have five cats, which makes me an official cat lady, I fear. 
I have practiced yoga for one and a half years, practiced very sporadically and badly but still reaped rewards from it.
I have blogged for two years and ten days shy of eleven months, blogged very sporadically and badly but still reaped rewards from it.
In one week and three days, I will join a gym and shift my priorities and focus from my job to myself.  (As a friend told me today, there's no grading if you're dead.)
I have been grown-up and self-disciplined for...about one hour now, maybe. 

Road Trip...

...with POM and three nieces.  Portland by way of Yosemite, the Gold Country, and Crater Lake.  It's the first time for these kids, and it is true pleasure to get to introduce them to these amazing locations.  I'll post photos later, once I've had the chance to upload and sort them.  For now, a first-draft reflection on a much-loved place. 
------
7/27
I think almost everyone has this experience:  you visit a place from your childhood and it seems so much smaller than your memory tells you it was.  A childhood home.  A former church.  A favorite library or museum.  Grandma's kitchen.  Yeah, well, Half Dome isn't any smaller than it used to be when I grew up in Yosemite's back yard.  In fact, when seen from Washburn Point, it is every bit as stark and breathstopping as it has ever been.  Maybe even more so, because since I was twelve, I have amassed experiences and perspective that inform my apprehension and appreciation of its mass, its scope, its importance.  I have since been at the top of a tower and looked down through a lucite floor and seen humans who look like little plastic figures from the game of Life.  It impresses upon me the significance, then, of the ant- or pebble-sized humans I observe on the top of Half Dome's beak through my high-powered binoculars.  I have seen, repetitively and in full harrowing color, the collapse into dust and smoke of two enormous skyscrapers, man's achievements, sandcastles kicked over by disgruntled playmates.  All the more resonant, then, the 8000-foot pinnacle of granite, sheared smooth but still standing after millennia of erosive weather and a shifting base and millions upon millions of tourist feet. 

A Reminder, and Amen!

"If you aren't free to fail, then you aren't really free."

--Madeleine L'Engle

(quote source)


Food for thought for teachers and the education system.  Hmmm.

I don't feel like being newsy

...so I attempted a quickie poem instead.  (This one is from a "line by line" prompt at WeWritePoems.) 


Writing Assignment

Sloth and frustration –
stacks of books unread, tall and tottery,
     my prison cell;
laptop, staring with accusing eye, shakes its head, disgusted,
     my jailer, glaring, taunts and jingles the keys of freedom.

When I was eight, my gift was a typewriter,
brown and plastic, cheap,
but the best, most official gift ever – I was a writer,
till I sat to spin yarns and came up with dust and drivel.

The sword of Damocles hangs by a thread overhead.
     Yes, again.
The dentist’s lead blanket of humid heat presses my chest,
I hate the pressure.
If only it were Christmas and cold
     (it’s never cold in L.A.),
I would write to the smell of cinnamon and fireplace,
and the eloquence would flow like winter hot chocolate.

Faithful Madeleines and Marys and Annies show up to work every day.
But the wrinkle in my time feels ironed in and permanent
and it’s hard to get up off the couch to walk the field
and I am so far from being a pilgrim of eventual grace.
I said I hate the pressure, but I lied;
that pressure seems my only hope.

In dreams, I fill twenty pages a day with pearls and sand,
     and smile to the interviewer and
     respond to mail with wit and
     declare my success to be born of just showing up to write
          – I just don’t feel whole if I haven’t written today.
My royalty checks would finance my coastal writer’s cottage
     in Mendocino or Maine, where the ocean salt would
     suck the words from my hands.

Laugh till you cry

OK, WhatNow posted a link to the most hilarious site I've visited in ages.  I just spent an unseemly amount of time trolling through its archives (still not done) laughing till my jaws hurt.  Caveat:  I have a semi-twisted sense of humor;  if you don't share that trait with me, you might not like this site.  If you're sick and weird like me, though, click now.  I'll listen for the howls. 

Camp!

OMG, THIS the coolest. thing. ever.  (As seen on Read Write Believe.)  I want to go to it almost as much as I want to go to Oxbridge in England next summer!  This is going on my bucket list for sure!

Bullets of Tuesday

Well, the enjoyment and self-discipline continue unabated (or so I'm telling myself). 

• Met a classmate/colleague at Peet's Coffee to work on our theses together.  In reality, we spent several hours catching up after not having talked much throughout the year, though we did spend an hour or two actually working.  She was a bit hungover, so we cut the afternoon short.  I did stay a little longer than she, but then it got cold again so I went home.
• It's been cold-ish here.  It's as if we traded weather with Seattle.  I love the misty-rain and cloudy mornings. but the rest of our locale is complaining mightily (they'd be complaining it if was wretchedly hot, too).  On Monday, the sun only managed to break through for about half an hour, in the very late afternoon.  Today it managed a couple of hours, but again, only in the afternoon.  We'll see what tomorrow brings. 
• Today the rain-ish-ness kept me in bed longer than I had planned.  It's ok, though, as I was reading a book for my thesis, so it counted as work. 
• Tomorrow I will head to Starbucks for the majority of the day, to work.  I'm supposed to email my advisor "something" by Friday.  (Gah.)
• Thursday is the funeral for Madame X's dad.  Madame X reported having a day that actually felt "normal" today, for which I am grateful.  It's been difficult to know how to provide support to her and her family, which is odd to say about someone I've known and loved for over a decade.  I think the books and movie gift card were the right things, though;  she called today to thank us for them and let us know she's already used the gift card (which helped lead to the shreds of normalcy today).  After the funeral, she and her family may have to head to parts north to see her grandmother once more before the dementia sets in full-bore.  Pardon my English, but Madame X has had a fucked-up year, and I know she won't be sorry to see 2010 get hit in the butt by the door on its way out. 
• Saw Winter's Bone, and it was excellent.  They made a few changes between the book and the film, but it did not detract from the story in any way.  My only criticism is that the beating one of the main characters receive is in no way as intense in the movie as it was in the book.  That was probably motivated by a desire to spare the viewer the discomfort and gore, but it weakened the impact of the later plot events, at least for me in comparing it with the book.  They definitely nailed the casting dead-on, and the setting is just perfect.  I recommend both the film and the book.
• I think Despicable Me comes out this Friday, doesn't it?  Strangely, I'm really looking forward to seeing it.  When I first started seeing trailers for it, like, last year, I was fairly meh about it.  But since I've seen more detailed trailers recently, I'm hooked.  "It's so FLUFFY, I could die!"  (LOL.)
• I walked today. 
• I've been obsessively checking the College Board's website to see if our AP scores have been posted yet.  This is the first year we get to check them online (finally, join me in welcoming the CB to the 21st century), but they're not up yet, at least not for my school.  Sigh.  The curiosity is giving me heartburn (or was that the KFC I indulged in earlier?). 
• This was a pretty boring post, but I'm in documentary mode, I guess.  Thanks for reading. 

No more Debbie Downer for today

Other things are going on besides death and cancer this summer, so I figured I should include a post on those, as well. 

• I am actively working on my thesis.  I met with my advisor this week when I was on campus to do library business.  I struggled a bit this week with carving out my daily schedule to be efficient and regular.  I don't think I'll have as many problems with that next week, though;  I think I know now what I need.  If it doesn't work well on Monday, then I'll leave the house and work out in public somewhere.  (Damned distractions.  Damned internet.  Damned wi-fi.  Damned procrastinator and rationalizer that I am! :-)
• The weather here in SoCal has been gorgeous -- cool and "June-gloomy" in the mornings with full sun and breeze in the afternoons.  Fabulous!
• I've gotten to see some good movies recently:  Toy Story 3 (cried like a little girl for the last twenty minutes of it), Eclipse (liked it, want to see it again, and now that "Jacob" is 18, I can drool openly over his chiseled torso -- heh), Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (yeah, I'm a little behind in my cult favorites -- loved these movies, the second even better than the first), The Closer, Season 5 (which finally came out on DVD -- sheesh!).  Looking forward to seeing Despicable Me, Salt, and Inception when they come out.  I'm hoping to go see Winter's Bone this afternoon.
• My reading has been oddly varied of late.  Naturally I've been reading a lot of sci-fi criticism and theory for my thesis.  I did read Winter's Bone, because I knew I was going to want to see the movie;  I really liked the book, though I'm having trouble explaining why.  I think the main character is likable despite the world she's trapped in.  I also just finished Barbara Walters' memoir, Audition, which I've had for, like, ever but finally just decided to pick up.  It was a good balance of juicy and judicious, which I appreciated.  I've just begun The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender.  I've only read the first chapter, but so far I like it and am looking forward to reading the rest of it.  I'm also reading Switch, which is about the psychology of change (both institutional and individual);  I am learning a lot. 
• Bought and love Sarah McLachlan's new CD.  Will be going to Lilith Fair next week, which I hope will be fun.  Court Yard Hounds are good, too.  Bought but haven't yet absorbed the Eclipse soundtrack;  same with the Sex and the City 2 soundtrack. 
• Planning a road trip to the PacNW with nieces at the end of July, which should be fun.  We don't have any other major vacations planned this summer.  The thesis MUST be done this summer.  Next summer we may celebrate with a trip to England -- yeah-uh! 
• The theme for this summer:  total enjoyment and self-discipline.  I know, I know, those two things sound like oxymorons, but I think they're just a paradox -- they seem to be contradictory but they can coexist quite well.  It's like a sonnet -- strictures of format but complete freedom within those boundaries to write about absolutely anything.  My life this summer needs to become a sonnet. 

Sad start to summer

My dear friend and colleague, who likes to go by Madame X on my blog, lost her father on Wednesday.  He had only been ill for about four weeks.  It started as a UTI and pneumonia, which they treated with antibiotics, but then they discovered liver lesions and diagnosed it as cancer.  He went downhill very quickly.  They never did kick the infection, and they never discovered where the cancer originated (rarely does cancer start in the liver, and his was no exception), but they named the cause of death as metastatic liver cancer.  Her family will not have an autopsy done because, I think, they're just exhausted.  This is sobering to me, because Madame X is not yet 37, just one year older than my own younger sister.  I know death can strike at any time, but it's weird when your close friend loses a parent. 

I had a student in my AP class this year lose his mother just two weeks before school ended.  She had fought cancer for over 13 years, but after beating it so many times, she lost this round.  He didn't make a big deal about it;  in fact, he didn't really want a lot of people to know.  I only learned about it in the final personal essay I had them write.  It explained why he'd looked like such hell lately, and why he had missed several days of class after a year of essentially perfect attendance.  How do you comfort a kid who's less than half your age and experiencing a pain you can only imagine in your nightmares?  All I could do was hug him;  at least I'm good at those. 

POM's sister continues her own battle with cancer on multiple staging grounds.  Her long-term forced relationship with steroids (to reduce swelling in the brain where gamma knife surgery removed a tumor -- twice) has caused her to blow up like a human balloon.  This once stringbean blond looks like a perpetually pregnant air-filled weeble.  And like a weeble, she keeps bouncing back up after every punch.  Her faith astonishes me daily.  She lives for her five kids, the oldest of whom just graduated from junior high and the youngest of whom is starting preschool.  She's just come off the steroids, a development she's thrilled about, but despite good news about no more brain tumor, she's weathering bad news about her liver and lungs, where innumerable active cancer sites are now present in spite of the chemo round she just finished. 

Our only role in these situations is one of support -- praying, being a conduit of information to other pray-ers around the world, filling in where a babysitter or chauffeur or photographer or hugger is needed.  It never feels like enough.