washed up | blog

Washed up and out.

2011-07-20T21:13:00.000-05:00

I now do my bloggin' at Real Fat and Sassy. Pop on over!

Day two at the gym.

2010-07-07T23:34:00.005-05:00

I went in for Day Two at the gym. Look! I'm halfway to my goal for the week.

I now (sort of) understand the blue sheet B the T referred to yesterday. It's basically a spreadsheet-style log of my activity statistics (duration, resistance, pace, weight, reps...). When I got there today, she already had it filled out and ready to go, though she didn't show me the thing until after I'd completed the workout. I think that was a good move. I didn't feel defeated before I got started, and I felt totally rewarded after accomplishing everything she set out for me. I realize that this workout may not seem all that challenging to some, especially since many of the levels are rock-bottom, but it was perfect for me. I had to talk myself through some of it (see: arc trainer and sit-ups), but I was able to do it, which was more than I did yesterday. And I sweated my butt off in the process.

I look forward to the day I can look back at this and laugh at the ease of it.

Treadmill: incline 1, 3.3 and 3.4 mph, 15 minutes
Arc trainer: level 15, 10 minutes
EFX (elliptical): level 4, 10 minutes
Arm curl: 15 pounds, 2 sets of 10
Incline pull: 50 pounds, 2 sets of 10
Chest press: 15 pounds, 2 sets of 10
Overhead press: 10 pounds, 2 sets of 10
Abdominals: 35 pounds, 3 sets of 10
BOSU sit-ups: 3 sets of 10

This is my routine for the first few weeks, just so I can get used to working out. I'll do cardio each time and the weights one or two times a week, she says, but I'm going to shoot for twice a week. I'll add minutes or pounds or resistance or reps or something each time to keep myself challenged and moving forward. I'm feeling good about this.

In other news, I'm feeling good about tomorrow's weigh-in. I've done really well with staying within my daily points target, which I finally recalculated to reflect my actual daily activity (summer = sedentary). I'm now operating on a 30-point day. Not only have I eaten the right numbers, but I have eaten the right foods. I've made good choices even when it wasn't easy in favor of healthy, lean, and fresh foods. I've had only a few sweets and diet sodas, relatively speaking

Honestly, I'm afraid to get my hopes up for a big loss or any loss at all, but I have to remember that if I keep making progress like this, I am guaranteed to see the results eventually. And "results" aren't just numbers on a scale.

Introducing: B the T and the gym.

2010-07-06T17:26:00.004-05:00

I met with Brittney the Trainer today at the gym, and it went well. She seems friendly, knowledgeable, helpful, and thank heavens, not too judgmental. We sat down and talked about getting into the routine of coming to the gym and about not getting into the routine of doing the same workout over and over. We talked about goals. She had to write something down on her little paper that goes in my file, so we said my long term goal is to lose weight, even though I feel that doesn't exactly encompass the entirety of my motivation for being there. Since these goals have to be measurable, she seemed to think that 160 pounds is a good goal for me, which is ten pounds more than I had figured in my head, but that's fine with me. I'm not really working toward a number, but a lifestyle and state of health. For a short term goal, though, I didn't really want to put a number of pounds on it. We decided that, at this point, my goal should be just getting to the gym four times a week. Then she put me on some cardio machines.

This is where I should mention that, due a purse-switch and cruel turn of fate, I forgot my earbuds, even though I put together what I think is an awesome workout playlist. But I don't know because I didn't get to try it out. I did, however, try out the treadmill (15 minutes), the arc trainer (7 minutes), and the bike (10 minutes). The treadmill would be a lot better if I had my music, but I think it's a good place to warm up. The arc trainer was fun, but it kicked my butt. That's a good thing, though, right? The goal was to go five minutes or ten, if I could. Yeah. The bike was okay, though I wasn't feeling too challenged. My heart rate thought otherwise and stayed up while I pedaled away, so I guess it was doing its thing. I'm supposed to be figuring out which machines I like and can stay on for an extended amount of time. I kind of liked switching up.

Even though I could have skipped town tonight to go hang out with family overnight, which I've done for the entire long weekend, I made an appointment to meet with B the T again tomorrow morning. She's supposed to have a "blue sheet" (whatever that means) fixed up for me that outlines the routine that I'll work on for the next few weeks. I will roll up in there with some music this time. And yeah, and some deodorant. Oops.

After the gym, I hit up WalMart to pick up an extra pair of earbuds and some groceries. I cheated and went ahead and bought two pairs of pants to workout in. I won't consider them my cute, reward workout clothes, though. They're from WalMart, for pete's sake. But at the end of this month of going to the gym for four days a week, I'm going to find me a cute gym bag, too. I don't even know where to begin that search.

Speaking of buying clothes and things, let me leave you with huge victory I experienced this weekend. I've been having that defeated feeling when looking in my closet as of late. I have a few cute things that fit, but not much. So on Sunday, Mom and I headed to Kohl's and the mall to see what I could find. I didn't go on a shopping spree or anything, but I picked up a few cute tops and a dress that I am still not sure about. But can I tell you that these articles of clothing came from the misses section? Not the women's (aka, plus size) section. Misses! I have never in my life gotten clothes from the side of the store or an entire store meant for normal-sized people. (Though I realize now that I probably could have when I was a teenager and could have been a little more stylish. Oh, hindsight.) Now I still can't buy pants over there and I am only able to wear the largest size available, but who cares?!

Mom wanted to take a picture of me today, and I was wearing one of the shirts I got. The picture reminded me a lot of another one taken by my best friend when we were on a train in Europe three years ago. Until I looked at them side by side.

Going against the odds.

2010-07-01T22:48:00.005-05:00

I joined a gym last Thursday.

I've been considering it for a few weeks now, especially since I've struggled so much with Weight Watchers this summer. I know I need to incorporate activity into the lifestyle I'm developing. I've tried a few things. I did Couch to 5K for two weeks. I have a Wii Fit and can sometimes get into a routine, but I don't feel like that's enough. I know someone who is currently being pretty successful with doing his own workout routine at home, but honestly, I wouldn't even know where to start. I don't really know how to do exercises properly or how much to do. Without direction, I would give up quickly.

So I went on the hunt for a gym. We have a few fitness options in town. There's the YMCA, Curves, another women's boutique-style gym called Elements, and Fitness Formula, which is owned by the local health foundation. It was actually a relatively easy decision. I narrowed it down to Elements and Fitness Formula pretty quickly. Elements has some nifty exercise machines that use card scanners to adjust to your personalized settings with just a swipe. There's a fancy-pants hydromassage bed and a sauna. They also offer some neat group classes. But the really good-sounding classes and use of the massage bed and sauna have added fees on top of the already exhorbitant $400 annual fee, plus a big initial fee. Fitness Formula, on the other hand, has an agreement with our Board of Education and will waive the $50 enrollment fee and chop 15%-20% off the membership, depending on how you pay. While Fitness Formula doesn't have super-swank equipment with swipey cards (though each treadmill does have its own TV), they do have specially trained, um, trainers who will work with me to develop goals and teach me how to reach them.

Obviously, I went with Fitness Formula. I have an appointment there with a trainer in the morning. We're going to sit down and work up a plan for me. I am only a little nervous, but mostly excited.

The only thing I worry about is the stigma of joining a gym. Not that I'll actually be going, but that I won't go. Everyone has a story about joining a gym and giving up and paying ridiculous amounts of money for a membership they never use. I am determined not to be that person. Luckily, Fitness Formula will also let a person join for just a month. That's what I did. I haven't already signed up for a year's membership. I want to, but I also want to prove to myself that I will do this for a month. Hopefully after tomorrow's meeting I will be able to outline some goals for the month, at the end of which I will go for the year membership and some decent workout clothes.

Thursday, of course, was also my Weight Watchers meeting. Again, the numbers were not what I wanted them to be. I had gained 1.2 pounds. I can still say that I've lost sixty pounds, but I have officially gained four weeks out of the past five. After the meeting, I was pretty upset with myself. I think it was the first time I've cried about this thing. (Okay, maybe not, but I did cry.) But after talking it through with myself on a silent drive to my parents' house and talking it through with a friend, I'm okay.

I am no closer to quitting than ever. The Q word doesn't even compute in my brain. I have had some doubts, though. Like, some (highly stupid) part of me will start to think that maybe this is all I can do, that maybe I've lost all the weight I can lose. I know that's a lie. I just have to problem solve. I can see the choices I've made, good and bad, and thankfully, I can see the results. Now my actions should reflect that.

I am sort of glad that I had a gain on Thursday. It was a reminder that I made the right decision by taking steps toward becoming more active and fit.

The guilt wagon.

2010-06-28T12:07:00.003-05:00

I'm really good at spending so much time thinking about doing something that I have myself convinced that I am actually doing whatever it is.

I've done this with writing. Every now and then I go on these mental tangents during which I am convinced I have a writer trapped inside me. I think about writing books. I read books about writing. I even come up with writing schedules for myself. But do I write? Um, not really.

It has happened with reading, too. Big plans to read lots of books. Or going to graduate school.

The list goes on.

The truth, though, is that I am not really doing those things. As much as I think I want to, there's very little action taken to achieve these goals.

I'm working on becoming an active person. Yes, yes, the health and fitness thing, too, but that's not exactly what I mean. Though that is definitely related. I mean to say that I want to be the kind of person who chooses action over inaction. I'm pretty sure I'm the kind of person that people routinely want to grab by the shoulders, shake, and say, "Stop talking about it and just do it!"

Now, I have to admit that I have done very well at doing the actions necessary to get this weight-loss journey going. I didn't sit around and hem and haw about this one. I just did it. (Okay, so maybe I had sat around hemming and hawing for a decade or so. Whatever.) Six months ago, I decided that I could do this, and I started making good eating choices.

Sixty pounds later, I'm starting to see an old habit forming. These days, I feel like I'm thinking and talking about this lifestyle change more than I'm actually doing it. Granted, I am making better choices than I would have six months ago. I'm eating healthier and eating less. I think before I eat. I have formed great habits.

But I see them crumbling a little bit. My resolve is slipping. I make bad choices. The only difference between six months ago and now is that I know I'm making a bad choice when I do. I'm conscious of it. I feel guilt about it.

I don't want to be that person who says she's on a diet, but instead of eating well, she shovels in the unhealthy stuff all the while saying, "I really shouldn't be eating this."

That is incredibly obnoxious.

But that's who I've felt like lately. And it occurred to me yesterday that it's the very same as talking about doing something, but not actually doing it, like writing. Those days when I fall off the wagon and talk about getting back on it? I'm really just off the wagon, as much as I like to visualize myself on it.

I don't want to be on a diet, though. I don't want to be on a wagon. That's where the guilt comes from. I don't want to feel guilty for making bad choices. It seems silly.

I have to forgive myself and move on. I have to look back at what I've accomplished so far, which is a lot, and realize that I can do better than this wallowing. I am better than this. I have to grab myself by the shoulders, shake, and say, "Stop talking about it and just do it!"

Side note: Jack over at Jack Sh*t, Gettin' Fit is an awesome (entertaining, inspirational, hilarious, truthful) blogger, and today's post may or may not have something to do with my own.

Start ramble.

2010-06-24T20:55:00.005-05:00

I woke up at 7:30 and went to the morning Weight Watchers meeting. My meeting is at a local church, and the afternoon meeting wasn't held this week because of VBS. I saw one guy I know at weigh-in. I was surprised that I was the only person from our group that came for the meeting. I guess people have real lives and can't just hang out for a morning meeting. Anyway, nothing against these morning people, but I much prefer the afternoon meeting. We're a lot more boisterous, and well, we are a family. Maybe that's too strong of a word. But I feel like my afternoon people care about me, and I care about them. I missed them today.

I missed them asking how I did on the scale. (Up 1.6 pounds.) I missed them telling me it's okay. (So I told myself.)

I'm not exactly sure why I gained this week, but I'm not surprised, really. I definitely stayed within my points, but I don't think I made the best choices. It was one of those hungry weeks. I ate and ate and ate and was never satisfied. I ate lots of chips this week. It's time to make friends with filling (high fiber) foods again.

And I don't know what is up with the getting up in the middle of the night and eating thing. I mean, I tracked whatever I ate, but it's not healthy or characteristic of me.

I went grocery shopping after the meeting. Lots of fruits and vegetables. I bought a whole pineapple! Such a better deal than buying the already-cut stuff. Cheaper and more fruit, albeit a pain in the butt to cut up. Also trying to rekindle my love of bell peppers. The yellow ones are so sweet. And nectarines! There's nothing like a ripe nectarine.

I have to start cooking more and eating fresh produce. That should be easy considering it's summer. I've just been lazy.

I'm also trying to move more. It's been too hot to do anything outside. As if I would have anyway... So I've been trying to get at least 30 minutes in on the Wii Fit each day. Rhythm Boxing is where it's at. Haven't done that yet today, but the day's not over.

I've really been slacking on the water intake. I have been drinking way too much soda. Yeah, it's diet and all, but I need water.

Okay, so this has just been a jumble. Let's recap in the form of a bulleted list of goals:

Drink less pop and more water.
Eat more fruits and vegetables.
Get 30 minutes of activity in each day.
Cook some new recipes.
Track everything.

I need more specific goals, don't I?

Some victories:

I went canoeing last weekend. It's nice being semi-active and doing things that I wouldn't have imagined myself doing before.
I bought a pair of size 20 jeans! This is super exciting.
I successfully fought off an eat-because-I'm-bored moment the other day by knitting. I'm working on super-simple baby blanket for the new baby in the family.

End ramble.

Compare and contrast.

2010-06-18T16:59:00.006-05:00

I have a hard time seeing the change in my body as I lose weight. Other people can see it, but I just can't. I can feel it. It's hard to deny that when I can take off some of my jeans without even unbuttoning them. (Yes, it's time to go jean shopping.) When I did some sun salutations on the Wii today, I noticed how much easier it was to touch my toes than when I first started doing them. But when I look in the mirror, I just see me. The same me I see every day.

Today, though, I had to get a new driver's license. (Something about having moved to a different county and also registering a new vehicle. Yadda yadda.) I was all prepared. I was going to tell them my real weight, even though I know they don't print it on the license anymore and even though my actual current weight is about the same as my false previous weight. I also had enough foresight to snap a picture of the old license before I handed it over to the lady behind the desk.

She didn't ask for my weight, though, because the license wasn't actually expired. My new one is just a duplicate for the new county, she said. When she threw out the word duplicate, I was afraid I wasn't going to get to take a new picture. I was about to ask if I could take a new one when she prompted me to sit down in front of the camera.

So, uh, yeah. I can see what people mean. There is definitely a difference.

I can also see that I am still no good at smiling for pictures.

Uh, did I do that?

2010-06-17T19:26:00.005-05:00

I'm not really sure how this happens. I go for a couple of weeks, barely losing weight or (more recently) gaining a bit, and then bam! I lose an ungodly amount in one week. When I weighed in today, I'd lost 8.2 pounds. I have never lost that much in one week, not even that first week when I lost seven-something. Maybe I should be excited, and overall, I am. I have now lost 64.2 pounds. (Holy crap, that's awesome! Like, more than 20% of my starting weight!) I don't want to seem ungrateful to myself or the program, but these drastic drops in weight freak me out a little. It's not supposed to happen like this, is it?

I am not depriving myself. Most days I eat close to, if not all of or more than, my daily points target. This week, I ate almost all of my 35 extra weekly points, thanks to my misbehavior at a friend's True Blood premier party. I ate out almost every day, some days twice. I have done practically no physical activity, unless you count that one little Wii Fit session this afternoon. That sounds like a week that should result in a loss of a pound, maybe two. But eight?!

I don't know. I'm not yo-yoing, so I guess that's healthy. My mom suggested that it might just be a big boost after a plateau. Maybe. This wasn't really a plateau, though, was it? It wasn't like I was doing everything right and my body refused to budge. I just spent a week trying to act better. Maybe this is my body's reward, and next week, maybe the change won't be so drastic.

Something I'm thinking about: When I calculate my daily points target, it asks if I spend most of the day sitting, standing, etc. When school was in session, I always marked that I stand most of the day. Now that summer's here, I am certainly lounging around more than anything else. Guess I should change my answer to that activity question, huh? The thing is, though, that would result in my previously having 33 daily points to now having 30 daily points. I lost one point because of the weight change, and then they would take two points away because I'm not as active. Something tells me that lowering my points that quickly isn't a good idea. Maybe I should just drop to 32 this week and see how it goes.

My biggest challenge yet.

2010-06-15T21:29:00.005-05:00

Summer.

For me, it officially started on June 2, almost two weeks ago. That's when life lost all semblance of structure or routine, and I promptly lost the ability to discern what day of the week it is. I don't think it is a coincidence that, for the past two weeks, I've gained weight.

Two pounds.

I know two pounds is not much. I know. But it's not the right direction the scale is supposed to be going. And really, it's not about the scale. It's my attitude. For two weeks (or more, if I'm honest), I have cut loose. Maybe I've gotten cocky. There have been too many things to celebrate (really?), too many outings that I've let go unmonitored (why?!). I didn't track the entirety of Memorial Day weekend. FOUR DAYS. What has gotten into me?

And I know that people say I shouldn't be so hard on myself. But here's the thing: I am an excuse maker. This is something I know about myself. I can talk myself into or out of (usually out of) anything. And if I let myself make an excuse for one thing (event, person, meal), I am going to let myself make an excuse for every other thing. And the next thing I'll know, I will have excused myself from 365 days' worth of healthy behavior. Because there are an infinite number of excuses in my arsenal, and no day is immune.

So this week, I have been trying to cut back on the excuses. I haven't exactly succeeded each day, but I am doing better. I am trying to reestablish a little bit of structure and routine. I am learning to say no. I am tracking everything, every day. I am realizing that I need (and have) friends who don't help me make excuses for myself, and I am grateful for them.

I want to be healthy all of the time. Not just when it's easy or convenient or just an ordinary day. See, there's something I'm starting to realize: There's no such thing as just an ordinary day.

Hit and miss.

2010-05-12T18:15:00.003-05:00

Miss. Week before last, I missed a Weight Watchers meeting for the first time ever. As a teacher, I'm obligated to work three athletic events during the school year, and I was scheduled for a softball game that night. I did not like missing the meeting, but...

Hit. When I returned last week, I had lost seven pounds. Seven pounds! Crazy. But it was definitely nice to know that I could hang in there without being dependent on the meeting. I'm not tempted to go rogue or anything, but my independent success was comforting.

Hit. The fifty-pound mark! I'm there! Or at least I was there last week. Very excited and somewhat flabbergasted by this milestone. That night at the meeting during the "awards" segment, I racked up two five-pound stars, a fifty-pound charm, and my 16-week Stay and Succeed charm. Woohoo!

Miss. So I started out so well with the whole Couch to 5K thing. That's probably what accelerated my loss. The first week of C25K, during which you're supposed to run a minute and walk a minute and a half, I didn't ever get to the point where I could run the minute every time. I decided to do Week 1 all over again, and as I progressed through the week, my stamina grew. By the end of the workout on Wednesday, I just knew I'd be able to do it Friday. On Friday, I got halfway through the workout and bombed. I couldn't go on, or so I told myself. I dragged my butt into the house and crashed on the living room floor under the ceiling fan, sweating and huffing and puffing. That was over a week ago. I haven't been back out since. Yeah, I know. I'll put that on my list.

Hit. I hate shopping. I've had very few pleasant shopping experiences in my life. Until last weekend. Turns out, Kohl's in my friend. I found teacher pants that fit! A size or two smaller! So now I don't have to look like a clown. I also found some really cute tops. A size smaller! And y'all, I bought dresses. Like, several of them. One of which I wore just the other night to see Avenue Q. I admit, I thought I looked so cute I had to take a gas-station-restroom self portrait.

Miss. Yeah, I'm doing a fantastic job of keeping this blog updated regularly. Maybe someday.

Some successes.

2010-04-22T21:37:00.003-05:00

I recuperated my loss this week. Or my gain. Um, yeah. I gained .8 pounds last week, but this week I lost 1.8. I call that a success.

Speaking of successes, I have finished two days of the Couch to 5K program. That means I'm running. Okay, jogging. Okay, mostly walking. But I'm definitely moving. I'm a little scared to do the third day's workout because that means I'll have finished Week 1, and then it'll be Week 2. Part of me thinks we (Sarah and I) should do Week 1 again. I guess we'll see how Day 3 goes.

I can't believe I'm doing this. Running, or hopefully someday running. I never thought it'd be an activity I'd care anything about. To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about it just yet, but as I was telling a friend, I can really get my head around walking / running / jogging because it doesn't require specialized equipment (really) or a membership. It's adaptable to different environments, so there are very few excuses to be made for not running. Although I'm sure I'll come up with a few. Right now, I'd say my most likely excuse is fear of the program, that it'll progress too quickly for me. That's ridiculous, though. As Sarah and I discussed when we decided to walk one of the jogging intervals yesterday, we're not doing this to impress anyone. We're doing this for ourselves. So if I do need to repeat Week 1 before moving on, so be it.

In other news:

I'm still drinking mostly water. I still don't think I'm drinking enough. I'm probably only getting two liters in on a good day, maybe more. I can tell that the running has made me thirstier, though.
I'm also upping my fruits and vegetables. Petite baby carrots are awesome.
I'm going to try Almond Breeze as a milk alternative. Not that I've been having trouble with milk. Just thought I'd branch out.
I've been tracking all of my food and activity points.
My clothes are about to fall off. Seriously. I need to go shopping, but I don't know how to shop economically for transition clothes.
I did take my measurements a few days ago. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing, but the inches really aren't all that different than they were when I started. But that can't be right. See previous bullet.
I love love love Eggo Nutrigrain Low-Fat waffles for breakfast. Due to the Eggo shortage, it's been sort of difficult to get my hands on them. I've been without them for, like, two weeks now. Tonight, though, Kroger had them so I bought two boxes. Jackpot!

Okay, I need to go pack my lunch. Lately, I've been taking turkey and cheese (Laughing Cow!) on a sandwich thin and barbecue Baked Lays. I've added the carrots. I've been taking a Weight Watchers mini red velvet bar (one point), but I ran out today and decided to nix it. I also take an orange every day to eat during my planning period. Except today, there was a planning period meeting and it just didn't happen. I'm taking it back tomorrow.

P.S. Is it just me, or would it be nice if I blogged about something besides my weight, physical activity, and eating habits? Yeah, I thought so.

A mole hill.

2010-04-15T19:35:00.003-05:00

So it happened when I weighed in today.

I'd gained.

I know it's just .8 pounds, but it is a gain. I mean, I knew it was coming. There's no such thing as not having a setback or plateau. I just wasn't expecting it this week. I wouldn't have been surprised by a gain the past few weeks, but this week, I felt like I really had it together. I exercised a few times, which is a few times more than usual. I really stuck to water. And I've tracked the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the truth is that, after the insanity of this past weekend, there really hasn't been any ugly. In other words, I've been doing a pretty good job meeting the challenges I set for myself this week.

That's why I was surprised by the gain.

But I need to reevaluate. I need to realize that the surprise should be that I didn't have a gain sooner. After last week's unexpected five-pound loss, I think I can handle this tiny gain. After all, I've kept off most of those five pounds. Even after some really poor eating choices over the weekend. A realistic weigh-in is what I needed, now that I think about it. A reminder that I have to work for this.

So that's my goal now. Just to stick with it. To keep on keeping on. I don't want to fall into a negative mindset, and I know I'm vulnerable. Part of me thinks that I tried to make positive changes and it availed nothing. But it's just one week. Less than, really. It's not like drinking water and being active caused the gain.

When I got home from the meeting, I ate dinner -- leftover Chicken Enchilada Casserole from the new Hungry Girl 1-2-3 cookbook, which I will have to discuss later. I tracked it. I went for a walk. I filled up my water bottle.

I feel good about this.

Three challenges.

2010-04-11T19:19:00.004-05:00

Tracking. I am doing my darnedest to track everything I eat, even if I don't like what it does to the numbers. After eating festival food yesterday, things are ugly. But that's okay. I now know that I've blown all of my "flex" points. And then some. So I need to earn some activity points to get out of the red. I keep telling myself that the ugly truth is better lying to myself. It's more productive anyway.

Activity. We really hammered on getting activity in last week. I know I've got to get with it. Luckily, Weight Watchers is doing a Walk-It Challenge, the goal of which is to walk a 5K on or by June 6. That doesn't really seem like a big deal. It's 3.1 miles. Big whoop. But that's no excuse not to do it. So today I started a six-week training plan to work my way up to a 5k walk. It starts with just ten minutes a day and gradually adds minutes. Today was just too beautiful, so I took a walk around the neighborhood, which turns out to be a nice place for walking. Here's to getting out there again tomorrow -- and five days a week for six more weeks. Hopefully longer. But let's just take it one day at a time, shall we?

Water. I have been chugging way too much pop. Soda. Coke. Whatever you call it. Granted, it has all been diet, but even though it's calorie-free, it can't be good for me. When I woke up this morning, I knew what I had to do. I've gone all day and had only water, except for that first sip of Diet Sunkist I took when I knew I had to change my ways. I'm not swearing off everything except water, but I need to make it my go-to thirst-quencher. We'll see how this goes.

I hope I'm not biting off more than I can chew in the way of challenging myself, but all three of these changes seem necessary at this point.

Some exciting developments: I have officially lost over 40 pounds, which means I'm in the 250s. That means I'll soon be under 250. This loss total has affected me emotionally more than any other yet. I haven't cried, though. Something tells me the waterworks will spring when I hit that 50-pound mark. Oh, and I bought a pair of size 22 pants for work this weekend. (On sale, of course. 50% off!) I know that size doesn't sound very exciting, but I honestly don't know when I last wore a pair of pants that size. I will definitely be rocking them this week.

In the thick of it.

2010-04-07T14:02:00.003-05:00

The last time I wrote was February 21? Oops. Yeah, I knew from the get-go I wasn't going to be good at this blogging thing.

Good thing I've been doing a much better job with the whole Weight Watchers thing, eh?

This is my twelfth week with the program. As of last Thursday, I'd lost 37.4 pounds. The website has finally stopped telling me I'm losing too quickly because, at the last two weigh-ins, I lost a combined total of one pound. Once it was -.4 and another it was -.6. I was okay with both of those numbers because I was certain I would have a gain each time. And I'm not going to lie, I don't expect much progress this week either.

I don't want to be negative. Really. I'm just trying to be realistic. Over the past few weeks (or the whole month, really), I've struggled to stick with the plan on weekends. I have gone a whole day without tracking my points. In a way, I feel like that's somewhat healthy, that I can function without plugging in numbers. The truth, though, is that I don't plug in the numbers because I know it's going to be ugly. As if not recording it means it never happened. Yeah, right.

If I want to be realistic, I have to take the bad with the good. Ignoring the bad won't make it go away. That should be my goal this week. Track what I eat, no matter what it is. Face the facts.

All this means that I'm in the thick of it now. I think the easy, puppy-love part of this is over. I now know what it's like to feel like I've messed up completely. But I also know what it's like to feel like I'm finally getting somewhere.

Slump.

2010-02-21T14:49:00.002-06:00

So I haven't checked in as much as I would have liked to. This is the end of the trimester, and things are crazy. It's hard to find time to do anything, much less blog and pull my hair out as I try to get it to upload on a 19 kbps connection.

Grocery shopping and cooking have gone out the window, too. I was doing a really good job of preparing breakfast and lunch the night before to ensure that I was eating a variety of foods that I liked. I was having different kinds of fruit smoothies each morning and interesting salads and sides at lunch. It was good. I was enjoying myself. Now, I'm pouring a boring bowl of Total raisin bran for breakfast and getting burned out on hot dogs for lunch. I know it's time to spice things up, but it takes time. Time that, for one reason or another, I can't find.

I'm in a slump.

Not a weight-loss slump, though. As of last Thursday, I've lost 19 pounds. That's almost twenty whole pounds! I can feel it in my clothes. I'm switching out baggier jeans for better-fitting ones. Students have even asked if I'm losing weight. I am.

Maybe too much. Okay, let me rephrase that. I'm not in any kind of danger of being underweight, that's for sure. But last week, when I entered my loss into the website, it told me I was losing weight too quickly. That I needed to slow my loss. Something about health concerns, irregular heartbeats, yadda yadda.

I'm not going to lie. That was sort of discouraging. I mean, can't I do anything right? That's what I'm asking myself. I know, though, that the faster I lose, the faster it could come back. And heaven knows I don't want it to come back.

That week, Nancy asked us if we ate one meal a week where we didn't worry about points. Again, there were a lot of people nodding, but not me. That's when Sarah threatened to whack me in the head and then said something about deserving to enjoy myself every once in a while. Or something like that. But the truth is that I was enjoying myself. But I also knew that I was losing weight a little too quickly, so I thought I would try out the no-rules weekly meal.

I tried it, but I'm not sure if that helped. Me I still lost 1.4 last week, but I just didn't feel good about my progress. I was proud of the loss, but the week's behavior didn't feel very healthy.

I'm losing enthusiasm, and I'm worried. I know it's irrational, but I'm starting to doubt if I'll ever be at a healthy weight. I know that there will be a plateau soon, and I'm scared that I won't be able to push through it.

Today, the road seems longer than ever, and pulling off completely to go through the window at McDonald's has never been so tempting. Damn that singing fish.

A small victory: I tried on clothes in a dressing room without having a total meltdown. I even tried on a bathing suit top and was able to envision a time when I might be able to wear it. It was cute.

Thirty seven points.

2010-02-10T17:03:00.002-06:00

I like counting points. This surprised me. I've heard people complain about the point-counting in the past as if it were the worst thing ever. Even at the first meeting, our leader was discussing tracking, which is what the counting is officially called in Weight Watchers Land, and several members expressed frustration with the process, that they didn't like it or that they would always forget to do it. Needless to say, I was a little ambivalent about the points going in.

But at the same time, I figured it would be the points that would help me. It would give me a guide for healthy eating and portion sizes. That's exactly why I thought this would work. I didn't dictate exactly what I was eating. (Which is what I define as a diet. It's true: Weight Watchers isn't a diet. It's a tool for lifestyle change. At least that's what it seems like so far.) I just had to follow the points. If I blew 20 points on a large-portioned, high-calorie, high-fat food, so what? I just wouldn't have that many points to eat on later when I got hungry. I have never actually done this, but my understanding of the concept alone has given me an improved decision-making process.

Knowing that many people seem to struggle with the points, I started the very next day diligently managing and budgeting and tracking points to the finest detail. I wouldn't put a bite in my mouth without figuring out the points value (thank God for the iPhone app) and logging it. It became fun, like a puzzle. I make all of these pieces fit together: What can I eat, how much, how filling will it be, and most importantly, how good is it going to taste? Obviously, this takes some planning.

Four weeks in, I'm finding that I'm not as insane about the points now as I was in the beginning. It's not that I'm not tracking because I am, but I have a pretty good idea about what I should and shouldn't be eating. And of course, I know the point values of the foods I eat regularly. So I feel comfortable tracking after I've eaten the meal, but not too long after or I will forget. I've only accidentally gone over my daily points once, and that was because it was weigh-in day. I was still operating on a 38-point day, and since I can't log my weight on my phone, I didn't do it until the next day at my work computer. That's when my loss put me in the new points category of 37. But that's no big deal. The program allots everyone an extra 35 weekly points to be used whenever. I haven't really used these yet, and no, they don't roll over. But they are there if I need them. Most days, I actually have a hard time getting all of my points in. I guess that's because, due to my weight, there are just so many of them.

So what do these hypothetical points look like in practice? I'll show you. Even though today is a snow day and I am able to cook at home, this is typical for me.

Breakfast. This morning, I made a smoothie. I used to be anti-smoothie. I don't know, they just seem so hip and diety that I they turned me off, but when I got burned out on my Fiber One cereal (Honey Clusters, not the rabbit food-looking one), I had to try something new. By the way, maintaining variety in what I eat has to be one reason that I'm sticking with this so well.

Every smoothie I make has the following ingredients:

1/2 cup plain fat-free yogurt (1 point)

1/4 cup fat-free milk (1/2 point)

1/4 no-sugar-added applesauce (1/2 point)

1 medium banana (1 1/2 point)

Today, my other ingredient was a cup of no-sugar-added frozen sliced strawberries (0 points). I have used a cup of frozen blueberries (1 point), half a fresh mango or 3/4 cup frozen mango chunks (1 point), or a tablespoon of natural peanut butter with flax seed as the flavoring (3 points). It's all good, but I think the frozen mango is my favorite. (The WalMart I went to last didn't have the mango, though. Duly noted.) Also, I am not very good at determining the size of these smoothies. I usually put it in a Solo cup with a sandwich baggie over it and refrigerate for the next day, but like today, I had about a half a cup left over. I refrigerated it later for a snack, which sounds good about right now, and it's nice because the points are already figured in.

Fruit smoothies are surprisingly filling, but especially on a work day, I have to drink it with a half-cup of low-fat granola cereal (3 points). Then I'm good to go until lunchtime.

Lunch. Lunch has been the most torturous meal of all. I think I've got things sorted, but in the beginning, I couldn't figure out what to take that wasn't totally depressing (those little tuna kits, for example) or time consuming (like the frozen dinners). Thanks to my librarian friend Tammy, I have been introduced to the wonder of 98% fat-free turkey hot dogs and whole grain buns. Just the other day, though, I accidentally discovered the lunch meat magic of Canadian bacon.

I took this meal to lunch the other day along with what I call a Fake Olive Garden Salad, and I barely touched the salad. According to the online point tracker, Canadian bacon is one point per slice, but they say the most accurate way to figure points is to use the points calculator. You plug in the calories, fat, and fiber per serving and it gives the value. I swear, according to the nutrition facts of LandOFrost Canadian bacon, five slices equals one point. I know!

5 slices Canadian bacon (1 point)

5 Zesta whole wheat crackers (1 point)

1 wedge Laughing Cow Light Creamy Swiss Original Flavor Cheese (1 point)

Spread some cheese on the cracker, fold a slice of the Canadian bacon on top, and voila! I mean, it's really good. I was totally full after the five mini-sandwiches. That was noon, and I'm just now (about 4:00 pm) getting ready for a snack.

NOTE: Clearly I am not being paid by any of these companies to promote their brands. For the most part, I just buy whatever WalMart or Kroger has for the best price. But let me tell you, Laughing Cow cheese is the best stuff ever. Go. Buy some now and see what I mean.

Dinner. First of all, before I committed to this program, I ate out five or six nights a week. I am not exaggerating. My family regularly meets for supper at our local family restaurant, where I would usually eat a chicken strip dinner with fries, toast, and sometimes gravy, and about one night a week, I'd do dinner with Sarah after school, a trip that would usually feature the Dairy Queen drive-through window. Now let me say this: All of this could be done in accordance with the Weight Watchers program. It would involve some better choices in food and portion sizes, but I just don't yet have that sort of self-control. If I'm at a restaurant where they serve something I like, that's what I'm going to order, and if the food's there, I'm going to eat it. I will be able to eat out more in time, I know, but now, I have to manage my environment.

So I'm learning to cook, thanks to the recipes on the Weight Watchers website and the ones shared at our meetings. There have been some disappointments, for sure. Like the Cheesy Chili Mac, which despite the chili powder and Mexican-style stewed tomatoes had no flavor whatsoever. And I’m still not sure about those yellow-cake-mix-and-pumpkin cupcakes. But there have been some successes. Like the Enchilada Soup. I made this a few weeks ago after copying the recipe from that week's meeting. I made it on a snow day, and it hit the spot. Who cares about the point values here? This soup is good, and that's why I'm having it for supper tonight.

2 cans of 99% fat-free chicken broth

1 1/4 cup celery, chopped

1/2 cup onion, chopped

3 cans green enchilada sauce

1 can pumpkin

10 ounces cooked chicken

1 cup frozen corn

Simmer celery and onion in broth until tender. Stir in enchilada sauce and pumpkin. Return to low boil and add chicken and corn. Cook additional five minutes.

I know. Pumpkin? Well, it adds color and thickness. You can't taste it at all. Oh, and the last time I used Tyson frozen "grilled" chicken, but it had a fake grilled flavor that I didn't particularly like. This time I used the oven-roast diced kind. Those bags of frozen chicken have 22 ounces in them, so I just estimate a little under half and freeze the rest. This is way easier that actually cooking the chicken, and something tells me you could use canned or package chicken, too. For the corn, I used two single-serve Birdseye SteamFresh packs of sweet corn.

One cup of this stuff has a value of two points. I'll probably have two cups throughout the evening. I may be tempted to throw some fiesta cheese on it, but I tell you, it's not necessary.

If you've been counting along at home, you will know that I will have only used about fourteen points today. That is way under target and definitely not intentional. I usually eat between 30 and 35. I may have to crack open a can of black beans to go with my soup. And you can always count on my eating chocolate every day. I often have a Betty Crocker Warm Delights Mini Molten Chocolate Cake (3 points) with a cup of milk (2 points). I definitely need to get more fruits and vegetables in.

It's a learning process, for sure. The good news is that there is no food police. Right now, it's easy to stay a little under or reach my point target, but hopefully there will come a day when my point target is much lower. It will probably be more challenging to maintain. But it's one day and one week at a time. It's not like I'll walk into my meeting tomorrow and someone will tell me I will only have 20 points from now on. It's a gradual change, and I'll be ready for the changes as they come.

My choice.

2010-02-07T16:37:00.003-06:00

Another question that Nancy asked on Thursday night went something like this: "Does what happened yesterday have an effect on how well you do today?"

I think the implication was that if we had "blown it" one day, were we less likely to "succeed" the next day because we already felt defeated? (I generally hate it when people put words in quotation marks because it's not usually necessarily, but here, I think it is. What does it really mean to screw up or to succeed?) I looked around, and many people nodded their heads. I wasn't nodding. It wasn't that I'm just that darn positive that I don't let my failures affect my actions (or inactions). It's just, well, I hadn't blown it yet. I suppose my previous days were affecting me, but it was because I was doing well. I expected to do well the next day.

That's when I knew I had to be careful. I was surprised by how many people seemed to think they messed up frequently. This didn't bode well for me. I'm going to have bad days.

Each week when I weigh in (a process I am surprisingly not intimidated by), I am told my loss for the week, given a sort of newsletter that focuses on the week's challenge for everyone on the program, and handed a booklet tailored specifically for my week with the program. The book for week four is Habits of Successful Members. These little books focus on issues that members face as they work through the program and usually include quizzes that help us understand ourselves and the program a little better. It sort of reminds me of takings those quizzes in Seventeen when I was in middle school, except these are much more enlightening. This week, the quiz helped me identify the healthy habits I should work on developing.

The results were no surprise, but I find it comforting that the quiz got it spot-on. It said learn from experience and manage your thoughts. These are both things I've known for a long time are struggles for me.

Take learn from experience for example. I think this one has a lot to do with worry, in my case. I tend to expect the worse, but what in my experience has shown me that the worst will happen? Nothing. Things turn out okay, as a general rule. Also, I have to look at successes from the past, determine why I was successful, and practice those behaviors. When I do this, I find myself looking back at how my lifestyle was drastically different in Honduras, where I seemingly effortlessly lost over thirty pounds. I drank almost exclusively water. I walked everywhere I went. I ate very lightly, and I'm not sure I had anything fried at all. For example.

The managing the thoughts one, on the other hand, seems more relevant right now. I think for most people, though, negative thoughts involve body image. I often read advice saying that you wouldn't look at your friend and tell her that she has a huge butt or a disgusting figure, so why would you say that to yourself? Even I have a hard time believing this, but I don't always have a negative inner monologue when I'm looking in the mirror. Now, put that mirror in a dressing room, and things change a bit. But really, I don't toil over my appearance all that much. My personal inner monologue of negativity is instead about my abilities.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I doubt myself. I have a hard time making even the littlest decisions because I'm afraid I'll make the wrong one. When people make the general statement, "You are your biggest critic," they are actually talking to me. I expect the worse, and even when things turn out okay or even good, I find something about what I did to pick on in hindsight. Like teaching. My students, coworkers, principal, and various observers can tell me all day long that I'm good at my job, that I'm a good teacher, but I don't believe them. I don't know if I will ever believe them. Because as I tell myself, I know better. Either they are just trying to be nice or their standards are lower than mine. I'm that kind of negative.

Even after the first week of Weight Watchers when I weighed in and discovered I'd lost over an astounding seven pounds in one week (more than I weighed when I was born), instead of being proud I tried to downplay it by saying that it just goes to show how much I have to lose. Luckily, Sarah set me straight and basically told me to shut up and be proud. I tried.

So my big challenge here is believing that I can do this and, even more intimidating, that I can keep it off, because it's not like I’m just trying to lose five pounds to fit into a dress here. While I haven't really had a bad WW experience that has adversely affected the subsequent day, I have a discouraging experience that may impede my overall progress. Remember that weight I lost in Honduras? I gained it all back. Plus some. Which sounds exactly like those stories I hear almost daily about people who lost weight. This is the negativity that keeps nagging at my mind: So what if you lose it? You'll just gain it all back.

But I have to be realistic. I did not set out to lose that weight in Honduras. It wasn't a choice; it was circumstance. I was changing with my environment by necessity. I'm not very good at imposing imaginary restraints on myself, so once I got home, I couldn't convince myself that water was the only drink available to me, that I didn't have a car to drive, and that there wasn't anything to eat except beans, rice, and some tuna and crackers every now and then. Yes, that's how I had lived for those two months, and obviously, my body changed. But I didn't really choose to be healthier.

This, though, is my choice. I am choosing to live healthier. I am working on developing new habits that fit into my lifestyle. My lifestyle is changing when it comes to eating and activity, but I want to make these changes here with the people, places, and thing that I love. Not in some temporary reality.

This morning, I slept later than I have slept in a while, probably since I started the program. And again, if you know me, you know I love to sleep late. But when I woke up at 10:30 this morning, I had an immediate feeling of dread, as if I'd blown it yesterday and fully expected the same for today. I was still in that hazy half-sleep, so it didn't even occur to me that I was feeling this way because I'd slept away a chunk of the day and regretted it. Instead, I interpreted it as having failed the program in some way. Yeah, Weight Watchers. What the heck does that have to do with sleeping in a little? I don't know either. At least now I have my wits about me.

The truth is that yesterday was a really good day. It was probably the first day that I wasn't constantly aware that I was following a plan, but I did follow it. I spent most of the day with a group of knitters, spinners, and weavers hanging out working with fibers. I had brought my own lunch (a really good chicken and orange salad and my new favorite, Laughing Cow cheese) rather than eating the good-looking food prepared at the convention center, but that was okay. I did not feel deprived. I think it was mostly because I was intentional about eating well, rather than leaving my choices up to circumstance, and I focused on enjoying the day, doing something I love and meeting new people who love it, too. I chose to have a good day. So I did.

I am choosing to live healthily. So I will.

The longest road.

2010-02-04T21:51:00.004-06:00

I have been on the Weight Watchers Momentum program for three weeks, and according to Erin, it's time to blog this thing. So here goes.

Tonight, our meeting leader Nancy asked the group what our "fed up" moment was. When did we know we couldn't take it anymore? One lady said it was when she had to alternate between two pairs of jeans, washing them every other day, because they were the only ones that fit her. Huh. I've been doing that for years. Heck, I'm down to one pair now. Another said it was when she had a hard time getting up from the floor after playing with the children at the day care where she works. I can definitely identify with the awkward struggle to get to my feet, but it's never been embarrassing enough to spur change.

There's no pressure to share during the meetings, which is good, because I couldn't bring myself to say mine, the moment in which I knew I could not gain another pound. The moment when I'd reached my limit. I couldn't say it out loud, but I'm going to write it. Just typing it into this Word document has got my heart racing. Never mind that I'll be copying and pasting it onto blog for all the word, if it so chooses, to see. That will be another hurdle. Anyway.

I don't know why I decided to step on my bathroom scales. They've never been my friend. But for some reason and with much trepidation, I did step onto them about two months ago. And when I did, that little red hand -- I kid you not -- swung completely around the dial. All the way from zero to 300.

Surely my eyes had deceived me. The little adjustment wheel must've been tampered with. I stepped off, made sure it was set exactly on zero, and stepped back on. No change. Three. Hundred. Pounds. There it is.

Okay, maybe I've been in denial. Or maybe all this time I've been under the wrong impression of what 300 pound looks like. But when I envision a 300-pound person, it doesn't match up with what I see in the mirror. I mean, I know I'm fat. I always have been. (Except maybe on the day I was born. That was a very acceptable 7 pounds and one ounce, thank you very much.) It wasn't that I was shocked I had gained the weight. I was never under the impression that I was losing or even holding steady. But me? Weighing 300 pounds? That dark number that is definitely the unspoken barrier between overweight and Fat, with a capital F? Apparently so.

So when my teacher friend Sarah came up to chat with me while I was doing my morning hall duty and mentioned that she was going to join Weight Watchers and asked if I would like to join her, I knew what I had to do. She said that, of course, one has to have the right mindset to make this sort of commitment. This is normally where I would hem and haw and say, "I don't know…" Not this time. No. I had already done all the thinking I had to do. I was ready, and here was my opportunity to make a change. The change.

Mind you, I've been looking for this opportunity all my life. I've never been a dieter. I did try a Christian weight-loss program for a while when I was in high school and there was that freak accident in which I lost 30-something pounds while in Honduras for two months, but other than that, my life has been a steady weight-gain from Day One. I've always been too skeptical of diets and programs that I know aren't going to become lifestyles. I mean, who's going to eat only grapefruit every day for the rest of her life or never eat bread or potatoes again? Not me, that's for sure. Why try if I know beforehand that it won't be for real? You may go ahead and translate my skepticism as an excuse for laziness. Even if those so-called plans don't really work, it's not okay to pack on pounds day in and day out like I have for 26 years. So I admit it. My logic wasn't altogether flawless, but I did have a point.

In Weight Watchers, though, I've found something I think I can handle. This is just three weeks in, so I know the program and I are still in the honeymoon phase. I know things will get more challenging. I am learning, though, and that's everything. I’m learning to see food differently, to make better choices, to cook, for heaven's sake! (Talk about giving a man a fish and feeding him for a day versus teaching him to fish and feeding him for a lifetime.) I also know that I need to learn to see myself differently. That's where I need the most work.

So I know I've made a big deal about the number 300 (300.6 to be exact, according to my Week 1 weigh-in), but as my friend Jenny frequently tags her tweets: I am not my weight. If and when I lose the pounds I need to lose, I will still be me. Being thinner will not make me a better human being. Being heavier than I am now will not make me an unworthy person. But what I've decided is this: I may not be my weight, but my weight reflects the way I see myself. If I care about myself -- because if I don't, who will? -- I cannot treat my body the way I have been. This unhealthy and uncomfortable state I've gotten myself in shows how little good I've expected for myself. And I'm learning that I have to expect good things in my life. Again, if I don't expect them, who will?

Stay tuned to read more about where I've come from, where I'm going, and most importantly, where I am. I will have successes, failures, revelations, breakdowns, and certainly oodles of stories about navigating the POINTS system, learning to cook, and getting active.

It's going to be a long road, but if I've learned anything from experience, life is about the journey. I'm not looking for shortcuts.

Today's victory: I found out that I lost 2.6 pounds this week for a total of 11.4. That means I earned my second 5-pound loss sticker. I now weight 289.2, which puts my new daily POINTS target at 37.

Afternoon Detention

2009-04-27T15:23:00.000-05:00

I have D-Hall duty.
As if it's my punishment.
There are 7 kids in here.
2 reading books.
One boy has his lit book out.
2 girls seem to be writing notes.
One is doing her homework.

Then there's this kid in the back who looks like Stephen King.
Clearly his first D-Hall.
He's just staring, looking around.
Space.
Ceiling.
Blank TV.
The girl next to him (homework girl) who probably thinks he's a creeper.

His name was just called over the PA.
His ride is waiting out back.
So he got up and left.
Clearly doesn't understand how detention works.

The other kids know.
Spaced evenly throughout the room.
No one talks,
No one sleeps.
They are surprised when I say,
"You can go."

This is not punishment.
This is quiet time.

Professional development.

2009-04-21T14:21:00.003-05:00

After three months of bloglessness, I reappeared here last night. It heralded what was, in my mind, the beginning of a series called Bound and Determined, in which I try to read one of my purchased-but-as-of-yet-unread books weekly and then blog about it. So I introduced the concept, prattled on about Birdwing (which I read during the ice storm), and then went to bed. After sleeping on it, I made a decision.

Actually, my first decision upon waking (which, interestingly, turns out to be after getting out of the shower and eating breakfast) was not to go to work. My stomach did (and does) not feel right at all, and well, it didn't take much arm-twisting to get me to log onto the help-I-need-a-substitute! website and unplug the curling iron.

Then, after making a nest in the living room, I made this other decision. Instead of just a series, I turned Bound and Determined into its own blog. I've done this before. And by this, I mean both starting up a new project blog on a whim and starting up a reading blog. I do not have a good track record here, but you never know when I just might stick with something.

Plus, and this is where I'm really honest, I am way too impressed with myself for coming up with the multi-faceted title. I mean, bound? Like books. And determined? Because I am and the whole point of writing the blog is to keep myself motivated. Okay, I'll stop patting myself on the back, but you gotta admit… But of course, I did some research, and I'm not totally original here. Bound and Determined is also the name of a few other blogs and a work of erotica. It's a cliché, unique only in its redundancy. Whatever.

I have to admit that I'm jumping the gun a little. I've already acknowledged my paper-thin willpower. Ha, I haven't even written about a second book yet. And I have over thirty – thirty! – other books on my list. The sheer magnitude of the list alone is enough to defeat me. Some accountability can't hurt.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm not doing this because I want to be a librarian. Obviously, I am. Books and reading are what I love, but I have a lot of work to do if I honestly want to consider myself "knowledgeable about current children's and young adult literature". It's professional development.

Follow me as I develop professionally at http://determinedtoread.blogspot.com/. And join in the discussion. Ask questions. Make reading recommendations. Let me know if you have read / want to read / don't want to read the book I'm reading.

I've recently decided that books are only important because they connect us with other people. If I can't share the experience or knowledge or insight that I gain from a book, what's the point in reading it?

Bound and determined.

2009-04-20T21:45:00.005-05:00

I have a problem. I cannot stop buying books.

Once after acknowledging our similarly overflowing bookshelves, Niaz and I half formed a pact in which we vowed to allow ourselves to buy only one new book after reading three already-purchased ones. That sounded nice, didn't it? A good way not only to get through my ever-lengthening reading list, but also to give my bank account a break. I don't know about him, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he too surrendered like I did to the siren song of bookstores. I think I read one whole book before going to Barnes & Noble and buying enough books to make my 10%-off Member Card worth the membership fee.

I have never been good with resolutions – New Year's or otherwise – and it's becoming increasingly apparent that I might have an addictive personality. This probably explains the almost-one-hundred dollars I dropped at the Southern Kentucky Book Fest in Bowling Green on Saturday. While unpacking from the weekend last night, I somewhat proudly and somewhat ashamedly added seven or eight freshly-bound books to my collection, dividing them up among the large bookcase, the small unofficial YA shelf, and the stool-turned-nightstand beside my bed. I stepped back, surveyed the situation, and one thing was abundantly clear: It's time to rededicate myself to the not-a-resolution I considered back in February.

I refused to make it public then because I'm fairly convinced that telling other people about my goals has approximately the same effect on my progress as high school sweethearts professing their love to one another via a yearbook ad has on their relationship's longevity. The endeavor is doomed before the intentions are even published.

So I knowingly enter into this with great trepidation, but here it is: My goal is to read one book a week. To an average reading adult, this seems doable, but in the two months since I half-heartedly began, I've finished three books. (Time to buy more?! Okay, so I've already taken care of that. Plus, I've decided not to impose a book-buying embargo on myself because I learned long ago that I'm too smart – er, weak – to fall for my own fictitious rules and deadlines.) I can blame in on the lifestyle of being a new teacher, but let's face reality. The height of the book-stacks has reached mountainous, and intervention is critical.

I'm bound and determined to scale this constantly growing mountain. And I'm taking you with me.

Birdwing by Rafe Martin

I have a feeling that even if the plot of this fairy tale had been disappointing, I would have still loved it despite itself. Luckily, the coming-of-age adventure of Prince Ardwin did not disappoint. I had not expected that a winged boy would become the one character in all of literature with whom I most identify.

This is one of the many books that I've purchased because of its attractive cover, even though I later learned that the artist's rendering of the protagonist, the one-armed-one-winged Ardwin, is inaccurate. (No, the wing is on his other left, I'd say.) I picked it up at the Scholastic Book Fair that the book club sponsored in the library at school. I mean, I had to buy books to support the student organization, right?

Not surprisingly, though, the book landed on my bookshelf unread until a month or so later when Victoria asked me for reading recommendations and I, despite having read the book, suggested it. She and I once had a tryst with the Brothers Grimm, and this story reimagines and expands the Grimm's tale "The Six Swans". Seemed like a match. She took it, read it, loved it, and foisted it back at me so that I could read and love it, too. Done and done.

Rafe Martin's writing style drew me in immediately, and I suspect it would carry me through an even poorly spun yarn. The tale is written in prose, but it is nothing short of lyrical. Martin is fond of alliterative and original adjective pairs, prepositional possession, intriguing names, and weighty nouns and verbs. His characterization is vivid and his setting is timeless in the way that the realms of the best legends are. The cast line-up is full of archetypes (orphans, evil step-mothers, and wizened wizards), but Martin develops them into a unique humanity despite their otherworldliness. The themes of love, loss, betrayal, and belonging are worked out with heartbreaking and redemptive reality.

Birdwing's narrator is omniscient, which explains my frustration with the thought processes and choices of Ardwin, the young hero. The reader is far more enlightened about reality and its consequences than he, so the attempt at dramatic irony sometimes fails because the plot twists are apparent to the reader long before the twists occur. This makes Ardwin seem very naïve, but this may just be part of the tale's theme. This youthful naivety juxtaposes nicely with the young man at the end of the novel.

I would have loved this book no matter what because I am a sucker for a nicely turned phrase, but Birdwing is more than a pretty book. It is a journey that takes us – Ardwin and the reader – fearfully into our insecurities and brings us victoriously out of ourselves.

Coming Soon! Bound and Determined: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Check it out here.

Greenjeans: Now with cables!

2009-01-25T11:06:00.004-06:00

This is the fun part. I really do like doing the cables, which are far easier than I had ever imagined. And I have no shame in admitting that I get giddy every time I've added at new twist to the cables. Joy in the small things, for certain.

Related: I stayed up into the wee hours of this morning updating my Ravelry account. I have most of my projects on there with pictures and notes. The site may be more addictive than the knitting itself, but it is an incredibly useful tool. How else would I find over one thousand other knitters who have completed or are in the middle of completing the very cardigan you see above? I'm in awe.

Go. Join. I'm washedup. Who are you?

Greenjeans: an update.

2009-01-18T22:18:00.005-06:00

It is becoming more and more apparent to me that I actually am knitting a sweater. A plus size sweater, at that. And that is certainly something. I brag not. I myself can't believe that I'm making this thing appear on the needles. Off the needles. Wherever. Here is an off-needle picture. I did (successfully) try it on, but the pajama pants and general unkemptness told me I was not a model today.

I don't believe the color is accurately represented here. While I know the color is indeed called olive, it's not so olive drab in person. It's far happier -- with a hint of yellow, even. Oh, and the periwinkle business is just waste yarn keeping everything from unraveling until I come back and pick it all up. So, no. It isn't going to be a sleeveless, bare-midriff number.

Still to come: Ribs and cables to the bottom, three-quarterish sleeves with rib-and-cable cuffs, and a ribbed button band and collar. I wasn't feeling too bad about the future of the project until I picked up Knitting Rules today for some between-row reading, and the Yarn Harlot made me fear the button band for reasons I don't yet understand. And she told a horror story about a green cardigan. Great.

The truth is this: I've probably made too much progress. "This is a knitalong, not a race," says Kim, the knitalong ring leader. Oops. I've even done a few rounds of cables since taking this picture, which testifies to how much I really do not want to do all that planning for school. And I have some serious planning to do, considering the three-week KTIP marathon staring me down.

I am a very productive procrastinator.

Greenjeans.

2009-01-11T19:36:00.006-06:00

This is more than a lifeless blob. It is the beginnings of a cardigan. An actual sweater.

To see a completed and smaller version in a different color yarn of a different fiber, click here.

I'm knitting mine in Vanna's Choice Olive, which is acrylic and afforable, which I may regret for its texture, but this is my first sweater. I didn't exactly want to buy that delicious forty-dollar-a-skein alpaca just so I could mess it up.

So far, I've only forgotten to increase one stitch on one row. I don't think that's going to result in total lopsidedness -- yet. I keep thinking about how, when they were building the arch in St. Louis from the bottom up, they couldn't be a fraction of a degree off, or it wouldn't have met properly at the top. But I have to keep telling myself, This is a cardigan, not a landmark.

It's only right.

2009-01-04T01:42:00.003-06:00

My guess is that I pull this one out about once every .87 years. But I'm no mathematician.

current clothing: The long-sleeved gray shirt that I got at Goodwill to take to Honduras and these four-sizes-too-big Christmas pajamas pants that I shamelessly wear year-round.

current mood: Productive, apparently. Not productive productive. But just wanting to do something.

current taste: The aftertaste of a peppermint mocha truffle. Christmas clearance at Wal-Mart.

current hair: Curly, verging on frizzy. And close to needing a trim. I'm not used to getting my hair done more often that once every six months.

current annoyance: I've been sitting in this wooden kitchen chair for far too long now, and well, my butt hurts.

current smell: *sniff sniff sniff* Nothing (a la Yukon Cornelius). Actually, I keep thinking I smell caramel apples, but I must be making that up.

current thing you ought to be doing: Oh, this is easy. Updating grades. Planning Monday. Planning Tuesday. Planning the semester.

current jewelry: Big ol' earrings I got at Lane Bryant when I was eight dollars away from another discount bracket. I'm wearing these only because I managed to lose one of those silly earrings for which I paid way too much when I was distraught over losing one of my copper Bell's Drug Store earrings. O, the despair! Ahem, and my teacher watch. I'd be willing to bet that in all the instances of filling out this survey, I've never listed a watch here. My, how things change.

current book: I have a stack a mile high beside my bed, but truth be told, I'm only really trying to read Making a Literary Life right now. The first chapter calls upon the reader to write one thousand words a day, and I haven't managed to do it two days in a row. I feel like a fraud picking up the book to read Chapter Two.

current refreshment: I'm fresh out of my new invention, Tangerale. It's a glass of ginger ale with about two-thirds teaspoon Tang. Ay, que rico.

current worry: That I'll be unprepared for the last day of last semester and the first day of next semester, also known as Monday and Tuesday.

current crush: The cashier at Hobby Lobby. He's probably either a husband or a high schooler. Or homosexual. So it goes.

favorite celebrity: Hmm, I find this one more and more difficult to answer as the years pass. John Green? I don't know.

current longing: For one more week before school starts back. Just one? Aw, c'mon...

current music: Nada. My computer can't handle the internet and a music player.

current wish: That out-of-state tuition for master's degrees wasn't so exorbitant.

current lyric in your head: "You'll learn to hate me / But still call me baby"

current makeup: Physician's Formula that needs to be washed off.

current undergarments: This would require actually checking. This much I know: I am wearing some.

current regret: Not doing all of my teacherliness earlier in the break.

current desktop picture: Party lights on the camper. From several summers ago.

current plans for tonight/weekend: Tomorrow is Sunday, and by necessity, I will be a teacher in preparation for the coming days.

current cuss word du jour: Today? I think I'm clear today.

current disappointment: Hm, Sissy, Victoria, Kathryn, and I saw Tale of Despereaux today. It was a cute movie, but not exactly what I expected it to be.

current amusement: Looking at AT&T to see which features everyone on our plan has.

current IM/person you're talking to: One is the loneliest number.

current love: My bedroom. I rigged up some paper lantern garden lights over my mirror. It's all about the lighting.

current obsession: It might be safe to say that I'm not totally obsessed with anything at the moment. Knitting may have taken the prize just a few days back, though. I've found my balance.

current thing or things on your wall: The only actual thing that's not just scooted up or leaning against my bedroom wall is a little "antique" shelf that just happened to be the perfect height to hold DVDs.

current favorite book: I'm never good with this question. I did, about a month ago, decide who my favorite authors are: C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, Anne Lamott, and John Green.

current favorite movie: Driving Lessons is still holding on for the win. Though I did just rewatch Love Actually for Christmas, and that cast just couldn't get any better. I like the Brits, apparently.

Bandwagons, ho!

2009-01-03T21:18:00.006-06:00

It may not last for another twenty seconds, but I am -- watch me screw this lingo up -- twittering. Tweeting? Oh, what is it? Am I now so old-fashioned that I shouldn't be allowed a login on the website?

By way of being old-fashioned... I got organized last night. Well, with my yarn, at least. I bought one of those dorm closet shoe organizers at Big Lots and then Roy G. Biv-ed my yarn. My shoes, mind you, are piled up and pairless at the bottom of the closet and so they shall remain.

Who knew I had so much yarn? And this set-up doesn't even include my whites, blacks, grays, and browns. Nor the in-use, recently in-use, or soon-to-be in-use skeins. Just as with books, I buy more before I can read (or knit) what I've got. *sigh*

Here's to seven years -- some more interesting than others -- in the archive list.

Not again.

2008-12-30T16:32:00.003-06:00

This does not bode well for the immediate future of my writing habit. I am notorious (among myself) for the reverse binge-and-purge of good deeds.

But I could not stop myself.

In another requisite end-of-year reflection, I am forced to recognize how quickly this year has passed. The What Significant Things Happened in 2008? Game was played by my mom and me on Christmas Day as I drowsily drove home from my sister's house. It was meant to keep me awake, as the game Cows was not cutting it.

This year passed with such swiftness, I believe, because of how compartmentalized it was. This is how I think of it: Post-Graduation/Pre-Honduras, Honduras, Post-Honduras/Holly's Wedding/Pre-Teaching, and Teaching. For each segment of time, I was oblivious to anything but my immediate physical and mental surroundings and the tasks at hand. Each chapter, if you will, flowed neatly into the next one in such a way that, without my notice, I graduated college one day and finished my first semester as a real teacher the next -- with a whole year gone in the process.

Perhaps the most surprising realization of all (maybe I exaggerate) was the inspiration for this entry. Looking at my links (almost unfamiliar from the lack of seeing them regularly), I saw the one to my Flickr photos. I knew before I clicked it what I would find: My premium account has expired. The year passed and I did not make my payment. What was more than a thousand photographs and several nifty albums dividing them up has been reduced to 200 pictures, being less than half of my Honduras album. I have not yet decided whether or not to upgrade and save the account. Its practicality has, too, expired for me.

It seems strange to me that silly little bits like this mark the passage of time.

Considering the new year's resolve.

2008-12-30T15:26:00.003-06:00

With the new year fewer than two days away, I am almost inspired to renew my dedication to this blog. Almost.

More than half of my school winter break (to be politically correct) has passed, and I am just now unearthing the tools of teacherliness that have conveniently been out of sight -- and undoubtedly out of mind. I'm trying to get last semester -- in all its incompleteness due to snow days -- graded and out of the way, but today, I found myself preparing for this coming semester during which I get to be an English teacher, too. In theory, it sounds exciting. A little bit, anyhow. We'll see. So I must carve out that path for myself and my students. Plus, I need to apply all of my lessons learned from this past semester to rethink my strategies and routines for this semester. Is organization next to godliness? Or is it preparedness?

And so it is now time to reflect upon that hideous false construct of the new year's resolution. I am leary of saying them out loud, much less writing them down, much less publishing them for others to see. I think it is a curse akin to that of the senior yearbook ad. (Refresher course: The couples who take out an ad in the back of the yearbook in order to profess their love for another are doomed to break up before the yearbooks come off the press.) I'm not sure I've accomplished any goal I've ever written down save purchasing an item on a grocery list, which is still a dubious example.

With the above in mind, I will not share my list of very specific tasks I have proposed for myself, both personal and professional. But there is a list! In my mind and nowhere else. Of course.

The ban on MySpace cleared out the crowd.

2008-11-04T11:45:00.004-06:00

Ah, Election Day.

The leaves have peaked around here, and the weather's nice. It took me three seconds to vote. Now, I'm at the public library where there is a book sale, and I wonder what it must be like to be the author whose books have been pulled from the shelves, branded with a bold "WITHDRAWN" stamp, and shoved onto the "Reduced! Unmarked books only 10 cents!" table. I bought one Newbery Award winner. How'd that make it on the table? And a ton of audio cassette recordings. Famous speeches, Charles Kuralt essays, a Garrison Keillor broadcast, and a Studs Turkel series because I know that he just died and I don't have a clue who he was. I'm a sucker. I know.

Anyway, I'm getting ready to multitask -- enter grades and catch up on Nerdfighteria while I sit here with the public library computer lab crew: the match.com dude, the solitaire guy, the YouTube lady. We're pretty cool, all of us.

Tomorrow, I'm going to see John and Hank Green. And that's all that matters.

Decision-making and the art of lawncare.

2008-11-02T15:27:00.000-06:00

Last weekend, after a week at school that made me actually love my job, I decided that it was time to start looking for a place closer to school. After all, if I'm going to be keeping my teaching post for at least two years, I should be looking for a more reasonable dwelling with a commute time of fewer than 45 minutes each way. Thusly began the hunt.

It was frustrating -- not because I wasn't coming up with any information. I was. My word-of-mouth and school-wide email inquiries were turning up results faster than I could sort through them. But I was frustrated because this week had me chained to my desk until well after dark, long after the hour it is advisable to track down uncharted rental property. Plus, I was just too tired to do the sifting.

Thank goodness for this week. No, it didn't make me love my job quite as well as last week did, but it did give me some time to think. I still haven't followed up on any of those leads. Freeish-time is only now peeking around the corner. Who knows? Maybe I'll go apartment hunting. Maybe I won't. Yes, being closer to school would be nice, but maybe I'm just conning myself with all those glittering pros on my pro-con list. With gas prices going down and with home getting more homey by the minute, I'm not sure if sleeping with a shotgun beside my bed is really what I want right now.

Here's what I've decided:

The grass is no greener anywhere else than it is where I stand at any given moment. I should tend it and cultivate it. I should water it and be grateful for it. I should choose to see the tender shoots of green beside my feet, instead of tromping them down. And if anyone else's lawn looks more lush and velvety green than my own, it is because that person chose to make it that way, and if that same lawn doesn't stay that way after the previous owner leaves and I set up camp, it is because that person took his or her attitude with him or her, I've brought mine along, and it's the same attitude that kept my little patch of grass brown and brittle before. And I can't forget that every place goes through seasons. Nowhere -- short of Narnia -- is grass really perpetually green. But it is almost always certain to come back if I wait long enough.

If I live here or if I live there, life is life. Good or bad. I can choose to run, or I can choose to change myself. Running seems easier, but it's only temporary.

don't get me wrong

2008-08-23T21:15:00.002-05:00

I know. I've disappeared. What can I say?

I sometimes get the feeling I spend way too much time on school, but I haven't figured out yet how to manage. I've never really understood the saying not enough hours in the day until now. I'm not saying it can't happen, but I don't currently understand how someone can be a teacher and a person. You know, a person who has a family, has friends, has hobbies, reads, listens to music, watches movies, gets on Facebook... And to be a real person while being a good teacher? I don't know. Maybe my definition of person is skewed.

One teacher told me that someone once gave her this advice: "I think you would be a better teacher if you didn't work so hard."

I could understand that. "I think I'm in danger of being that teacher," I said.

Another teacher who was standing with us then asked me, "Are you married?" I shook my head no, and she laughed knowingly and confirmed, "Oh, yeah. You are in danger."

I guess you compensate and displace. You can only fill up the time you have available and then the excess gets pushed out. Maybe I've made the mistake of making all of myself available.

I know, I know. It's my first year. It's supposed to be this way. I'll find the rhythm. I'll catch my breath. I just wonder when.

2008-07-02T22:40:00.002-05:00

On Friday, Holly treated Elizabeth, Rachel, and me to McDonald's lunch. It was the one semi-calm moment in the wedding-day whirlwind, even if Holly rushed to paint her own fingernails as soon as she finished her southern chicken sandwich. While Holly did that, Elizabeth and I decided to brave the newly-formed lunch crowd at the counter to get desserts. While we stood there in line and debated whether or not we should ask the lady at the cash register for "vanilla thrillas" instead of "ice cream cones" (Elizabeth ultimately did, though the cashier was not amused.), I felt became aware of a feeling in my stomach.

It was one of those feelings that is neither fully physiological nor fully psychological. I vaguely recognized it, but I couldn't quite place it. It was sort of an emptiness despite having had eaten. Then I had a flashback, similar to the mental connection between an aroma and a place or between a song and a season. For a split second, I wasn't twenty four years old or standing in line with Elizabeth at the McDonald's on Washington and Green: I was seven, and I was alone, lying in the bed that my sister and I shared until the day that she got married. And I had that feeling in my stomach -- or in my heart.

Who knew that I'd have the same reaction to my best friend getting married that I had to my sister getting married? It struck me as sort of odd, mostly because I'm seventeen years older than I was when Sissy married. You'd think my emotions would have matured a bit.

But really, it makes sense. Why wouldn't I feel the same way? I mean, I'm still not sure what the feeling means. I believe that it is one of those amoral things that is -- at the risk of being redundant -- neither good nor bad. But whatever it is, I'm glad that my heart knows what's going on even if, in the whirlwind, I don't.

I'm happy for you, C. B.

2008-06-03T23:38:00.003-05:00

It occurred to me the other day that a person can drive down any road he or she wants. No one is stopping me from driving down those roads that don't really make up the most direct route between home and my final destination. There is no law enforcing the straight line between points A and B. There's no one keeping me from going anywhere except me. Huh.

Mining 101

2008-05-28T15:26:00.002-05:00

For better or for worse, Niaz and I have decided to start a blog about our first year of teaching, mostly because we thought it was cool that we graduated together, will be doing our first year at the same time, and we'll both be teaching Spanish. We recognize that we are at least partially insane for even considering such an undertaking during what is widely known as the most hectic time of a teacher's life. We're hoping, though, that it will be a good tool for us: a place to reflect, to compare notes, and maybe even to get some feedback. Who knows. It might actually help us make it through the year.

It's called Mining 101, and there is a handy little link to it in the sidebar. We're going ahead and getting started because, after all, we do have to prepare ourselves in advance for this adventure of being first year teachers in Kentucky schools. So we'll be chronicling our experiences, developments, and general teacherliness, hopefully with some regularity. Even if you're not a teacher, it might be interesting to watch us flounder around. And if you are a teacher, help! We'd love to have some of your insight.

Two tales.

2008-05-19T21:03:00.007-05:00

I counted twenty-four rings from the center to the sappy edge of the stump. Thinking of the boy in the Giving Tree sitting there bent and wrinkled, I laid a hand on the felled trunk and patted it the way you do the cooling fingers of a loved one newly passed away. This mulberry -- a mulberry because of the little green clumps in her hair -- was twenty-four years old this morning when Dad put a notch and a wedge in the base and pulled her to the ground with a chain and his truck. She was disfigured, he said, from the January icestorm, but Mom and I, driving past in the afternoons, had both mentioned that we liked the way she lifted her jointy arms into the air. Now they are in pieces at her sides. The exposed interior is yellow and solid, not like the hollowed white stump of catalpa keeping vigil several yards away. Grabbing onto a tiny arm, I rock a small section of the trunk toward me. Dad warns me that it'd crush my toes were it to slip, so I push it back and ask if we can take it to the house. Not questioning my motive, which is good because I'm still not sure of it myself, he backs the truck alongside the tree, rolls the little log away from the rest, and lays it in the bed. When we get home, he adds it to a row of wizened chunks of trees past lined up beside the garage. I'm not sure if this is a memorial for fallen trees or if it is a monument of remorse, but this new piece looks out-of-place at the end, with her twenty-four fully-intact rings, same as me.

II.

"Might as well look at the road if you're going to drive."

Dad was taking turns looking at the fields of yellow-tops out to the left and glancing at the road. I was getting tired of my side of the truck getting near the weeds in the ditch and then whipping back into the road. We had been watching yet another pile of brushwood burn when he decided we should go to Sebree. "Let's go get a bite to eat," he suggested. "How about that?" So there we went.

He sat in the Subway parking lot while I ran in, twenty dollar bill in hand. The familiar Subway smell smelled unfamiliar in Sebree. The restaurant is only a few weeks old here, and I am unused to seeing national chains in the area. With Mom out-of-town for the week, I went ahead and ordered a Five-Dollar Footlong for each of us, figuring it might last us a few meals. Chicken breast for me, and meatball for Dad. (True to form, when I ordered his, I requested a football.) I took the sandwiches and Dad's change back to the truck, and we headed for the Dairy Bar.

This was more like it. The Dairy Bar has been in Sebree for longer than my memory. We went through the drive-through and ordered vanilla ice cream cones to eat before supper. Mine small, his medium. Before we could get across the railroad tracks to go home, we heard a train whistle drawing close. We were the first to stop at the crossing with the red-and-white-striped arms and flashing red lights, and we both saw this as an opportunity for Dad to eat on the ice cream before having to contend with it and the steering wheel. Waiting for the train to come, I heard a car rev up behind us and pass us. I figured it was going to turn onto the street parallel to the tracks, but instead, it zoomed straight ahead, zig-zagged through protected arms, and trailed up Main Street only a few seconds before the train crossed the car's path.

For about three minutes, railroad car after railroad car flickered past as Dad neglected his ice cream cone to gripe about the idiocy of that car's driver. I'd finished mine, cone and all, by the time the lights stopped flashing and the arms raised again. Coming up Main, we saw the sky light up pink with rattlesnake lightning.

As we passed out of Sebree, it started to rain. Juggling the barely-eaten ice cream and the barely-functioning windshield wipers, Dad grew anxious. He worked on the ice cream and jumped just a little each time lightning streaked the sky. By the time he offered me the last bit of cone, which I turned down, it was raining steady.

"Guess it's raining on the garden," he said. Today, it was cucumbers, squash, and cantaloupe seeds and more tomato sets in the ground. Indeed, they were getting a soaking.

The rain had slowed when we pulled up the long gravel drive beside the house, but the lightning had grown more frequent. He parked around back, turned the key in the ignition, and squinted out the window. "I don't know." There was a bit of distance and a hickory nut tree between us and the locked back door.

"I don't know," he repeated. "They say not to open windows because the electricity can travel." He rolled down his window.

Lightning behind us flashed and turned the building in front of us pink for a split second. Dad was counting under his breath, the fastest seconds I ever heard, waiting for the thunder. When it rolled, it was apparently far enough away to satisify him. I gathered up all our belongings, Subway included, and made him sort out which was the back door key before we made a run for it. Just as we scurried through the door, there was another flash, but we were safe.

"Don't you think it'd be nice to eat on the front porch," he suggested. I couldn't help but laugh. I nodded and took our sandwiches out through the front door to the rocking chairs, and he went to the basement after two cans of Pepsi. While I rocked and waited for him, I watched the hills across the road disappear into nightfall. Except for those few seconds every now and then when the whole sky would be strange daylight before dimming again and rumbling away.

The Restaurant.

2008-05-15T23:06:00.007-05:00

I knew that I was taking advantage of the waitress when I ordered the salad bar. When Dad asked how much it would cost to add the bar to his burger and chili, she accidently said two bucks rather than the actual $2.99 that's printed in the menu, the one updated with newer, slightly higher prices to compensate for the economy. I told her, "I think it's $2.99," but she said that since she'd said it wrong, she'd give us that price. I wasn't even going to get the salad bar because, though this new little feature of the Restaurant has made eating there two or three times a week bearable, I was a sort of burnt out and just wanted a burger and fries. But a dollar off? Why not, I said. So at 4:30 in the afternoon, I had a bigger supper than I could handle.

Mom had late meetings and a dinner at work tonight, so it was just Dad and me. There's been a lot of just him and me lately, if you couldn't tell, but it's good. To hear Mom tell it, he's spent the last six years missing me. I'd say he's spent the past six years missing keeping an insanely watchful eye over me. However you cut it, he's glad I'm home these days, and I'm trying to make the most of this year that I've decided to spend here.

Whether anyone wants to read it or not, it's got me writing. Almost too much, because I find myself already drafting paragraphs while I'm still in the experience. For instance, while I whittled away at my too-big meal, I was taking mental notes about the constant drone of FOX News in the background, about the way carrots was misspelled with two Ts on the daily specials board, about how specials had an unnecessary apostrophe in it, about how Dad was alternating between a conversation with me about undergraduate and graduate degrees and a conversation with a guy at the next table (the old man coffee-drinking table for regulars) about how many tons a certain tractor might weigh.

But really, there isn't anything that insightful to write. It was supper with Dad. It was normal and pretty cheap. And that's interesting enough for me.

The Dad Chronicles continue.

2008-05-14T20:16:00.003-05:00

Maybe I'm just swept up in the fever of the fad, but I'm trying to be green. Ish. I'm buying all the canvas totes at WalMart and IGA so that I don't use any more plastic bags. Of course, I love that the bags are cute and under two dollars, and I keeping carrying my knitting in them instead of groceries. Oops. Anyway, I'm also attempting to compile a compost heap, which so far only consists of a lot green onions, a smattering of eggshells, and one ground-filled coffee filter. Oh, and I'm trying to garden. Trying.

My first feeble attempt is this "egg" plant I have in my bedroom window. I'm trying to get a pansy seedling to pop up in a pre-fab eggshell. Easter marketing, go figure. Still no sign of green despite the daily sunshine and water that I make sure it gets.

And right outside that window, our garden is visible. I can see the tomato plants Dad set last week. I was going to help with that, but I'm still working on my priorities. Last night, however, I did not miss out on the sowing of the carrot and radish seeds. Dad raked out the first trench for the carrot seeds, sprinkled them along, and pushed the soil back over top of them. I dropped the tiny carrot seeds in the second row. Then, I dug, dropped, and threw dirt over a row of future radishes -- hopefully.

Dad's always been the star gardener, and now we're going to see what I can come up with. I'll be watching.

Johnny's

2008-05-13T14:00:00.008-05:00

We went fishing yesterday, Dad and I, at a dead man's lake. It was almost eerie standing, fishing rod in hand, in the short grass of his lawn, well-maintained by his son over a year after the accident, while Dad sorted out lures in the tackle box and lit a cigarette, explaining that we'd need the yellow rope called a stringer to bring the caught fish home. I almost felt like we were trespassing.

But I also felt welcome there. I knew the man. I had been at this same house many years ago for a Christmas party. This was the guy who, in front of the gas station/bus stop, gave me the first fig I'd ever eaten that wasn't in a Fig Newton. He had fished with Dad in his lake just days before the accident, had told him to come whenever he wanted and take as many fish with him as he could. After, his son had renewed the offer. So off we took yesterday, in Dad's white third-hand pickup bouncing down the backroads, which I recognized from my old bus route when I was in high school.

There in the yard, I held my rod and reel, fishing line already prepped with hook and neon pink rubber worm wiggling in the breeze, and I watched Dad, cigarette dangling, hunkered over the telescoping box with its three tiers reaching up, offering every type of sure-fire lure imaginable: worms, crickets, minnows, centipedes. All species, all colors, all synthetic materials represented. He selected his first bait of choice, a white underdeveloped-looking grub, and clicked it onto the line, and together, we headed for the weeds. The grass around the bank of the water had not, apparently, been a landscaping priority for the son, as it had been for the father.

As we tromped around the lake's perimeter, looking for a nice starting point, I just followed Dad and watched my feet as they lay down little walls of weeds with each step, like how one cable television show that I once saw described the making of crop circles. We saw a mud turtle, making her own crop cirlces, apparently laying her eggs, Dad said. I wouldn't know. We found a spot that was close enough to some cattails -- "structure is good," he explained -- and far enough away from the shallow edge so that I wouldn't spend the afternoon dragging up hookful after hookful of algae.

Now, I'm no angler, but it seems to me that I go fishing to cast the line and that Dad goes fishing to change the lures. Essentially, I have no idea what I'm doing, but if I have any theory at all about the catching of fish, it is to stay in the same spot, to use the same lure, and to throw it out there over and over. Let the fish come to me if they want to be caught. If I don't get a bite after three casts, no problem. Keep casting until something happens. Wait and see, as foolish as it might be, works for me.

Not Dad, though. I think he used fifteen different lures in the two hours we were there. He was, of course, just trying to figure out what the fish wanted. I, on the other hand, am able to convince myself that if I keep giving my set-up second chances, it'll work out. Either that, or I'm just too lazy to try new things. That's more likely. But let me put it this way, I caught four fish, two of them just as we were giving up on our spot, two of them while Dad was picking out a new spinny, shiny contraption to tempt the fish with, all four of them with that unrealistically pink version of an earthworm. Dad caught one. We threw all of them back and watched as each one happily wove itself back into the lake water.

Right after my fourth bass, Mom called to see if we wanted to meet her and Wade and Day to eat. I told her yeah, that I was getting tired of catching fish. Dad laughed and told me not to tell anyone that I put a hurt on him. He threw out three more casts just in case, and I wished that he'd get something. He didn't, but I knew he was as happy for me as if he'd caught a hundred himself.

We went back through the weeds and up the hill, and I let him put my fishing rod, with the half-eaten worm with the Eagle Eye hook poking through its rubber belly, in the bed of the truck, next to the empty bucket for bringing fish home. Dad put the stringer, still in its package, back in the tackle box. I slid in the passenger side and popped open the half-hot can of Mountain Dew that he put in the truck for me before we left the house, when it was still cold. As we navigated the blind curves and hilltops on our way to Dixon to meet Mom, I pointed out all the houses and who lived in them, names I still remembered from riding the bus to school, and Dad drove and smoked and listened with the windows rolled down.

¡a leer!

2008-05-11T22:21:00.008-05:00

I have the following: a teaching job that will officially begin in the fall, a long list of books that I want to read, and quite a bit of time. I shouldn't feel guilty about sitting around reading for a month or so, should I? Okay, good.

Here's the list.

Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen -- I checked this book out from the public library and have only read thirteen pages. I am bound and determined to read the other four-hundred nine before the due date comes around. I have to earn my right to check out an unlimited number of books next time -- books I will check out, not read, and return late. And I want to be a librarian.
Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis -- I have, of course, already read this, but the movie comes out next week, and I feel obligated to re-read.
I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak -- I bought this book on a recent (small) B&N binge. I read his book The Book Thief while I was in Honduras, love it, recommend it, and can't wait to read more from where it came from.
Flash Fiction -- A compilation of short short stories, also purchased during the aforementioned bout of consumer therapy. I'm getting a feel for the form, reading a few pages at a time. Once, at four in the morning when I couldn't sleep.
Malinche by Laura Esquivel -- I bought this hardback at a mark-down-mark-down price at the mall. I wanted to buy it at that fancy-pantsed bookstore in Seattle, but it was just too pricey. Now I've had it for several months and haven't touched it.
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer -- I'm putting it on my library list. Allison, I blame you if I jump on the vampire wagon.

I'm going to pretend that putting this list on here will hold me accountable or something.

Honker Lee speaks again.

2008-05-09T13:47:00.007-05:00

Twice I've seen a red-winged blackbird sitting on the tallest broken-down cornstalk in the acre, probably standing sentinel over its unborn. It is iconic. It is a poem already written, its existence now a cliche. Here I am, where life is like a poem rather than the poem reflecting life. So I can't write about it. Not allowed. I have to find the spin, the original thought worthy of verse, so I write about not being able to write about the bird who has been written about before. But I imagine that this dilemma, the desire to write about an oft-treated image, has already been bemoaned on the page.

So there it is. I've set up facing mirrors. The eternal picture of a picture, the repeating images, the question echoing back and forth in the dark of the rabbit hole, the portal out of time and into the place where we find an answer as plain and as perfect as a solitary blackbird on a stalk.

Alas, there is nothing left to be done.

Not home.

2008-05-04T21:13:00.005-05:00

It has been a few months since I've had anything to procrastinate about. Now, I reckon that I am making up for lost time. I'm in Murray tonight because I'm giving some so-called presentations tomorrow to the Spanish classes at Calloway, and to think, I'm staying in a hotel. This Hampton Inn is snazzy, I tell you. I'm tempted to use this fast internet to put up a video, but I really do, at some point, have to plan what it is exactly that I'm going to say to these high school kids tomorrow. But here I am in a hotel room in the town that I lived in for five and a half years. I just couldn't help myself; I swung by Brentwood. But as it was too weird and I felt like a real creeper, I buzzed in and out of the lot before I could think too much about it. I was going to get some Jasmin to-go, but wouldn't you know that the one restaurant that I've really missed is closed on Sunday, so I grabbed some August Moon carry-out and came back here to the room to get my money's worth out of this hotel experience, watching all twenty-two Brotherhood videos I've missed out on. I caught up with Tessa at Culver's, which didn't even exist when I left town three months ago. It's like this isn't the same place, and I don't know how to be here anymore. I've closed the curtains because I've got work to do. I could be anywhere.

checking the fire

2008-05-01T11:03:00.005-05:00

I went with Dad last night to see how the brush pile was burning. The far corner of the farm was dark despite all the lights: parking lights, flashlights, cigarettes, embers, flames, and fireflies that were in a hurry to meet the stars.

As I stood near the fire, feeling like Earth at just the right distance from the sun neither to scorch nor to freeze, I would glance up to the sky, trying to catch a spark pretending to be a star. Like when you first look at a clock and the second hand seems to have stopped, and just as you convince yourself the clock has broken or time itself has really stood still, it clicks onward dutifully one second at a time. And so I watched orange stars shake loose from the sky and whisp into the night air.

I stood in silence between the fire and Dad as he carried out his winding monologue about the fire, its heat, its size, its smoke -- my only lines, "I guess," "I don't guess," and one hand movement indicating north because he asked me if I knew where it was. Something about wind direction. Then I continued my own monologue, internally, discussing the irrelevance of north, south, east, and west once you exit Earth's gravity. A compass, I imagine, doesn't help any in outerspace. You can't head east to Mars.

Just as I was hypothesizing that north and south might exist in the solar system, Dad broke in, said his science teacher told him that all fire is trapped sunlight accumulated over the years. I could see that. These hundred-year-old trees were giving off their lives' work of drinking in light, a final catharsis. "Nothing is created or destroyed," he then said, in agreement with that teacher. "It only changes form."

I clicked on my flashlight to light a path back to the pickup, and a chunk of burning tree trunk shifted in the pile, releasing a new generation of eager sparks.

"Can you count them?"

My eyes followed as they raced themselves out of the fire and into the sky, and I knew they weren't pretending, just reminiscing.

I can feel it in my bones.

2008-04-29T16:44:00.004-05:00

I have never been a dreamer. The more I learn about myself, it becomes clearer and clearer that, though I don't like to admit it, I have a pretty significant pessimistic streak. I've never let myself have dreams because, well, what's the point if it is possible that they won't come true?

Ridiculous, I know.

I am not sure what has changed, but little shimmers of dreams are starting to slip in. And who would've thought it, but dreams don't have to be big, grandiose schemes. They can be small and simple. And these days, I find myself entertaining a few of that sort.

No body deserves to be this content.
Or every body does. One or the other.
Bones are resting in knowledge that,
one day, they will be slumped,
wrapped in beads and cardigan,
wielding spraggled hair of forsythia.
They cannot see the in-between,
but that, dears, is inconsequential.
Consequence is unyielding.
It is the end with which they are
finally able to begin.
They know who they want to be,
and therefore, are.

I'm figuring out what it means to be home, finding out what I love here. Last night, I set up a sewing machine, and I'm teaching myself how to use it. Today, I walked the entire perimeter of the farm -- wanting to take pictures, but contenting myself with looking, listening, breathing. I'm getting ready to go sit in a rocking chair on the front porch and write.

I'm thinking to myself, I want to be old here, but it looks like I already am.

Back from the depths.

2008-04-24T12:39:00.004-05:00

In which I make my comeback and hit the highlights of the past two months in Honduras.

Sidenotes:
I realize I need to nail my hands to the desk to keep myself from essentially doing nothing but flinging and flailing for almost four minutes. Ah, well.

Furthermore, I just want to say this: It officially looks like I am going to be a gainfully-employed, contributing member of society. More on this later as details develop.

Think before speaking.

2008-04-21T14:57:00.004-05:00

I was back in the United States less than twenty-four hours when my voice started showing signs of disappearing. It wasted no time sealing the deal. Thank you, Mr. Larynx. We've never had any problems before, and now, you think it's cute to close up shop? Now, when I've been out of the country for two months, during which I was generally unable to speak with the people I love? Now, when what I would like to do more than anything in the world is to talk with them for hours on end? You're right. That's cute.

Being the overly analytical person that I tend to be, with a little dash of everything-happens-for-a-reason spice of life thrown in the psychological mix, I can't help but wonder if you're trying to tell me something, Mister. Yes, I am positively brimming with things to say, but we all know that it's best to think before you speak. You know, do a little reflecting before opening the verbal floodgates. It is conventional wisdom. But with all due respect, looking over those words waiting on the tip of the tongue is usually a moment's task. Seconds, at most. Not for me. Not this time. Looks like I have been sentenced to a few days of silence, of captive thought.

When you are away from everything familiar for an extended amount of time, it is easy to forget that the world does keep turning. Life goes on. Much to everyone's surprise (and by everyone, I of course mean me), I am not the only one with two month's worth of things to say. In all this self-involvement, I am very much in danger of not listening, of not allowing anyone else's words to get in edge-wise. So maybe my voice knew exactly what it was doing when it was packing its bags while I was unpacking mine.

So talk to me. I really do want to know everything that happened while I was away. But get ready. When my wise friend Larynx rolls back in town, you won't be able to shut me up.

Saira

2008-03-27T11:32:00.003-05:00

I didn't know until about 5:00 this afternoon when I was at Casa Uno, but this morning, Saira left. Carlos Omar came up to me and told me that it was just him and Ricky left. I didn't understand. And then he said she had gone. I asked around. Ricky and others confirmed. So after, Abdul and Cristian Guerra wanted to teach me about soccer. Of course, I couldn't focus on their Spanish explanations of the rules. They had to say them over and over. Finally, for a few seconds, the indistinct shock and pain did disappear into the game, into the gateless driveway that we were using as a goal.

In Spanish, the word for fun is diversión. A diversion, a distraction. And it did distract me from my worries for a few minutes. Of course the kids love to play fútbol, to have fun.

I heard that she ran away, escaped from school during a test. I imagined her, white and navy uniform and all, crawling through the hole near the end of the chainlink fence. Now I know that she left in a car, with her mom. Karla saw her go, said she left with only her plastic, shoebox-sized Ayyám-i-Há gift box in her hands and the clothes on her back.

I think Saira was twelve. She may have been just a mediana, but she was my friend. She taught me the handsong with that really fast part, "Hola, comadrita. ¿Cómo estás?" I taught her how to knit.

The other girls tell me that she wanted to go. That she had been crying. I didn't know. I hadn't seen her for a few days. And I ate with the grandes instead last night. I taught her class yesterday, but she didn't participate. Quiet and invisible. So, the last I really remember of Saira was when we walked back from the terreno together. I got a picture of her swimming that day. She didn't talk much as she walked beside me with wet hair and shoulders wrapped up in a towel. Rosa and I were having a linguistic discussion about words like cheque and masiso. I guess I lost Saira that afternoon, somewhere on the road. I didn't know for how long.

I am asking myself several questions: Was I really her only friend, someone else to disappear? Did she get angry with me after I gave her a pretty stern lecture about how to treat books? Why didn't she tell me she was leaving? Because others seemed to know.

But there is one question I just can't get out of my head.

Were there two wooden knitting needles and a small ball of yarn in that little plastic container she left with?

26 March 2008, 7:23 pm

sitting on the back porch in afternoon

2008-02-26T15:22:00.002-06:00

I'm reading in the shade while my clothes, the ones I just worked over an hour to wash by hand, bake in the sun. (So it must be that our house faces east.) The back yard is more of a gulley of dust, rocks, and roosters than a yard. And there are enough banana trees, with their hearts hanging out, to wrap a clothesline around so that it zig-zags once, twice, three times toward the place where we throw our biodegradable trash.

A wind just came through, gusting across the tops of the banana trees, and I worried about my laundry that I can't see. It's blocked by the white wall of the porch, with its garlic growing in cut-off bottoms of plastic pop bottles. But I can see through the break in the wall, where the steps are, that my skirt didn't even flinch at the wind.

As I watch it dry faster than I've ever seen clothes dry in the sun, I remember "helping" Nana when I was a kid, putting out the laundry and gathering it back up again. I didn't know then that it meant she was -- we were -- poor. We might have been saving electricity, but it wasn't to save the environment. No, there was nothing green about us, especially not the insides of our pockets. Green. I guess I was. I just liked running through the damp, billowing sheets, like they were the walls of a palace labyrinth. So we were as rich as I thought we were, as happy and as high as these bananas and mangoes that won't be ready to be picked for another few weeks.

02/23/08, 3 pm

This is just to say

2008-02-20T12:54:00.002-06:00

I'm in Honduras.

The people are beautiful.

I start teaching English next week.

I don't know how often I will be able to update.

Email is more personal.

I hope everyone is well.

I am.

How much stuff does it take to make a gringa feel safe?

2008-02-16T23:21:00.002-06:00

Apparently, a lot. I mean, I know I have a stuff problem. I know I'm taking too much with me, but after several rounds of elimination, I can't pare it down any more. Something tells me this needing stuff thing is going to change soon. I hope so anyway.

If I'm lucky, three hours of sleep, and then I'm off.

thawed out

2008-02-15T12:35:00.004-06:00

Yesterday was our third day without power. Ice dragged down trees and power lines while we slept on Monday night so that, on Tuesday, we woke up without lights or, more importantly, heat. We all complained about it. Oh, the inconvenience, the cold, the unwashed hair.

Several people joked with me that it would be good practice for Honduras, which has frequent power outages.

During the day, we took refuge in the houses of family members with power (ie, hot water, American Idol) or at the Poole Restaurant, whose owners seemd not to mind that we used their electrical outlets to charge our cell phones. But at night, we would come home, light the kerosene heater upstairs to keep the pipes from freezing, and crawl under the covers in the basement, where the temperature remained, due to some fact of geothermal science, a steady 55 degrees.

At about 5:45 yesterday morning, Mom's shuffling around to get ready for work for the first time in a few days woke me up, and I had to pee. I went upstairs, where I had to bypass the kerosene heater on the way to the bathroom. On my way back, I couldn't convince myself to go back downstairs when I could stay by the heater. While I hovered around the heat, I noticed the sky getting pink around the edges of the fields. The sun was going to be up soon.

Instead of going back to bed like I would have done if the whole house had been warm and cozy, I stayed up and watched the sunrise. Everyone knows the sunrise is beautiful, magical, something almost miraculous that, when you actually see it, you can't believe it happens every day. So my description would be superfluous.

At 1:17 yesterday afternoon, the power came back on. I was sitting upstairs beside the heater with two layers of clothes on and reading the newspaper. I was quite comfortable, so the lights popping on, which I hardly noticed because the natural light was sufficient, was sort of anticlimactic. Needless to say, we were grateful, though. I wasted no time to get in the shower once the hot water heater recovered.

However, I have to admit that I was also a teensy bit grateful for the power being out. It was humbling because it reminded me of how incredibly spoiled I am. Though unpleasant, a gently wake-up call is much appreciated. And it got me just uncomfortable enough to get up to see the sun rise over the snow-covered fields and the ice-coated trees. How could I be upset about that?

And then there was one.

2008-02-10T16:12:00.000-06:00

One week, like the Barenaked Ladies' song.

I've spent most of this past one trying not to be sick. I've almost succeeded. In the relaxation part of my self-medication, I have seen quite a few movies. I've watched Benny & Joon on Encore more times than I could count. So many times, in fact, that I even started writing a blog entry about how, even though I don't call myself a rabid Johnny Depp fan, I think he's a fantastic actor. Thank goodness I came to my senses and didn't publish that one. I blame it on all the honey intake.

Some of you might be relieved to learn that I have finally watched Sliding Doors. I had heard enough about the theory to have the movie figured out, but it was worth watching. But as I was watching it today, I was reminded of something I realized last night.

Now, I am certain this is unoriginal. It might even be obvious. I don't think, though, that it had ever actually occurred to me. Last night, something clicked in my brain about why we love Story -- and by Story, I mean books, movies, sitcoms, whatever. At least in a traditional sense, a story is complete. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of course, it might begin in media res and the resolution might insinuate a future, but by necessity of its medium, a story is going to finish (in 312 pages, in two hours, in thirty minutes). And here's the kicker: as a reader/viewer, we get to experience that. We get to behold something complete, something whole. And that's more than any of us can ask for in real life.

I think the same reason we love Story is the same reason I find romantic movies completely frustrating: the illusion of the Big Picture. (This is where I know I'm not saying anything new here.) When we watch a movie, we see the whole plot, and in many instance, we know more than the protagonist does about his or her story. Also, because we're watching a movie, we even have a sense of a coming resolution because we know it's supposed to end in twenty five minutes. The character doesn't have that luxury. What I'm hitting at here is omniscience.

In "real life" (I dislike that term), we don't have omniscience. We can only see as far as we are, and we don't even perceive that very well. Story, though, lets us be omniscient for a little while. We at least are allowed to have faith that everything will turn out okay. In our own actual experience, it's not that easy.

As an occupational hazard of living a life, we don't actually get to see it in its entirety until, well, the end. And who knows if we will ever have the opportunity for ultimate hindsight, some posthumous Big Picture feature presentation? At that point, I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

The point, I suppose, is that Story is almost like glimpsing the Eternal. (Not always, I realize. Otherwise, there sure would be a lot of crappy eternity out there.) So stories are frustrating because we can never immediately liken our own lives to them. Time doesn't allow us that. But neat little plots are maybe smudgy reflections of reality. They give us hope of wholeness, of everything working out for the good. We can see that perfection in the stories that we read and watch, and for a moment, we know that our story is like that, too, even if we can't yet see it.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:12)

Getting it all together.

2008-02-04T10:22:00.000-06:00

It's now less than two weeks before I go to Honduras. I am, of course, making a last minute scramble to collect all the things I need for the trip. Here are the highlights of my collection thus far:

Plane tickets
Malaria pills
Hand-crank flashlight
Craft supplies
Chest-tightening cough

One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong.

Of course, I have quite a few more things to get a hold of. And a few to get rid of, too.

groundhog day

2008-02-03T12:10:00.000-06:00

It's five minutes to six when we drop onto the lower road, when the hairpin turns us toward the sun that we couldn't see before and can't see now. At dusk, the world is instead lit by an unseen source that has turned it all to black and white -- all but the yellow stripes that slide alongside the car, pulling us home. Everything else has gone grayscale between the chalk sky and the charcoal trees. (The three houses visible from this spot in the road were meant to be white; I can see that now.) By the time we reach the crossroads, the light will have changed again. I will, for just a second, put my hand between my eyes and the windshield, and I will, for just a second, be surprised to find that it's only a silhouette.

2008-01-31T22:58:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I like to look at my archive list, click a month at random, and read all the entries. Because I am somewhat obsessed with the chronology of my experience, I can usually figure out what was really going on in my life at the time, what had led up to the events I was describing, and what events followed that particular point. Tonight, I clicked February 2005.

It didn't take me long to notice a few things: Maybe it's just because I'm the one who wrote it (and therefore share the author's humor), but I think I'm sort of funny. Also, it was clear to me that I was going through a phase of some serious introspection. There is a sort of buzz of anticipation that floats around so much of what I wrote.

It wasn't until I got to the halfway point in the month that I caught on: That was the month that I decided to go to Spain for the summer. While the study abroad experience itself definitely influenced my subsequent perspective, it was the actual decision to turn in my KIIS application that was what they like to call life-changing.

I often look back on that time in my life and accuse it of being a signifcant series of steps that had led me to now. I know; people get sick of hearing about it. But who knew that I actually had an inkling about the importance of those days at the time? To quote myself directly from February 20, 2005:

The past facilitates the future. There would be no present without the past. There would be no future without the present.

...

There are so many aspects of my life that wouldn't be existent if a chunk out of the middle of my past hadn't occurred.

...

Looking back and seeing each slat of the bridge that would carry me across fall into place is easy. Yet another version of "hindsight is 20/20," no doubt. But waiting for that next foothold to come is not easy. And sometimes, it's tempting to believe that it will never come and you'll just have to jump from where you are--no matter how far you are from the other side. But what I'm learning is this: That foothold will come. The best thing for me to do is enjoy the view from where I am until it does.

...

By no means have I met the greatest obstacles of my life or taken the most fearful steps of the journey, but maybe I've learned enough to keep my eyes open a little more.

I surely hope so.

window poem at 9:04 am

2008-01-31T12:17:00.000-06:00

While I waited to call the travel agent back this morning, I picked up the copy of Wendell Berry's Collected Poems 1957-1982 that I got when I went through my poetry-buying rash, which also included the purchase of multiple collections from Billy Collins and Deborah Garrison. Today, I opened the book randomly to the Window Poems section. Before I found this larger collection in the bookstore, I nearly bought this originally handprinted, hardbound copy of Window Poems because of the accompanying woodcuts throughout. But I bought the larger collection instead -- more for the money, said conscience at the time -- though I had forgotten the window series was collected in it. So this morning, by chance, I opened to number 6 in the series of poems about windows and was somewhat "inspired" to try my hand at one. After all the most beloved aspect of my room is the, well, windows.

window poem at 9:04 am

I think my two are facing south and west.
I don't have the sense of direction like
These farmers whose land the eyes overlook,
That sense of understanding seen in the
Sun's eye as he does his thing, or as the
Moderns would have it, as we do our thing.
But it's the last day of January,
And who can trust the sun this time of year?

I prefer the one that I think opens
To the south, with the hills rising into
Its second-floor view. Gray trees line the top
Of the slopes, reminding me of that bed
Of pins that, if you push your hand into
Its points, there is a metallic model
Of your topography on the other
Side. Upstretched limbs thus indicate the land.

The white pseudo-panes and faux-wood blinds are
Transparent graph paper: It's an upward
Trend with a slight decline at the moment.
(I imagine Al on that dramatic
Hydraulic thing that lifted him into
The rafters in front of the red-lined screen.)
We are peaking somewhere near the middle
Of the last pane, at about the sixth slat,
Depending on how I hold my head. But
You know, numbers do not ever lie.

Of course, this was before I went back and started reading Window Poems from the beginning, a very good place to start, as it turns out.

"The window has forty
panes, forty clarities
variously wrinkled, streaked
with dried rain, smudged,
dusted. The frame
is a black grid
beyond which the world
flings up the wild
graph of its growth,
tree branch, river,
slope of land,
the river passing
downward, the clouds blowing,
usually, from the west,
the opposite way.
The window is a form
of consciousness, pattern
of formed sense
through which to look
into the wild
that is a pattern too,
but dark and flowing,
bearing along the little
shapes of the mind
as the river bears
a sash of some blinded house.
This windy day
on one of the panes
a blown seed, caught
in cobweb, beats and beats."

Wendell Berry
Window Poems, number 3

Well said, Wendell. Well said.

What would you do if your mother asked you?

2008-01-29T22:12:00.000-06:00

Last Saturday night, I watched my nieces, Victoria and Kathryn, while Sissy and Randy went to a dinner at their church. I spent the night at their house (for the third night that week), and before I left the next morning, I wrote this:

I put on yesterday's clothes. And I put on yesterday's socks, but they were yesterday's socks yesterday. They're all stretched out in the heel and toe, lint clinging inside and out. I unwad them and put them on my feet and set out to find my shoes.

Walking across the living room rug in my sock-feet reminds me that these socks have got to be washed soon. It feels like when I was a kid, sleeping over at a friend's and I've been there for a week, and the morning my mom comes to get me finds me in the same clothes I'd been recycling -- play clothes, pajamas, whatever. And a lot like those friend's-house mornings, I can't find my shoes. I'm looking under couches, under the futon I just made up, behind recliners until I remember Dr. Seuss.

We had a "book party" in Kathryn's room last night -- a regular Seuss marathon. I read Green Eggs and Ham, which I don't think I've ever really read before, and The Cat in the Hat. Victoria joined us on the alphabet rug and got in on the action by reading us the sequel to the Hat Cat's adventures.

It was beautiful.

Kathryn, three, listening with rapturous joy as her sister, twelve, reads her a book. Victoria -- who used to hate to read and still stumbles over some of the Doctor's rhymes, rightfully so -- is volunteering to read with enthusiasm. She hands me the pages with red background because, somehow, that trips her up. But together, reading, listening, looking at the whimsical illustrations, we manage to finish all three books. And with the vigor of the Little Cats and Voooom!, we "clean up" Kathryn's room and retire to the living room for a dose of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies and television. When Sissy and Randy return, it appears that we hadn't experienced the simple joy of reading at all, but rather that we are certified Couch Potatoes.

But this morning, the whole family of them has gone to church, and I'm about to leave, except I can't find my shoes. Until I remember our book party, as Kathryn called it. So I went into her room, still and strewn with Pinkness. In front of the miniature kitchen, I find, in this room of little pink things, my shoes -- big and brown and looking as foreign and as wild as Thing One and Thing Two.

A wake-up call

2008-01-29T16:31:00.000-06:00

Presenting installment número tres, in which I get a wake-up call and realize that I'm up to my old blogging tricks again.

I made this last night, so to update the info: I did get the application mailed, and I did get my shot in the arm. It hurts. Wah-wah. And I slept even later today. Of course, if I want to wake up early in the morning, I probably shouldn't stay up half the night making a silly video blog. Though, I have to say that I am learning so much about revising and editing a "text" through this process. So I'm going to tell myself that this is an exercise in improving my writing. Right.

Possible future topic of discussion: the word adventure. Look out.

Curiosity Killed the Cass, or I'm Nosy

2008-01-27T22:40:00.000-06:00

I'm getting excited. Seems everybody's getting that bloggin' feeling again. Now that people are officially being scattered the Four Winds, these crazy things called Blogs almost have a practicality to them. Turns out, we're not all writing about the same experiences anymore. And we have an almost eager -- though meager -- audience of friends. These days, our words might not just be trees falling into an earless forest, to borrow the phrasing of Wallace Stegner.

Here's my humble suggestion: If you're blogging, throw some links up to your friends' blogs so we (me and my 500 cats) can read them, too. If you're not blogging, start so I can see what you're up to. And then I can link your blog so that everyone else can see what you're up to. At the least, check out my "recommended reading" section and stalk my friends for a while. I think they have some pretty interesting things to say. That is, of course, why we're friends.

I know you're on the edge of your seats waiting for the next vlog (sarcasm added), but you might have to wait a day or so.

So do I get a senior citizen discount at Golden Corral?

2008-01-25T12:20:00.000-06:00

NOTE TO SELF: Check the middle-of-video screenshot before uploading it to YouTube. You're not flattering yourself at all.

Alright, not to spoil you guys or anything, but I've somehow managed a second...episode? Is that what we'd call it? I don't know.

washed up goes vlogstyle.

2008-01-24T12:52:00.000-06:00

I don't know what exactly I was trying to accomplish with this effort. It came off as a sort of pitiful mix between Reading Rainbow and A Current Affair, which sounds nice, but well. If you watch it, you'll see.

I wouldn't mind keeping this up, but it took nearly an hour just to upload the thing to YouTube. So I would have to come up with something worthy of vlogging to justify the time spent -- which was a LOT, despite the quality level -- on making/editing/uploading. And random books from my bookshelf with accompanying unenlightening discussion and my sort of irreverent reaction to Heath Ledger's death isn't good enough for me.

Suggestions?

All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished

2007-12-29T22:02:00.000-06:00

I am not sure how a twenty-four year old, single, unemployed person such as myself can accumulate so much stuff. But I did. In three and a half years, I've managed to acquire enough belongings to fill a standard-sized horse trailer -- and then some.

When I lived at Southwood for a month in the summer of 2004, I barely had enough to make a sub-leased room with a borrowed bed feel like home. I was able to carry the entirety of my book collection in one box -- the box my Tiffany lamp, which I bought solely for the sake of that room, came in. This weekend, I found that box -- labeled "BOOKS" -- and filled it with books again. Except, this time, I labeled it something like "Literature A-Cisneros" or "Spanish Language and Culture." See, I'm estimating twenty boxes of books that we packed into the corner of the horse trailer. The books, though, serve only as one fossil of this era.

When I first shifted my little pile of stuff from Southwood to Brentwood, my new apartment was still relatively empty. After hanging a freshly purchased shower curtain and feeling accomplished, I selected an English class literature anthology from my little bookshelf and sat in the floor, in the corner of the living room where the monstrous bookcase eventually stood. I read, from beginning to end, the Lorraine Hansberry play "A Raisin in the Sun" in one anticipatory afternoon.

I can't believe my apartment is almost as empty again as it was that day. It's not nearly as clean, though. I've still got that to do. But once I've collected the last evidences of my residence and once I've exterminated all the dust rodents, I think I'll have a seat in that corner again and read something. Of course, I would punctuate the chapters of my existence with literature.

But what should I read? Too bad all the books have been packed and taken away.

Show me that smile again.

2007-11-18T13:45:00.000-06:00

Sunday afternoon in November. I am in the library, preparing for my final student teaching observation. Really, that specific task seems like the least of my concerns.

I decided to walk here. The weather is suprisingly warm to be this late in the year. And the leaves are peaking a bit late, too. So I collected my teachery things in my messenger bag, threw on a light jacket, and started out the door. But when I stepped out, I had a moment of inspiration. Quickly, I transferred my teacher's edition Spanish II textbook, my student teaching binder, and the notebook in which I scribble "lesson plans" into my black backpack.

This backpack has been hiding behind the driver's seat of my car for about five months now. I haven't carried it since this summer, when I hauled it to, from, and all over Europe. I had cleaned it out once I got home, but there are still residual items floating around. My travel alarm clock, a brochure of travel information about the train that runs from Bregenz to Vienna, the flimsy comb I took with me on the weekends because it took up less space in my bag.

There is something distinctly student about carrying your belongings in a backpack. So in last-chance fashion, I walked to campus looking like a student. But I realized something. I don't so much feel like a student anymore. As I walked past the gate guarding campus against who-knows-what, I saw a kid that I had class with first semester of my sophomore year. I said to myself, Is he still here? Of course, I then realized that I'm still here, too.

In this last semester, though, I have been subconsciously bidding this chapter of my life farewell, to use the cheesiest, most hackneyed language ever. Like I said about the inevitable roller coaster drop, I don't know what's going to happen on the other side of this, but no matter what, it is time for it to happen. And student teaching has been the context for this semester, but it hasn't been the entire focus of it. The process of it has made me re-evaluate life and how I choose to deal with it. I can't say I've resurfaced from the challenges that this process has presented, but it's been good. It's been a semester of growing pains, for sure. I don't think they're over, the growing pains, nor do I think they will ever be.

While it was nice to feel like a student again, walking onto campus and fists clinging to the shoulder straps of my backpack, I couldn't help but feel that I had outgrown it -- the backpack, the studentness. I could be wrong. I could be over-analyzing this, like I over-analyze everything else.

For the moment, though, I think I might be ready to stretch my freshly-sprouted wings. Now it's a matter of edging out of the nest. 'Course, I might need some nudging, but well, graduation is less than a month away now.

Deep breath, deep breath...

Please keep all limbs inside the car.

2007-11-06T14:17:00.000-06:00

Somedays, I feel like I'm on one of those thrill rides that straps you in over your shoulders and lets your feet dangle as it whips you around loop after loop and plummet after plummet. Other, more peaceful days, I'm cruising along on the rocket-shaped kiddie car that glides gently over gradual hills and smooth curves. Being the risk taker that I am not, I prefer the latter.

Today, though, I can understand the thrill seekers of the world. As much as I would like to keep myself on the kiddie coaster, the reason the big rides are fun is that they make you realize you have something to lose, something valuable. They make you feel alive. In a warped sense, they make you see what you've got, even if it's about to be gone.

Right now, I feel like the amusement park personnel has locked a harness over my shoulders and I can't see anything beyond the big hill in front of me and the hint of the inevitable drop. I can hear the click-click-click as I make my way to the pinnacle of what I can see, and for once, I'm sort of excited about what will happen when gravity wins over.

I'm scared to death, but I'm holding out for a safe return to the station.

The scientific method

2007-10-21T15:01:00.000-05:00

I was really proud of myself the day I told my third block English class that they had to have the foresight to see the hindsight. I was hoping there was someone with ink and quill somewhere to jot down this line into a tome of timeless quotes, my name now among Abraham Lincoln and Confucius. I don't even remember the topic of that day's discussion, but I was giving some pseudo-sage advice about making wise decisions -- about considering the consequences of actions. Hindsight, we all know, is 20/20. So we have to look forward and consider what that hindsight will reveal to us. This is the simple and infallible key to decision-making.

It is also complete crap.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I cannot make decisions. I cower at questions and flee from responsibility. I don't know, maybe someday an editor of Bartlett's will include me, but only by mistake. Or only because of the cute parallelism of the sentence: We must have the foresight to see the hindsight.

As it turns out, this is a rule that I've been imposing upon myself for a very long time, but I didn't realize it until today. Let's face it, I'm drowning in a sea of decisions that need to be made. Or so it seems. They range from small (What am I going to teach tomorrow?) to larger (What am I going to do after I graduate? With my life?). And I get the distinct feeling that these are all connected. Like I can't answer one question unless I've answer the others. A circular puzzle. A dog chasing its tail, for sure. But nevertheless, I have been sorting out my thoughts in an attempt at answering the larger questions. The answers, though, don't come.

That's what I have been expecting for as long as I have had a concept of The Future. That life, its questions, and its answers come to me as they will, and I will be prepared to go with that flow as it drifts by. Recently, though -- and I am using a lose definition of the adverb "recently" -- I am realizing that passivity isn't exactly the best way of handling life. Yes, there are factors that we cannot control -- circumstances that present themselves, and the best we can hope for is to roll with the punches. But really, we have to be active, to be intentional, to take initiative. I realize this.

The problem is, though, that I don't take iniative. That requires making a decision. It requires, so I thought, the foresight to see the hindsight. It sounds noble, doesn't it? It's impossible, though. How can we possibly ever see the future?

I don't purport to have all the answers, but I think I've found one. I've looked at the decisions I've made, including some very pronounced indecision, and at the crises that surrounded those decisions. Then, I solved for x. Okay, it was more of a guess-and-hope strategy, but when I plugged "fear of regret" into all the equations, they balanced.

I have been operating on the principle that I should know how everything will turn out. Somewhere along the timeline, I got the idea that looking at all the possibilities of cause and effect was healthy. And I don't know, maybe it is. But what happens is that I try to channel my future hindsight, and as soon as I detect the possibility of regret, I melt down.

I know the what-if game is supposed to be pointless. But I always thought of that in the context of looking at the past. Somehow I have excused it by looking to the future -- unforeseeable as it may be -- and playing the what-if game with decisions that haven't even been made yet.

I'm afraid I'll make the wrong decision. It's that simple.

The question remains, though, what exactly is it that I am afraid of? How bad is a bad decision? Obviously, there are some decisions that are just plain bad, but what about the ones that are more nebulous? It's like forcing gray to be either black or white.

What ever convinced me that I wouldn't be able to recover from a mistake? Who ever told me that once I'm in a dreadful situation I wouldn't be able to get out of it?

There was a student in the same third block class who once encouraged me with a quote after I had attempted to conduct an activity that had not worked at all. In disgust at my own choice of instruction and at the group's failure to cooperate, I said something about it having been an experiment that had completely failed. He raised his hand and said, "No experiment is a failure." I responded, "Why? Because we learn from it?" He nodded his head affirmatively.

We can hypothesize all we want, but we never know what results an experiment will yield until we have actually carried out the process. Maybe life is just an exercise in trial-and-error, in guess-and-hope. Or maybe there are scientific proofs and mathemathical equations we can use to predict everything and to avoid hardships, but something tells me that there aren't.

All I know is that when I'm trying to make a decision, all I can see is the possibility that, no matter what I choose, it all might go disastrously wrong. I forget that it all might go miraculously right. I just never know.

The theory of relativity

2007-08-28T17:20:00.000-05:00

This summer, when Holly and I were traisping around Europe, we visited the apartment in Bern, Switzerland, in which Albert Einstein conceived the theory of relativity. After reading over the panels of information hanging on the walls and even making shadow puppets on wall where a documentary of his life was being projected, I still don't understand the theory of relativity. I just put my trust in the knowledge that it has influenced our lives and that being in the room where it sprang into his imagination is something of an interesting experience.

Now that fall is setting in, I spend my days in a high school classroom extolling the wonders of literature to students, sometimes to receive only blank stares in return. One of those blank stares came back to me when, in a what-I-thought-was-explanatory moment, I said, "Well, everything is relative, right?"

For whatever reason, I didn't take that moment to explain myself, but something occurred to me. This understanding of general relativity that some of us enjoy isn't innate. Somewhere along the line, probably in a university humanities or philosophy course, someone pointed out to us that everything is dependent on everything else for its quiddity. ["Quiddity" is a word I recently learned. It means essence or thingness.]

To define a word, we need other words. To define ourselves, we look to the selves of others and differentiate for meaning. For instance, I am a daughter only relative to my parents. If someday I have children, I will be a mother relative to their being my offspring, but I will still be a daughter. It is the paradox we live in.

Like, right now, I am a student teacher. The term "student teacher" itself seems an oxymoron, but it is apt. I am teaching my students, but I am still learning from my own teachers. I pass seamlessly from one end of the spectrum to the other without notice. But I wonder, do we retain something in this liquid process, or are we just mutable, intangible somethings -- real only within our contexts?

Leave it to me to look to a tree for answers, but I think this example helps me know that I am more than my relative definition: When growing up, I liked to play under trees. I have yet to explain this kinship with them except that, through the years, I have drawn more analogies between human existence and the nature of trees than I can now name. However, in the years before I realized my very existence could be explained through dendrological metaphors, I played beneath the backyard hickory nut tree.

I could bound out the backdoor of our trailer and run diagonally to the right, at some indeterminate angle, and land within a few seconds under my favorite tree. It was a rather uncomfortable play place, what with all the sharp, broken hickory nuts poking out of the ground, but I put them to good use and collected the bits as currency in my make-believe economy. (See, money really did grow on trees...) Eventually, however, I outgrew the tree, and its attraction and (monetary) value faded with my age. We moved away, too, so visiting the tree every afternoon wasn't feasible, even if we still owned the land on which it stood.

Now, around thirteen years later, my parents are building a house on the farm, which is where our trailer used to sit. Interestingly, though, the house has been built farther back on the property. The trailer, were it still around, would now be in the front yard of the new house. The hickory tree, though, still stands, and it is in the front yard. My beloved tree stands sentinel to the left of the front porch steps. (Left, that is, if you're coming down the steps. See, relativity.) So now the tree that I always viewed as "the backyard tree" is now a "front yard tree." Who knew how much orientation colored my understanding...

But this backyard/front yard tree, though my concept of it has changed, is not really different. Putting a house behind it didn't change it. Sure, it has grown another year's worth of leaves, bark, and hickory nuts, but beneath that is all the growth that happened during the years when it was behind the house and during the years when there was no house around it at all. No matter what situation we put the tree in, it is still the same.

Doesn't that mean something? Does it mean that no matter what situation I am in, no matter what definition I acquire due to my surroundings, I am still me? Maybe it is a simple understanding. And maybe I don't even understand the implications of it yet, but I like it.

I wonder if, someday, adventurous twentysomethings will make shadow puppets on these walls. I doubt it.

If I am alive this time next year.

2007-07-19T00:53:00.000-05:00

After I had been blogging for a year or so, it became an OCD obsession of mine to make sure that I posted an entry to this blog at least once a month so that my archives list would always show consecutive months. Alas, this is no longer true.

It seems that blogging has fallen out of fashion among people I know. This is reasonable. I did not quit writing on the blog because it was, say, uncool -- whatever that may be. It petered out because I didn't have time to write, or I didn't have anything to say. While I am not sure much has changed, I find myself missing the blog. So here I am with a two-month gap in my archives list.

I am sitting in my apartment on this Wednesday night. I am only here briefly because, these summer days, I try to stay at home as much as possible. At home, I am spending my days trying to get prepared for student teaching this fall. It is still unreal to me that I won't walk Murray's campus anymore as a student enrolled in proper classes. While graduate school has been on my mind lately, it sure hasn't been a vision of Kentucky's Public Ivy bouncing around in my head. So, I am making my oh-so-blurry transition from student to teacher, a hazy area between the two ends of the continuum that I imagine I will never fully venture out of. I am excited to delve into America's literary history with a group of high school juniors this fall, but I can't help but already miss the classroom in which I am the student.

Anyhow, the things on my mind tonight? I am wondering what my hair will look like this time tomorrow. I am bravely handing over my hair to an unknown stylist who will hopefully do some magic to transfigure me from lazy student to semi-professional educator -- avoiding a "teacher" haircut at all costs.

Also, I am geekily anticipating the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I won't lie and say I am not excited. It always bugged me when certain childhood friends of mine used the word "excited" in such a way that it carried a negative connotation, meaning emotionally upset. Perhaps, though, this is what I mean here by "excited."

In the more traditional sense of the word, I am here to proclaim my exultation at the discovery that even the Murray WalMart stocks Nutella, the hazelnut and chocolate spread that enamors all those who have tasted it abroad. I was so excited that I even developed this somewhat-fraudulent graphic to display my relief.

With this probably being the one and only post added to my blog in the light of this "rededication," I say so long. Perhaps I will keep it up. Only time will tell.

Don't go breaking my heart.

2007-04-04T14:46:00.000-05:00

The past week has been interesting, indeed.

I got my nose pierced. This, of course, is old news these days.
I had my first accident in which I am the one to blame. Backed into a car in the Corvette Lanes parking lot. You can get any classier than that.
I found out my rent is going up and that my landlady wants me to sign a new contract. This puts me in a particularly precarious position as far as living arrangements go. Who knows where I'll be nine months from now, much less a year, which means I can't sign a year contract. Which means that I don't know where I'll be living, like, a month from now. Oh, I think I just had an instantaneous nervous breakdown.
And other assorted matters of the heart which I cannot quite verbalize.

I am putting my Scholars Week presentation together. Me, oh my. What fun.

First thing I remember.

2007-03-28T15:07:00.000-05:00

This title of this entry is in honor of the realization I had about the parallel structure of Paul Simon's "Late in the Evening" and Better than Ezra's "Recognize." Not that it's earth-shattering. It's just that I realized it all of a sudden and was surprised at how I had missed it for so long.

To be honest, the only reason I'm checking in here is to say that I've been feeling as intense need to be creative. Maybe it has something to do with spring. I've made a purse, which is what I am most proud of. I've redesigned this blog thing. Kinda. I've been shooting some pictures. I feel like busting out my watercolors. To paint what, I'm not sure.

The good question, though, is why the heck am I sitting in the library?

It's just this thing the seasons do.

2007-03-25T22:11:00.000-05:00

I acknowledged my station in adulthood yesterday. I bought a living room suit. Sofa, chair, ottoman. Goodbye futon, hello real people furniture.

Spring break is over, and it signals the homestretch for my last semester of classes. Next semester is student teaching. That's it. Then graduation.

But there's lots to look forward to, you know, besides being an adult. Like going to Austria and assorted other European destinations with my best friend.

And wearing my new wardrobe, here and abroad. It's not new clothes, really. I just had a wardrobe renaissance today. I rearranged it and ended up with something quite nice. It involves lots of flip flops, skirts, and necklaces. Quite girly, in fact.

Oh, and I made myself a purse tonight. A hobo sling, if you will. Joy of joys.

On a family excursion to WalMart, I laid the most superficial (er, girly) stack of purchases on the conveyor belt that I've ever seen. Us Weekly magazine, makeup, and the American Beauty DVD. Not that American Beauty the film is superficial. But, you know, the whole beauty thing.

It's warm. My apartment windows are up and the fans are on. Leaves are budding. Blooms are blooming. I'm happy indeed.

The weight of tomorrow.

2007-02-19T15:43:00.000-06:00

I took an hour-long nap today on a couch in Waterfield for no other reason than I couldn't make it home before I fell asleep. That was a strange experience. It was one of the best naps ever, and I took it while about a hundred people milled around me, getting their homework done.

I got three interlibrary loan books today. One of which I don't need anymore because it relates to research topic number two. I've opted for research topic version 3.5. I am glad practicum is almost over because I am actually quite excited about examining Sandra Cisneros and her book The House on Mango Street within the new American canon. It involves both of my majors and education, even. Hopefully I can stay motivated.

One of my professors is coming to observe me teaching tomorrow. It will be my last day at the school. I am a little stressed -- surprise, surprise -- because today's class got out of control. I am going to have to do an unexpected lesson tomorrow on how to use and to cite sources. Great fun.

This has been a great learning experience for me. I know that I have a long way to go to become an effective teacher (ooh, that phrasing feels like the product of being brainwashed by the teacher preparation program), and I am excited about having my own classroom with my own students to teach. I worry, though, how much I am making an impact on these students' futures while I thrash about, making a trial-and-error process of their educations. I wonder, after a week of making them think about their opinons on immigration, are they still closed minded? Tomorrow is my last chance -- or last cha, if you will -- to see to it that I'll be leaving these students in a better state than I found them.

The weight of tomorrow just got heavier.

I can't believe it, but it is true.

2007-02-16T11:49:00.000-06:00

I just taught an English II class for four days. Almost successfully.
My best friend forever slash is on the road right now, less than two hours from Murray!
The same man for whom I've driven over 2,000 miles (total round trip nileage) to see over the past few years, the same man who is on the cover of this week's Rolling Stone named as a Guitar God, the same man who just won 2 Grammy awards on Sunday is in this town right now. Murray. Kentucky.

Hold the apples, at least for a few more minutes.

2007-02-10T22:27:00.000-06:00

It's Saturday night, and I'm getting ready to make a Viewing Guide to go along with a ChannelOne video series called "Crossing the Border." I've already make a grade book, a rather detailed assignment sheet explaining how to "picture a poem" using Google Images and PowerPoint, a unit anticipation guide, a unit reflection guide, a scoring guide for the reflection guide... The list goes on. All of this is only a portion of what I've done (and what I've yet to do) in preparation for teaching an English II class for a little over a week. One class. One week. And I haven't even taught yet.

I don't like how this bodes for my future.

But who am I kidding? I actually enjoy all of this, and I think working with the students -- all this planning in action -- will be fun, too. Even if the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Hopefully I can deal.

Last night, I was watching the 10 o'clock news at my sister's house. When the sports segment came on, I found myself engrossed in the report on the Calloway County versus Graves County boys' basketball game. Who knew I cared? But oh, how I did when I saw one of "my" students on the ol' television making a play. I was so proud, and I haven't even taught the kid yet.

Sometimes it makes me wonder if this really is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. Not that I've even started yet. And not that I hadn't been planning it all along.

There's a reason I love IMDB.

2007-01-28T01:57:00.000-06:00

Eighteen-year-old Zach Braff. And to think, I remember watching this episode of Babysitters Club. I didn't have a clue I'd fall for the geeky (or as they say, "really cute, don't you think?") David Cummings, like, twelve years later.

Enjoy the flashback.

It's not you; it's me.

2007-01-21T22:01:00.000-06:00

Just this past semester, I wrote on the front of one of my classes' folders: I HATE POETRY. It wasn't true, even then. Maybe it was the class, the professor, the specific poem that we were harassing as a group. Or rather, it was the way the professor was using the poem to harass us that made me write it in capital letters, to emphasize my disgust. That's the thing. Over the past years as a literature student, I've come to view poetry as a weapon scholars use to batter us intellectual fledglings into humble submission.

It makes me sad. So much so that a couple years ago, I wrote a research paper about ways to make poetry seem less intimidating in the classroom. Hoping that students and poetry can be friends, I decided that the microteaching that I have to deliver in a couple weeks ought to be about poetry. So I set out on the search to find the poem to incorporate into my lesson. I still haven't found a poem I want to "teach," but I have found my new favorite poet.

Introducing Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and NY State Poet, and his poem "Thesaurus."

It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, lodgings, and digs,
all sharing the same picnic basket and thermos;
hairy, hirsute, woolly, furry, fleecy, and shaggy
all running a sack race or throwing horseshoes,
inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile
standing and kneeling in rows for a group photograph.

Here father is next to sire and brother close
to sibling, separated only by fine shades of meaning.
And every group has its odd cousin, the one
who traveled the farthest to be here:
astereognosis, polydipsia, or some eleven
syllable, unpronounceable substitute for the word tool.
Even their own relatives have to squint at their name tags.

I can see my own copy up on a high shelf.
I rarely open it, because I know there is no
such thing as a synonym and because I get nervous
around people who always assemble with their own kind,
forming clubs and nailing signs to closed front doors
while others huddle alone in the dark streets.

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget,
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
Surely, you have seen pairs of them standing forever
next to each other on the same line inside a poem,
a small chapel where weddings like these,
between perfect strangers, can take place.

See, I don't hate poetry. Thank God, because this stuff makes me happy.

It was this passage from the poem "Reading Myself to Sleep" that had me at hello: "and the only movement in the night is the slight / swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing, / and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand." Aaaah.

So now I'm going to go put fresh sheets on my bed and read myself to sleep.

The grass may be greener on the other side, but it still needs mowing.

2007-01-02T23:52:00.000-06:00

Apparently I have to keep moving to stay sane. I'm back in Murray for a refresher. I have things I want to get done. While I don't mind whiling away the hours at home, well, I can only knit so much before I go insane.

I've made myself a decent-sized list of things to do tomorrow. I'm not calling it a new year's resolution or anything, but I'm actually going to try to get a jump-start on this semester. I can already feel that once it gets started, it'll snowball out o' control. It's best to not put things off, so says my conscience.

I'm uploading a handful of photos to Flickr. I got a handy-dandy tripod for Christmas, so during the last few seconds of daylight on New Year's Eve, I tore it out of the package and used it to shoot a few fun-filled photos. Yay for alliteration!

Were somebody to force me to make a resolution, it would be to write more. Yeah.

Oh, she's leaving (leaving) on that midnight train to Pooletown.

2006-12-15T23:22:00.000-06:00

Things I know for certain:

Between now and Christmas, I will be knitting until my hands bleed. I'm going to try my ~~bloody~~ hand at socktops.

There's a margarita out there the size of a kiddie pool with my name on it. Pass me the water wings.

I will be studying for the PRAXIS at some point during the break. The Spanish and education parts. Not my idea of fun, unless I convince myself that the practice questions are Jeopardy questions.

Things I do not know for certain:

What my final grades for this semester are going to look like.

If I will have internet at home over break. Seems as if there is a strong possibility that I will.

If I'm really going to be awake enough to make the trip home.

Well, most everything, really.

From inside the quarry.

2006-12-06T22:24:00.000-06:00

I don’t want to be afraid of the blank page. Or if I am afraid of it, I want to be only because I am so eager to fill it.

I am tiring of writing, and I am tired of not being able to write.

A fresh notebook used to excite me, but now all these books with crisp, clean pages are still empty. Instead, I find myself half-trying to chisel half-formed ideas into academic stone.

What I really fear is ending up with a lap full of formless gravel and an untouched sheaf of paper.

I know that you don't care.

2006-12-05T14:59:00.000-06:00

Wednesday
German, Quia workbook due
Teach Dr. Howe's 202 class
Present COM 181 project, turn in paper
Tutor

Thursday
Give culture presentation
Turn in two papers for Dr. Howe
Tutor

Monday
COM final
Waag's final

Tuesday
German final

Thursday
Culture final and paper due
MLA final paper due
Sign up for PRAXIS exam

I'm not sure if that exercise of writing it out like that helped or not. And suddenly, finals week actually looks a little scary.

Whatever.

Overdue trip to Wal-Mart will commence in five, four, three, two...

sigh

2006-11-26T18:46:00.000-06:00

Beautiful, beautiful Order of the Phoenix sneak peek.

Minty fresh.

2006-11-17T00:02:00.000-06:00

It's St. Patrick's Day season again. Here comes the cold, and all that. And I'm celebrating with a new wintry design.

Here's a rundown, free-stylin' the list:

Today was the last day for Dr. Howe's class. I see post-Waag lunches happening for the remainder of the semester.
I have at least three different Spanish poems in my head. Uninvited.
I'm cold. Yeah, that's all there is to that.
I'm going to see Happy Feet tomorrow -- and it just happens to have the teaser trailer for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix among its previews...
I forgot to eat supper. Crap.
I think I left my umbrella in FH 406. Luckily, that's where I have German in the morn.
I think I've been ripped off by a Half.com seller. It's been almost a month since I ordered my copy of Speak English Like An American. It's a no-show.
Why are FreshInk cards leaving me? The bookstore is no longer going to sell Hallmark cards. I can just feel the joys of my life slip-sliding away.

Simon says: You know, the nearer your destination, the more you're slip-slidin' away.

Is that so?

More in the way of Facebook theft and song surveys.

2006-11-15T00:31:00.000-06:00

I am to choose an artist and answer these questions / finish these sentences by only using song titles belonging to the chosen artist.

Mayer, of course.

Are you male or female? Daughters.

Describe yourself. Bigger Than My Body.

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? Why Georgia.

Your best friend is... Comfortable.

Your favorite color is... Another Kind of Green.

What's the weather like? Covered in Rain. (I really do hear thunder out there.)

If you life was a TV show, what would it be called? Wait Until Tomorrow.

What is life to you? Wheel.

What's the best advice you have to give? Why Did You Mess With Forever?

If you could change your name, what would you change it to? Victoria. Well, it's either that or Lenny.

Yes, I admit, I got a drinkin' problem.

2006-11-12T18:59:00.000-06:00

Does anybody remember that David Ball song from back in 1994, "Thinkin' Problem"? Oh, country music. Oh, childhood. Anyway...

The title of this post is indeed not referring to my fancy for margaritas or my growing fancy for Killian's Irish Red. Rather, I'm referring to the fact that when I go to WalMart, about fifty percent of what fills my cart is beverages or beverage mixes.

Just tonight: orange juice, soy milk (I'm giving it a shot after seeing The Corporation), cranberry-apple juice, Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea, and spiced apple cider mix. Also, upon further inspection of my box of Great Grains, I discovered that the cereal people decided that adults like surprises in their cereal, too, and there inside was a three-bag sampler of Tazo tea. I mean, I know that the cereal aisle is laden with subliminal messages -- mostly found kids' sugar cereal shaped like cartoon characters -- but I really think I subconsciously registered the free tea label on the box. Why else would I buy a whole grain cereal? I mean, seriously.

I've just recently become obsessed with interesting things to drink. Perhaps it is the Starbucks culture infiltrating my system. But I've noticed that everywhere I go, I'm either going to have coffee, or more recently, a cup of tea. And honestly, it excites me. Just this afternoon, my mom, sister, nieces, and I had what unexpectedly turned into a tea party. I had, for the first time ever, milk in my tea. Oh, the glory. I'm practically a new woman. Anyway, I took pictures of the event, complete with a miniature Dora the Explorer tea set, and I need to put them up on Flickr.

Perhaps I should go on a diet where I do nothing but drink fluids. Something tells me I could be very happy.

Lighten up.

2006-11-11T13:07:00.000-06:00

It's definitely time for some mindlessness.

This is the "soundtrack to my life" thing where I put iTunes on shuffle and let it pick the songs that will accompany the following scenes in my life. I stole this off someone's Facebook. Isn't it funny the things that it assumes would be a part of everyone's life? Anyway, no time for analyzing. I just thought that some of these were kind of appropriate, some funny. And what's up with all the James Taylor?

Opening credits: "Picture" - Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow
First day at school: "My Stupid Mouth" - John Mayer
Falling in love: "Levon" - Taylor Hicks
The fight: "Things Change" - Dwight Yoakam
Breaking up: "Reelin' in the Years" - Steely Dan
Prom: "Walking Man" - James Taylor
Life's okay: "Girl on the Wing" - the Shins
Mental breakdown: "I Walk the Line" - Joaquin Phoenix
Driving: "Sweet Baby James" - James Taylor
Flashback: "Handy Man" - James Taylor
Getting back together: "At the Stars" - Better Than Ezra
Wedding: "You've Got a Friend" - James Taylor
Birth of child: "Blue Eyed Soul" - Wilco
Final battle: "One of These Things First" - Nick Drake
Death scene: "She's Only Happy in the Sun" - Ben Harper
Funeral: "Yesterday" - the Beatles
End credits: "Empty" - Ray LaMontagne

Real quick-like.

2006-11-08T23:03:00.000-06:00

People are not projects. I don't want to be your project. I don't want you to be my project.

God forbid we lose so much respect for one another that we forget this.

Make no mistake; this is not a poem.

2006-11-07T00:13:00.000-06:00

I know it could be worse. It always can be.
I know that it's all probably self-inflicted.
I know that it's probably PMS.

But I'm tired of working and not getting finished.
I'm tired of light bulbs blowing.
I'm tired of dragging soggy leaves onto the carpet.
I'm tired of being in the library
and hearing people text messaging
and the TAB and M not working on my keyboard
and someone sitting in my place.
I'm tired of the long line at the coffee shop.
I'm tired of detours.
I'm tired of too many pennies in my change purse.
I'm tired of all these little things,
even if they happen only once.

I know that the grass really isn't greener on the other side of right now.
I know that hindsight is 20/20.
I know that I will look back and sigh.
I know that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
I know that this too shall pass.
I know that I'm making a mountain out of a thousand little molehills.

But is it too much to ask to be bored?
To entertain whimsy,
To go out because I want to and because I can,
And not to worry that I'm screwing up my entire future
with five minutes of breathing easy?

And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills.

2006-11-04T13:20:00.000-06:00

I talk about growing up a lot. How that's what I've been doing for the last twenty three years. How that's what I'll be doing for the rest of my life. And sometimes, when I'm brave enough, I try to imagine what my life will be like in five, ten, or twenty years. I'm usually quite unsuccessful at it. Because, one, I am so unclear about what it is that I want in life that the image is too blurry to make it out anyway. And two, because I find it easy to convince myself that there is no way of knowing what will happen, and therefore, there is little purpose in playing the what-if game.

I had to play that what-if game today, though.

It was less than an hour ago. I was singing along with The Shins' "Pink Bullets" on my iTunes, heating up some left-over chicken and biscuits dinner-in-a-box I'd "made" last night, and thinking up ways to avoid doing my homework. My phone rang, and it was my sister.

With the recent deaths in our family and the financial and legal challenges that come along with it, I'm getting quite used to this being the topic of my phone conversations. But as I told Holly yesterday, talking about money gives me a rash. Probably because money generally signifies responsibility, and we all know that the thought of responsibility makes me come unglued. But you know, I'm dealing.

So this particular conversation with my sister started off with references to will-making and life insurance and all those pleasant things that I've grown accustomed to talking about. But before I knew it my sister was asking me if, at some point in the future, I would be willing to be listed as guardian of my nieces in the event of my sister and her husband's death.

[Insert silence here.]

What happened, though, was so contrary to my form that I'm still in a bit of shock. I was already nodding my head affirmatively and prepared to give a yes before my sister was finished asking the question. I, the me who hems and haws at any sort of decision or responsibility, discovered in that moment that if there is anything I am sure about in my life, it is that I would accept responsibility for raising Victoria and Kathryn if I had to. I would not bat an eyelash in doubt.

It is a responsibility that I hope I never have to assume because it would be indicative of other unspeakable tragedy. But as I leaned against the kitchen counter in my unkempt apartment that reflects my relatively self-centered, college-student life, I was able to look into a possible -- but not probable -- future in which I was okay. I was responsible -- not because it was a characteristic of my personality, but because it was the role in life that I had assumed. Through that tiny window of possibility, I could see that everything was going to be okay.

There is a lot of talk about life being what you make it. And you know, I can see that. But we can spend so much time trying to make life be something that it isn't, and in the meantime, we end up missing the life that is or forgetting that, sometimes, life has a way of making itself for us. What we can do is become the sort of people who make decent decisions in our given cirumstances.

For me, the future is still just as blurry as ever. I don't know what will happen. None of us does. What I can say, though, is that the present -- which is always morphing in and out of the past and the future -- came into focus some. And that's all we can really ask for.

All settled and sorted.

2006-10-29T19:16:00.000-06:00

This silence is so loud.

2006-10-26T23:37:00.000-05:00

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Maybe it's because it looks like Harry Potter could live there.

2006-10-19T15:54:00.000-05:00

Words cannot describe how much I adore this house. From the outside, that is. I'm sure if I ever saw the inside, the whole thing would be demystified. It belongs to the university, and it's the Nash House, whatever that means. I have no idea. I almost plough over pedestrians every time I drive down 16th because I am so enchanted by this house and I fail to pay attention to my driving. But it's just so, mm, cottagey? I just think it's adorable. So today when I was taking a different route home from a meeting at Alexander Hall, I rummaged through my bag and found my camera so that I could take a picture. Maybe now pedestrians won't be in so much danger. But I doubt it.

Thank you for riding the Raven.

2006-10-17T21:52:00.000-05:00

Twenty-three is the age that scares me. It is the threshold of oblivion. It is the age when the numbers start to blur. Or perhaps that was twenty-two. If twenty-two was the apex of the hill on the roller coaster, twenty-three is the initial descent. I know it sounds like I am describing turning forty and rolling over the hill. Maybe forty is that big drop with lots of air-time, but this twent-three that I am contending with now is that first teaser hill. The one that makes you realize there's no turning back.

I don't really like roller coasters that much.

And I never thought that age would bother me. Age ain't nothin' but a number, right? Maybe so, but if time passes without fail twenty-four hours each day, these numbers start to add up. How did all these "sands through hourglass" pile up so quickly, and who is shoveling them? Call me Hootie (or the Blowfish, if you prefer), but I don't want to believe in Time. Just thinking about it is enough to make me hold my breath -- an attempt to slow things down.

But as for the age of twenty-three itself, well, I don't know. It's less about feeling older and more about being more aware of time. But so far, I can't say it's wonderful. In the course of the few days since my birthday, I've suffered several minor set-backs involving everything from inexplicable numbness in my hand (they all say it'll pass) to a series of road detours that made me feel like I was in a maze with no exit.

Surely it will get better.

No I'm not colorblind
I know the world is black and white
I try to keep an open mind
But I just can't sleep on this tonight

Stop this train
I want to get off
And go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't
But honestly, won't someone stop this train?

Don't know how else to say it
I don't want to see my parents go
One generation's length away
From fighting life out on my own

Stop this train
I want to get off
And go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't
But honestly, won't someone stop this train?

So scared of getting older
I'm only good at being young
So I play the numbers game
To find a way to say that life has just begun

Had a talk with my old man
Said "help me understand"
He said "turn sixty-eight"
"You'll renegotiate"

"Don't stop this train
Don't for a minute change the place you're in
And don't think I couldn't ever understand
I tried my hand
John, honestly we'll never stop this train"

Once in a while, when it's good
It'll feel like it should
And they're all still around
And you're still safe and sound
And you don't miss a thing
Till you cry when you're driving away in the dark
Singing
Stop this train
I want to get off
And go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't
Cause now I see I'll never stop this train

"Stop This Train," John Mayer

Calm between storms

2006-10-11T12:38:00.000-05:00

Thank God midterms are over. I can't believe it's already time for the homestretch, though. Things aren't looking too terrible, though. For the first time ever in my life -- I think -- I got all As at midterm. I don't know whether to be proud or scared. Final grades are never the same as they are at midterm.

With all this new-found time in the wake of midterm, I'd like to welcome back The Loose Association.

Poem in October

2006-10-08T20:59:00.000-05:00

Get ready

2006-10-05T16:20:00.000-05:00

This camera -- or one similar -- with be mine come this weekend. It will be nice to have a good digital back in my hands. Oh, the places we will go.

For those to come.

2006-09-30T16:14:00.000-05:00

Today is the last day of Banned Books Week. If there is any one issue that I actually do care about at all, it is the freedom to read. Thanks to ALA, here is a list of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

For fun, I am going to bold the ones I have read. Because I am a little lazy, there are ones that I own, but I haven't read them yet. They will be italicized. And there is a far-too-large amount of them that I am ashamed to say that I haven't read, but have full intent to do so. As a sort of goal-setting exercise for myself, I'll underline them.

Of the books that I have read on this list, I want to thank every teacher who made me read it, every library from which I borrowed it, every store from whose shelves I purchased it, and my parents for allowing me the freedom to read it. You are all wise folks.

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth's Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Fantasies by Nancy Friday
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Stood on the corner for a while.

2006-09-27T11:24:00.000-05:00

Some time between now and 1 o'clock, DHL is supposed to be delivering the fourth version I've had of this cell phone. I'm really about to give up.

Anyway, to ensure that I do in fact receive the package -- as I didn't yesterday because I forgot to tell Cingular my apartment number and then they gave DHL the wrong phone number to contact me...the freaking phone company forgot my phone number! -- I am spending my between-classes time here instead of on campus. (Yes, I'm aware that sentence was nearly impossible to disentangle. God, I love punctuation.) Normally, I would camp out on the third floor of Waterfield and read copious amounts of Spanish literature. But no. I tried to tell myself I would do my homework here. Of course not. I'm shopping on iTunes and looking at exciting, new production pictures for Order of the Phoenix.

And blogging.

And now, a random thought on life and literature:

Plot. The representation in fiction of a character's efforts to achieve a purpose in the face of obstacles, concluding with his decisive success or failure.
-- Theme and Form, 1964

In creative writing classes, we talk about the differences between character-driven and circumstance-driven plots. The circumstance-driven one is like an action movie where what happens to the characters determine how things end up. The character-driven one is a story that is moved along, complicated, and resolved because choices that the protagnist makes. It's the difference in an external locus of control verus an internal one. So of course, the character-driven plots make for better, more meaningful stories. They are significant.

So yeah, this applies to life, right? You can float through life like a piece of crap and just let things happen to you, or you can make decisions. I just realized the other day that letting life come to you (er, me) is basically living a circumstance-driven plot. It's a crappy story. Anyway, the moral of this story is that I'd much rather live a character-driven plot. Even if it means making some bad decisions here and there, of which I am scared to death. If nothing else, it makes for a better story, eh?

Of cell phones and ice cream cones

2006-09-21T16:40:00.000-05:00

I have had considerable technological trouble with my cell phone over the past several days. First the screen wouldn't work. They sent me a new one, but I couldn't get the cover off of my old phone to put onto the "new" one. This new phone, in less than twenty-four hours, has screwed up twice by shrinking the volume in the earpiece two half a notch above audible. Something tells me that this "possibly reconditioned" phone will be going back to the folks at Cingular.

I do. I appreciate technology, but the thing is that when we rely on it and it then fails us, we suffer unnecessary stress.

Anyway, on my way back from the Cingular store -- whose associates really could not care less -- I decided I needed a butterscotch-dipped cone from Dairy Queen. While I was waiting for my butterscotchy goodness, I noticed what I have been looking out for for weeks. The sign. The sign that says that DQ hibernates for winter, starting October 31. The sign that strikes fear in the hearts of many. The sign that incites panic throughout the land -- of Murray, anyhow.

They handed me my cone -- and I have to say that the butterscotch shell is way better here than in Henderson -- and I took it to my car where I rolled down the windows and played "This Time of Year." As I sat there, I really didn't know how to feel. Glad that it's getting cooler and that the leaves are changing colors? Sad because I was alone? Nostalgic about the past -- sad that it's gone or happy that it happened? I didn't know how to feel, but I was feeling something.

I did learn something, though. Apparently, butterscotch-dipped cones are the favorite among many. I sat there for just about ten minutes during a relatively slow part of the day, and I saw about three other people with them.

One of them happened to be middle-aged man in a business suit who seemed to be spending "quality" time with his wife and two kids. He never got off of the phone for the duration of the visit. I say visit because he was standing next to his big truck while his over-made-up wife -- who was abstaining from DQ's cool treats, certainly to maintain her figure -- tended to her SUV with Soccer Mom stickers on the back. For a while, they all four stood together in the parking lot, but no one seemed to notice any of the others. The kids, of course, were enamored of their (chocolate-dipped) ice cream cones. The man held his idly while conducting some supposedly imporant business. The woman/mother/wife pranced around a bit in her high-heeled boots and repeatedly smoothed her blouse to ensure that she looked just so.

They continued this way until I finished my own ice cream, so I naturally, pulled my car into gear and left. By that time, I was glad to leave. I knew for sure, then, what it was that I was feeling. It was a bit of sadness. Not for me, though. Suddenly, I felt less alone that any of them standing there. But I also felt happy that my family doesn't have to schedule slots for superficial quality time. We are aware of one another. And I also felt a responsibility. One that reminds me that, if and when I have my own family, I want to have one that is connected, that isn't just a loosely associated group of people who are more interested in business or in themselves than each other.

Heart aflutter.

2006-09-17T00:14:00.000-05:00

The loves of my life -- at the moment:

Butterscotch discs, by the bagfull. I've been on a tear to find them. Rite Aid finally got me my fix. Don't know what my deal is. This summer, it was butterscotch-dipped cones from DQ.
Construction paper. I've taken to making my own postcards to send to people, a la construction paper, index cards, and Mod Podge. I found fun new colors at the store today. Hoorah.
The prospect of Scrubs being syndicated on Comedy Central starting Monday night. I've been wanting to get into this show. I've looked at every video rental joint in Murray, and ain't a one of 'em got the seasons on DVD. I've never even seen the show, but I hear it's good. You should look at the reviews on Amazon. A solid five stars. Season Four is sold out at WalMart. That's gotta say something. Anyway, I have to figure out how to set my VCR to tape while I'm at class. For the love of Zach Braff, I swear.
Dictionary.com. A love that will never die.
"Three More Days" by Ray LaMontagne. It's on his new album Till the Sun Turns Black, and you can hear the song here. I don't handle heavy new-music-saturation very well. With Continuum out there now, it's got the priority. I'm going to try to digest one Ray song at a time, I guess. This one has my attention right now.
Windows-up / windows-down weather. It depends on your location. Windows up in your house, apartment, or room. Windows down in your car.

We have a good thing going.

What's 'washed up' mean anyway?

2006-09-15T15:17:00.000-05:00

I just want to congratulate myself on finally sticking with a blog design for a while -- a "while" being over a year.

In the past when I was a more regular blogger, I redesigned this blog quite frequently. I've blogging a bit more these days, and as it is a fallish Friday afternoon with little to do, I thought, Hmm, why don't I look into changing the blog?

But here's the truth, I like what I've got going. I still like the colors, and hey, it's fall again. It's fall, again?! When I decided to look back at the files I created to develop this design, I was surprised to see things like "Last modified September 15, 2005." At first I just thought that my tinkering around with the computer had caused the system to recognize today as "modification." Oh, but no. 2005. A year ago today.

As normally goes my astonishment by time, I can't believe that a year ago was, well, a year ago. Last night, while I was celebrating Kathryn's birthday at Sissy's, I realized that it'd been a year since I made those Elmo cupcakes. (We had Wal-Mart-made Dora cupcakes this year, by the way.) It's the little things like that mark off time. Seemingly insignifcant moments that are lost in the whirlwind of time, swiftly blown a year, two years into the past before you even know it.

*sigh*

In other news. I want to see the new Zach Braff movie. It is playing in Paducah. Anybody? Anybody?

Also, rumors are swirling that I am getting a digital camera of my choice for my birthday. I can barely contain myself -- from both peeing on myself and spending all day shopping on Amazon.

The purest little part of me

2006-09-13T18:36:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, as I turned onto the sidewalk that runs along the street that crosses my own, I saw a school bus rumbling down the road. In a matter of the seconds it takes to walk a few feet down the sidewalk before crossing the street, I was taken back to those years when, every afternoon, I filed through the gym of the elementary school with all my bus-riding peers, all of us with backpack straps twisted hastily over our little shoulders. (There was also the slung-over-one-shoulder style, but we weren't that cool yet.) We would spill out onto the sidewalk with the canopy where the smell of diesel exhaust reigned, and we would scatter with the excitement of going home and with the anxiety of accidently boarding the wrong bus. But I would eventually find number 9114 among the buses lined up like a row of grungy rubber ducks and settle into my sticky faux-leather seat for the long ride home.

What astonishes me is that I am the same person who rode Karen Frederick's school bus every afternoon, swinging my little feet over the dirty bus floor and watching cornfields zoom past my window. Somewhere deep inside me, there is a self that has not changed one bit from that little girl. It's not quite as hard to comprehend that I am still that kid as it is to understand that that kid would become me. (Yeah, I'm not sure that makes sense, either.) I had in me then what it is that makes me me now.

When I think back to when I was younger -- even to my total ignorance -- I see those memories through my eyes. Not through "my eyes now" or through "my eyes then." Just through my eyes. Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but it's the circumstances that change, not us. Not the real us.

As I turned onto my own street, I was met by three boys who looked to be between the ages of seven and thirteen on bicycles. They rushed past me with their shaggy little-boy hair brushed back by the wind and with sufficiently mischievious looks on their faces. They barely acknowledged me, and even if they did take notice, they probably looked at me like I was some stodgy, old semi-adult with whom they could never relate. But I felt something different. Kindred, almost.

See, inside of them are twenty-two-year-olds that they don't recognize yet. And inside of me there is a seven- and a twelve-year-old that has never and will never go away. And inside all of us is that wizened adult who, although we'll never believe it until we reach that age along the timeline, really does understand what it's like to be us. Because we never age, really. Perhaps we understand more about the world around us, but we are who we are, forever.

It's the only evidence I have, intangible as it is, that our souls are eternal.

Twice as much ain't twice as good

2006-09-12T20:58:00.000-05:00

Back when I was a groupie -- we'll pretend I'm not now -- I used to write what I called the "obligatory concert post" (see 1, 2, and 3) after a John Mayer concert. Maybe this is it. Maybe not.

Well. I guess it is.

In a way, this was the least exciting concert yet. coughcoughmoreconcertstocomecoughcough That is not to say anything negative at all about the experience. Part of it is that I hadn't had the chance to psych myself up for it. I was more concerned with safely making the 400-mile trip to Muncie, IN. With that finally behind me, it was less than twenty-four hours until show time, and it still hadn't sunk in.

The other factor contributing to this lessened sense of excitement, I think, is a sheer sense of maturity. Holly and I have individually done a heck of a lot of maturing over the past two years since we dropped off the tour circuit. Of course, John Mayer had dropped off the tour circuit, too, to do himself some maturing, which is so incredibly evident -- through his musical finesse and his lyrical explorations -- in the new album that went on-sale today. Like he says in the improvisational introduction to "Something's Missing" on the John Mayer Trio album, "It's only music now." If you need concrete evidence, he's played fourteen shows thus far on the tour and not once has "Your Body is a Wonderland" appeared on a setlist.

I think he's trying to say something. And I like what he's saying, too.

Anyway, the show was beautiful. And I'm not going to pretend that I didn't scream like a twelve year old -- or a trashy forty-year-old woman with rose tattoos, alternatively -- every time he went into jam-mode or announced a set change. But this was the first time I wasn't holding a camera in front of my face throughout the whole show. (Though I would have if I could have. And Holly did the picture-taking this time, anyway.) I just held onto my twelve-dollar beer with one hand and tapped the beat out on my chest with the other as I sang along.

He didn't play one of my favorite songs, though, one he has played on every show of the tour except ours -- "Gravity." (It just made a very poignant appearance on the wonderful show House, by the way.) When that track started playing this afternoon after I bought the record, even though I've heard it a hundred times, I had cold chills. It's that powerful, and I was quite disappointed when he neglected to play it. However, he did dazzle us -- and redeem himself -- in the encore with surprise performances of the throwback tunes "Victoria" and "Love Soon," albeit a fragmented jumble of forgotten lyrics.

There are two types of love. The one that fades in the event of prolonged absence, and upon rekindling, there is no hope because the flame has gone for good. Then there's the one that endures separation, and when one returns to the ashes, the flames jump up and dance just as wildly and even a little bit more brightly, as if no time had passed at all.

Call me crazy for likening the last one to music. That's okay.