Notes from the salt mines

Who's aFraid of Doing an MFA?

2010-09-26T15:43:00.001-04:00

My Bird and Bear and Buddha Self, Irked on the Commute

It was early.
Gwyneth was purring, her new car smell almost
over-powering the stereo.
Chumps! I chortled, zooming past—
and the world spins madly on
(snippets of a sad song in shafts of light).
This week there was a
super-harvest moon hanging pendulous up there—auspices of
the crazy alignments to come.
Like that one day—I might just fly!
Not little by little (like that dream
I had about holding the magical window above my head)
but at once and as if on mighty wings
shrieking like a fearsome air raid.

I would soar in my blissful soaring,
and like the arctic tern, my wings would be edged
with a smear of soot (only iridescent)
playing in the taste of salt
and the smells of water.
I would bring you treasures, beloved.
Squirming gems of sea-life,
flashing food fumbling low on the food-chain
meant to nourish you, inspire eggs even.
On these pearlescent wings I would perform stunts,
grand and glad journeys.

From close speculation, roundabout wonder
and the focus of a nearsighted bear
(my bird sight obviously gone now)
I study and study and study and establish
that a connection between suffering and the end of suffering
is insurmountable.

It is indicative of so much, I grumble.
(Too soon ambling into the salt mines).
Rapacious patriarchy changed the face of everything, with their cultural
knout, like the historical chastiser they have proven to be.

The Grind

2008-07-23T08:48:00.003-04:00

Blogging has been low on the priorities of late. June was a whirlwind at work and then a crash-course in emotional endurance that I may just be getting over now. I have been doing a great deal of visioning and hoping in the last few weeks: how can I find a way to be a productive creative person AND keep a house, maintain a relationship & do my job? I have been thinking that not needing sleep would be a nice start, alas that is not really possible unless I want to be a big ole bitch to everyone. Besides not enough sleep would likely get in the way of productivity...
So-- the economic climate being what it is (oil and food prices steadily rising, rising, rising) T and I have been having some serious conversations about how to make it all happen this year. Luckily, there *are places where we can trim. Sadly it is going to require of us a level of inner "lawfulness" heretofore unseen (ie actually following a budget, instead of just writing it and then filing it in the drawer). But we have The Oasis here, and we must make the necessary choices to heat it and feed ourselves in it.
But I have so many wants! And what a powerful drug wanting is. I have spent so much of my brainspace railing against materialistic monoculture-- only to look deep in my heart and see it there lurking like an ironic promise kept by some other self.
I WANT gap jeans.
I WANT a digital camera.
I WANT a new tattoo.
I WANT to go out to lunch.
I WANT to have the summer off.
WANT, WANT, WANTS!

Sigh, the brat factor, eh? or it is it less about my being a brat and more about the American Dream? No matter how "radical" one feels oneself to be there is still a level of inescapable conditioning that seeps in to even the most astute mind. I like my creature comforts, that's for sure. And there was certainly no lack of them when I was growing up (despite the Boston/Shreveport economic split). So here I am, a grown-up with a house and a big pile of want trying to wade through it as best I can. Trying to balance the wants table against the needs table and just hoping that I can find my way through the maze that it is.
I was just re-reading Huxley's Brave New World and marveling at how deep their conditioning was cut into them-- truely starting at conception. Certainly I was not created on an assembly line and then intentionally conditioned to be what I am through "sleep teaching" and specific embryonic advantages and disadvantages. But Huxley's warning feels very timely, still. Some say we are born just who we are-- personality and tastes and procilvities already there waiting to be honed with experience. But I say who we are born as (and become more fully as time marches on) is meddled with by the media monoculture! For exampel, natural tastes are turned into WANT, and therefore exploited by Nabisco and Gap and Delta. How can we escape it???
Perhaps this is what I will try to address with my writing, and with my teaching, for the rest of my days.

Truth

2008-05-10T07:22:00.002-04:00

It was drag day at Rock-N-Roll High School on Friday. There were, of course, a few freaked out straight boys doing their best to make sure all the world knew that even though their girlfriends and friend-girls had dressed them up they were NOT gay. But there was also some seriously fabulous Drag-- boys who really looked firece, girls who even I mistook for dudes! But my favorite was the contingent of self-described "geek" boys who dressed as the girls they might have been. Picture long, lovely skirts, cute matching tops, modest breasts, and their usually very bound pony-tails now long and lose, and no make-up. There were a few girls who were truely excellent Kings-- a few with very compelling facial hair who manifest stout and convincing walks to match the costume.
Since it was a Friday there was a performance in the theater after lunch/before afternoon classes. There was an award section for out kick-ass Mock Trial team, and then a preview for the african drum and dance troupe that all ended early. It was clear that we needed to fill the last 15 minutes with something fabulous. With only a blip of hesitation I sashayed my high femme ass up to the stage (oh yes, I was in drag, too) and once the yelling died down invited all those who were in drag up for a little parade! Meanwhile somebody was able to put their hand on that silly song you know you all love "I'm Too Sexy" and the kids made a little magic. It was a day of great joy for this queer teacher-- especially, as one colleague noted, in other schools boys can be sent home for wearing skirts and dresses. But no no not at R&R High. We dedicate an entire day to the fine art of questioning gender expression!
In the spirit of the day I asked my classes to discuss a poem by Margaret Atwood about telling true stories and telling lies. It seems to me that outside the oasis of places like Rock and Roll High most folk, especially teen agers, who want to express their gender differently than what convention dictates are at the least ostracized and at the worst in danger of violence. It was cool to hear them digging around this big ole' word, since TRUTH is such a high and heavy word loaded with the baggage of religion, law, and personal philosophy. In any event, we wrote poems in the style of the Atwood one and here is mine:

i
Don't ask for the true story
Why is it necessary?

Truth isn't universal or clear
it isn't on my back like a tattoo.

What I'm walking with
holding like sharpened steel

isn't luck, or fire, or kind words
that tick like my heart telling a tale.

ii
The true story was lost
during that terrible snow and howling hail

when shoes and clothes and hair were
a dark tangle of cues on the outside

a crystal refracting the light of so
many millions of years old light.

Light blurred by salt and the
tiny footprints of Athena's silent fowl.

iii
The true story lies
among a jumble of colors

like specimen on wax tablets, like
sounds, like that owl's kill.

The true story is chrulish
and snide and mythical,

and besides, truth is
improbable, and floats

like pollen in the spring.

Our place in the scheme of things

2008-04-29T06:34:00.005-04:00

I had a big burphday party last week. It was a gala event with wonderful food, beloved people, and glorious weather. My mom came-- with Williamsburg Orange Cake-- and amazing people from near and far showered me with affection, books, and music. It was a delightful way to mark 33. The next Monday I thought I was on my way to spend 4 days in Phili with Mom. We were going to bake and apple pie, visit the traveling Frida exhibit, and faff about enjoying the spring weather. On Tuesday early I got the call from my Dad that Paw-Paw had passed away and I was flung headlong into an epic journey down the eastern seaboard to a tour of Louisiana.
The ritual of saying goodbye is important, and Paw-Paw's was heartfelt, partially Hebrew ( a language I am not sure he even knew or revered in life), and short. I was standing with J and A-- T was not in attendence-- looking around at a crowd of people who used to be the grown-ups in the family and I realized that J, A, and I are also the grown-ups in the family now. Like the inevidable motion of the most rhythmic order we moved up in the generational design that day. There were no children a generation younger than us there represented-- in fact none of my generational cohort have divided that way yet. And this was a realization I found notable as well.
Of course, upon return home, T and I had another one of those uncomftorable conversations about spawning. She is much more salmon-like than I, and seems to be quite drawn to the idea of returning to the proverbial grounds to make babbies. I, on the other hand, don't seem to have the slightest inclination whatsoever to do such a thing. Call me crazy-- but the idea of pregnancy and labor is as abhorent to me as becoming a stock-broker. And then there are diapers, toddler rages, outrageous child-care costs... i have real trouble seeing the positive here. This is a source of much constrenation between T and I-- and a conflict that I believe one day may become a grave problem. But for now we simply bump into it occasionally-- and as her biological clock ticks louder and louder each year I simply hope for flexibility of mind and open-heartedness to descend upon both of us.

OMG, shoes

2008-04-15T05:25:00.004-04:00

I awoke dreeaming about shoes. I was in this mall-like place with people I don't enjoy much in waking life and we were looking at this place where you put your feet in trash bags and they trace you all up and then create for you a pair of individual shoes. I was hesitant (since I want and need a new pair of hooves in waking life and apparently in dream life, too) but also strangely obsessed with the whole process. I woke up just as dream-friend was putting his feet in the bags and the shoe-maker was emerging from the back to help us.

What could this possibly mean? Shoes could be representative of stability? of status? of standing on my own two feet? of that stupid youtube video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3ywukQYA) that I am oddly in love with. Humph.

As my big burphday partay looms I am thinkiing more and more about this notion of identity. How that identity changes over time! Certainly when I was younger I was more focused on WHO I AM and what that looks like, how I manifest that, and what that means. These days I am less intereseted; I care more about kindness, and being honest about what I want and how I feel. These days I am less interested in being some "consistent" person-- especially if that comes at the expense of changing my mind and being wrong. Life is here to be lived, no? Life is here to be present for, not to for forcing and shoving and imposing our will around. More and more the activities that feel important to me live with the people who are important to me-- more so than art, or ideas, or beauty. This particular me has been around the sun almost 33 years. 33 fucking years-- Goddess help us! But that is a long time to be here. Of course, it is nothing on most time scales (the geological one, the galactical one...) And I don't feel "old" really. I feel more and more humble if anything. Maybe that is what being around teen-agers all day does to ya-- they are really, for the most part, the opposite of humble. And having been first hand witness all day most days, except summer, to the mess that attitude whips up I am more and more interested in manifesting humility.

In fact, one of the short quotes up in my classroom is a line from an Ani song: humility has buoyancy. And in my experience so far, truer words were never sung!

2008-04-03T05:27:00.003-04:00

It isn't every day that you get to moderate a mosh pit at ye olde day job, eh?!
And conversely, it isn't every day that you see a kid running down the sidewalk away from her parent who looks around panicked at the edge of the driveway (I did see the kid look back, once, but then she turned the corner).
And finally it isn't eveybody's reality to be so blessed and so moody all at once: what is wrong with me?!
T and I are on our way to the keys tomorrow at 0:dark thirty for the nuptials of dear friends (who have found a steadfast love) and still my moods are like a capricious ocean this week! Perhaps I am becoming more and more like the teen-agers I spend so much time around, perhaps I am further down on the inner evolutionary trajectory than I had hoped. And perhaps, just perhaps, all this poetry and yoga and kale-eating isn't getting me anywhere but where I already am anyway. And where is that, might you ask? Well, this morning it is right here on the computer, instead of exercising or reading or cleaning the bathroom.
Sigh, I feel like an old Robbie Robertson song this morning: Somewhere Down the Crazy River. Not so much the lyrics or the melody but the atmosphere of it, the nostalgia of it, and the a little bit cheesy nature of it...

Comedy

2008-03-28T06:08:00.002-04:00

There is something about a person standing on a stage TRYING to make me laugh that brings out my inner hater, my most stubborn and stone-faced humorless self. Don't get me wrong-- I enjoy laughing, and wit, and irony and synicism; especially when they are employed to critique current doing of this dumb-ass world. And satire, in most of its forms, I especially enjoy, particurally the mockumentary variety (a la "This is Spinal Tap" and "But I'm a Cheerleader"). Camp usually makes me laugh out loud unabashadly, and even occasionally well-played slap-stick has known to squeeze a chuckle out of this old crumdgen. But stand-up, yuck!... http://www.whitless.com/ is one bit of evidence for my cause here. While Jay is not really doing "stand-up" on his show it is damn well close enough, eh?
I was recently invited by a new friend to go see this comedienne at that gambling mecca in CT (the funny lady's name escapes me this early, as does the casino). And while I was really excited for the invitation to spend an evening with her I had to bow out because I don't like stand-up. (That and casinos usually make me cry). I felt unevolved, and a little like a killjoy, untill I really looked closely at my opinion.
I have now concluded that I heartily agree with Henry Drummond in "Inherit the Wind" when he quipped to Rachel Cates “Lady, when you lose your power to laugh, you lose your power to think straight” (50). However there are certain deliveries that make this lady laugh-- and that's a truth.

This ain't a movie, nah

2008-03-27T06:24:00.004-04:00

I have spent a lifetime being a careful student of music that moves me. I have cried along, belted it out in the car, and hummed along in the shower. I have been making mixes since the days of cassete tapes and have long held the opinion that a really great mix is perhaps the best gift any one person can give.
I have nursed a secret fantasy of being a rock star (a fantasy I sort of live out every day in my daily one woman show know as English Class). There are some songs that I have loved for so long they have become like life itself, like my bones and my hands, like the mash-up opera in my head that never fades out completly but carries me thourgh the fire and sailing on the high winds of this mortal coil.
There are voices that resonate in my cells and in my counsciousness both-- that I dream in and that I imagine I might sound like if I practiced enough.
I f music can give me hope and offer the rare balm of solace in this dirty-minded and unjust world-- well that is something, idn't it!
To the east the sun is rising again-- all pink and bold in the sky. itunes is playing me a lovely mix-- quiet and pretty-- and as I mutter along (right in the thick of love, sometimes we get scik of love) musing on sunrise's inevidibility John Lgend is right
maybe we should take it slow.... it's more confusing every day.. no it'snot a fantasy...maybe we should take it slow

The Art of Wooing

2008-03-15T10:23:00.004-04:00

I have long been a proponent of the DIY ethic for everything from gardening flowers to fixing cars (if only I knew how to do that!). And art, to me, is the ultimate in DIY: if you don't see enough beauty in your world go ahead and make some your own damn self! I think this is one sure fire way to beat the apathy and hopelessness that all things legislative, heteronormative, and full of saturated fat and corn syrup can bring on.

But I digress-- I am here to tell you all about my friend Kaz's new book that she SELF-PUBLISHED! (I am so proud of her). It is a beautiful multi-media romp through the slings and arrows of dating misfortune, the upsets and false starts of love, and it just so happens to have a little something-sumthin from moi therein (though it transcends the actual writers and is really about the ever-elusive critter known as love).

The website is gorgeous-- check it out and buy a book!!!
http://www.theartofwooing.com/

Happy Thoughts

2008-03-13T05:44:00.004-04:00

How life does sweep me away in its current... last night T and I were scrolling through the "on demand" free movie options on our too many choices TV box and decided to give the 90's "Hook" a shot. Who can really pass up a Robin Williams tale, especially if the theme is Peter Pan?! We didn't actually make it to the end (we got sleepy) but there were a few things that were quite striking!

For one thing, the sets were real. This movie was made enough before the time of digital everything in modern movies, and it was so refreshinging! I will never cease to be amazed by what my fellow humans can build. The set of the lost boy's tree house was so shockingly cool that we both got all woozy wishing we could build one just like it in our backyard. Also, Captian Hook's ship (who I believe was played by Denis Hoffman!?) was a set marvel with wonderful details all over the place. The actors were trilling around in this magical made-up kindom of imagination that was an actual place in some movie lot somewhere! It is so much more fun to watch them in that environment! Much similar to "Aeon FLux"-- a film that was shot in Berlin. Upon first view of this incarnation of Aeon's story (having been a big fan of the liguid television version when I was in High School) I was really struck by the atmosphere of the settings, though I was sure they were all computer generated. But when I learned that they were real places in a city I have long wished to see for myself I was doubly struck by the coolness of it all. Certainly "Aeon Flux" was a digitalized version of Berlin-- while "Hook" was movie magic old school-- they have in common the transformative allure that happens when a story is being told in a real place. All this action packed, digital mumbo jumbo in the virtual world of a computerized scene is fun (don't get me wrong, I just watched "Across the Universe" and was really touched by the whole thing)-- but I crave real sets!

I guess this seems like a silly thing to blog about-- especially as it has been so damn long since I wrote one-- but that is about where my head is at these days. There just seems to be so fcuking much to do all the time (school, future, house, maintanence of the modern life, etc...) that talking about a really impressive set (or setting) in a movie is actually more interesting. I mean I really coud have edited a poem last night, or reckoned the checkbook, or found an outfit for the Island wedding in April-- these all would have been more effective uses of my time last night. But is this not the exact lesson of the Peter Pan saga? Somedays you need to just engage what is enjoyable about life. As Joesph Campbell says: We can reckon the meaning later-- right now it's all about the experience!

Birthdays and Soldiering

2008-02-25T05:42:00.002-05:00

I got an email from my first love this morning. He has been deployed in Afganastan for an entire year now. Usually his emails are full of shennagin tales, trips outside the wire, and the bliss that is PT. But today's message contained more longing for home and hearth than usual. He was telling this short story about wild dogs and how they wouldn't really listen to his reasonable suggestions-- but all I could picture was my friend looking sad in his desert gear with his big ole gun in his arms.

Contrast this experience with this weekend's princess burphday party that we threw for T (she turns 30 tomorrow!). We were making pipe cleaner crowns, and eating junk food, and listening to music in the kitchen-- as though life was just peachy for everyone out there. I beleive this sentiment I am feeling this morning can be neatly rounded up in this quote that I have been including in my emails for months now:

> "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to change the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
~~ E.B. White <

When R announced (the second time) that he really was joining up I was more than a little upset. Not only did it require me to put a real (and beloved) face on a war that I would not get my head around, but it also asked me to support my freind who was making a choice I NEVER would have expected in a million years! It was a rocky time for me. But as the years of this have marched forward I have grown more...supple. Is this not the job of a true friend: to require continued mental and love flexibility of us? I can admit freely that it is unlikely I would require it of myself, being naturally incined to stubobrness as I am. Perhaps this is a shard of the meaning we all seek?

Digital Media

2008-02-19T06:04:00.002-05:00

When I was a tadpole trapsing around with my carmera and my doc martins, smoking camels and listening to The Cure there was very little more satisfying to me than making images that felt beautiful and then going to the darkroom for a few hours of magic. Since high school there have been too-brief stints where I had access to a darkroom so I could burn-n-dodge to my little heart's content. Sadly those days seem to be over for me.

Yesterday I spent a little time in Iris looking at the digital SLR's and listening to the very informed guy there tell me all about image stabalization, lens compadibility, battery types and lives, and relative costs and qualities. These cameras have almost no delay between the depression of the shutter and the image capture, there is one that is even "weather-sealed" (though likely not for paddling trips or long hikes). Insert here any petulant little noise, punctuated with a "but..."

I don't know yau'll-- at the start of my photography carrear it was serious this question of where does "documentation" end and "art photography" begin. And I beleive that this question burns hotter and brighter now than it ever did when it was just me and my K-1000 stromping the world. Perhaps I am simply resistant to change (why did I bother with that perhaps), and maybe it is an issue of capital (I ain't got it), but possibly it is something bigger. The PHYSICAL, CHEMiCAL, and (frankly) magical acts of film photography are quite different from digital media. The quality of light is quite flat and unrealistic in a digital image--is this perhaps what the analog recording artists are yapping about?

When i was a kid I had this strange fascination with making things "last". I would write dates on things, I would cover paper trasures in plastic tape, and I would THINK about wanting "it all" (whatever "it" was) to last for good. And then later when I met photography this fell in wonderfully with my already developed quest for the permanant. What you have in a negative is the ability to recreate an image over and over no matter how many prints you give away, ruin, or lose. But-- and this is what appeals to the Taurean in my methinks-- it is still a physical item, the negative. And tragically therefore, being physical, can be eventually, or acctidentally, or ruthlessly destroyed.

As I have encountered more ideas on the subject, I have now grown fascinated with the idea that impermanance just might be what causes the temporary state known as ballance. How about them apples. So, all this dithering about digital vs. film: what's the point? Would I even be making a fuss if I could afford that $800 Pentax K-whatever I saw on sale at Iris yesterday and just test it out for myself? Probably. Any philanthropists out there reading one lone girl's blog? Wanna fund an experiment?

Just Breathe

2008-02-15T05:57:00.003-05:00

It's a staple sentence, this. Commonly found in yoga classes everywhere, my classroom when students are having a hard time, and in my head to myself on a regular basis. But yesterday it took on new meaning. I arrived to the hallowed halls of Rock-N-Roll High School to find a student back in class after an absence for a few days. I exclaimed to see him-- an unusually quiet young man, though a deep thinker and very responsible student. It became clear within two sentences that he had been absent because of a death in his family-- and then he began to weep.

There is this not-enforced rule that we are not to *touch* students-- you never really know how even casual and very innocent contact can impact a young person. However, once the waterworks began I put my arm around this kid's big ole heaving shoulders and held him while he cried. Between sobs the story came haltingly out that he had been with his grandma when she passed. He was describing her labored breathing, and how hard it was. "Just to see her like that--sob--and to see my grandfather loose---sob-- it. It was so hard for her to--sob-- breathe-- and--sob--when something like that happens you forget who you are--sob-- you just--and then she would try to breathe---sob-- and I don't know-- it was--sob--so hard..."

I wanted to say-- when you face mortality in the guise of a loved one you *have to see yourself differently. It alters not only your own life, not only how you see life, but also what you think is important in this life. Shit, what IS important in this life. Our expereince of this mortal coil is a finite expereince. Perhaps the pilosophers and spiritualists are right afterall, and there is more to our existance than just this human experience. But to SEE somebody giving up the ghost-- an oddly descriptive colloquiliasm-- you do forget who you are, a little. I think you forget because for just a second you cease to be the muscian, the student, the teenager-- and you are just a naked eyeball (as Ralph would say). These are the life-altering moments. They happen in the halls of high school and in the sick rooms of grandmas all over the place.

Yau'll ready for this can of worms?

2008-02-13T06:34:00.002-05:00

It is still a man's world.

I have long held this view of our culture, privlidged and queer positive though mine may be up here in the Pioneer Valley. And nothing supports this opinion quite like the recent doings in politics. We have a very intriguing race in the dem. camp. It's like Political Celebrity Death Match-- the suffragists verus the abolitionists all over again! Geez-- will history teach us nothing?! Following rather lengthy conversations with my sister and my bestie I was inspired to do some research. I found these two paragraphs on this website:
http://www.iwantmyvote.com/recount/history/

"In 1866, the 14th Amendment to the federal Constitution was passed, guaranteeing citizenship to the former slaves and changing them in the eyes of the law from 3/5 of a person to whole persons. Then, in 1869, the 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote to black men, with most women of all races still unable to vote.

Initiatives to promote voting for women have been traced back to the 1770s, but the modern movement for a vote for women traces its beginning to the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, when supporters of a Constitutional Amendment to allow women to vote came together. While their movement was slowed during the Civil War years, the two major suffragist organizations united after the war and pushed forward with a movement that culminated, after many difficult years, in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920."

1920, people! I will be the first person to point out that, while black men had the right to vote ON PAPER, voting rights IN PRACTICE were mostly nonexistant at first-- if not outright dangerous. I beleive this in indisputable. In fact, I will go further and say that even to this day people of color and poor people encounter challenges in their neighborhoods that I do not at my polling station. Regardless, if we are looking at prevailing cultural views by analyizing the laws (not the practice) it is clear as a river in the backcountry after weeks of happy weather-- it is a man's world.

What really matters

2008-02-11T05:52:00.001-05:00

"...things don't have to be important to be fascinating. And while your fascinations may not be contagious, your glee sure as hell is."

There is this other blog (gasp) that my friend K told me about forever ago-- and when I read the above sentence I had one of those "yes, that is just it!" early morning flashes. www.xtcian.com was talking about crazy passions, and how some of us are shamed out of them while others of us obsess unchecked and develop some fascinating interests. And it is perhaps just these geeky fascinations that we weave into other projects that mark us as truely unique. T and I have been talking about this idea on and off for years. Wondering if perhaps it is the lack of "hobbies" that sends so many folk into the noxious spirals of greed and addiction. How could we not spend every day just marking time inbetween sleep, food, work and sex if not for the camera, the iris, or the way sunlight is fractured through a prisim? Don't ge me wrong-- sleep/dreams and food and sex and teaching are certainly occupying a great many shelves in the library that is my head. I can obsess over sex like a pro-- let me tell you! And the amount of time I spend thinking about food and eating...well it's intense, friends. But there are other rooms full of mind-books, too. So in the spriit of Mr. xtc.ian here is my list of geeky passions:

35mm photography
perrenial flower gardening
trashy fantasy fiction (preferably with a cool pantheon of god/desses)
wind chimes
feminist re-tellings of myth and legend
prisims
beaded necklaces
collage
used bookstores
organizational systems
fountain pens
decorative painting
the view out of windows

Belay off, good climb

2008-02-08T06:17:00.000-05:00

Sadly, today marks the return to the salt mines for this intrepid English teacher. Paideia is officially over, and to celebrate my school is having a "Curriculum Day". This could be worthwhile, I suppose, but a day of meetings and thinking about the business and practice of teaching sounds like a depressing day to me; especially when it is contrasted with 6 hours in the climbing gym. I really wanted to climb that W4 again-- and not hang on the rope so much. I really wanted to climb, and climb, and climb with nery a paper to graade in sight...

Ah well, it is back to shaping young minds, negotiating the pot-holes of school politics, and tending to delicate young people. Some days I am sure that I was cut out for this business-- and then other days I think I have no idea what I am doing this for. It keeps the mind active, certainly. Teaching is humbling, of course. But is my true passion elsewhere? Perhaps on an empty page? Or maybe on a trail somehwere in the backcountry with a camera and my journal? Or maybe, just maybe, behind the helm of some creative and exciting community based project (whatever that means?).

On why hair products suck

2008-02-07T05:30:00.000-05:00

After climbing yesterday I traveled to Sunderland to get my hair did. All in all it was a lovely experience-- my racing stripes are no longer white but red and purple (more subtle than I had hoped, but c'est la vie). We were chatting, and she was cutting and thinking about symmetry and doing the magic that a hair artist does and at the last second she smeared this awfuly smelly gel all up in my newly coiffed hair! Yuck.

I was miserable on the way home-- walked in the door and, after tending to sylvester who was making the sounds of a squeekie toy, stripped down and jumped in the shower to wash the misery out of my hair. Let it be known that I was almost in a blinging headache from the smell, and clearly very distracted. But when I chucked all my clothes in the wash shortly after my shower my cell phone was still in the pocket of the fleece vest I was wearing. It went for a little swim.

What a piece of work is a man

2008-02-06T05:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning I awoke singing an old U2 song from The Joshua Tree album (Im hanging on/Youre all thats left to hold on to/Im still hanging/We see love slowly stripped away/Our love, has seen a better day) which even then struck me as a really maudlin way to begin the day. It turns out the day was not nearly the dramatic shit heap the day before was, but that is another story involving teenagers and their foibles (we called 911 once for an accidental head bump and then another kid locked himself in the bathroom and didn't come out 'till after the bus had left the climbing gym-- he and I were there too long for my liking waiting for his mom to come collect him and a coworker to come collect me). The story I am trying to tell here is the one about what our brains do when we aren't there to control them. Apparently mine sings old U2 songs to herself-- did hearing that piece on NPR about how the joshua trees are dying bring back this song? Am I worried about T and my love? (We have been fighting.) Have I never quite recoverd from my Bono obsession?

Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Rosencrantz:
My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

Unlike the prince of melancholia I am delighted by wo/man most of the time-- though admittedly the anonomous "men" who start wars and abuse childreren and value greed do not delight me. And also, unlike our rotten prince, I don not think wo/man is the beauty of the world nor the paragon of animals. We have a great deal to learn from the simple and profound symmetry of the world, and how animals take only what they really need to stay afloat, and not what they want and desire as well. animals don't emotionally eat, or hold grudges, or get so self-involved they forget to be kind.

Why must it always come back to Willy? I have professed loud and clear my distaste and discomfort for reading and teaching this guy, and yet his wrds still return to me in my dreams and in my early morning rumblings. Perhaps as my actress friend L has been telling me all these years he is one of our culture's repositories of wisdom. That, despite the difficult and somewhat antiquated diction, therein lies a great big pipeline to the collective counsciousness that we moderns get cut off from so easily in our cars and behind our computers. Certianly Mr. Orwell had Winston long for William as a symbol of what was lost...

Congratulations! Now you're a woman...

2008-02-04T06:01:00.001-05:00

Perhaps one of you can shed a little light on the mystery of the monthlies. Every month I write a little "?" on the calendar which is exactly 28 days after the previous month's "x" on the day the blood began. Some months it is exact, some months as many as 4 days before or after the happy event actually happens-- but either way it continues to be a damn surprise to see the red in ye olde underoos!

Before I started my period the first time my mom told me all about what would happen. She regailed me with tales of what she had to put in her drawers to catch the aforementioned uterus wall lining (the straps, the belt, the terrible rigamaroll of it all), and she bought me a box of pads with an adhesive strip and "wings" that folded around the backside of the pants to secure the whole bloody mess. So, when I got home from what was probably a miserable day of middle school (they all run together...) to discover that I had finally started my period I marched myself striaght to my parent's bathroom and promptly began my carrear as a bleeder (and potential breeder) with the first application of the self-adhesive, wing-having pad in the pants. I was pretty excited-- you know womanhood and all that-- but mostly because this meant that I would FinALLy get to have my ears pierced. Oh, boy!

So I am certainly happy to be here and be alive and all that stuff that the sight of blood is supposed to make one thankful for, but all I can think is that I am looking at a world of hurt today:
rock climbing harness (ode to the bloat...)
first meeting with R, the personal trainer/yoga teacher (I'm tiiiiired, I'm craaaaaaaampy)
the week before classes start for the spring term (can anyone say lesson plans, who has the focus!)

And if all that isn't enough, there is also the emotional fragility (read emotional eating, uncontrollable bitchiness, and irrational everything) associated with the days preeceeding and then the first day or so of the actualy bleeding... I swear-- it's like there is some correlation between emotional stability and volume of blood in the body. In any event, boy readers (even boi readers), take a moment to be thankful that this is not one of your challenges to meet today.

Belay on?

2008-01-30T19:04:00.000-05:00

It is smack dab in the middle of Paideia in my line of work. This is a greek word that roughly translates into "learning from other sources"-- and in practice looks like the same class all day everyday for almost 3 weeks. Some would say this could be very difficult, but I am lucky, lucky as I am at a climbing gym with two other teachers and 35 (!) young'uns. Today I only climbed once, but I clawed my way to the top of the boulder cave twice (I went up the corner with the least steep overhang). Yesterday I climbed three times and loved every second of it.

What a world. I am teaching rock climbing to future rock stars while somewhere deep in a far away place a woman whose name I do not know is a sex slave to mercilessness; while in a country I can't find on a map a young boy is learing how to shoot people; while the daffodils sleep under the snow; and while all our futures percolate out there. Is it possible for beings to live simultaneous incarnations? and if so: what do we gain from these parellel experiences?

I once lived with a beagle who inspired this theory of the simulltaneous incarnation and ever since I lusted after Garett's life I haven't really stopped considering the possibilities and ramifications of being both the sleeping dog and the paper-grading, lesson planning, rock-climbing dog moma. If the mystics are right-- and everything is connected on an ontological level (and that is the secret?!) then this theory of existance is true, kinda. It could imply that the woman living under a merciless enslavement is also a rock-climbing teacher here in the Valley, and that we are also learning to shoot people with a gun almost bigger than we are.

But what is the point? I feel that it really comes back to this question more than it dosen't. What is the lesson-- probably so obvious-- that the nature of our embodied self can not figure out?

Tomorrow and Yesterday

2008-01-28T05:46:00.000-05:00

It is a cold and dark morning in the Valley. The sun is reflecting loudly off the half moon and I am up later than usual. Today offers another opportunity to write poems, be kind, and try again. Today offers another fucking growth opportunity, as my freind L would say. It turns out that, according to my doctor, I need to do some serious habit changing in the eating and exercising pockets of my life. This same prognosis happened to my friend A about a year ago and I remember how she focused and conentrated. She lost weight, she got more fit, she felt great.
But I happen to be a stubborn-as-a-brick-wall Taurus.
When I was growing up it was fat-free everything at my Dad's house (mmm chicken baked with slasa) or cheesecake and pork chops at my Mom's. There hasn't been too much middle ground in there, even in my own kitchen. So here today is, wintery and predawn offering me another shot to get my stubborn butt to the pool and swim; offering another opportuniity to forego the chips and the cashews and cookies. Here today is ofering this public, yet strangely anonomous way to address and speak out about what having a body is all about. Sometimes I float off into the postulating land thinking about other states of being-- unembodied phases in specific; the ball of light is what I call it in my head. I wonder to myself: when do I get to go back to that? Will this embodied part of existance be like a blip on the timeline of whatever it is in me that looks out of my eyes? And what does whatever it is that peers out of my eyes think about diet and exercise?
Well, much like and ecosystem, I believe that we are connected to everything else on a very basic level that can not be sundered even by the might and static of modern culture. And maybe, just maybe, this ________________ peering out of my eyes right now-- wondering with me-- knows how to become lucid in this waking life.

Maiden Voyage

2008-01-26T07:33:00.000-05:00

3...2...1...Wow! Is this really me in the 21st century? Bloggin like some self-indulgent heiress? Putting waste words and poo-poo ponderings out into the interweb for all the thought police to monitor?

Is it true there are no things but in ideas? Is it true there are no more original storylines left for the novelists and film-makers of commercial entertainment? Geez, what is the real point, anyways? To dream big? To find ballance? To challenge the ones we love to fierce honesty and savvy truth telling?

I decided to start this crazy blog journal because the world gives me gas. And I also decided to start this crazy blog journal because my heart needs to write.

So with that, dear strangers, I shove off on my maiden voyage into the heretofore uncharted seas of blogging-- with its attendent typos, mispellings, and opiniated ranting. May my vessel be sound, may the stores stay dry, and may the fresh water remain plentiful. And, like Puck, I beg apologies for any future offence:

Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream