Puff

Never have I said "TGIF" and meant it as sincerely as I did yesterday morning, when I sat in my bedroom floor in a towel for twenty minutes watching "The Office" at 5am and wishing I was still asleep. But I threw my hair up in a messy bun, put in some bad-ass earrings, and finished the first five days of seventy.

My first week of student teaching is complete.

And I'm surprised at how well it went. The way the student teaching experience is set up, my first week was just supposed to be observation. Over the first few weeks I'll pick up a class here and there and take on a full-load (and it's co-teaching, which means balancing the leadership role with my cooperating teacher, not so much taking full control while she plays on her phone and drinks lattes) starting day 20. But already I've taught on two separate days. On Wednesday I took over a lecture while the teacher stepped out into the hall, and I led the whole lecture for the last class period. Yesterday (Friday) I read the same section of "Beowulf" three times and led out-loud reading of "Of Plymouth Plantation" in two junior classes. I led a couple of activities for the seniors as well and passed out papers to most of the classes. In a nutshell, I've been there for five days and I've already had a day of leading activities in five of our six classes.

I've graded, sorted, filed, recorded, stapled, copied, hole-punched, and passed out papers. I've made connections with a few of the kids already! And for the first time in many years of starting new school years, I haven't been nervous. The other night I went to dinner with my pseudo-aunt, a former elementary school teacher for 30+ years, and told her that I feel like I've been doing this teaching thing forever - not because it's boring or monotonous, but simply because of how comfortable I am with it. My hands don't shake when I'm in front of a class of 30. My heart doesn't race when my cooperating teacher says, "Do you want to take over this lesson?"

This is one of the few things in my life right now that just makes sense. This is what I am supposed to do. It's a little overwhelming at times when I look at all the things I'm responsible for - no longer is the role of the teacher simply to impart wisdom and grade papers. And like any job, it has its drama, its ridiculous tasks, its "why in the world do we consider this important?" But I'm ready. I am so ready to keep going with this, even when I roll out of bed bleary-eyed and sore-footed and leave my house before the sun comes up. Because it's what I want to do - it's what I feel like I'm meant to do.

Such a good first week. So thankful for a long weekend. I get to see my sister tonight and my Linus tomorrow. And I am so, SO thankful for all of you being such an encouragement to me during this time. :)

Landing

And just like that, August is nearly gone.

The cicadas are singing and the sun is still warm, but the evening air is cooler as summer wraps up her aria and autumn waits in the wings. The leaves haven't started to turn yet, but the twilight sun in the woods is sad, and before we know it the lace of the limbs will drift to the ground in the dance of death that only God can make lovely.

It's strange to think of new beginnings in the time of nature's annual demise. December is the most popular month for proposals, which means fall is the prime time when young hearts burn, plans are made, love is nurtured, and dreams are born. Young minds are pulled from the pool and stuck in a classroom to start that arduous task of expanding with things about which most of them neither know nor care. These, though, are the "someday things," waiting to be put to use on a someday, a job, a higher degree. With autumn comes the harvest, the bounty of labor that means life. Making a living, providing a livelihood, feeding livestock - all these necessities are born in the time of great death.

"O death, where is thy victory?" O death, why should we fear your sting when from the ashes rises new life? It is only in the death of man that human hearts mourn, but from elsewhere in the natural realm we pull inspiration for art and hope of rebirth. Perhaps our God put before us the perfect example of His plan and the crucial role death plays, and yet it is us who still misinterpret and grieve what we have made death, equivalent to finality. Perhaps it's just something else we see wrong.

There is a harmony in autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hunter

Back from another amazing three days with Joey and his precious family. There really is nothing like shooting stars, walks around a farm at sunset, lots of laughs, and good music to refresh the battered soul. :)

And now, in a little over a week, I start student teaching. When people ask me if I'm excited or nervous, the answer is always "yes." I'm excited to start this phase that's basically the waiting room for my future career. I'm nervous about getting into a new environment, this new role. But now, sitting here in my pajamas on a nearly-fall Saturday with paperwork and old English notebooks and writing out potential notes for the literature we'll be covering with 190 juniors and seniors, I'm starting to look forward to this more and more!

Since it is only 10 am on a Saturday morning, I decided to turn on a movie in the background to wake up a little bit. And this morning it's "Patch Adams," in memory of the late great Robin Williams. Word of his death rocked me more than most celebrity deaths - maybe because of the tragic way he went, maybe because I still have the idea that actors and famous people of my generation will never not be there. Whatever the reason, I was deeply saddened by the passing of one of the funniest men I've ever seen.

Geared though he was toward comedies, his best roles (in my mind, anyway) are the ones who dare to defy what has always been, the ones who put heart and soul into jobs that have a straightforward definition. "Patch Adams," "Good Will Hunting," "Dead Poets Society," "Good Morning Vietnam" - these were the ones that truly defined his acting career to me. It was "Dead Poets Society" that made me want to be a teacher in the first place, as I've heard it is with so many people. "Patch Adams" showed the relationship that can be developed when people see each other as people and make the effort to touch them on a human level. These films have heart, humor, and severe inspiration for those who watch them.

I think that's why it's so tragic that he went the way he did. Obviously the man behind the roles had his own demons that nobody else knew about, as we all do. But I wonder if he knew how many people he touched with his work.

I wonder if it would have made a difference.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, at this time this blog post will turn from a commentary to a commission. Go tell somebody. Go tell somebody what they mean to you. You may be exactly what they need to hear today.

Moment

Let me tell you a story.

It’s not a very good story. It’s about shame and guilt and not pulling your weight and doing what you want to do instead of what you should do.

But then again, it’s not a very bad story. Not many bad stories have happy endings.

Four years ago I was a freshman in college. I still can’t believe that when I say it – they say (whoever that all-knowing they are) your college years fly by, and it isn’t until you’re standing on the other side of them that you realize how true that is. But four years ago today I was preparing to move into my first college dorm room with my first college roommate to experience my first year of college education. At this point, I was probably to the point where I was so nervous that I wasn’t eating, laying on the couch watching a documentary about PIXAR and trying not to look at the growing heap of dorm things under the upstairs window. I was putting on the happy face and telling people how excited I was, when my insides wouldn’t stop moving and my hands hadn’t stopped shaking in three days.

But move in I did. Settle in I did. I remember on the second day – when my parents had gone home until that afternoon and my roommate’s family had taken her out somewhere – I took my campus map and walked around to all the buildings to find where my classes would be. And I remember feeling so proud of such an independent move. And as I walked around by myself, dreading the “getting started” group meeting that would come later after the required chapel services that I came to despise as my four years progressed, I felt very grown-up.

As the year progressed I realized that homework wasn’t much fun at all, and that reading novels was. I stayed up late (never later than my nose-to-the-grindstone roommate, only twice in all three years of living with her) but not to study Politics or U.S. History – I chatted on Facebook and watched YouTube videos and amazed people with how many for-fun books I flew through that year. I was making the executive decisions in my life; nobody sat across the dinner table and said “no TV until you’ve studied.” And I felt very grown-up.

At the end of that first year I got a 2.9 grade-point-average. I blew a four-digit-per-year scholarship, missed by three GPA points. And when my parents sat me down on their bed and threw out the words “student loans,” I realized for the first time that I was, whether I liked it or not, a grown-up.

I didn’t tell them for a week after I found out that I had lost my scholarship. Every time I thought about it, my stomach would sink with shame as I had let them down. They don’t ask for much; they don’t have outrageous expectations. But they ask that, in everything I do, I do my best. And I had let them down. And this wasn’t just my grades that we were talking about. It was Laziness – that old ghost who comes to visit me every now and then with his cousin Procrastination in tow, telling me that “later” is the same thing as “now,” it just means you get to do what you want sooner. And I had let them get the best of me. Again. When I finally told them about it – and for another year or so after that – they talked constantly of other scholarships, how to apply myself (which I knew how to do, I just chose not to), that they expected only my best and that was all they could ask. They truly meant the best for me and wanted me to succeed. But every time it came up, I would shut down. I refused to listen, because I brought up all that shame, all that guilt, and threw it right back up in my face. It wasn’t their fault: I never say if something like that bothers me, how were they to know that I felt that way? To them, though, it appeared as stubbornness, which made them talk even more. As is my custom, I let my emotions rise to a boil until it exploded with many tears and my heart screaming out, “I’M SORRY I’M NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!!!!”

I went hunting for a legitimate, 9-to-5 job for the first time when I was 18. I didn’t have very far to look: in a few weeks I was hired at Kroger, which has been my steady summer and holiday employment for the past four years. When I am asked if I like my job, I respond that whether I like it or not doesn’t matter – I need my job, and so I come in every day and deal with misunderstandings and seemingly-stupid requests and obnoxious customers and straightening up the toy aisle which always seems to be a mess no matter how many times a day you put things back where they go. And while there are certainly other places I could go that pay more or might be more in line with something that I would like to do, I stick it out.

My dad talks all the time about a spirit of gratitude. He pressures us to look for something in every situation that brings our eyes up to heaven and pulls a “thank You Father” from our lips. And it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve looked back on this frustrating, fearful, disgusting situation and seen something to be thankful for.

In the three years after I lost my scholarship, I didn’t get it back. I worked my butt off during semesters and summer classes, my final GPA being short of the scholarship marker by a percentage of a point. And while at first I considered my progress with a “when you try your best but don’t succeed” mindset, I’ve switched it around to considering the journey so much more important than the goal that I have in mind. Over the past three years I have begun to understand the benefits of working hard in all that you do. I understand now what it means to go looking for opportunities, not just sitting back and waiting for them to fall into your lap. I have been tired since May, because in between my regular work hours I have picked up three or four extra jobs that have kept me busy nearly all summer. But when I lay in bed at night and my muscles hurt and I think, “I have to get up and do the same thing tomorrow,” I remember that I am working myself out of a debt that I put myself into. And that renewed self-worth is so much sweeter than thinking that I am not good enough.

I see the value of a hard day’s work. I respect so much more the value of the dollar that I have earned. Through my time at Kroger I have learned so much about thinking on my feet and customer service and being part of a team and not letting the job affect the way I live my life.

Not to mention that I have met some of the most amazing people that I’ve ever had the privilege to know. They are my family now – my dysfunctional, grumpy, hard-working, through-thick-and-through-thin family.

I use my story a lot to encourage people who have fallen short, particularly students in a rat-race where grades are the most important factor. You, my friend, are NOT defined by these worldly things. Your actions, your transcript, your talents, your lack of talents, your house size, your salary – none of that defines you. You are not put into a category of “greater” or “lesser person” because of these things. There is something going on behind the scenes that is so much bigger than all of that, that you are part of; these earthly details are no more than just that – earthly. And they will all fade away.

Four years after I started college, I am finally to the point where I can call myself "adult." I am staring at the final leg of my higher education with a five-digit debt to chunk away at. I am contemplating moving out (eventually), maybe moving away (sometime), and seeing what this whole adult thing is all about. And the past four years of disappointment and hard work have prepared me so well for those next moves. 

Blues

All writers – particularly all fiction writers – are fundamentally good liars. Because it’s their – not even talent, but responsibility to make people believe things that simply aren’t true. You present a story that never happened to people who never existed and say, “This is what really occurred.” And if you do it well, your reader will be swept along without ever questioning the validity of it. The key, though, is to believe in it yourself. You as the writer have to put on that delusional mindset that tells you the stories in your head aren’t just figments of your imagination, but could have been a story on the news or something you found in a forgotten history book at Goodwill, and it’s your task to tell it to the world.

If you think about it, it’s really no wonder that creativity was associated with mental illness. Sometimes I sit back and think, “I just might be going crazy,” because I have things floating in my head that are as vivid and real to me as reality itself. The conversations I hear between two characters that I have created are just as realistic as a discussion I had with my mom the other day. I can see the kitchen table they’re sitting at, the coffee cups they’ve filled with Braveheart Scottish ale that awkwardly tastes like grapes, the dead yak in the living room they’re wondering how to get out to the woods without the neighbors catching on. That’s half the creativity that goes on in between my ears: scenes, snippets of “reality” that are completely detached from a fully fleshed-out story. Which is why I have such a problem writing fiction – who wants to read a book of scenes that have nothing to do with each other when the writer can’t figure out how to tie them all together? This is also a problem because that makes them all the more difficult to separate them from real life. Because if you think about it, life is nothing more than a series of scenes – you don’t know the full story until the very end of it, and then it’s not even you reading the full story, it’s somebody else looking back on your story and seeing a complete beginning-middle-and-end structure.

Why do I write? I’ve answered this question before and tried to be very philosophical like so many others have before me. You look up quotes online about writing (attributed to authors who probably never said such things, somebody else just thought their words would be more readily accepted if it sounded like Mark Twain or Edgar Allen Poe wrote them) and you get all this melarky about “words are the window to the soul” and “record your thoughts for future generations” and some other such nonsense. And with respect to the penners of those words (whoever they may be), that’s bullshit. What pompous turd sits down with his leather-bound volume (only really posh people write in leather-bound volumes) and quill pen (again, only the really posh people) and says, “I’m going to write something today that is so profound, so groundbreaking, that people generations from now, long after I am dead and entombed somewhere, will still be misquoting it on the internet and inspirational classroom posters.”

Nobody – and I mean nobody – thinks like that. Do you know how much pressure it is to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and try to fill it up, much less fill it with something profound? No, thank you.

Other than the above universal statement that I have no right to deliver, I can’t speak for other writers. For me, though, the whole point to writing is to catch the bees of genius that constantly buzz through my brain and pin them down in a paper shadowbox. Not for anybody else to examine, not for future generations to look to for wisdom, not for people to see “the real me.” It’s simply a housekeeping procedure. How the hell am I supposed to be a contributing member of society and get done all the tasks I need to in a day when my head is surging with creative ideas that are neither productive nor helpful to me or anybody else? I have journals packed full of midnight rants, loose pieces of paper with conversations, my own quotations in the notepad app on my phone, sticky notes with ideas of stories that I will probably never write. Because if I don’t capture them when they flutter onto the tip of my nose, they’ll fly away and be lost to me forever. And my imagination, to me, is too colorful and interesting a place to let things like that slip past – like the little chip in a Magic 8 ball – without being acknowledged, even if they’re never used.

I am baffled, intrigued, frightened, confused, marveled, concerned, leveled, amazed by the things that float in an out of view in my own head. 

Plebians

I have 246 books in my little room. My four bookcases are jam-packed – I had to built another one and shove it in my closet. I have books everywhere: lining the back of my desk, books lying sideways on top of upright books, books in stacks on top of my ancient typewriter, books hidden behind other books. And trust me: there is a system. Novels are over the desk and dresser. The staunch-looking hardbacks are set aside on the desk (I’m particularly proud of the 1936 edition of Robin Hood addressed to “Eugene” from “Uncle Hubert and Aunt Helen” on Christmas Day 1957, a 1942 copy of Great Expectations, and a combined copy of Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1937). Biographies are in the closet with the seven Bibles I’ve accumulated since my first black KJV, issued to all new kindergartens at Middletown Christian. Textbooks (the ones that aren’t novels – English majors’ “textbooks” are more fun than everybody else’s) are next to my own meager attempts at literary genius.

Certainly there is overlap. Some of them were purchased before I realized we had a copy hidden somewhere in the house. I bought my own copy of The Da Vinci Code when I was in Paris because 1) I ran out of things to read on a “mission trip,” and 2) how can you not visit the Louvre and then read the book that takes place largely in those hallowed halls? I accumulated a Dickens here and there before my parents gave me a GORGEOUS set of Penguin editions for Christmas last year. And I received a copy of Gone with the Wind as a birthday present a few years before one of my closest friends gave me another edition for a graduation gift: it’s a little battered and one of the pages is missing, but the fact that she introduced me to the story in the first place and the first page bears a handwritten note from her, that beaten-up paperback is as special to me as if it had been signed by Maggie Mitchell herself.

Once while I was drying my hair I went around and counted how many of those I’ve read. 117. One hundred and seventeen. The rest of the ones I’ve read in the last seven years (how long I’ve been keeping track) have been borrowed, rented out, or given away to someone else who would appreciate them as much as I did. I can look at almost every one and think of what I was doing, where I was, what was happening in my young life as I turned the pages. I read most of Huckleberry Finn out loud, mulling over each of Mark Twain’s accents to an audience of none in my bedroom. Charlotte’s Web was the first novel I ever read, and Peter Pan was the first novel I ever read in a day. A Tale of Two Cities took me three days, Les Miserables three years. I’ve blazed through Prince of Tides three times; the first time I read Water for Elephants, I finished it in a day on the way to a Florida wedding and had to get No Place Like Home from Walmart to tide me over for the rest of the trip. Captains Courageous, Treasure Island, and The Sea Wolf are the exhilarating sea stories I love so much, each one bearing a different tone that makes them whimsical, riveting, and sinister in their turns. The first three of the four Robert Langdon escapades were amazing, while the last one fell flat and was an unwelcome weight in my backpack in England. The Road and Life of Pi were philosophical and deep and made you read them upside-down to catch the meaning lurking just beneath the surface – a far cry from A Liar’s Autobiography which you have to read upside-down to catch the fact that it has no meaning at all. My Last Days as Roy Rogers, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn only in the summer (just because it’s summer doesn’t mean you have to read beach quiki-mart shiterature); Little Women and Oliver Twist only in the winter; and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Kite Runner only if you feel like abusing your heart.

My brother found me six hundred pages into Gone with the Wind the other day and said he couldn’t see how I could read all the time. And honestly, I don’t either: how can anybody be content staring at a piece of paper with the same old words for hours? And I do mean hours: between a two-hour car ride and sixteen hours on an airplane I flew through nearly 800 pages of detail about the biggest bitch in all of literature. (I despise Scarlett O’Hara. Almost as much as I despise anything Jane Austen dreamed up: who wants to slog through three hundred pages of walking from room to room gossiping?) And I don’t like the Pinterest graphics that call reading an escape from reality, a chance to get away from your world to delve into another one. For me it’s merely an exercise for the imagination. Look at it from a writer’s perspective: the only way to get better at your craft is to write (no shit) and to look at other writers’ work. One of my writing profs told me last semester, “Don’t try something new with your writing: look at what other writers prove works and do that.” How the hell can you do that if you don’t look at examples of what works?

And when it comes right down to it, I do love a good story.

Ma

So a few months ago my creative writing professor asked us to write about ourselves. “Who are you? What makes you you? How are you different from everyone else?” And I had more of a problem with that than I thought I would. How do you define yourself – your worth, your being, your psychological composition – in two pages? That’s a lot to ask of anyone, let alone an exhausted college student.

I set it from the angle of “where have I come from.” I talked mostly about myself: coming from someone who passively let life happen to her to someone who stands up for what she deserves; coming from very small-minded and intolerantexpectations of how people should be to a broader point-of-view that allows other people to be themselves; coming from the scared freshman living with a stranger to the senior standing before you, ready to take on the world and see what happens.

I am a strong woman. I am a tough woman. I think this because I have a legacy of tough women to live up to.

My great-grandmother, Mary Isabelle, the feisty little woman who was dancing the Charleston at ninety-five years old, her arm cut off at the elbow from a work injury many years before I was thought of. In her, her grandchildren found an escape as she whisked them away for outings to the store, for ice cream, anything to get their minds off the house where they must return and endure. She has taught me that hardship should not be muddled through with a grimace.

My grandmother, Pearl , the quiet lady on the couch in her pantyhose and trousers who had survived a tyrant, a drunk, the judgment of a much less tolerant time, two sons who never realized – one from physical incapacity, the other from blatantrefusal – how much her heart beat for them. She crept on with quiet dignity, hidden talent as her hands with the mutilated finger danced across the piano, not from lessons but from instinct, limited though she was to only two keys. It is through her that I learned love is not something to be discarded even if it’s not idyllic.

My other grandmother, Nancy, whose past was riddled with dark secrets but we as children never saw them in her cooking, her playing duck-duck-goose on the back porch, her laugh that I can still hear in my head that continued even when her body was riddled with cancer and her own mortality was thrown starkly up in her face. Her death six years ago taught me that sometimes our childish, innocent memories are more important than what actually happened.

My mother, Tina, who has given me the best childhood I could have imagined. Through her I have learned the importance of hard work – the work itself is sometimes more important than the desired outcome. I have learned how to be self-sufficient, when your options are exhausted and it comes down to you and your ability to think on your feet (lying underneath a toilet with a Home Depot how-to book when Dad’s not home and we don’t want to call a plumber). I have learned to recognize your past but not let it define you or hold you back. I have learned to be tough, selfless, not to fall apart until everybody else is taken care of, but also to realize that sometimes you just need to have a break-down. I have learned to reach for the stars, but also topack enough fuel for the rocket ship to get you there.

I am from beaten wives. I am from dark secrets. I am from hours and hours of work at a piano that blossomed into a passionwithout which I cannot breathe. I am from stories in my head that churn constantly, especially when I sit quietly and try to push them away. I am from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus and amaretto brownies, “Hogan’s Heroes” and chocolate milkshakes. I am from dancing in my pajamas to 80s rock-and-roll while we got ready for church. I am from treadmill ranting with my Irish twin and duck-hunting stories with the man that I cannot believe is my baby brother. I am from keeping my heart to myself so intensely that I feel like I’m standing naked in a ballroom when I let somebody catch a glimpse of what’s behind the curtain. I am from secret writings, oddball traditions, questions of sanity, and moving to the realization that I am not nuts, simply myself.

And I have these women to thank for that. Mom Belle, Maw-Maw, Grandma, and my ma. You have taught me to proudly wear your names that have christened me, and your lessons have taught me to be a woman of laughter and a woman of bravery.

Happy Mother’s Day, and thank you.