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October 9th, 2009
11:08 am
I spend a lot of my time working to write and speak as clearly as possible. I talk slowly and take care to enunciate (without raising my voice), and avoid use of idioms.
Sometimes I wonder if the poetry in my life has ebbed away. I'm in a stable relationship. My spouse and I communicate honestly with one another. I am no longer an unhappy person. I have my days here and there, worrying about the future, putting off talking to my parents, feeling anxious, but it's all at least under control. I love my husband very deeply, but would rather bake him a pie than write him a poem.
I watched this movie the other day, and I'm putting together a workshop for all of the tutors to participate in. It's called Writing Across Borders, and it delves into the individual cultural expectations for academic papers. Some cultures believe that our incredibly straighforward method of stating our thesis in the very first paragraph removes any kind of suspense in the paper, is inelegant, and treats the reader like an idiot. They feel we don't establish a relationship or credibility with the reader before we bombard them with information. In American academic writing, the burden is on the writer to present their case as clearly as possible; in some Asian cultures, pronouns are EVERYWHERE and the burden of interpretation lies with the reader.
So we'll be talking about what some people call "writing with an accent." After students move beyond basic ESL and English grammar courses, do we choose to focus on the ideas and organization of their paper, or do we mark off for grammar problems, for using the wrong preposition in a phrasal verb, for forgetting an article?
This is not the Ivy League, my community college down here in Annandale. We teach a lot of developmental English classes. They're the ones you've heard called "remedial," although I prefer the newer term. We teach a lot of ESL classes.
It's dirty and it's practical, this teaching people to read and write. This feels a lot closer to who I am. I tell people I graduated from NOVA, not that I "went to" William and Mary. This place is the first step I took to making my life better. Community college is the first step anyone just getting by day-to-day takes to make their life better.
These days I express myself with a clarity and simplicity that make it very difficult for me to be anything but honest, with my students and with myself. I feel like I am doing something good and moral, something clean and real. I think this might be the poetry in my life, written in words of strength and simplicity and common sense.
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September 7th, 2009
09:12 pm
As of about 3 weeks ago, the Reading & Writing Center (RWC from here on out) at NVCC Annandale no longer had a director. I went in two weeks ago to fill out some paperwork, asked some questions about who was training the new tutors, and found myself as the Acting Writing Center Instructor. The ESL Center Instructor, Veronica, and her boss, Michelle, had that wild look around their eyes that people get when their coworker has quit and they've had to take on the empty position's responsibilities as well as their own.
There's a possibility that this is what I want to do as a career. I've never really forgotten the lesson of the sad Latin student teacher we had in high school...she'd completed most of her education and just had to finish up with doing some time in the classroom. At which point she found out that she just couldn't teach. Getting this position full time means that I'll have some opportunity to explore whether or not this is actually something I want to get myself into.
Obviously, this isn't permanent (as a matter of fact, the job listing's up on the Nova website if anyone out there is interested). I am simply not qualified for the position, not having had the kind of education I need to run the place to its fullest potential (e.g. grad school in education). On the plus side of things, one thing that I know I can do is to tutor, so I'm going to make sure that the tutors are fully trained and ready to go; I figure this is probably the most important point for the RWC because most of what we do is tutoring.
O. came in this week to schedule an appointment, and had an enormous smile when she realized that I was still going to be at the RWC this year. I can't meet with her now, though. She needs a tutor who will be able to work with her for the duration of the semester, and since there's still a chance that we might move, I didn't want her to have to deal with the transition between tutors halfway through the semester when she would need help. Nicole, the previous Instructor, has accepted a teaching position and is still on campus, so I was able to talk to her about which of the new tutors she'd hired would work well with O.
I felt really terrible handing her off to someone else, even though I'm sure the new tutor will do a good job. But O. is fragile, and vulnerable in ways which I obviously can't go into here, and I'm worried that her new tutor will dismiss her concerns and feelings as just ploys to get attention, won't know her history, won't understand.
Reading someone's writing is intensely personal. Developmental English students tend to write essays about events that have happened to them, people they found to be influential, their plans for the future, that sort of thing. I think most people find it easier to talk or write about themselves before they start to branch out into other subjects, maybe that is why. For the past year, as O.'s writing improved, I got to read all of those essays, learn who she was, and encourage her to talk about herself. She read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and we talked about its similarities to and differences from her own life.
I am expressing this poorly, and I will blame the weekend travel, and worry about tomorrow, when tutoring begins and I have to train 5 new people. I hope I can do good.
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August 17th, 2009
July 14th, 2009
05:32 pm - why I am married to my husband
Ben: Oh shit, I think it's Kate Jordan's birthday!Where can we get an erotic cake? Delivered.
Ben: Oh, it is not.Kate's birthday that is. Her status message was a lie.
Ben: There is still time to plan for an erotic cake.
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July 2nd, 2009
01:28 pm - I will finish this later.
I liked my friend Shane's blog post on the games of his life, so I've recreated this list for myself, and worked to evaluate it using metrics that I find to be meaningful to me.
Shane chose to break his games down into a variety of numerical values (years published, score on metracritic, prevalence of common elements, that sort of thing). I'm no good at statistics so you get stories instead.
10 Impactful Games (in the order in which I played them)
King's Quest 4
King's Quest 6
Wizardy VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge
Quake
Sam and Max Hit the Road
Ocarina of Time
Baldur's Gate
Grim Fandango
Puzzle Pirates
BioShock
( Read more... )
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June 23rd, 2009
04:47 pm
So, my father definitely has cancer. Obtaining answers more detailed than that from his doctors have only resulted in more requests for tests and scans and whatever else, so none of us have much of an idea as to what is going on.
He's lost about 50 pounds. It's obvious that I got my height and weight from him, but until now I never really noticed how short he is. He's grown small, somehow.
I am depressed. The fall semester is growing ever closer, and the deadline for my applications is July 1. I worry that if I move away, nobody will be around to take care of my father. I'm not working right now, and I spend a lot of my time lying on my couch, petting Penelope.
This is no good, of course. But I had really wanted to be back in school in the fall semester, and it is looking more and more like that's not going to happen. Ben went with me to NOVA the other day to pick up a copy of a recommendation from my former boss at the Reading/Writing Center. He hadn't walked around on campus with me since we first went to try to register for classes. I was absolutely terrified of going back to school; I had forgotten.
I called my brother ("Your father has CANCER please call him back") and he's flying in this coming weekend to visit with my father. Even though he's coming in to BWI, there was no mention of him bothering to visit me.
How can I be strong for other people when I feel so weak myself?
(Even though this is a rhetorical question and I really am feeling pretty miserable, my brain just told me, "tea!")
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May 26th, 2009
12:53 pm - Mr. Moose-burger is such a nice-a man, I give him double stitch anyway. That's some strong stitch...
...you betcha!
I had a great time at Cookie's wedding. I'm lucky in that everyone I know who's gotten married thus far has had weddings that were quite different from ours, so the only comparisons consist of: "Oh man, they did that differently."
Chico managed to split the ass-crotch area of his pants open and sat through the ceremony looking uncomfortable and trying not to giggle. Apparently this marks the third pants-related snafu for as many weddings, so hopefully the tradition can continue (my story has been told here before, and the subsequent one is up to another, unnamed, wedding couple). A bunch of young, skinny, pretty girls in young, skinny, pretty girl dresses sat in front of me. We all sat in the sun, which was bearable because of a breeze coming across the water, and I was satisfied to note that THEIR asses obviously got just as sweaty as mine because they all had wedgies when they stood up.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) droct and I rifled through our cars, looking for a mending kit or a stapler or something to allow Chico to fix the hole (now that Chico's in a relationship with a nice girl, he's less interested in having open pants). He apparently was considering using a Chip Clip found in Steve's trunk when I remembered that wedding pictures take a thousand years, so we had enough time to run out to a store. I repeat: A CHIP CLIP. CHIP CLIP!!
First, we bought cigarettes at the second of TWO stores I saw that were named "Cigarettes." It was drive-thru but Chico wanted to go in so we could get some sort of Multiple-Hour Energy for Jules. Then we picked up a mending kit at Food Lion, and Chico dropped trou and drove back to the wedding all Risky Business style--tie, nice crisp shirt, boxers--while I sewed up the crotch of his pants.
And so we laughed and had friendship, and I think that's the last of the weddings for a while, at least. Sometimes it bothers me that I've gotten old and can't do things like do 1000 drugs and rock out REALLY HARD but it satisfies me to know that I still have things Under Control and can solve a lot of problems by Being Sensible.
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12:19 pm
Thanks to the folks who commented on my previous entry, or sent me an email. it's really incredibly meaningful when you air out some issues you're having and people take the time to ruminate on what you said, and give thoughtful and sensitive responses.
I think the real thing that I am trying to work through with this whole issue about my father isn't that he didn't do right by me, it's that he BEAT UP MY MOTHER. They were married about 10 years, and got divorced 24 years ago. So, I guess the question is, how do you forgive a dude who you know BEAT UP YOUR MOM repeatedly (a long time ago)?
I don't know. But my gut tells me that holding on to stuff and being unable to forgive someone is bad for me, and I DO owe it to myself to do the right thing.
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May 22nd, 2009
10:05 am
After Ben left for work this morning, I had an amazingly terrible dream. I was visiting Pirate, my father, for some kind of family get-together. We were riding a bus to somewhere with a bunch of random relatives I'd never met before, when the bus stopped and my brother, Peter, got on.
I found myself in one of those dreams where you are just SCREAMING and crying and nobody around you seems to care. And I asked my brother why he'd gone out of my life, and why he was cruel to my father and my mother and stepfather, and why he didn't come to my wedding, and he just shrugged and smiled like I was being my old silly and irresponsible self.
When I have nightmares, they are usually comprised less of scary things happening, and more of just an intense, inescapable feeling of TERROR. These dreams where I am just racked with sadness possess that same quality--just a concentrated outpouring of emotion.
I got a call from Pirate a few days ago. He has throat cancer and is getting treatment at the VA hospital here in DC. He's left my brother a couple messages, but hasn't received any response. The last they spoke, my dad had gone out to CA for a week, and about halfway through his visit, Pete had told him that things weren't working out and that he needed to go stay in a hotel. Pete's got a couple of kids, maybe 5-8 or something, and they let it slip that Mommy didn't want Grandpa touching or hugging them.
And so Pete won't return Pirate's phone calls, and now I gotta figure out a way to either get them in touch with each other or tell my brother what's up without his wife deleting his emails or phone messages.
My brother was always the golden child, and I was the misfit. Pete behaved and was more easily controlled as a child, didn't have a lot of emotional issues, didn't fail out of school, wasn't unreliable. I certainly wasn't a bad kid in the general scheme of things, not at all, but I simply didn't live up to the expectations my parents had for me. I may joke now about being crazy because I have it under control, but I can distinctly remember wanting to kill myself when I was eleven. It hasn't stopped, either. There's still a part of my brain that tells me to do such things, that tries to undermine my confidence and my sanity whenever possible. I've just learned to shape and change these thoughts, or, if all else fails, ignore them.
My dad's efforts to get to know me or stay in touch have always been half-assed. My mother tells me that he told her to terminate the pregnancy when he found out that I was a girl. Mom told me this when I was older, in a serious, not spiteful kind of moment. Even though he'd been abusive to her, she never badmouthed him when we were younger, or kept us from seeing him, even though he wasn't paying child support and we were living in a trailer. When we'd visit him--maybe once or twice a year--he and Pete would go out to the garage and leave me inside to watch the Transformers Movie on repeat.
Pete and my dad saw a lot more of each other when Pete hit college. I think my brother was bitter about having been shut up on a farm while he was in high school because my parents were so strict. Plus, he and my stepfather Bruce never got along, mainly because Bruce was not what you'd call a flexible or forgiving dude. Then Pete got married to Amy. She didn't like any of us. Pete and my dad stayed in touch for a while, but I think his visit out West put an end to that. He tells Mom to contact him on his work email, since sometimes messages on his phone or home email "don't get through."
Pirate came to my wedding, and brought two sets of aunts and uncles that I hadn't seen in years. He was very, very proud of me, and it was nice to see him. I choose to believe that he has changed for the better, mainly because I ask people to believe the same thing about me, and it's only fair to give others the benefit of the doubt, too.
My dad is all alone, these days. The doctors told him that he should get in touch with his kids, and I'm the only one who's responded. Should I take this opportunity to get to know my father better? It's a large burden, to be there for someone who is sick. Do I even have the fortitude to handle this?
Pirate is coming back to town on the first and second of June. Between now and then I guess I just need to work up the gumption to do the right thing. I want to say "whatever that is," but let's face it, I know.
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April 21st, 2009
11:18 pm - The arrival of the bee box
I helped a student work on explicating this poem last week. Sometimes I worry that poetry is too hard for my students for whom English is a second language. Thought of it again today because a friend's mother actually has a box of bees on its way.
I have one student, though, a Korean woman in an advanced ESL class, whose poetic writing and imagery are not entirely subsumed by her struggles with grammar. I wonder what she writes about in Korean.
I think a lot about the tutoring that I do, about how vulnerable it makes people to share their writing with others, and how much trust my students need to have to expose themselves so intimately to a stranger. I feel like I have somehow started living a much more moral existence because of this.
Ben got me a buckling spring keyboard for my birthday because I mentioned that I enjoyed using a keyboard that had more feedback--made me feel like I was actually engaging in the physical act of writing. Of course, I promptly spilled a beer into it and he's had to order a special wrench to open the dang thing up and clean it out.
I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.
I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.
I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.
They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
The box is only temporary. ("The Arrival of the Bee Box" is by Sylvia Plath. Should have actually mentioned that)
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March 23rd, 2009
08:21 pm
From the kitchen wafts the smell of five spice powder and beef ribs.
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March 22nd, 2009
11:23 pm
Currently I am glad that I'm avoiding a sinus infection by taking decongestants. The part that's almost as bad as sinusitis is when the Sudafed turns your sinuses into dry, sore caverns filled with pain and broken dreams.
Went out to Manassas and got Portugese food with internic and B's cousin Jim and his wife, Meghan. Ben's family continually surprises me because of their family-ness. I really only have a cousin or two with whom I am on good terms...I really do enjoy spending time with my cousin Tory, but the thought of having to maintain relationships with all of my cousins and their eventual spouses is slightly daunting. This might have something to do with my mother having 8 siblings, tho.
It's almost easier starting up family-type relationships with people who I haven't known my whole life and who haven't been witness to the myriad of Poor Life Choices I've made. It's nice to be judged on your current merits, instead of something you did ten years ago.
I spent Friday scrubbing my mother-in-law's house and cleaning her kitchen. We had to go out of our way to get down there, but it felt good to be able to help out. Plus Miss P was especially happy about going on a ride, so everyone won, except for me. Turns out that my body wasn't used to scrubbing for a good 12 hours in a dusty environment so I spent yesterday laid up with aches and pains and an angry nose.
In other news, Penelope continues to be ugly and horrible.
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March 15th, 2009
11:46 pm - A bad day
Today was a rough one, folks. I do pretty good on a daily basis: pay my bills, go to a job, maintain healthy relationship, etc.
I woke up today and was a mess. I laid on the couch and stared at the ceiling, said cutting things to my spouse, cussed at my dog and was just generally surly and depressed. I didn't want to do anything at all except feel miserable and selfish.
I locked myself in the bathroom and scrubbed the grout with a toothbrush for half an hour with the shower running. When these sorts of things hit, you have to bargain with yourself in odd ways--outwit yourself, change your thoughts, take control. And I knew I would never, ever, give in to what my body was telling me to do if I'd just spent half an hour scrubbing mold off of tile. I'll be damned if I don't stick around to enjoy my clean shower.
I get tired sometimes of living in a body that occasionally tries to convince me to off myself. It seems absolutely silly that we're equipped with so many survival mechanisms, so many ways to try to keep ourselves alive, and I just have this part of my brain that sometimes goes, "Psst! Want a Zagnut?" and tries to get me to think and feel things that I know aren't true. What a load of shit.
In the interests of honesty, I will admit that I would have said those swears at my dog anyway.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/tired.gif) tired
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February 27th, 2009
02:45 pm
THIS ONE TIME Penelope sucked all of the marrow out of a bone and then burped into it like a megaphone. The burp came out louder on the other side.
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February 26th, 2009
07:19 pm - Thanks to apresminuit for reminding me about this
THIS ONE TIME I found a copy of Vauxhall and I lying on the side of the road. It was the first Morrissey I'd ever heard and in retrospect someone probably threw it out the window of their car so they wouldn't drive into a tree.
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February 17th, 2009
04:25 pm
I wore a pair of Ben's underwear to my wedding.
Mom and I had put in a lot of work for me to have the suit I wanted for the wedding. We'd taken sewing lessons together from a woman in Charlottesville, and together we modified the pattern and talked about what we wanted to do. We waited and waited for G Street Fabrics to have a sale, so I could go and pick up the expensive ivory gabardine that we both agreed was the best fit.
And the suit really is beautiful. It really meant a lot to my mother that it turn out right. She even made a practice copy of it in another fabric just to work out all the kinks and not have to do things like tear out darts--that's the sort of thing that can damage fabric.
The problem is that you don't know how the fabric of a garment is going to wear until you...wear it.
Our hair appointment had run long, so we were maybe 20 minutes behind when we got back to the hotel to get dressed. I put on drawers, pantyhose, the shell I wore under my jacket, and my skirt. I sat down with Jess to do my makeup, without the jacket on, since I didn't want to have to deal with white fabric and any sort of offgassing or sprinkling of makeup.
It took maybe 15 minutes to get everything painted and stuck on, but when I stood up to put on my jacket, I noticed that the skirt had really wrinkled in front while I'd been sitting down--if you look at my later wedding photos you can see the winkles I'm talking about.
So while the rest of us continued to get ready, Rose, clad in scarlet bridesmaid's dress, ironed out my wrinkles (and also the kickpleat in the back but nobody noticed that until later, so whatever). I traipsed around in pantyhose, shoes, and jacket while we were in the hotel room but when it came time to leave, we realized we were facing the same problem again.
The weather cleared up by the time of the reception, but it was raining fairly heavily during the leadup to the ceremony. We knew if I got into the car to go over to the wedding, the damp air would certainly guarantee that the nefarious wrinkles would again appear.
By this point we were also perilously close to running late, and I knew that it was Parents' Weekend in Charlottesville that weekend, so bad traffic plus bad weather meant it was going to take us extra time to get to the chapel.
I put on my coat, put on my shoes, donned a pair of Ben's most venerable boxers to at least be street legal, and ran out into the rain.
So when I walked into the chapel the day of my marriage, I was wearing a stretched-out pair of cotton boxers instead of my very nice pencil skirt. I changed quickly behind someone's coat, tossed the boxers underneath some table in the corner with a flower arrangement on it, and went and got married.
While we were getting pictures taken, lots of coats and bags and personal posessions had been given to one person or another who had given them to someone else, so a lot of wrangling and yelling had to be done to return the item to its owner. After all the sorting out was finished, the boxers were MISSING.
And we never saw them again. They either walked off with some unfortunate soul's coat, or remained under the table in the corner for some other unfortunate soul to pick up with a broom handle.
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January 24th, 2009
04:10 pm
I love that dude slice here is singing about how sexy it is that his lady pays her own bills. Also check out women dancing with briefcases.
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January 3rd, 2009
11:14 pm - JESUS CHRIST
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a terrifying movie. It's like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory plus Return to Oz plus The Wall.
How about Siamese roller-skating twins conjoined at the beard? Sadly there appear to be not a ton of videos from this crazy ass movie online and that's a pretty lousy picture of the twins, and does not capture their fabulous beard-centered choreography.
Let's just say it's the only live action movie made by Dr. Seuss. So far a mean piano teacher is enslaving children to operate his enormous piano and making them wear strange hats with creepy yellow gloves on them. Our only help appears to be a plumber who's installing sinks in the dungeon so the piano machine will be kept sanitary.
I cannot look away.
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December 28th, 2008
11:11 pm - Be seeing you
Tomorrow I am embarking upon my honeymoon. We'll leave DC on the Chinatown bus to NYC, spend the night with Dave and Rose in Brooklyn, and then catch a plane from JFK to Toronto.
These days you need a passport to get to Canada, which is why there were those insane backups on passports a few months ago. Ben and I put it off for far too long and had to take a special trip to the passport office to get rush copies done, since both of ours had expired. I am now in possession of my old passport that I got on my trip to Norway when I was 12. I assumed that the cover was green because I was underage at the time it was issued to me, but apparently all passports used to be green and they switched to blue for the Bicentennial. Wikipedia says:
Green covers were again issued from April, 1993, until March, 1994, and included a special one-page tribute to Benjamin Franklin in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the United States Consular Service.
Historical!
The back cover is absolutely incredible. I can only assume that's where they stamp when you go to space. The rest of the thing is just as absurd. I hope other countries have passports that are just as embarassing, but I know it can't possibly be.
In Toronto, we'll make our way from the airport to the train, station, where we will hop on the Canadian. We'll spend New Year's on the train, traveling towards the Canadian Rockies. We'll stop in Alberta for 4 days in Jasper, a small town in the middle of a huge national park. Then on the train again, to two days and Vancouver and a flight back on the 9th.
And thanks to exchange rates, it's like everything is 20% off!
Recovery since the wedding has been slow, and planning for the honeymoon more last-minute than I'd like. Overall, the wedding was a smashing success and we managed to power through the parts where we, say, were $3 short when we went to get the marriage license or the lost dog came to attend the reception.
I must say that I found the best part of the entire thing to be the way that all of our friends and family pulled together to make the entire affair go off without a hitch. It's honestly been taking me forever to write thank you cards because I've been trying to make each one as heartfelt as possible so I've made all the cards myself and am slowly filling them with the least cliched things I can think off to attempt to express my appreciation.
Wedding photos are sadly a couple weeks late, but I do intend on sharing when the gallery goes up online.
I suppose that I could have more to write, but a lot of it I've done privately, and anyway, I talked about the dang thing for so long that probably everyone's tired of it.
Special thanks to the people who deserve it. You know who you are.*
* Did you help out? Then it is you.
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October 26th, 2008
11:15 pm - it must be said
Reader, I married him.
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