Even a Writing Drought Cannot Withstand the Strength of a Christmas Tradition(!)

"Christmas comes into the year just like God comes into our lives: quietly, in the middle of the dark and cold, preparing the secret seeds of life and love even in the depths of the frozen ground. Be silent, be still; His love is always working."
-Steve Gershom

I had meant to quote the song that Carrie gave me today: in lieu of a traditional Advent calendar, with little presents, we filled up little candy-stripe-colored paper bags, clothespinned along a string strung across the doorway-thing into the kitchen, with Christmas-themed quotations. Many were serious and Christ-centric; some were song or hymn lyrics; some were just there to be funny. I got behind a few times on my half of the quotations, but it was good to've done it. Anyway, like I said, today's was a song, and I wanted to quote it here, but then I forgot to bring it with me, and now I'm back in Syracuse.

My brother has discovered the song "Dominick the Donkey," which I already knew thanks to Kristin; he found a YouTube clip of it tonight and sang along to it and danced around, waving a fist and elbow to keep time, looking as he did so basically like the cast of Whose Line used to when they played "Irish Drinking Song."

He got me, for Christmas (by longstanding tradition, he and I exchange our gifts to each other on Christmas Eve, opening the ones from our parents on Christmas Day), a card game called We Didn't Playtest This at All, which we proceeded to try out with our parents, deciding (since the games tend to be short) to play until someone had won five times - it turned out to be my dad who did so, despite games with changing rules or elements of randomness not really being his favorite. Also, I had an allergic reaction to something, though we're not sure what, which manifested itself in bright red knuckles and fingers. Tentatively we're blaming it on the Starburst that my brother had taped all over the card deck as the first layer of "wrapping paper," since, who knows, maybe my Skittles allergy, which has already spread to fruit-flavored Mentos, has gone further still. (Then again, I don't think I'd been eating any vividly-dyed candy back last week, when I got probably the worse case of hives of my life. So if "Why have I been having minor allergic reactions lately?" is the kind of thing you like to make guesses about and then check back later to see if you're right, you'd better jump on it before I figure out what it really is. And/or you could certainly pray for my apparently-hypervigilant immune system.)

But, as I sort of implied above, most of my day wasn't spent here in Syracuse, but in Binghamton, like last year. And, like last year, I went to see the pageant again at church, which this year descended into a bit of chaos when one of the young sheep started wandering around the altar at the point when everyone was supposed to be admiring the baby Jesus, and a young angel kept stage-whispering to try to get him to come back. Still (or, really, in addition to that), it was a good pageant, as pretty much always.

After the pageant came communion, and I looked around our lovely church, all decorated, and surrounded by so many people who bring joy into my life, and even though I was headed up to Syracuse soon after, and even though I love my family, I was glad I'd chosen to also be there, in that moment, with my friends.

I'm grateful for this year's new friends, too - Pisey, Heather (and Katie, soon enough, likely enough), Rui, Meredith, Kyle, Jenny, Wilkie, Adam and Heather, Tracy, Anne B., other church people whom I've known for a while but can probably call friends now (Chris O., Mark and Anna), Sophia, Amy, Rachael, Dan, and anyone else I'm forgetting. Merry Christmas or happy holidays, as applicable, to my students, especially K. and T., whom I wish I could keep tabs on, but probably won't be able to.

A merry Christmas to Manfred, to the other sponsor kids of my past (and one of Ananda's who, if I ever make a living wage again, may still be half-mine in the present), and to all those away from home for military service - less of them though there are this year, happily - or any other reason.

Here's to 2011, in all its sometimes-messy glory, and to 2012, which's shaping up to be the most impressive not-actually-apocalyptic-after-all year since Y2K. Peace to you all.

This Has Nothing to Do with Thanksgiving, But I Hope You Have a Happy One Anyway

Dear Makers of the Plastic Sleds at One of My Local Supermarkets:

I can tell you're trying, but I think you really are going to have to split your brand name into two words and then just put the second word on the next line. Because even with the second word capped, "SnoTwin" still looks like "Snot Win."

And I don't wish that upon you.

Sincerely,
Me

PS: Or maybe just a hyphen between them?

I last wrote when?

Ugh. Apparently I can be good at either blogging or teaching, but not both.

To Come

When I'm not writing about the things I think about while grading papers, I also intend, though I can't promise, to cover all of the following in the coming couple of weeks:

-The flood. Like, for real.
-Melissa's wedding.
-Jodi's wedding, because it was over a year ago and it was lovely and I'm a bum.
-The first entry (and maybe the second) in the Presidential Biographies series.

Also, there were all those Christianity ones that I was going to get to, and I really did start the research for one, but I left off not because I couldn't get good information, but because any big question about Christianity requires so long an answer, with so much backstory, that frankly I despair of ever doing it well, and goodness knows that the internet doesn't need any more Christian theology done badly. But I may try to get those going after all.

Self-Description

The descriptive essay is our first unit, but in some ways it's the hardest to explain. I was never taught how to teach or grade creative writing, and in many ways that's what description is. Yet I do have reasons, ones I think are good, for choosing that unit as one of the four I've picked out of our textbook: it's a good backdrop for grammar lessons; it gives them a chance to write about their lives while lowering the chances that they'll just recycle an old college-application essay of theirs; in some ways it can be less intimidating a genre for them, even though it's more so for me.

The first homework assignment also has them talk about themselves, though in more of a question-and-answer format. At the end, I give what I hope is a tactful plea for people to tell me if they've got any backstory (primarily because FERPA rules don't allow me to know about learning or other disabilities unless the student self-discloses, but the presence thereof sometimes stands to change the way I structure my lessons): Is there anything else I should know about you that I don't know yet? And the question does draw out probably most of the students with obvious goings-on: I have Asperger's, or I'm dyslexic, or even, as I got twice this semester (from students who both look to still be in their twenties), I don't have any parents anymore.

It's in the essays that I sometimes get backstory that's harder to summarize. I flipped through one guy's the other day, noted that he'd missed a lot of the difference between subjective and objective detail (a big part of the assignment), and expected that his sports story was one of those, well, mildly tiresome play-by-plays of his role in a glorious game; I've gotten them before. Going back to grade it, though, I discovered that it's actually about how he, a team star, broke his leg on the night all the football scouts were there to watch him. (My quick Google search brought up a local-TV story mentioning him by name.) The game is from only a year ago, and he now sits in my class here at Broome, where we don't have a football team. Though he's missed much of the form of the genre, he does succeed in "show, don't tell" in a way I didn't expect.

And sometimes, of course, you see things that you almost aren't meant to see. In his first paragraph, the same guy works in the second person to build an image of what it's like to be his team's star. The last sentence of his paragraph has two clauses, and the weight of the sentence, at first glance, falls on the second one: but what happens is something that no one expected, he writes. But stuck in before it, as almost a throwaway line, is that first clause: Your parents are proud of you for what seems to be the first time in your life. He moves from that quickly and, predictably, never brings it up again.

It seems unfair somehow to act more sympathetically towards the students who decide to be more vulnerable. But I do find myself doing it, or at least looking at them differently.

Bitlet on Aftermath

BCC was still closed yesterday (not because it was so flooded, but because a number of our students couldn't get to us), so I came with a church team to help a family in our church who'd been flooded badly (though reportedly not as badly as they'd been in 2006).

I'll write more about that later, too. But while I was there, I was out in the backyard for a while at one point, and I was struck by how odd the colors looked. The whole scene looked a little like a doctored photo - some of it was normal-colored, some seemed sepia-toned.

The sepia came from the mud, which had covered the grass without much obscuring the shapes of the blades - like frost.

Instead

I spent a couple of hours writing a post about the flood. Then the internet ate it.

So you're going to have to wait a little longer.

Today it's been a decade since September 11th, of course. And I wish my words about that were something other than this: don't spread blame any more than you have to today about anything that's happened in the past ten years. Build people up. Don't look for a villain. There's probably a time for that, but whether I have any authority in the matter or not, I don't think today's that time. Today, just fly a flag, just mourn the dead; just be, to what extent possible, at peace.

Second Bitlet (Seriously, It's Not Much Better than Twitter on Here, Is It?)

So-o, we're kind of under mandatory water conservation (which I suspect is being violated by a large number of our county's citizens today, but never mind that for now), which means no showering/laundry/dishwashing if we can help it. ...Pretty soon, we're essentially not gonna be able to help it. And I do go back to BCC on Monday, if I read the college president's message right, so I would like to have clothes on that don't stink. I'd already been starting to run low on clean clothes before the flooding hit, and then, well...

Another funny thing that's come out of the flood: thanks to said water conservation, yesterday I started to see day-or-two-old facial hair at church on guys who typically don't wear much of it. On Brendan I think I've seen it a time or few before (probably the time he had pneumonia, for starters), but on the conscientious and more businesslike Mark Dreher, it made him seem more casual in a slightly unusual way, like I'd run into him on a camping vacation or something. Which, in a way, I suppose I had.

Bitlet (More to Come)

Best thing I've done so far today: keeping it as short as possible (because of the water-conservation requests), and feeling a little like Lizzie from "Goblin Market" as I kept my mouth shut tight as the water ran off my face (since we're under a boil-water advisory now), I took a shower. For the first time since about seven-thirty on Wednesday morning. And my thick hair being clean and fluffy feels really good.

Flood

Binghamton's been flooded again - it was supposed to be about another 95 years before we were likely to get another as bad as '06's, but here it is anyway. All kinds of areas are flooded; all kinds of people have been evacuated. It's our second big-deal flood in just over five years.

Carrie and I are home and safe, with power, without (so far, please God) a flooded basement. Some of my relatives and friends are not so lucky. Please pray for the Southern Tier.

I can afford to be a little excited at a chance to really do some good - a generosity largely born of privilege, given that it's easy to offer when your hands are full. But I am interested to see what blessings will come from this, as well as tragedy. And I'm glad to be here in my city instead of watching from someplace else, glad to be standing with the people who make this my home.

Today

Today I redid most of my descriptive-essay unit, if "redid" is the right word. I leaned on some exercises I've used before, ones I'd considered throwing out but eventually came back to as serving useful purposes after all. I still have some gaps to fill in, but I hope it'll be a better unit now. I felt like the version I'd had before put out a lot of information but also ran the risks of (1) overcomplication and (2) sucking the joy out of everything.

I lost one of my sections yesterday, so I'm down to two. This calls for some other kind of work on the side, whether paid (logical option) or unpaid (my parents have essentially offered to fill in the pay gap if I want to intern unpaid at some job I'm interested in, more or less to put another string to my bow because teaching will probably not work out long-term). But I think I can keep on top of that. The lesson-planning, bizarrely enough, will probably be the easy part of that, the grading and suchlike the difficult one.

First-World Problem

There's a part of me that's long felt a sense of dread at Saturdays. I mean, not every minute of them, since they started when I was a kid with Beakman's World at 7 AM, and that was among the highlights of my week. But, generally speaking, Saturday has long carried a feeling of resignation or discomfort: my mother cleaning the house, me cleaning my room, or else our going on family trips, which sometimes involved long rides and any of various bodily complaints, all in the name of being someplace I didn't necessarily want to be anyway (I mean, there were people there whom I did want to see, but sometimes the location itself was a problem in some way, or seeing people I wanted to also meant seeing other people who were more difficult to deal with, or whatever).

Much of it is the fact, I think, that the only structure Saturday ever seems to have is one of drudgery, or of things being forced. It feels guilty-icky to not have structure, to sit around doing nothing in particular all day. But in some ways it feels even worse to impose what structure one gets from cleaning, errands, lesson-planning, grading, or trips out in the heat or in the cold to do nothing much in particular because it's our free day to do something and so we ought to capitalize on it. Not that I never want to do anything on Saturdays; I often do. But even then, it often feels unpleasantly different from how it would feel if I'd done it on a weekday. Saturday is sometimes just a wrong-side-of-every-door day, an awkward steppingstone between two days that feel right, that make sense.

Neural Findings

Thank heaven for the records I kept last semester of the descriptive-essay unit. They're nothing like as thorough as they should have been, but they make a good springboard.

This semester I'm trying harder to be more organized so that I'm finally at the point where I don't have to reinvent the wheel so often - ironic in the sense that this may be the semester when I also start trying to find another job, so you'd think I wouldn't have to try so hard for a career I may have to leave. Though more likely I'd end up just making BCC my secondary job for a while and working another job primarily. But there's only so long I'll be able to spend without feeling like I need to be closer to financial independence. I'm twenty-six; though they're willing enough in a good cause, my parents are no longer obligated to support me, even if only partially, like now. It seems increasingly unfair to expect it, and increasingly dissatisfying to not be self-sufficient like my real-adult friends.

On the other hand, I'm also, at least for now, entirely committed to staying in Binghamton. And Binghamton is not necessarily a hotbed of attractive employment opportunities. So we'll see what happens.

Thoughts from/about Places: Rhode Island

This is partially patterned after the Vlogbrothers' occasional series "Thoughts from Places," wherein either John or Hank Green reports from someplace else, telling the story of his day and then coming around to a point (or points) he wants to make about it. I wrote most of this last Tuesday, the day before I left Rhode Island, and haven't changed too much since then (what I have has mostly been to clarify), but the stuff after the asterisk is the stuff that finished coming together in my head afterward, which I've just now set down so as to finish the entry (the timestamp is the entry's post date/time, rather than that of the start of my composing it). It's not a really polished piece, but here you go anyway.


I woke up this morning sometime around or past 8 AM and crossed the hall to the bathroom, and for about the first time, the baby-gate that blocked Ella the attack dachshund from running at me was gone, and she was sitting on the couch apparently without being held, but she didn't race at me barking and growling, as she so often does to people and has mostly done to me, hence the gate. I think she did growl a little from her chair, and Albert's mom told her to quiet down. But given that dog's psychology, we have made major progress over the last two months, progress that people usually only make by being bitten by Ella. So things felt good.

I also spent today packing up most of my belongings, ignoring the scribbled labels (where applicable) about what had originally gone into each box; instead I just arranged things as I wanted. Things have gone well: I think I'll end up using the same number of boxes to leave that I did to get here. I might have needed another, but when I went back to New York briefly in June for Michael's wedding, I grabbed my plastic cube-shaped pull-out drawer and brought it back here. I've been stuffing my junk into it, on and off, since then.

I had been thinking that my final trip over the Pell Bridge, the long one that brings you onto Aquidneck Island, where Albert lives, would be something profound. But I'd probably forgotten again that usually my deliberate attempts to create a memory fail: I'll only really know what my memories of these two months are once I've gone home and forgotten about large swaths of the trip. What's still there will have been the things I really took mental snapshots of, whether I'd realized it at the time or not.

In reality, I crossed over to Newport probably listening to All Things Considered instead, and thinking about Albert and about dinner (leftover orange chicken from this past Friday, when Andrea and Joe and Tom were here and we all made dinner together) and about being maybe-early (depending on your definition) for once. And later tonight, when I crossed back over the bridge onto the mainland for the last time, I guess I was thinking of Albert, and other things, and not really about the bridge or the moment itself.

Rhode Island represents my first two months outside of New York State - not a full two months, since early on in the trip I went back for the wedding and stayed for a few days, but still the longest I've ever been away from the state in which I was born and have lived all my life. And Rhode Island is different from New York, perhaps most notably in its consciousness of history.

Or maybe that's just Albert, who likes history so much, but sometimes it's hard to be here as a suburban New Yorker and not feel like this place is a little different. You go over the bridge, and you see sailboats, and it's easy sometimes to think of sailing culture itself, past eras in which boats played a bigger role in people's lives (though sometimes, instead, you think of the rich people of Newport). You take in the military culture (the naval base being located in Newport), and you hear reminders of battles and generations gone by. You see Revolutionary-War-era buildings and come across historical or just old-fashioned houses, you hear about Gilbert Stuart and Roger Williams, you stand by the ocean. I mean, there are also plenty of things that aren't historical, plenty of quotidian things. But even beaches, another big thing about Rhode Island, don't scream out modernity. If anything, they make me think of the past - Charlotte Beach in Rochester, as a kid and as a high-school choir member and as a college student.

A couple of weeks ago, Albert and I watched some of the John Adams miniseries that came out on HBO several years ago. I tried to picture living that history, making those decisions, being Abigail Adams. I couldn't put myself there; I'm not sure how I would have decided which was best, working with a system or being part of the grand undertaking of starting a new one. We know how everything ends, but of course they didn't. But I bet that felt more vivid still. Maybe every day would feel profound.

I've never studied abroad, and I love my state. I loved Rochester, I came to love Alfred, I came to love Binghamton. One thing I discovered early on while I was here was how very important, in fact, Binghamton is to me. But I didn't expect to like Rhode Island as much as I did. It grew to feel important - a symbol, maybe, of what I'd undertaken.

In a way, it seems as though a second world has opened up. Not one I want to live in all my life, I don't think, but one that seems connected to me anyway, that right now seems to be starting to be associated with things like wonder (quiet and otherwise), decision, and even to some degree escape, but which may come to stand in my mind for other things entirely.

Tomorrow I cross back over to the life I left, and I'm not sure what will come with me.

*

One lesson of history, I guess - not really a new one, but one that I'm thinking about - is that a lot of things happen, all the time, everywhere, to everybody, and there's usually no way to know what things will rise to the surface to be remembered later. There's usually no way to be sure of what will turn out to have been important on a grand scale. A lot of people considered the question of independence, and probably many of them came to have dramatic lives, but John and Abigail Adams were so placed that they're two of the people we remember: two people once seen as fairly normal.

I went to Rhode Island; in some ways I left home for the first time, though saying that is much more dramatic than living it usually was. I've been trying to figure out how I'll explain, to myself, to everyone, what it meant that I went there. But some of my explanation will have to be incomplete now and come later in retrospect. I don't know what parts will rise to the surface, or when; I guess I'll have to find out in time what has.

Thought While Writing a Sample Descriptive Essay

You know, I'm starting to think that some things that would look and sound just fine on a blog page or book leaf come across as less fluid, and less interesting when they're put in black Times New Roman against a white background, double-spaced, with one-inch margins set.

Either that, or my opening paragraph really just is that boring.

Two Three Four Things

Perhaps needless to say, my goals for this post have evolved since I started it. (The finished title doesn't even reflect the proper number of changes, I don't think.)

-Have finished both Eight Cousins and its sequel, Rose in Bloom. I think I actually liked the latter better, though both are good on the whole, their upsides shining through their being, as a fellow reader (who wasn't being negative, just matter-of-fact) put it about the first of the pair, "a little dated and a little didactic." (And anyway, two hundred years down the line, the recent writing we find least offensive is going to contain assumptions and tones that'll be awkward for those who'll have come after us, and we probably have no more idea of which assumptions/tones they'll be than anyone does. Tim Keller pointed that out once about cultural assumptions.) An interesting thing about the sequel is that essentially it's a little like Little Women, but rather more dramatic, and with boys: there are four who get most of the attention, and you can even draw rough parallels between each boy and his corresponding March sister (though in one case out of the four, there's really only about one thing the two characters have in common - the other comparisons have a little more depth to them). I mean, the book is about Rose (people who have any better idea of the history of literature than I do: when do we really start getting women authors writing from a male-adult character perspective? Does that even happen a lot now?), but the boys really figure heavily into it.

-I learned two new forms of solitaire last night, Canfield and Forty Thieves, thanks to a Hoyle game book at Albert's mother's house. Now, Canfield is every bit as half-impossible as people say it is (I suspect that Rainbow Canfield, where you can turn the cards over one at a time instead of three at a time, would be easier, especially if you let yourself go through the stock deck as many times as you want), but I actually think it's more interesting, even though I actually won the one game of Forty Thieves I played (it seemed to take a long time), and I have not yet won Canfield. (I'll have to try the Rainbow variation with real cards soon; last night I soon abandoned the real deck I'd started with and turned to the digital one on Card Shark, this free card-game app I put on my iPod. So I've also played a lot of Memory and Crazy Eights over the past, like, sixteen hours.)

At some point I should probably teach myself poker as a way of giving myself something else to do with my brother. But I don't know yet if I have the willingness to lose that badly all the time. Dude is not to be messed with at poker, as you've heard.

-In food news, wouldn't this be fun if you were a kid? Or, you know, whenever?

-Joe, Andrea, and Tom will be here at the end of the month to visit! So between Joe, Albert, and me...I mean, basically that's half this blog's regular readership in the same place, right? So we're pretty much a walking QPQ-Con. I feel like we should have a keynote speaker. (Okay, I admit it, I totally don't.) Except that by default I pretty much am.

All right, I think that means it's time I went and did something productive. At least after a few more minutes online.

Medicine

What I've been taking to ease, if perhaps not cure, what today must have been (given the symptoms, which included some pronounced dizziness and a short bout of vomiting...I'm sure you were keen to know) either fluid in my ears, a stomach virus of some variety, or both:

-ginger ale
-chicken-and-rice soup (preferably garnished with Albert's mother's nice garden herbs, left over from pizza-making yesterday)
-a Louisa May Alcott novel I've never read (Eight Cousins, which so far is so much fun), in e-book format (public-domain material triumphs once again)
-lots of sleep

I'll have to stop dosing myself on the penultimate item soon, and turn again to the last one.

Seven Quick Takes: Great-Bloggity-Moggity-It's-Another-Post-Already Edition

One: So my Bible study material lately has been twofold: I'm finally doing that thing where you take a 31-day month(...like July!) and read one chapter of Proverbs per day, and I'm also going through one chapter per day of Acts because, I dunno, I like it, and it's different from what I usually read from (an epistle or gospel). This is good, because my consistency with what a lot of Christians like to call "quiet time" had been a little substandard lately leading up to July, but now that I have a routine and so far am sticking to it, I feel more on track, and kind of like I'm thinking more deeply about the texts at hand.

Two: During that study today, I covered, naturally enough, Proverbs 8. One thinks of Proverbs as a collection of short wise sayings, but those actually don't start up until a little later; right now I'm still in the longer instructive passages. Two thoughts: 1) Boy, is the book of Proverbs against adultery (something like four warnings already, across eight chapters!). 2) It's really interesting (and heartening) that Solomon, who owes his very existence to an affair (being a child of David and Bathsheba, who got together when David sent for Bathsheba, slept with her, and later killed her husband - of which proceedings God did not approve - but that whole story is in a different Biblical book), is probably the one who's there speaking out so strongly against them.

Three: Another book I've started reading (which, you'll notice, has nothing to do with the President Project described a couple of entries ago, but whatever): The Complete Idiot's Guide to Teaching College, which with Albert's encouragement I bought at Job Lot this past weekend because we were in there anyway, and because it cost all of four bucks, which is pretty good considering it's usually closer to twenty. Anyway, it looks like it's going to be helpful.

Four: Newport has a lot of fog sometimes, being so near the water and everything. Albert and I took a walk along foggy streets the other evening, which was pretty cool - literally as well as figuratively. It does a nice job of turning down the heat.

Five: By the way, assuming I haven't told you this already by now, Albert's family sometimes calls him Eric (it's part of his middle name), so if I ever do that, that's who I mean. It confused my dad the first time I said "Eric" - understandably enough, since I hadn't explained - though it wasn't such a crazy idea to him altogether, given that he's also somebody who seems to go by a different name for each group of people he interacts with.

Six: Today, since it's cooler than usual outside (and hence I don't feel so bad about using the oven), I might just make some oatmeal crispies, which are so good. But then again, I still want(?!) to do a thing or two for school, so maybe I'll just stick to making baked chicken cordon bleu for dinner and tackle the cookies some other time.

Seven: Also, I'm looking for a place that sells decent women's polo shirts, especially ones that would go with a long black skirt. I'm planning to see whether Old Navy's are all right or a little too thin. Any other suggestions? Remember that I don't really like doing anything lower than a crew neck (not just modesty; it's also the best choice for me fashion-wise, believe me), so besides being of a reasonable thickness, it's also going to need to button relatively high.


For more, check out the site of the 7QT hostess, Jen!

Unrelatedly

I'm starting to think that my Skittles allergy also applies to fruit-flavored Mentos (blast it!). I guess they are pretty similar candies. I should compare ingredient lists and see what they have in common.

New Project (As Though I Needed One)

So it's back: as has been the case so many times over the nine-or-so years since this blog came into existence (...wait, really?! ::goes to check:: Wow, yes!), it's time for me to come up with an overachievy personal goal to chase until I mostly complete it (like the Newbery Project), or else get tired of it (like the books listed on this blog's sidebar, though I still mean to get to those) or for some other combination of reasons abandon it (more or less like this).

This time, then, here's the project: I'm going to read either a biography or autobiography (my choice, where both options are open to me) of every American president. In order. No time limit, because, good gracious, it took me two years to read/reread over sixty Newberys, and many of those are a lot shorter than the books here are going to be.

I like American history, but sometimes the subject as a whole makes my eyes glaze over. Laws and geography and battle plans mostly don't hold my interest in the way that the domestic does - family, hometown, personal temperament, aspirations. So I feel like biography is really going to be the way to go here. I'm interested in the presidents themselves, and I think I'll be more willing to try to follow some of the duller larger-scale concerns if it's done out of interest in the people behind it. At least that's what I'm hoping.

And c'mon, can you think of a better excuse to read David McCullough writing about John Adams?

Anyway, I hope you like the idea, because I'm probably going to post about each book, at least briefly. So, you know...stay tuned.

This Post Needs a Title....and Some Content.

Heh. Somebody should have told me that there was a random second "six" at the bottom of my seven quick takes.

Anyway, I don't have much to offer, but I figured I should write something. So hello, and I've been doing lots of hiking around and looking at beautiful ocean views lately, and I hope you're all enjoying yourselves as well.

And also, happy birthday, Bethie!

Now it is my intention to start some no-knead bread (going to a potluck tomorrow) and then hit the hay.

Seven Quick Takes Friday: Back-in-Binghamton(-For-Now) Edition

One: In the unlikely event that you've heard any, yes, the rumors are true: Albert and I are going out, and I am spending most of the summer in Rhode Island, at his mother's house (because two-month apartment rentals on the island are way out of my price range). But this weekend I am back in Binghamton/Ithaca/maaayyybe-Alfred, thanks to my cousin Michael's wedding.

Two: Yes, I should be in Binghamton long enough for trivia on Monday night.

Three: What have I been doing in Rhode Island? Among other things, I have been following Albert to chasms and forts and reservoirs (well, okay, only one of each); I have helped with a soup kitchen (no lie, Good Shepherd: we ought to serve some chicken salad sandwiches some night at Shepherd's Bowl); I have experimented with multiple routes to and from Newport; I have read George MacDonald's lovely fantasy tale The Princess and the Goblin; and I have succesfully survived nearly eight days without being chomped on by an attack dachshund. So it's been really eventful, considering that I don't have a job yet.

Four: What have I done since re-entering New York State? Well, I spent about two hours in Crossgates Mall in Albany on my way home, doing that thing where I come in with an actual need (namely, a pair of blue jean shorts), try on about sixteen things (fewer than half of which actually fall into the category of the item I truly need), and then leave without having bought anything (except, in this case, something to eat).

Five: Also, I did some recreational cooking, because I probably haven't done any since before the Indiana trip, and I've missed it. I made leek-chickpea-and-potato soup according to Jamie Oliver's recipe, and I used homemade chicken stock (though, as homemade stock goes, it was only okay) that I'd made last month and frozen. It was a satisfying project. Maybe on Sunday or Monday I'll make something else, like no-knead bread and/or baked tortilla chips.

Six: Did I mention yet on this blog that Joe and Andrea and I went to Indiana to see our Alfred friend Jessica? We did. It was fun. Links to Joe's blog entries about it will come some other day; tonight I'm typing from my iPod.

Seven: Because of the iPodness, please forgive any typos. It's basically impossible to scroll within a text box from an iPod, as far as I can tell, so editing something this long is very tricky. Also, yes, this was technically finished on Saturday. But it was started on Friday. So there!

Another Word from One of Our Sponsors

Thanks again to the brilliance of public domain.

Note: I should point out again that I often don't agree with everything Chesterton says in any one essay. Here I wonder how far someone actually in serious pain would agree with him that one shouldn't talk about it - though, not having had many incidents in my own life which would fall under such a description, I can only wonder, as I'm not in much of a position to know. But, as you'll see, the handling of serious pain is not the primary topic of this piece anyway.

The Advantages of Having One Leg
G.K. Chesterton

A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement and casting about for some phrase of consolation that should not be either insolent or weak, said at last, "I think one can live through these great sorrows and even be the better. What wears one is the little worries." "That's quite right, mum," answered the old woman with emphasis, "and I ought to know, seeing I've had ten of 'em." It is, perhaps, in this sense that it is most true that little worries are most wearing. In its vaguer significance the phrase, though it contains a truth, contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error. People who have both small troubles and big ones have the right to say that they find the small ones the most bitter; and it is undoubtedly true that the back which is bowed under loads incredible can feel a faint addition to those loads; a giant holding up the earth and all its animal creation might still find the grasshopper a burden. But I am afraid that the maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is sometimes used or abused by people, because they have nothing but the very smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling the crumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity she would wear the crown of thorns — if she had to. The gentleman may permit himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he would behave much better if it were a mere matter of starvation. We need not deny that the grasshopper on man's shoulder is a burden; but we need not pay much respect to the gentleman who is always calling out that he would rather have an elephant when he knows there are no elephants in the country. We may concede that a straw may break the camel's back, but we like to know that it really is the last straw and not the first.

I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right to grumble, so long as they grumble about something else. It is a singular fact that if they are sane they almost always do grumble about something else. To talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head. But people with great troubles talk about little ones, and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very often has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do no deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. No one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a hassock. William III. died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man (not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path — bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts, finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse, finding punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures to be drawn from all these that I sing — I sing with confidence because I have recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot, with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork — a stork is a poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.

To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing itself symbolise something other than isolation. If we wish to see what a house is it must be a house in some uninhabited landscape. If we wish to depict what a man really is we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand. So long as he is a single figure he means all that humanity means; so long as he is solitary he means human society; so long as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship. Add another figure and the picture is less human — not more so. One is company, two is none. If you wish to symbolise human building draw one dark tower on the horizon; if you wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the sky. Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we call our day there is but one star in the sky — a large, fierce star which we call the sun. One sun is splendid; six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower of Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg. To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness. As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which stands most alone.

This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity of some Doric column. The students of architecture tell us that the only legitimate use of a column is to support weight. This column of mine fulfils its legitimate function. It supports weight. Being of an animal and organic consistency, it may even improve by the process, and during these few days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness or dislocation of the one leg may find compensation in the astonishing strength and classic beauty of the other leg. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith's novel might pass by at any moment, and seeing me in the stork-like attitude would exclaim, with equal admiration and a more literal exactitude, "He has a leg." Notice how this famous literary phrase supports my contention touching this isolation of any admirable thing. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfect picture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg. She delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive fact that he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous and irrelevant, a reflection, and a confusion. Two legs would have confused Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London. That having had one good leg he should have another — this would be to use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do. She would have been as much bewildered by him as if he had been a centipede.

All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrender of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, all desolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that it may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong and splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very much otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God's image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of all visible things — wink the other eye.

Woo!

Final grades are in and summer's begun, and to celebrate both, I've decided to do the following today:

1. Get a new blog template. I liked the old one, but variety is the spice of life and all that, and this one's cool-looking. That's right: I have once again used maps for decor despite having a bad sense of geography and not even that much desire to travel. But this summer will contain an above-average amount of travel for me, so besides that I just like it, it also seems kind of fitting.

2. Take a nap sometime before the vestry meeting this evening. Despite how much potential napping-time I've just blown on this entry, I'm still hoping for this one, because no matter how many or few students I have to grade, I always procrastinate on getting it done and end up having to finish said grading on too little sleep.

3. Buy an ant trap. Because apparently a colony of tiny ants likes my room. Including my bed. Ew.

Also, I'd like to make some chicken stock, and later some vegetable stock, and later some chickpea-and-leek soup, but that's going to have to happen tomorrow or something.

Aaand that's your mid-May report. But I'll try to be more regular now that I don't have 234902934 things to do. Although soon I'll have 234902934 other things to do.

Two Things, for No Good Reason, Given that I Should be Grading

1. Tonight, after many weeks of ducking the game as everybody else took part in it, I decided to join in Capture the Flag with Ife and the youth group kids in the church sanctuary. And, in fact, thanks to a mad dash at a ripe moment, I was able to seize the opposing team's "flag" (which I believe was a jacket or sweatshirt). All I needed was an epic getaway back to our side to secure our win, but opposing player M. was coming right for me. In the midst of his approach and my teammate S. (in jail)'s cry for me to tag her (that would get her back into the game), I made a quick decision to try to evade M. via a hop onto a raised-up area of the altar (about the size and depth of a kiddie pool, but more square), from whence I planned to, after running across it, hop back down into a sort of aisle leading to the side. Or at least I think that was my plan. Either way, it was foiled, because in the relatively-low light and probably some shadows or something, I failed to recognize that the edge of the raised area was a little bit closer and higher than I thought.

You can guess what happened: still at a run, I tripped over it, fell heavily over the side (more or less into the aisle I'd planned to hop into), and became Exhibits A (bruised, scraped, and soon bleeding left shin), B (bruised, scraped, and soon bleeding right shin), C (scraped-and-soon-bleeding right foot), D (bruised left pinky and adjoining knuckle), and E (bruised right index-finger knuckle) as to why We Do Not Run on the Altar, a rule that at one point had been in place for some time, although I think it'd since been relaxed, for whatever reasons, probably none of which make much sense in retrospect.

Ife was apologetic and sympathetic; the kids, less fazed, joined him in watching part of the proceedings as I dabbed off blood with a paper towel, rubbed Neosporin in, and applied largely ill-fitting first-aid-kit bandages. Then, seeing that I was alive and essentially still mobile, the middle-schoolers clomped back upstairs to play the next round of the game. As Ife wryly told Carrie later about the injuries, "That's how we roll in youth group."

2. You all remember last Monday, which besides being noteworthy for another reason was also my twenty-sixth birthday. That evening, I got a couple of texts from my brother:

[br0:] Happy birthday! i hope u had a good day
[Me:] Thanks! It was pretty good.
[br0:] They killed osama bin laden for you

...I did reply, though I couldn't come up with anything better than, "Well, I knew the Navy Seals admired me from afar, but I never expected anything that elaborate."

And yeah, I know: it's supposed to be SEALs.


So there you go: that's some of my life these days, and I should probably get through another paper before going to bed.

Seven-Quick-Takes Friday: The I've-Been-Up-Since-5:15 Edition

One: Well, the Royal Wedding has finally taken place! I will say, in the time leading up to yesterday, I had felt kind of like, "You know, this is probably what DVR and the internet are for - to make it so no one has to wake up at four AM anymore just to see a television event." (Clearly, I had forgotten about the World Cup. But sporting events are different, right?) But anyway, eventually Carrie and I discovered that the actual wedding didn't start until six. And Reverend Anne, who despite being born and raised in Africa has a deep personal connection to all things British, was really excited about the whole thing, and really wanted Carrie and me to come watch it with her.

So we did, arriving at her house at five-thirty. We ate a fairly lavish breakfast (in my case, it was mango cobbler, wheat buns, and lots of decaf tea, but I could also have had some reheated crepes, Yorkshire pudding, and/or lots of regular tea) and gave most of our attention to the wedding and the rest to the flock of Kennedylets, at least half of whom were essentially oblivious to what was going on. And then the kids went off to play, and the three of us hung around and talked to Matt and amongst ourselves and watched a little more of the commentary and waited to see the balcony appearance. All in all, it was definitely more social and fun than my trying to watch it alone on a website livefeed would have been, and I am glad I went. ...Oh, and also, Princess Kate's dress looked thoroughly lovely. As did she, though that's not a surprise, since as far as I can tell she's just a lovely-looking person.

Two: All that said, if you feel like praying that neither Carrie nor I comes down with the latest chez-de-les-Kennedy stomach virus (seriously, I love those kids, but, as I've tried to describe to a few people before, do all of you who went to public elementary school remember that kid - every class must have one - who could always be counted on to throw up at the slightest provocation? At least two of the Kennedy kids appear to be like that), we will surely appreciate your goodwill.

Three: Anyway, I also haven't written since the beginning of Holy Week, which was good. Saturday night was the best part: not only is Easter Vigil my favorite service of the whole year (guys, for real: it starts in the dark, we light a fire in a biggish bowl on the altar, there's an epic and beautiful chanted song, and we get to rejoice that Christ is risen because in the ancient world Saturday night was really the start of Sunday morning), but afterwards Carrie and I had some people back to our house for fondue and other tasty treats. Both events were joyous and fun.

Four: Also, here was the practically-perfect moment I had last Saturday: during its pleasant and sunny midafternoon, I went out to Nezuntoz, bought myself a delicious hot roast-beef sandwich (which had on it, among other things, mild banana peppers, which I discovered this semester that I really like) and a drink, sat in the corner (the sun coming through the big glass window and falling across the table), and, while having this late lunch, began the even-more-delicious first chapter (well, prologue, really) of the fantastic Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy Sayers, the last in her Peter Wimsey detective-story series. I'd conveniently forgotten my phone (not that anyone needed me, which was just as well), and everything was great, and I hope the café staff couldn't see me grinning and probably reading under my breath (probably in badly-imitated British accent), though they probably could.

Five: And then there was Sunday: I went over to Aunt Cathy's for a nice Easter dinner with her and Jay and my parents, followed by a trip back to Syracuse, where my mom and I lounged around and watched a TLC reshowing, now with added commentary, of Prince Charles and Princess Diana's wedding (done in a style reminiscent of Pop-Up Video, with little factoid bubbles). And my indulgent mother presented me with, as Easter candy, a bag of Lindt dark-chocolate truffles, eating three of which is basically the nutritional equivalent of consuming an entire Snickers bar. (Or should that be "equivalent to"? I am sure that at least one of you knows, or will find out.)

Six: And as though all that feasting weren't enough, on Monday afternoon I went to Rochester and had take-out Chinese (well, sort of - what do you call take-out Chinese that you eat at the restaurant?) with Julie, Glenn, and Matt, the latter of whom was back temporarily from his relief work in Haiti. It was a good time with them, and I still miss Rochester - and, oh my gosh, the guy near my old neighborhood, the one who's basically tried to recreate a miniaturized medieval German castle-type scene in his front yard, appears to be in better form than ever. Next time I pass by it, I will try hard to take a picture so I can show most of you what I mean.

Seven: I have, I think, about twelve research papers to grade before Tuesday. They are the only ones I received from among the thirty-sevenish students who are still officially enrolled, though at least half of them shouldn't be, given that they haven't come regularly since before midsemester. But the hardest part of grading, of course, is starting.


And with that, I think I'm going to take a nap - if you want more quick takes to read while I'm asleep, check out the series's founder, Jen!

Small Medical Victory

For people like me, clearly not savvy about the wiles of the American insurance system, here's a protip:

If your insurance company's "Find a Doctor" page says that an office takes your insurance, the proper response to their over-the-phone "Oh, we don't take that kind" is to tell them - brace yourself for brilliance here - that their office appears on your insurance company's "Find a Doctor" page. They may check things out and find that they do, in fact, take your insurance, and you will be a happier person theoretically poised to receive better medical care.

Since, on Attempt #1 at getting a dermatological appointment, I had failed to try the tactic of pointing out that the office did appear on that page, I'd been all set to see how far I could get with a primary-care appointment (as any longtime reader of this blog is probably aware, I have pretty much the most problematic skin of anyone's I personally know, and now that I don't live in Rochester, I've come to need a dermatologist here), which was probably not going to be that far, given that, you know, they're not dermatologists over there. Then I realized that I basically had the mother of all excellent reasons to call the dermatology office back and ask them to double-check. And now things are working as they should. The end.

Unrelatedly, I like going to friends' houses and making pizza.

Also unrelatedly, my spring break is now over, and it's back to teaching tomorrow.

In Not-Quite-as-Brief-but-Still-Brief

Thought I'd throw you faithful checkers a mini-update.

I went to Syracuse last night and today and spent time with my parents. I'd just like to say: one restaurant dinner (with a shared dessert), one next-morning trip to the public market, a localishly-made yogurt smoothie, various public-market samples (culminating in my dad buying eleven dollars' worth of what apparently was the best muesli he's had in some time, and I will say that it was pretty delicious), lunch at a local church having a pig roast, homemade greens and beans for most of tonight's dinner, and some delicious chocolate for dessert...

...those things constituted much of my about-twenty-five hours with my parents. We also, to be fair, took a long walk and did a little clothing shopping. (Oh, and my mom took thirty seconds to test my blood sugar, since she was testing hers for something and had already stuck Dad and was curious about me. Turns out that blood-sugar test needles are flat and tiny. I had fussed lightly, expecting a Red-Cross-style puncture, and instead was like, oh, that's it? For the record, my before-meal number was 82, which apparently is very good.) But seriously, my fascination with buying, making, and/or eating food? Though my presence and willingness certainly contributed, at root we can probably lay much of the blame on my parents.

It's been, as you can imagine, a delicious couple of days.

In Very Brief

Was in Rhode Island this weekend. Now I'm home. Man, that place has a lot of history. The Revolutionary War is so fascinating historically.

Also, I broke my glasses by mistake.

What's that Unfamiliar Feeling? Accomplishment? Really?

In brief: I gave up procrastination for Lent.

Well, actually, that would be so hard as to be virtually impossible, so what I did do was impose a ninety-minute block of time (can be broken up into smaller blocks as long as eventually it all adds up to ninety), six days a week, in which I have to work on stuff that really needs to get done. School-related stuff is first on the hierarchy, since the reason I took this up for Lent really was that the halfheartedness of my teaching-related work was one of the biggest areas of my life in which I was not loving God and my neighbor (besides the obvious problem of my students' dependence on me for help and knowledge, this blog's archives will hint at how I've dealt with my own guilt and sense of failure at adult life), but other stuff (like temp-agency applications) is permissible if it really is more urgent than the school stuff on a given day.

I've been doing it since Ash Wednesday (this year, that was March 9th), and it's been going pretty well. I've been doing school-related stuff every day, and I've been a lot more prepared for class than I otherwise would have been.

The only real problem is on the days when really I ought to be putting in more than ninety minutes - sometimes the temptation is to cap it at the minimum because I know that I'll be working on it every day for the next x number of days, so it can be hard to judge how much time I really ought to spend. Altogether, though, it's gone well. And it's been timely - this new unit would have been a mess (and, more than likely, so would I) if I'd waited any longer on putting in regular work, or put in much less than I have.

(Before you're all rather understandably like, "Really? You're putting in about twenty-five percent of the work I put into my own job, and you want me to be excited for you about that?", keep in mind that this is only a part-time position, so it's not supposed to require that many hours per week. Right now, on paper, given lesson prep and teaching and office hours, the Lenten discipline puts me into the thirteen-and-a-half-hour range, as opposed to what was probably seven hours a week back before then.)

This has been your update. There were also supposed to be pictures of the japchae I made on Tuesday night, but maybe that'll happen next time.

Thankful Again for Studded Snow Tires

Depending on whom you ask, Binghamton got somewhere between eleven and twenty inches of snow between last night and this morning. All I know is, the snow's literally up to my knees. Carrie and I could hardly figure out, after a while, where to shovel it, given that we couldn't throw it into the neighbor's driveway, which is close to ours, or into the sidewalk.

No plow down our street. Literally every car that tried to come through between, like, ten and eleven-something got stuck. Our across-the-street neighbors, who have a snowblower and so had cleared out a lot faster, did themselves credit by taking shovels and garden implements (a long-handled spade, a hoe) to dig out and then push the vehicles that found themselves going nowhere fast...including Ife's, since he'd come by to return some books (and ended up helping Carrie and me shovel. Bless him).

State of emergency in Broome County until 5 PM. But it's already 1:18 PM and sunny. Among other things, this means that it's time for me to grade some papers, given that my chance of an actual snow day off of work tomorrow (BCC declared one for today, of course, but I don't teach on Mondays this semester) is looking pret-ty slim.

Maybe some pictures to follow? Depends on how motivated I feel to go back out there.

Mobility

Do people who study employment also keep track of not just job availability but also job, like, mobility? That is, from what I can tell, even when the job market stops being so intensely, well, stercoraceous, it's still going to take a lot more time for companies to be willing to take a chance on people coming to them out of similar, but not identical, fields. For example, eventually there'll be more jobs for journalists, but even then, if you're coming into the job market just out of college, you're still going to need a degree in journalism to get one - having one in English will simply not be enough, especially given how much of a buyer's market the working world is going to be for a long time.

Or maybe it's always been like that, or never been like that, and my impressions really are as ill-informed as one would expect based on the incredibly-small amount of research I'm basing this on.

Classroom Interactions: Kyle

Note: Obviously, that's not his real name. The satisfying thing about writing about students under other names is that you get to name them after what they look like their name should be, rather than what it is. This kid looks a little like he should be a Kyle. So Kyle he is.


In my class we've started a unit on description, and the first descriptive essay we're reading is Yiyun Li's short piece "Orange Crush," which you yourself can read here if you're curious. If not, basically Li describes being sixteen in China in the 1980s, when China was just starting to get products and commercials from America. She talks about Tang, which in China is renamed Fruit Treasure (I think probably because Tang is a Chinese surname), contrasting it with the bitter boiled-orange-peel water that her father makes to cure the family's colds. Fruit Treasure becomes a symbol of everything she wants life and especially love to be - rich, colorful, intense - but then she describes how she was disillusioned, ultimately deciding that "every dream ended with this bland, ordinary existence, where a prince would one day become a man who boiled orange peels for his family." It's something of an anticlimactic ending, but its descriptions are good, so I use it as one of the examples.

So.

Dear Kyle,

When you read "Orange Crush," you could take it, if you were in that kind of mood, as another indication of everything that's wrong with me. My guess is that, after today's conversation, you think that I'm glib rather than wise - that I'm unaware of how people work; that I give up too easily, make too many excuses for myself, and take defeatist philosophies as my standard.

But you know what? Teaching is a lot more like "Orange Crush" than it's like Dead Poets Society. And despite what you may think, I, for one, am not at all sure that I'm supposed to be here to be your John Keating.

*

When I was in seventh grade, I saw Dead Poets Society, and, like any bookworm middle-schooler, I was enchanted. I penned a rapt entry about it in my journal. The journal's since been thrown out, thank God, because it really was that insufferable, but I clearly remember writing, at some point in that DPS entry, the partly-underscored sentence, "I have to be a teacher."

Flash forward: I'm in class this morning, and Kyle, whom up to this point I've liked and thought liked me (not that that's supposed to be important, but in real life it certainly is), is raising lots of objections, both in class and afterward. He's frustrated (partly, though only partly, legitimately) about how long it's taken me to get the first essays back. He's frustrated (again, partly legitimately) about the fact that he didn't get his first essay back before the second one came due.

In class, he's pressing and pressing me, relentlessly, about the point at which narration turns into description. I've drawn a spectrum on the board, with narration at one end and description at the other, and tried to tell my students the difference so that when they go to write descriptive essays, I get descriptive essays with some narration, rather than narrative essays with a few adjectives thrown in, which last semester was mostly what I got. So I'm trying to explain the spectrum, and he's trying to nail me down about it. "But if you take narration and add description, doesn't it then become description?" Well, yes, but I'm asking about which one is primarily being shown. "But doesn't your example of a narrative paragraph have description in it?" Yes. I'd said that it did. But what I'm saying is that it has to do with what you're trying to do, the difference between focusing primarily on what happened and instead focusing primarily on what it was like. ...I'm trying to reassure him that I'm not going to be out to get everybody when I grade, and that as they read more examples, which they'll get next class (though I believe that I probably told them they'd get them this class), they'll get a better idea.

"English isn't just science. It's also art," I'm trying to tell them. Please, Kyle, just trust me. This is only 110. It doesn't have to be exact. Don't scare everybody into thinking I'm going to not tell you what to do and then punish you for not doing it.

After class he doesn't let up. I'm trying to explain it to him. I'm trying to explain to him why I can't explain it better. I don't write descriptive essays for a living. "I guess I'm just going to have to go back to the dictionary and look it up for myself," he says. "I'm not just here to get a degree. I was homeschooled. I graduated at fourteen. I started college at seventeen...that's why I'm asking questions that the students don't ask."

We're edging near the door. The room's been empty, save for us, for some minutes now. "I can tell," I eventually say, trying to be diplomatic, and also trying to be honest because I feel like my students deserve honesty, "that you're familiar with genre, and you may be coming up against the limits of my own knowledge." At this point I think I've already said, "Like I said, English is partly art, and it's partly science."

"I want exact definitions," he said.

"You're gonna get very few of those in the world of English," I tell him.

"I know. Or anywhere else..."

Anyway, by the end of the conversation I've tried to explain to him that I'm trying to make a working definition - I explain last semester's confusion, how I got a lot of narrative essays that threw in a few details here and there and thought it was description, and tried to explain to him that my definition's not going to be an exact one.

"But isn't it a teacher's job," he asks, "to get as close to the exact definition as possible?"

"Yes," I said. "I agree with you. I think it is."

Lest you wonder why I've let him get so far at all, it's because, first, I think he deserves it, because he works hard to try to learn, and he asks me the deepest questions of any student I've ever had except for Leah. But secondly, because earlier in the semester he's been much more playful about it - staying after with a classmate, Drew (also not his real name), who also likes to be philosophical. They ask me big-picture, at times faintly deconstructionist questions, and I try to answer. But it hasn't gotten like this before. Today he sounds disappointed in, frustrated with me.

I think it's as we go, but maybe it's already happened: he also asks me why I let Drew sleep in class today. It's really a combination of things, though I don't say so: for one, because it's uncharacteristic of Drew to sleep. For another, because I made the mistake earlier of getting a little snippy with him when I felt like he hadn't been listening (in other words, I told him, "If you'd been listening, you would know"), and because he felt like he had been listening but I just hadn't been articulate enough, that's the point at which he shut down and fell asleep. So I didn't feel like picking another fight.

Which is really another way of saying that, at heart, I didn't wake Drew because I'm scared of most of my male students, except for the ones who go out of their way to be friendly. This is stupid, but it's true. I am not one for gender stereotypes, and I am impatient with the possibility of someone implying that all my problems in education are caused by patriarchy, but the plain fact is that most of my female students are just plain nicer to me than most of my male ones, even when they see that I'm flawed as an educator. In just seven semesters of teaching, I have been questioned, patronized, ignored, sucked up to, and/or criticized by a lot of boys and men, a considerably greater number than the number of girls and women who've done so. And you'd think I'd be used to it, but I had kind male friends both in high school and college, and I'm really not over the shock yet of how no-win a situation it usually is when they decide to be difficult: be weak, or else be resented. I'm never sure which to choose, so I add the additional flaw of being inconsistent about the one I choose.

But that's not what I tell Kyle. Basically, I try to tell him, it's because people have to take charge of their own education, and some days it's not worth it for me to wake every sleeper. (In other words, I find that often it's not much use. Typically, when I try, they get vocally snotty. Almost invariably they deny that they were sleeping. Sometimes, after this, they fall back asleep.)

And - I can't remember his phrasing - but he told me, in response, that good teachers do more than just the minimum needed to get paid. That the ones who are memorable are the ones who do more.

Well, thank you. Thank you for your combination of assuming that I don't know that and, by extension, accusing me of mediocrity.

"I don't think it's going to make me memorable just to wake every sleeper," I said, or something like it.

"You'd be surprised," he said.

You'd think that after all this we'd be done. But no. We were only climbing the stairs toward the main entrance.

"I'd also like to thank you for being on time these past two classes," he said. "Before that, the whole first month, you were late enough to cost us a whole class all together."

"Probably about that," I laughed, thinking he was exaggerating.

"Exactly that," he said, correctively.

Which, again, is not literally true. Not that he doesn't have a point. It's true that some days I've come in late to their class, and two or three times it was by wide margins - a couple of times because getting to and through the copy center took more time than I'd planned, once because my parking pass had fallen between my seat and door and it took me a long time to find it. And I apologized to them for those, since they were egregious (nine minutes, once) and my fault. And smaller latenesses - on the order of two or three minutes - other times. But I had plenty of classes like that in college, with teachers who were perfectly fine. And we've also had two snow days, so given the times I have been on time, we simply haven't had enough classes for me to have lost them a full seventy-five minutes.

"So I want to thank you for being on time. And for giving me time after class," he said. But - maybe I'm imagining it, looking back - almost with a note of challenge, almost sarcasm, almost resignation. As though he'd thought I'd only condescended to do it.

"You're welcome," I said. And, more out of a sense that I should than a sense that I meant it, I added, "And thanks for your help." Since I'm the teacher, and already I wish he'd remember that, maybe I should have said "suggestions," but I think "help" is all that came to mind.

And we parted ways. And, not to be melodramatic, but I worked not to cry.

*

I'm used to my students not wanting to be in my class - to the bored looks, or the defiant ones during freewriting. Go ahead. Tell me to keep writing. You can tell me that every class if you want. But if you don't tell me that every class, I'll stop writing when I want to stop writing. After a while, it's not worth it to nag. After a while, it's not worth it to settle into full-blown power struggle. They may grow more compliant, but they won't know more at semester's end. They have to want it, too.

I know what to say to students who are already curious about my subject. I know how to answer questions. I know how to admit contradictions. But I don't know how to inspire people who don't want to be there. The question is, though, is that my job? My seventh-grade self would say that it is. Maybe my college self, too. Maybe I'm mediocre because my love for them doesn't burn, because I don't put unnecessary hours into my job.

It's no use, I know, to try to tell Kyle how much I have working against me. I'd say how little I'm paid, but I know as well as he does, from a lifetime of believing it, that the pay shouldn't matter, that anything that feeds/clothes/shelters me should be enough in the service of education.

It's no use to tell him how little education I really got, the canyon of a gap between what English majors learn and what they need to know in order to teach. Professors taught us to read and to write, sort of. But they didn't teach us to teach. And they don't watch us while we're learning. I get observed once a semester. But Kyle, as many former homeschoolers are, is self-motivated enough to know that that's not an excuse. I could learn how to do it better; therefore, in his eyes, maybe also in mine, I should.

It's no use to tell him what's in my life - my housemate, my friendships, my efforts at getting a second job, my church, the mission group, helping Ife with youth group, the mornings I've lost sleep because I've woken in the middle of the night short of breath, the amount of time it takes to grocery-shop and cook meals and get exercise once a week, the time it takes to keep close relationships close. You're on shaky ground with a community-college student anytime you try that, crossing your fingers that they're not one of the students who works full time in addition to going to school full time. Kyle, I know, walks half an hour every school day to get to the nearest bus stop. He dropped hundreds of dollars - money I don't have - for a specialized pen and notebook that record the lecture as it's happening, such that he can tap any part of his notes and get the recording of what I was saying as he was writing it. If he's got a list of things to do, if he has to work himself to the bone to do everything, I'm sure he does it.

The real answer is that my heart isn't in this - or, at least, not primarily in this. Teaching's okay, except when it's not, but I have a church I love, friends I love, a life I love, and teaching doesn't light me up the way those things do. The real answer is that life isn't like Dead Poets Society. Maybe he thinks that no one should be in education who doesn't burn to teach. Dorothy Sayers did, if I recall, and I certainly have plenty of respect for her.

And surely, under the best of circumstances, they're right. When NPR talks about education systems that would base compensation on merit, that would "remove incompetent teachers," it hurts to know that they might well be talking about me. When people talk about teacher incompetence, they don't think they're looking at an incompetent teacher.

It's not that I don't know that I should organize better, lesson-plan better, get to class on time more consistently (though certainly my current boss doesn't consider punctuality a high priority, if what he's said offhand is to be believed), grade faster and better, wake the sleepers, shush the talkers. I know those things, and frankly, I resent being patted on the head about them as if I didn't know. The problem is that I'm so scared. I'm so scared of my students. I'm so scared of my responsibility level. It makes me want to do almost anything else, when I have to plan lessons or grade papers, almost anything else but confront the huge gap between what's being asked of me and what I can easily - maybe even possibly - do.

To be John Keating, I'd have to breathe teaching, spend all my waking hours in pursuit of it. And people do that with their graduate majors. They spend hours reading, researching, writing, submitting. Because they love it.

But I don't. I have many other things that I love. Not that that excuses my many failures of duty: I have a responsibility to my students, and I should put much more time into them. They really get too little effort even for me to be a pretty-good teacher, rather than a fully good one. But even if I fixed that, I will not immediately be a capital-T teacher. I just don't love it enough for that. I need more time. A lot more time. And a little more education wouldn't hurt.

I ended up at home, in the driveway and then in the kitchen, berating Kyle, who wasn't there, berating an empty house. This is NOT Dead Poets Society, and I am NOT here to be your freaking John Keating! I am going to disappoint you daily! And you are just going to have to find a way to deal!

And then, the worst: Sit there, get your A's, and get out of my class!

I complain about my students not caring. But maybe, at heart, I don't want them to care, because I don't have the energy to satisfy people who do. Maybe, if the alternative is humility, which I don't seem to be willing to give; if it's being nothing but a teacher, maybe all I want are his nineteen peers. Maybe what I want is compliance.

Seven Quick Takes Friday: Downtime Edition

One: It's "midsemester break" at BCC, despite the fact that classes only "started" (but not really, because of the January 18th snow day) a month ago. They gave us Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off, which was convenient in the sense that it let me out of this week's office hours. Inconvenient, though, in the sense that it's just enough to let me slide into Vacation Mode, in which I throw myself into my non-school life and forget that, in fact, it's really only one day off compared to what I'd normally be teaching. I really ought to start grading some papers.

Two: I had a job interview this week - there's a coffee shop around here that sells delicious sandwiches (which is what I, the non-coffee-drinker, have long liked about it), and they may be about to make me the backup delivery driver for their catering division. Or, given last month's accident (which they would have found out about during the background check anyway, but they also asked me if my driving record was clean, so I explained why it isn't), maybe not. But maybe they'll hire me behind the counter. We'll see.

Three: My regular dentist (to whom I went this week to get a broken filling redone), upon discovering that I no longer had dental insurance, told me, in something of a low voice, that BCC's dentistry program will clean my teeth for cheap if I get a hold of them. I also already knew from a local Cost Cutters worker that BOCES's beauty school also takes appointments for low-rate haircuts (don't worry, the students are watched by their teachers all the time!). So, Binghamtonian low-incomers, fret not about the upkeep of thy appearance, and get thee to a student.

Four: It is a beautiful day out here - fifty-nine degrees and sunny. Carrie and I went out to the track and walked around.

Five: We also had a springy/summery lunch: inspired yet again by Mark Bittman, I made tuna salad with lemon (juice and zest), olive oil (pick one that tastes good if you decide to make something like this for yourself), and minced shallot, instead of the regular mayonnaisey kind that I think I probably still don't like. And Carrie peeled a ripe mango, and I poured myself some white grape juice and she herself some diet ginger ale. It was lovely. I may carry on the warm-weather theme and make this for dinner, assuming I can get my act together and thaw the chicken in time to marinate it.

Six: So it's one of those things that my parents knew would happen even though I thought I could avoid it: I took out Alan Jacobs's essay collection, Wayfaring (which I definitely liked), from Syracuse's library system because Binghamton's didn't have it, thinking that I'd be back up there soon. Then I got delayed for various reasons. No matter, I thought, and renewed it. ...Then I overshot the new due date by nine days, and now, though I've tried to renew it again online (since I was offered a second renewal back before it was overdue), it will neither let me do that nor tell me how much I now owe (though I suspect it's ninety cents). So now I'm going to have to find a proper-sized envelope and get enough postage to send it back, because surely the mail will get there sooner than I will.

Seven: Thanks to Albert's approaching visit, the house is increasingly clean. Carrie and I always clean better when there are people coming. Plus, I'm off of school and unwilling to do a lot of schoolwork. So basically, as I told her this morning, there was the Albert factor, the free-time factor, and the avoidance-of-work factor. Basically a cleaning trifecta. And there'll be more to come this evening...after I actually do some schoolwork.


For more takes, go see Jen.

Closure

Well, JaBloWriMo has officially come to an end. I'm tired and have to get up earlyish tomorrow, so here's how I'm going to finish: I'll soon have a new-to-me car. Though we didn't hit each other all that hard when I was in that accident a couple of weeks ago, somehow part of the frame of the car got bent, and so the insurance company decided that the thing was totaled and sent us the resale value or whatever. Personally, knowing the amount, I'd have expected that it'd be cheaper to fix the frame, but whatever. I hadn't been driving the car for very long and had no particular affection for it. Still, the outcome's a little startling, and also feels, even if it has no real reason to be, a little embarrassing.

But not as embarrassing as getting tagged with a $185 ticket (yes, that's right: the town court leveled the $100 fine, but New York State added an 85% surcharge on top of it) and presumably three points on my license. You remember - failure to yield right-of-way at an intersection. I'll tell you, the court up there works fast: I sent my guilty plea out on Thursday afternoon, and by Saturday night had the bill for the fine in my hands.

So be careful out there, kids. Turn your radios down and creep up around snowdrifts, lest you find yourself with yet another reason to find a second part-time job.

Anyway, thank God no one was hurt. It could easily have been a lot worse.

I hope to blog fairly often in the coming weeks even though now I don't have to - there're several topics I would gladly have covered if I'd only had the time, which I didn't.

You've been a great audience - good night for now.

International Feast, Continued

Two sample plates:

This one (above) was mine. Some of the food you're seeing here (in, unfortunately, no particular order): some kind of enchilada thing (that's the thing on top); some chilled carrots that I think were Middle-Eastern style; something that may have been tabbouleh; an Asian dish involving glass noodles; a pierogi or two; a few of my pelmeni; some coconut rice buried under there; a bit of sauerbraten and spaetzle somewhere; and what I thought was a tiny bit of conch, but it didn't taste fishy, so I'm not really sure. A couple of other little dibs and dabs of things, but I can't remember them. One thing we should do next year is have nametags for the dishes, not just country-of-origin tags.


And here's Andrea's. Of particular interest is the left side of her plate: the bread-looking stuff is Irish soda bread, but on top of it is one of the Welsh cookies (more or less a simpler, but as far as I'm concerned probably better, version of this) made by a ninety-four-year-old woman in our church named Mary (she is very active - gardens, volunteers, all kinds of things). The shiny caramel-colored stuff not far behind those is, I believe, flan. Also among the desserts, though apparently not pictured: madeleines, brought by another parishioner, Carmen - whom, to my surprise, I appear not to have mentioned on this blog before - and who also brought a few pages of Proust and an explanatory note for those who didn't know what they had to do with each other. ("Et ça, c'est pour votre culture générale." Right, Albert?)

So it was good. And afterwards, people played Set (I finally get it! I finally like it!), and ultimately Carrie and Zack and I played some Rock Band today for the first time since December.

This was the last weekend of January. Winter can't last forever, can it?

I Got'cher Blurry Pictures Right Here

A few shots from Carrie's and my meat-filled cooking spree for the International Feast:



This, the best-quality shot of the bunch (I think I took it on my phone-camera's "food" setting...yes, in fact, it does have a "food" setting, which just shows you how many cooking blogs there must be out there these days!), is of some of the ingredients for Carrie's contribution, a South African dish (kind of in the meatloaf family) called bobotie (pronounced buh-BOH-tee; from what I can tell, you should pronounce the T instead of turning it into a D), being browned. Carrie's the one holding the spatula/spoon, which may be the one Tim made and gave to me, I think my senior year at AU.





This is what it looks like after it's had stuff put on it and it's been baked. On top so far are raisins and chutney, and I think curry powder went into the dish. Still to come: some kind of eggy topping as well.





Changing the view, here's the dough for pelmeni. You mix flour, salt, water, and eggs, as I did in one batch; or you can substitute milk for the water and add a little vegetable oil, as I did in another.





And these are the almost-finished pelmeni; I didn't get a shot of the filling, which is ground beef, ground pork, finely-minced onion, and salt and pepper, all mixed together. Once the pelmeni look more or less like they do in this picture, you can boil them right away, toss them in a little (or more) melted butter, and serve them with a dollop of sour cream or a mixture of mustard and vinegar. Carrie and I did that for dinner (we went the sour-cream route, topping-wise). Or, if you don't want to cook them right away because you can't serve them right away - like if you need to take a bunch of them to church tomorrow - you can freeze them uncooked and then just boil them from frozen.


By the way, as predicted, these really did take me a heck of a lot of time. Granted that some of this wasn't mixing or assembly time; I also boiled some pelmeni up for dinner, washed dishes, cleaned up the ground meat germs I'd probably strewn across the kitchen, checked my e-mail and Facebook from my iPod, gave my undivided attention to "News from Lake Wobegon," and probably did a couple of other things as well. That said, in the kitchen today I got through an hour of podcast material from church (an interesting thing I'd missed while I was gone last weekend), a respectable amount of All Things Considered, both hours' worth of A Prairie Home Companion, all but the last couple of minutes of Says You! (my iPod ran out of juice at around 8:57), and whatever music Carrie was playing. It took a long time. But the nice thing was that it didn't feel like a long time. It was a surprisingly-satisfying way to spend most of a Saturday.

And if you like those pictures, just wait 'til you see the ones I hope to take tomorrow of the feast in all its multicultural splendor.

Also, I had leftover meat mixture that I'm making into meatballs right now, so I should go and attend to those.

Seven Extremely-Quick Takes Friday: The I-Have-Only-Fifteen-Minutes Edition

(Note: This post was finished and submitted on time, but I did go back later to clean up several word choices and such. So if you're curious, not that I expect you to be, about what I actually can accomplish in only fifteen minutes...this isn't fully it.)

One: Laura's birthday party was very nice. Her family seems to believe in doing it up right: despite its not being a milestone birthday for her as far as I know, there were lots of people (both family and friends), the family brought very nice gifts, and there was great food and an ice cream cake straight out of Cold Stone Creamery. As for the conversations, though people tended to gravitate to people they already knew, family talked to friends and friends to family affably, and things were low-key and pleasant.

Two: Having bought at least most of the ingredients for the pelmeni-thon (seriously, it's going to take a while to assemble enough of these babies to feed a respectable-enough percentage of my church. The ingredients themselves are mostly cheap and simple, but to get them into pelmeni form I am going to need counter space, time, and probably a couple of long podcasts or something), there is now a bunch of fresh dill in my refrigerator, just like Natasha used to buy. And I will tell you right now that I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to use it for (probably not the pelmeni themselves). But dill, along with sour cream, is among the Official Ingredients of Authentic Russian Cuisine (though I'm being wry with the capitals, I am also serious; Natasha used to go through a lot of it), so I am sure that it will come in handy somehow.

Three: School's still all right. Not much to say that I haven't said already, I think.

Four: I'm waiting for my Car Talk calendar to actually teach me something major and memorable about cars. In the meantime, though, there've been a couple of really interesting puzzlers. Did you know that some restaurants put a big magnet in the garbage can to catch silverware that's being thrown out by mistake? No word on whether it's supposed to catch said cutlery on the way in or, during the dumping process, on the way back out.

Five: Still on my to-do list: get another sweater to teach in. Some of the ones I have are really too old to be professional enough for my tastes. Hopefully it'll match my brown dress pants, because right now nothing I own does.

Six: I really only included that last item, which is boring even to me, because it's 11:57 and I'm running out of ideas.

Seven: Last night I started the book The Great Typo Hunt, about two guys who went around the country correcting typos on signs (really). It should end up being pretty good.

Okay, I'm done - for more, see Jen!