Writing as a way to beat the blahs?

This morning I woke up groggy and irritable.  Somewhere in the six hours of sleep I got  I had an unhappy dream, and the bad feelings from it were still with me. After scraping my window, then getting sandwiched between two “oversized load” semis and getting to work late, I was feeling pretty tired. You know that existentialist’s question–why am I here–? It was rippling slowly through my brain all morning. Except it wasn’t in the existentialist sort of way. I was more wondering why the hell I had to come to work, when  I figured that no students would be in to see me today (it’s a writing center day at the UC). I felt  very much a part of drudgery mode.  I also had a stack of papers I’d wanted to grade, but having forgotten the rubrics at home, I had to set them aside.

And then… then I got an email from the editor of  POET’s quarterly magazine,  Vital. POET is the ethanol manufacturing organization here.  I’m doing some freelance for them now,  and his email included more specificity of what he’d like in this upcoming article. It’s about ethanol brewers who brew their own beer, and should be a lot of fun.  I’m not sure how it happened, but somewhere in thinking about what he wanted for the article and how to deliver it my brain fog and soul funk went away.  It felt good to be creative, to see what kinds of angles I could take on this story to really make it pop. I’m often amazed at just how synchronous the world is.  When  I feel flat and gray, something pops up to make the day better.  Often times its writing, but sometimes that’s the cause of my pain. I don’t think there’s any way to get around that, but I wonder why we writers put ourselves through the pain of that kind of bipolar life. 

I know that my writing is the only way to beat my blahs, I guess I just need reminded of it sometimes.

Variations II

I sat at work and read poems today:
Atwood, Collins, some guy named Bruce*
They wrote of travel through sleep, distant moons and the sweet white brilliance
of truly knowing
I sat at work and drifted across the page, the screen, the day
And I thought of you
I’m not sure if you believe me
when I tell you I love listening to you talk
about books or work or your past loves
But I do
And I’m not sure that you believe me
when I tell you it’ll be up to you
But for now none of that matters
Because I know
that for every time I’ve looked up at the moon
its icy brilliance reassuring
And wondered
I know now that I’ve been wondering about you

* see previous post, “Variations”  to get a better sense of the poems I spent the day reading and thus was influenced by here.

Variations

It has been hard to entertain myself today. This morning I awoke  to an empty bed, a cold room. I shuffled through the morning, teaching, thinking, speaking on the fly. Preparing for classes has me unraveled most days. It’s not that I can’t get into the subject matter, I just can’t get into my class.  Half the class-exactly-is failing. They don’t show up, they don’t care, they text while I talk, then forget they didn’t get the assignment because they were off in cyberland. The other half is into it; we have discussions, we debate, we laugh. I am in it for them, exactly. So this afternoon, sitting here in front of the computer with papers to grade but no motivation, I shuffle through the motions once again, visit Salon, and Facebook,  then Poetry.org. Poetry.org offers up something worth my focus.  Poems offer something, always, even if  that something is not quite clear.  That feeling, that spark of oh! that flares up then fades as fast as it came on… THAT’s where breath happens. THAT’s where understanding is. THAT’s where life happens.  I’ve found that moment  three times today, here, in Billy Collins’ forgetfulness, where he writes on the process of forgetting:

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

That line at the end,  with a love poem moon drifting across my stream of consciousness… that’s the moment I want to hold on to and know right now. I want to hold on to this image because in doing so I am reminded (I remember, not forget) all those times when a love poem moon has illuminated my face and heart. I am taken into the power of the word to alter memory (and thus reality). And  here in Margaret Atwood’s Variation on the Word Sleep I find myself again wanting to participate, to know. To feel.  To be something other than this, today.

 I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

 In poetry the nothingness of breath and the space of  inhaling becomes something tangible, no more mere ideas but beings.  Here, in poetry, in this moment of lungs expanding and mind knowing and ideas and memories connecting do I find myself centered, brough into a moment as I’m taken out of the one I’m really in.

I suppose I should be grateful that my boredom instantly leads me to Facebook, because FB is where I began my Poetry.org quest today, as someone had posted this think piece of a poem,  Bruce Smith’s Untitled [I closed the book and changed my life].

I closed the book and changed my life and changed my life and changed my life and one more change and I was back here looking up at a blue sky with russets and the World was hypnotic but it wasn’t great. I wanted more range, maybe, more bliss, I didn’t know about bliss. Is bliss just a rant about the size of the bowl? The trance was the true thing, no, the rant, no, the sky, now, that icy whiteness.

It’s so short,  this poem, this snap, this moment of being here and alert, this life… One more, one more change indeed. But how to get there, to make that flash happen? Where to find the icy whiteness when it fails to shine outside words?

Grateful for all that is

Another year almost down the drain! Just a month ago I was sitting in front of this computer, chillaxing at my parents’ place during Thanksgiving, and here I am again, procrastinating with lesson plans and my own writing once again.  It seems like only a few weeks ago that I was with my family for my dad’s birthday and my aunt’s birthday part in June; wasn’t I just turning 28, like a few days ago?  Nope, 29, two days ago, to be precise.   It’s a cliché to say it’s hard to believe that the year has already passed me by,  so I try to avoid saying it, but it’s true. 2011 is almost history. And what a history I made for myself this year.

As I review the past year, I’m proud of my accomplishments, thankful for all the struggles I went through with the heart-grenade kid, and even happy to find myself teaching once again.  I’m not sure if the end of the year will find me working as a teacher still, but at least I’ve learned that I can get through a class, help students and find meaning in all my fuckups. As I look toward 2012 I’m excited about making time for me, now that I have no “real” homework” assignments (lesson plans, though, have replaced them), and getting to the gym on a regular basis. My friend Shannon and I want to participate in some kind of uber 5K thing later in 2012, so I’m working on getting into  5K shape myself.  Next year at this time I’ll be 30, so the time to get back my runner self is now!

  I’m  sad that  the HGK and I will probably never be friends in the way we were during the good times in the past year, but I am sure that the next guy will  be thankful for all that the HGK made me work on in myself and consider as a relationship partner. I hope he has learned something from me, too.  I’m feeling pretty confident that I truly learned what is important to me as I look for a partner, and what I can and can’t deal with.  It’s a bummer to know I can’t go for the 90% spontaneous/10 % stable mix anymore, but I guess it’s a good thing to know!

The other big part of self-awareness for the year is really knowing that I will no longer be able to do a job “just to get by” anymore. No, I have experienced the awesomeness of what it means to discuss books and ideas and writing and stories as part of my job, and working in an environment any less stimulating and challenging would just kill me. More than a bad day on the job does.  I’m no so certain that teaching is where I really want to be-no time for my own writing-but I AM certain that I want to stay in higher ed, in some capacity. I’ve always loved being a student, or being in that academic atmosphere, so it shouldn’t surprise me.  The PhD has tickled my brain again as of late, but I’m holding off on that for now because I want to keep the  promise I made to myself, that I would take it easy for a year after graduating and work to publish some of the shit I worked on for two years.   So with 2012 and 5 months left in that “year,” I’m trying to just focus on what’s in front of me right now.   I have my other goals for the year of course (work on Spanish, take some math classes, learn Excel and Access), but one of the other things I really want to work on is simply being grateful for what I’ve got going for me.  Spending time at home as much as I have in the past year (was home in Feb., then April, then June, then August, Nov. and now) has been great, so the schedule I’ve got is somehow perfect. Even if I can’t see it as such sometimes. 

I think feeling this way is the best way to end a year, and if I can carry this sentiment over into much of the next year, then who knows what a year from now will have me doing, as I sit here, plunking away at the keyboard, in the basement in Nebraska.

Limiting education but ignoring the obvious

It’s another beautiful day in the neighborhood. As I sit in my living room and stare out the window,  rivers of condensation run down the outside panes of  glass. We’ve had 50 degree temps here all week, and it’s almost Christmas. I rally for nice weather until Thanksgiving each year, and for the past 3 years it has paid off.  I like this, but am reminded of how different the weather patterns are now than they were 20 years ago.

When I was a kid I used to build snow tunnels and forts into the banks of snow that drifted up against the north and east sides of my house. These things would reach the roof some years, and since I was never cold back then, I loved playing in that stuff all winter long.  I hate being cold now, and am, much of the time,  so I don’t miss that snow so much. But seeing just how much things have changed in my lifetime is kind of eerie.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that the earth has undergone several cycles like this: warm, cool, warm, Hot, cool, cold, cold Cold.  What’s on my mind today though is the way South Dakota has tried to handle the subject.  It’s bad enough that the government tries to limit women’s reproductive rights here, but in the past politicians have also tried to limit what can be taught about climate change,  and how.

From a resolution passed by  last year’s House (and appearing at the Center for Environmental Journalism website):

BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:

(1)    That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;

(2)    That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and

(3)    That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.

It’s like a precursor to the Scopes Monkey Trial.

I’m not too worried that the earth is going to blow up or melt down completely in my lifetime (and to be honest, what happens after I’m gone doesn’t really phase me either), but I do believe that making kids aware of the changes is important so that as they age and become  good like American consumers they can make informed decisions about what to do to lessen their impact on the earth.  However, being a good lil’ American consumer goes against the grain of frugality and necessity, which is ultimately part of the problem with the human contribution to climate change.

A career is just something to do until you die

I did a daring thing today. I emailed the head of the creative writing department at a regional college to inquire about part of the PhD application process.  To me, a critical paper at this point in the game is backed by a research study, a hypothesis, and detailed outcomes. My MFA didn’t require or offer any such thing, and I’m pretty sure most creative writing programs don’t.  But because the critical paper is the one part of the PhD application I don’t already have, it’s the one thing holding me back from doing something potentially dumb/rewarding like getting my doctorate.

Now, I’m not so sure that a PhD will happen for me  right now.   I mean, I know I want to continue bettering myself as a teacher, because I want to be as effective as possible. I know I want to continue learning, and what better way to do that than continue the education path I’ve been on for all but 10 years of my life? And I know that only in enrolling in a structured teaching program will I get what I missed out on in the low-residency MFA program I participated in.

BUT what I really want to do is travel. Go around the world. Open a hostel. Meet people from around the world. Get sand in my toes.  Or else I want to just read manuscripts and be involved with writing from a publishing point of view. I KNOW without a doubt I must be involved with writing and words and ideas in some way. I cannot comprehend the idea of going back to a drudgery job where people use their minds for menial tasks.  I was thinking the other day that I miss having time to write, and I do, but no retail job is worth that. Unless it was a bookstore job… And still, even then, I dunno. So the problem with my wants and desires is my needs. I NEED a job that pays more than minimum wage. I NEED a job that stimulates me but doesn’t overtax and leave me stressed and frazzled. And I NEED a job that is a career, not just a job.  Someday I want to own a house (or that hostel) and I know that I’ll want a retirement plan some day, or at least enough money of my own to stash away over the years.

So.  Even though I am seriously in love with the idea of running away and doing nothing, I know I need that career.  It’s a depressing thought– that I can’t job hop anymore– and last night I was really feeling that a career is just something to do until you die. Despite the sobriety of that fact, it’s true.  Which is what prompted me to contact this English department. If the reply is favorable, and they will let me write the kind of essay/hypothesis/literature review I want to write, then full steam ahead.  I’ll try to get into grad school 2.0. If not, well, Colombia sure sounds nice. Maybe I could have a literary themed hostel and travel journal?

Boy rant

It’s official. I have lost faith in the male sex.

To be specific, I mean I have lost my belief that any man who I am more than friends with will ever be able to take care of himself, much less me. It doesn’t matter to me if my male friends stay up until 4 am., sleep till noon, own more video games than books, and aspire to nothing more than clean laundry, good beer and equally “chill” friends. The male friends I have I have for reasons such as camaraderie, humor, dependability, and the willingness to make me laugh or help me hang a picture.  But I don’t think of my male friends as potential sperm donors, men I want to spend every day of the rest of my life with, or men that I would trust with my life if I had a deadline and a sick baby.

And since most men I know today fall into the  category I first listed,  I have lost my faith (maybe I mean respect?) for most males.

I think I’ve been remotely aware of this for a while, but last night my roommate (who is a male and a friend, yet not someone I want to share chromosomes with), his cousin and I sat around and discussed everything from the state of politics to society to technology.  They all converge, really, but…

I heard myself saying, with disgust, even, that I can’t believe how most of the men I know would rather just sleep in than do anything productive.  Our culture portrays this in the media, and has since I was little, so  boys and young men grow up wanting to do this–hell, I want to do this too–but it seems like it’s reaching pretty epic proportions.  Where are the men who grew up with work ethics, structure and goals?  Do I just not meet the right people any more?  Probably.

For as hard as I am on the male gender right now, I know I’m not perfect. I, too, want to live my cushy lifestyle, do what I want when I want, and eat Cheetos all day.  But I don’t. That’s the difference.  This is a hot water topic, I know.  But I wonder how many women feel the same way I do, and what we’ll do about it? Studies show that we’ll stay single longer– men and women both– and in the book Manning Up: How The Rise Of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys shows that men have chosen to stay children.

In a section on Maxim Magazine, author  Hymowitz writes

Victoria’s Secret cover art was not the entire key to Maxim’s success…what set Maxim apart from  other men’s mags was its voice.  It was the sound of guys hanging around the Animal House living room –where put downs are high-fived; gadgets are cool;  rock stars,  sports heroes and cyborg battles are awesome; jobs and Joni Mitchell suck, and girls are simply hot–or not.  In other words, Maxim asked the [single young male] what he wanted, and got this answer: he wanted to hear he didn’t have to grow up.

So. Call me a feminist–or a bitch– but I have to agree with  Hymowitz.  But it’s not just men. I don’t want to grow up a lot of the time, either.  Except I know I have to. Or maybe, to play on words, I accept  I have to.

The problem becomes, as I, and other females move forward, if we no longer want to play with the boys, what kind of future are we growing up into? A wholly feminized world, like that envisioned by  feminist writers from the 70s ? That sounds terrible as well.

Now, I’ve not yet read all of this book, so I’m not quite sure how women are to blame for this predicament in which we find ourselves (maybe it’s not a predicament?), but I am interested in learning  more. If anything, the above Maxim stuff I’ve pulled out makes it sound like the media is to blame, more than women.

Here’s to you, ma

“At thirty-four I became the matriarch of my family.”

So writes Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, her memoir/exploration of what was happening to the birds near her home in Utah  when the Great Salt Lake began to rise to unprecedented levels.  I had to read the book for a class a couple of years ago, and it’s on my mind tonight for the above quote.  I was thinking about my mom, wishing I could call her and ask for advice, but she’s in Colombia, her own place of history and family. “I can’t call her,” I thought, “so this is what it would be like if she were dead. I’d want to talk to her, but couldn’t.” And then I began to think about how someday she WILL be dead, and I won’t have her to talk to at all.  It’s not like she’s very good at giving advice– she’d rather talk about work or her friends or even the dog than think about a useful way to answer my questions–but  I’m finding that there’s something nice about at least having a mom to call.  Like, just the fact that someone who loves me unconditionally exists and is available to call is nice. Even if she gives me shitty advice, or in most cases, hardly even listens. She hears, but listens… no.

As I lay on my bed thinking about this–mom, not having a mom anymore (Tempest Williams’ mother and grandmother both die of cancer in her book), being a matriarch, and being old and established enough to be a matriarch, I began to feel rather doomed.  I, who want my legacy to be in books and parchment and words, began to think about how sad it must be to finally be at that place–alone, the only one of your kind–and what it must feel like.  Like being the only person left in the world?  Probably not. That’s pretty dramatic. But it’s also incomprehensible to me right now.

Incomprehensible, but spooky.

Too black and white

October! Good. I’m delighted to see that I’ve written something in the last two months. I forget that writing is what has squelched my writing here–the Rose Metal Press  chapbook contest opened Nov. 1 and closed Dec. 1, so I was busy with that kind of writing. No extra outside stuff. Other than writing comments on papers, the chapbook has been my life. And I missed the deadline, not paying attention to the time. But I have an almost 40 page chapbook to show for  the effort. And it feels good, as it is a substantial piece of work post-MFA, and I can see the flaws and triumphs in it with a practiced eye.

I started making some new edits tonight, in hopes of breaking up the pieces into smaller groups or stand-alones, to send off for non-contest hopes of publication, and I even wrote the corresponding query letters for each cluster of pieces. Since it’s flash, I want to them out in groups of three, but for some of the other things that didn’t go into the chapbook, I have some stragglers. This means more writing, to round out a one or two set into a fuller group.  That, too, feels good.

I was talking to a valuable critic and friend tonight, telling him how I cannot get motivated to write unless I have something  specific to work toward, and although grad school helped me work through that, I feel that old laziness habit creeping back in. Not laziness, necessarily, but more of an undefined emptiness that prevents me from working if I don’t know who my audience is or what I’m working toward.   Feeling the rare bite of motivation today, I spent the afternoon and night working on this stuff, and I realized that the other part of my inability to do anything lately (lately as in the last month, since I’ve completed the chapbook) is that my life is so consumed with papers and writing and lectures that when I get home, although I want to write, I have no desire to think any more.  My critic friend told me he just drinks a lot to shut his brain down, but I can’t do that anymore. Oh, I probably could, but  that too, like my writerly time and motivation, has kind of been pushed aside for the business of being an adult. If only there was a way to mix them.  I mean, I did find a journal tonight that promised to support and carry the work and interests of the girl who is a kindergarten teacher by day and a go-go dancer by night.  There are people out there who can juggle both daggers, I suppose, but I don’t think I’m one of them.  It’s too black and white for me, although I want both.

I want to get the doctorate and study language and all of that.  I know it’s the only way to secure that job that well, secures me and my future. But I also want the time and clarity to write, and if what I’m doing now (with just  Comp and tutoring) doesn’t allow the mental energy for that, then what will a full-time, big-time job do for my writing life?

Phooey. Just when I think I’ve gotten over one rut (yes, I am willing and able to teach again! after my despair post school) I find myself spinning into another one. Made of my own mind and opportunity, of course.  The one good thing about posting so infrequently here is that I can see just where I was at 3 months ago and gauge it.  One of these days I want the points A and B to be very far apart, very dissimilar in terms of uncertainty.

Oo yah, accents are a problem

Sometimes I have a hard time settling on my place within an issue. For instance, today I read an article in the NY Times about teachers in Arizona who speak with heavy accents. Apparently, the state used to send in “monitors” to listen to the teacher’s enunciation, then “grade” these teachers on whether or not their accents got in the way of student understanding.

The teachers who were found to have strong accents were not fired, but their school districts were required to work with them to improve their speech. That was the case even when the local school officials had already assessed the teachers as fluent in English.

That practice was done away with when a concerned citizen filed a class-action complaint with the Federal Department of Education against the state in 2010, for discriminating against these teachers. The Justice Department got involved, and the state changed its policies in August. At first I was outraged that people would be discriminated like this, then I thought about it a little more. I’m  still stuck on my feelings. My sense of humanity tells me it’s wrong to put someone’s career in jeopardy because of his or her accent. My mom has a really thick accent, I have friends with various accents, and I work with  a lot of amazingly brilliant and eloquent students who fall into this category as well.  So  being told your accent is too thick  is kind of like being told you’re  ”too fat” to do a job. However, there are jobs where weight and ability does matter. Call me an ass, but it’s true. I wouldn’t sign up for a personal trainer who was 300 pounds of pure flab. So I see where Andrew LeFevre, a spokesman for the State Department of Education,  is coming from when he says, of the monitoring,

It was a repeated pattern of misuse of the language or mispronunciation of the language that we were looking for. ..It’s critically important that teachers act as models when it comes to language.

To sidestep my humanity for a moment and draw upon personal experience (which is also of humanity, technically speaking, since I’m human) my  mom has a heavy accent, and her mispronunciation of words during my childhood led to my own problems with the word, sometimes in my misunderstanding of what she was talking about, and sometimes in my inability to clearly communicate an idea to someone else. This really sucked, so I can see the importance of learning language from someone who speaks it clearly. But as any of the ESL students I work with can tell you, none of us who speak English as a native language speak it clearly either!

The thing is, I’ve since figured out how to say most of those words correctly. My mom still struggles, and always will.  Yet she is as smart as they come, and she figures out a way to get her point across to her clients. S0 the problem then, is not in that words are mispronounced–because my mom is still an effective counselor–but in the way those without accents chose to think of language. Dialects vary from region to region, sometimes even within a region (living on Northside Chicago and going to Southside Chicago often illustrated this for me), but the meaning of words remains the same. In the end, isn’t that part of what an education is all about learning that things are different, and yet the same, al around us?  We are an increasingly multilingual, multicultural world community. Whether it’s one accent or another, today’s students are going to have to learn how to communicate with other accented tongues as our working class tomorrow.