When I woke up, I remembered lying and wondering, “could I move there?  could I teach and live and work there?”  Of course not.  Right?  I get on this hamster wheel in my head every now and then where I run around and around the idea of picking up and shipping off for a new course, a different life.  It’s not because I’m unhappy.  It’s not because I don’t like where I live.  I just get this claustrophobic feeling that if I don’t push for this adventure now, if I don’t make this life what I want it to be, it will never happen.

I feel like I’m running out of time, because I’m sure I’ll want to settle down someday.  Honestly, I don’t want to anytime soon, and I just want to be my own spirit, and move, and make some mistakes, and challenge myself, and learn, and grow in ways I may never have a chance to do again.  I want to write a novel. Or a memoir.  Or a collection of wanderings and observations about my travels.  And I don’ know why it has to be Europe, why it has to be England.  Maybe it doesn’t.  But ever since July 2009, I haven’t stopped thinking about it.  I have the doctoral program catalogs from London universities sitting quietly on my bookshelf.  I have my e-mail correspondences with different programs stashed away in a g-mail folder.

But will I do anything about it?  Should I calm down and just get a few years of teaching under my belt and revisit?

Perhaps.  The catharsis of admitting these hopes feels better.  It makes me feel like I won’t let myself forget that I want this.  Now to just work, and hope, and wait.

I started full day inservice (8:30 AM – 3:30 PM) at Fulton High school on July 27th and I can count on one hand the times I have seen anyone outside of school, class or work since that started.   With the advent of inservice, I was moving into the final project phases of two summer classes, packing up my life to move from the 6204 back to the parents’, and working odd shifts at work when I could.  Davey came to visit for a few days last week in the midst of the chaos for some of the last times we’d see each other before his move to Memphis.

These past two weeks have been some of the most chaotic and stressful that I’ve experienced in a long time.  I feel frazzled, spread thin, and frustrated that I am only managing to produce semi-average work as I’m pulled in so many different directions.  Also…I miss my friends.  We are all slowly but surely entering new seasons, new chapters, and I’m afraid of what I’m missing.  Our relationships will all begin to change, for better or worse, and they all mean more to me than they ever have before.  I hope they know it.  As my new routines start settling into place, I am coming to terms with the reality that these next nine months will hold significantly less time for fun and friends.  I can deal with this.  I know I am pursuing the career that I want, the life that I want, but I am terrified at the idea of losing touch with best friends I’ve had for almost a decade or more.

I’m in starbucks, who FINALLY realized that charging $2.99 for internet was a bunch of garbage and now offers free WiFi.  This rare downtime between inservice and class tonight has been a much needed break.  Tonight is my last night of summer class, thank heavens.  With summer classes behind me, getting settled back in at home, cutting back at work, and getting into a routine at school, I’m hoping things will start sorting out and I’ll get a better grip on this looming challenge ahead of me.

Will finally get to see the gp ladies after class tonight and I can’t wait.  I’ve missed them SO MUCH.

Conversation with an American Writer

"You have courage,"
                    they tell me.
It's not true.
               I was never courageous.
I simply felt it unbecoming
to stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.

I've shaken no foundations.
I simply mocked at pretense
                            and inflation.
Wrote articles.
                Scribbled no denunciations.
And tried to speak all
                       on my mind.
Yes,
     I defended men of talent,
branding the hacks,
                    the would-be writers.
But this, in general, we should always do;
and yet they keep stressing my courage.
Oh, our descendants will burn with bitter shame
to remember, when punishing vile acts,
that most peculiar
                   time,
                         when
plain honesty
              was labeled "courage"...

Well…I can’t get the movie to load on wordpress for some reason. tried two different mediums, but anyhow, please just click here and you can watch it!  Don’t you want to see how big of a nerd I am?

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

For one of the first times in several months, I feel as though I am back to being myself.  I can not only face challenges, but surpass them, and excel.  I’m more and more excited about a chance to teach my own classroom, fully prepared to fail and fall on my face more times than I can know now.  I’m not afraid to fail, and I’m not trying so hard to be perfect anymore, either.  I don’t feel guilty, and if I get sad, I know that it can still be a productive emotion, or if nothing else, passing.

I’ve accepted that being self-conscious = being human.  Being self-conscious doesn’t negate confidence.  I’m confident in whom I am this very moment, and even more so about the person I am coming to be. i am so blessed by the family, friends, resources, and education available to me, and I look forward to making the most of each one.  

A thought from one of my favorite poems keeps running through my head, “our lives happen between the memorable”, and how all the mundane, unimportant events in my life are my life. Hopping off the tube at Russell Square for the 15th time, spending all day at Gulf Park for the 213th time, convening for a girl(z) nite for the 137th time, playing that Neko Case song for the 78th time, and every other step of life that becomes a routine or an expected will all be the pieces of life I miss when they are gone.  When you lose someone to time or space or death, you remember the big events you shared, but you miss the tiniest, most unexciting parts of that relationship like how they smell or what their voice sounds like when they’re tired.

Just some thoughts from me, sitting on my fake porch on a gorgeous spring sunday.  I’m gonna dedicate this post to the golden summer, and for those of you who shared it with me<3

nurses her broken window bruises

while her doors rot

and fold into her empty belly

the drooping fan on the porch

turns only on a wind’s whim

and her paint once warm 

and bright like a canary’s coat

now chips, flaking off

like sallow, dead skin.

a quick, shuffled dance of fingers

the casual comfort of song

each verse falls

like footsteps

that have walked these roads

through every season

These are also her parting words when we go, every time.  The reason these words always stick out to me is because she says them with such warmth and sincerity.  She’s not just going through the motions of greeting family, she is making sure that whenever we see her, we are reminded that she loves and cares about us.  I am so amazed and thankful to continue to have such a wise, loving, and Godly woman in my life and my family.

“For Shakespeare, like no other writer before or since, wrote the spoken word, and that is why it can still excite us when we speak it aloud…I think what is important is to get these young people to experience a feeling of owning that language, of having the right to express it in their own way – and so feel part of it.”

This book provides over 200 activities, exercises, and games.  At the end of his forward, Cicely Berry spells out the real importance of books like this, and teachers that want to use them:

“Business jargon and techno-speak are so taking over our lives that we could be in danger of losing the imaginative essence of our language…we must keep Shakespeare alive and speaking in the classroom”

<- This is Shakespeare’s “north face”.  The iconic image that most could immediately associate with his name.  Shakespeare’s editors chose this image to appear on the cover of the first folio as a memorial image in 1623. Today, this image projects connotations like stiff, ancient, intimidating, or even boring.  But Shakespeare was like…the Steven Spielberg, the Martin Scorsese of his day, except even COOLER (ok, an opinion there, but you get the idea).