Flat Lining

I wish something exciting would happen to me. I've been walking around in kind of a daze for the last couple of weeks with the days blurring into one another, no books or films or people to stimulate me, and I don't know what to do for myself to zap out of this blahtitude. It isn't depression. It's just...un-elation, un-inspiration, un-blaze-ation. That's it: there is no fire in me.

I got my passport in the spring and went to Costa Rica in July and had an amazing time. Since my sojourn in Central America, nothing has interested me very much. Not work. Not school. Not love. It's like I caught the curse of mere existence and only getting on a plane and going far away from my life again will cure me.

I had my "palm read" and a tarot card reading for the very first time in my life a few weeks ago and I pulled the card of "The Barren Woman." At first I was scared because I thought that this was fortelling that I would have no children. But when I heard that it meant that I was a woman who was unstimulated in all aspects of my life, I was comforted somewhat by this accuracy. The palm reader told me that I needed to take a great risk in order to become who I am supposed to become, that I have a gift to share and it is time for me to start really living my life. She also said that the line for my heart is very dark and long and that that was a good sign for meaningful love which I hope is romantic love. It was an interesting experience. The woman who read me was a colleague who didn't know me very well at all, but even if she was just guessing or saying the same generic things you would say to any single woman in her late twenties, I still keep thinking about what she said.

I need a jump start, the kind that you give to a car when it can't get going on its own. I don't know where the jolt can come from but I need it. I really need it.

A Thing Yet Unmaterialized

Last night I had a pregnancy dream. I was very visibly pregnant and the baby was coming late. I was past the due date some days and was really worried that the child would never issue forth. This was a first for me, this type of dream where I was the mommy-to-be in question. Where I am in life right now seems so far from the universe of this dream that I can't even imagine how I will get to that place.

Things that I don't remember or that weren't apparent to me in the dream:

-the father of my baby
-whether I was married
-whether I had been trying to get pregnant or if it was a happy accident
-where my mother was
-if my sister was pregnant, too, because we have vowed to only do it at the same time
-if my father was still alive
-how old I was
-how my career was affected
-how I had decorated the baby's room
-was I healthier (which I want to be when I become pregnant)
-was I glowing, as they say pregnant women do
-had my nose swollen, as many pregnant womens' noses do

Ten years ago, I would have considered a dream like this nightmarish. Now, I consider it extremely hopeful. I think that it is incredibly healthy and on schedule, so to speak. It is the right time to start thinking and dreaming about these things. It doesn't make me feel rushed, but it definitely made it seem as though it could be an actuality for me.

Not today or tomorrow, but one day. And since I didn't dream about fish, as my grandmother says, I don't have to worry about an actual undiscovered pregnancy right now. I would also have to be actively engaged in human biological acts that bring about conception and I am not. I am so thoroughly unsexed at the moment that I don't even know if I remember how. I actually can't remember the last time I was sexed, it was so long ago.

Ah well. Funny, tricky, pushy dreams our minds conjure up when we can't fight back. I wish I had made it through the delivery to see if my baby would have been as chocolatey as me.

Age 29: True Love Reality Unsettlingly Sets In

I'm starting to wonder if there's such a thing as "Him." Not as in the divine, one man upstairs sortof Him, but a made just for me, soulmate, life partner, eternal lover, love of my life, father of my children, best friend, finally figured out just where I'm ticklish and frequently tortures me in light of this new knowledge, my...man...Him.

I've been dating for a little while, perhaps six years (yes, it really took me a longer time than most other people to get started with this business) and I've mistakenly thought that I had come close, but each time I've been incredibly mistaken. Each of the separate times that I thought that he had found me and I Him, the men were all incredibly different. Which leads me to believe that the list of what I want/hope to find is an incredibly schizophrenic list or that I am open and willing to be surprised by the particularities that abound in the multitudinous manifestations of manhood on earth. Whatever the case may be, my radar has gotten tired and I don't know if I have the energy to keep up the search for the one true Him. I think that I must not be the only woman to have reached this conclusion and thus latched onto the very next him that crossed her path after her epiphanic loss of hope. Still, though this seems logical and the thoughts in my mind have changed from "Is he the one" and "Was this meant to be" to "Is his career stable enough for us to acquire a mortgage" and "Would he be willing to seek counseling if it turns out, as I anticipate, that he is reliable and financially viable but extremely comatose and bumbling in bed," I am disquieted by my new mind on this.

I do know that it is possible that the world has handicapped me by teaching me that it is a feminine preoccupation or goal to meet and live as happily as happily can be with one man for the rest of my life. Intellectually, I can understand that it may be irrational to imagine that one man could be the answer to all things romantic, secure, and companionable; no one person can be all things to or for you. And yet...I've always liked fairy tales. There is something in me that really stands up to listen when the stories romance novels tell of electric physical attraction between irreconcilably different personalities encountering one another only to reluctantly fall into bed and be forced to acknowledge that the chemistry that exists between them is like nothing they've ever experienced before and perhaps they should try to be together just as some force in the universe rises up and causes one of the parties to realize that the person they thought they were falling in love with after that great sex they had is not, in fact, the entire image of the person they'd fleshed out in their heads post-orgasm, until the one who lost their love realizes that the awfulness that the universe sent down was just a misunderstanding and that they really should be together, and forever at that, so they jump through hoops of fire and crawl through fields of briar to prove their love and they live happily ever such and such way we're all familiar with. I live for stories like this. They fill my heart and jumpstart my loins and I itch for my own story to start in its own particular way. Though I've known the folly of my desire--that these experiences do not actually occur in nature--almost since I began to purchase my first Johanna Lindseys, I can't help but to ache just for them rather more passionately than I ache for things like world peace or clean drinking water or a multi-party political system. I've wanted what I wanted. Until now. Until these days. I think.

There is this African man whom I met at the mailboxes in my apartment complex that I gave my phone number to somewhat absentmindedly who keeps calling me to tell me about the different types of cunnilingus and for how long he'd like to perform them on me. And though I am on all other days than the days when he calls an avid fan of this practice, when he talks of it, I am unmoved. He doesn't even try to pretend that he's interested in the kind of person I am in order to woo me like all other men do. He says we're not children--indeed, he really isn't. He is, in fact, 15 years my senior. And yet I keep answering the phone every third or so call because he works as a financial analyst for one of the major research universities in the city. He is also a part-time Economics professor at a few community colleges in the city. He won an academic scholarship to attend high school in the United States. He attended university back home in Ghana and then earned Masters degrees in India and Africa. He did tell me I was beautiful. He dresses nicely. Wears glasses. And so I found yesterday that I had conjured up ridiculous questions like "Would he want to father more children at his age" and "Would he marry again after having a bitter divorce" and "Will he really be as controlling and misogynistic as he seems to already be once he realizes that I am a strong, intelligent woman?" Even one year ago, I would not have entertained him at all. Yes, it could have been the wine I was drinking as I lamented springtime finding me with no prospects. Could be that I'm in serious estrus with no randy and sensible males strutting near enough me to recognize my state of need. Could be my mommy-o-meter tick ticking away letting me know that my conceiving days are numbered. Could be.

But this time I'm really not sure if taking what I can get isn't the way to go. Afterall, lots of other women do. (Not that it could ever, ever be this Ghanaian.) Still. Who do I think I am? What makes me think I should be so special as to think I deserve better than a middle-aged, intellectually unstimulating, clinical, sex-obsessed, inarticulate, politically and culturally unversed, divorced, stalkish, gray-haired, sexist man? The next one who is even slightly better than this may just have found a sucker freed of all illusions who'd treat him like he is her lucky day.

Damn. If this be maturity, I may begin to purposely regress quite soon.

May Every Higher Power Bless the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama!!!

If you know the truth, then you, too, must be for Palestine...

For those of us who need to brush up on our Ottoman Empire and/or Persian history so that we may have a context for the attrocities being committed by Israel and the resistance being waged by Palestine, here is an excellent website that gives a balanced, truth in the telling of history perspective on the conflict:

If Americans Knew

An especially thorough and enlightening section of this website is a resource created by Jews for Justice in the Middle East entitled "The Origin of the Palestine-Israeli Conflict." This document is not your typical internet fair; it is not the uninformed, biased, inflammatory, unacademic rhetoric you might find on 1,000 blogs on this topic. Instead, it is a collection of citations from scholars who have all analyzed and published authoritative, research-based and/or theoretical texts on this conflict. Some of the scholars cited are Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Benny Morris, and numerous selections from a text (pictured above) called Our Roots are Still Alive printed by The Peoples Press Palestine Book Project.

Other books on this topic which might engage you are:

The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

If you know the truth, too, share the truth.

Peace be upon you.

My Two Cents, My Vote

Barack Obama is the first national politician in my lifetime who seems to be keenly aware of the ways in which the intersectionality of the multitudionous experiences we have as Americans have made us all a new breed of citizen ready to forge revolutionary ways of governing ourselves and our country, relating to and communicating with one another, and creating or re-establishing connections with the rest of the world. He knows that times have changed. He knows that America has changed. He knows that we can be and do better than we have in the past beginning with letting go of stale, limiting, and anachronistic party allegiances that have so defined the nature of our political landscape up to this moment. I believe that his stated desire to change this country, i.e. to help the government of this country change/catch up to the changing ideals and needs of all, not a select few, of its citizens, is genuine. His intelligence, character, and the posture of servitude which has characterized his professional life are all things that I believe make him more than capable of leading this country toward a new horizon--one that it seems we have been standing on the precipice of realization of almost since the founding of this nation. I believe that he can help us to make good on the seminal ideal of "one nation...indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Show Me How

Don't ever say I love you unless you mean it. To do otherwise is a kind of cruelty that I don't think those who perpetrate it even consider. Saying it isn't nearly enough. When you say that you love, those to whom you have spoken these life-affirming and miraculous words go to look for that love. They ask themselves why and how you love them. And so to be sure that the gift they think they heard you give voice to is for them, to make certain that these words are truth, they seek it out--the tangible and intangible exhibition of your love. When you utter these words, no matter the kind of love, there is a promise to the being to whom they are directed also being made. When you say these words, you are promising to prove them in deeds. Be prepared to show. I believe in quantifiable evidence of love. That's right. It can be measured. And if you can't measure it, if you can't see it, if it can't be felt by the loved being, how can you expect for that being to believe in its existence?


Show me how, please.


I show You because I don't want You to ever doubt it. Or rather, I am compelled to act--my love must express itself to You--and thus You are shown.


Maybe You never learned how. Watch me, I'll show You. I'll hold your hand.


You can trust my love.



(For You to reference...)



Acts of Love:

1. Kiss

2. Make love with me

3. Cook for me

4. Engage in a thoughtful conversation with me

5. Return my call

6. Write (and SEND) a letter to me

7. Lock eyes with me

8. Care for me when I'm sick

9. Enquire about how I'm doing/feeling

10. Pat me on the back

11. Smile at me

12. Listen to me

13. Hug me

14. Recommend a book to me

15. Give/Loan a book to me

16. Communicate with me regularly

17. Give me a back rub

18. Take my car for an oil change

19. Brush my hair

20. Give me a foot rub

21. Set up wireless internet for me

22. Kill (or release into the wild) spiders or lady bugs

23. Acknowledge my birthday

24. Watch a movie with me

25. Invite me to your house

26. Introduce me to your friends and family

27. Show an interest in my writing

28. Tell me when you come to town

29. Make a mix tape/CD

30. Be nice to me

31. Forgive me when I say something inconsiderate

32. Forgive me when I pick a fight

33. Forgive me when I use you as the inspiration for a piece of fiction

34. Forgive me when I take a short break from you

35. Understand when I am hormonal

36. Don't accuse me, though, of being hormonal

37. Be patient with me

38. Procreate (a.k.a. "go half on a baby") with me

39. Tell me the truth

40. Take me seriously

41. Don't take me for granted

42. Read a book I recommend to you

43. If it may effect me, consider my feelings when making a decision

44. Respond to my emails

45. Write me an email

46. Remember my middle name

47. If you're a vegetarian, let me eat meat around you

48. Don't judge me for eating meat

49. Hold me when I cry

50. Make a home with me

51. Make attempts to connect other than text messaging

52. Help me to reach orgasm every time we make love

53. Tell me about your work

54. Tell me about your desires

55. Tell me about your fears

56. Tell me what you're thinking

57. Let me help you

58. Be vulnerable with me

59. Eat the food I cook for you

60. Travel with me

61. Laugh with me

62. Laugh at my jokes

63. Decorate my classroom

64. Take a nap together

65. Kiss my belly!!!

66. Say goodbye properly before you leave (my life or my presence)

67. Photograph me

68. Introduce me to your children

69. Hold my hand

70. Hold my hand when I'm scared

71. Go with me to the doctor/hospital

72. Rescue me from a predicament I've gotten tangled up in

73. Ask about my day

74. Pay attention when I tell you about it

75. If you have to go, stay until I fall asleep

76. Follow through

77. Be careful about my feelings

78. Create something (artistic) with me

79. Be fair to me

80. Call when you can't make it

81. Help me to paint

82. Help me to pack

83. Help me to move

84. Respect my privacy

85. Respect my need for solitude, every once in a while

86. Dance with me

87. Dance slow with me

88. Sing to me

89. Stop everything because you've just got to have your way with me!

90. Seduce me

91. Feed me

92. Put me in my place

93. Carry my wallet in your purse/bag/pocket -OR- carry my reluctantly donned purse

94. Miss me when I'm gone

95. Ignore the phone when we're together

96. Make time for me

97. Make time for me even when it seems impossible

98. Pick me up if I'm in an accident

99. Believe in feminism

100. Tell me, as gently as you can, when you don't love me anymore.



These have/do/will work for me. We're all different. Please feel free to borrow from this list. Tell me if it worked. Tell me what has/does/will work for you.

Letter Never Sent

I found a letter, never sent, that I wrote a little over a year ago.





__________,

Beginning in the earliest of our conversations, you expressed the sincerest desire, so far as I could tell, to protect me. You said to me, "People like you need people like me to help them navigate the world. You writers and artists, "you said with derision, " need to mate with people like me." Of course I asked "How are you?" Predictably you answered "Logical. Reasoning. Practical." I feigned offense even as we laughed together at your worse than simplistic reduction of us as individuals and what we could be if we were to become a forged entity. A unit. Which is something I never thought was the sort of existence made for me. But you were so keen on it. You were so invested in persuading me to have faith in this already settled, in your mind, idea of an us that I fell in love with you as I know it will never be possible to again. Not in this manner. Not with any other man.

In each of our exchanges, you have respected my mind, you allowed me to challenge you intellectually and you never once made me feel guilt or shame for daring to be your equal. And yet…you are a man, a being in which I had never found much value. So you were, to me, absolutely revelatory. Positively epiphanic. A brilliant man, not a feckless man. An ambitious man, not a man handicapped by any real or imagined persecution complex. A man who, still utterly inexplicably to me, just wanted to take care of me—in whatever way I would let him. Which was, of course, no way at all. I was (and in some ways still am, I will admit) ill-equipped to entertain those kinds of notions so anxious about my feminine autonomy I am in the habit of being.

I was so afraid of the threat you posed…but you wanted me to work. And you wanted me to talk back. And you wanted possession of my body. And you wanted to give me babies. And you called me your gee-chee girl. And the sound of your voice alone would make me flush with the most exhilarating, erotic fantasies. Your big to my smaller. Your power to my submission. Your confidence to my tentativeness. You as teacher, me as your ripe pupil. Even, on occasion, you as king—me as your courtesan straddling and purring in your lap. All of that strength so thoroughly wrapped around me that there would be no doubt as to who I belonged to. Because you made me trust you, I could be those things in private. You made me feel safe.



I wish I had finished writing. I wonder if sending it would have made a difference.

My Life in Movies

I was sent this rather long questionnaire in an email and thought that since I took the time to answer these questions, I'd post them here and try to get some of my blogging friends to answer them as well. There are some really good questions here.

1. Last film I saw in the theater:
The Grand. I really wanted to see something to make me laugh.

2. Last movie I watched on dvd/vhs:
Things We Lost in the Fire

3. Last movie I watched on tv:
Barber Shop 2

4. Last great movie you saw (for the first time, no repeated viewings):
Hearts of Darkness

5. Top three favorite movies of all time:
- Funny Girl
- The Color Purple
- Pride and Prejudice (A&E's version, not the new one with Keira Knightley)

6. Three comedies I can watch over and over and they still make me laugh:
- Old School
- Bottle Rocket
- Friday

7. Three dramas I can watch over and over without tiring of them:
- Legends of the Fall
- Nowhere in Africa
- Girl Fight

8. Favorite romantic comedy:
Knotting Hill

9. Favorite suspense/horror movie:
Alice in Wonderland

10. Favorite movie musical:
Chicago? My favorite musicals haven't been made into films yet.

11. My three favorite movies when I was a kid:
- School Daze
- Purple Rain
- Small Sacrifices

12. Three movies I loved when I was a kid that I still love now:
-Mississippi Masala
- Dirty Dancing
- Shag

13. Favorite movie based on a book:
Mansfield Park

14. Favorite sequel (think hard):
Dirty Dancing 2

15. Favorite movie that you know is kind of crappy, but you love it anyway:
The Last of the Mohicans

16. Favorite foreign film:
Y Tu Mama Tambien

17. Best documentary I've seen so far:
Control Room

18. Movie I put on when I'm really depressed:
The Mirror Has Two Faces

19. Movie that can make me cry even if I am in the happiest mood:
The Color Purple

20. A movie someone recommended to me that I ended up loving and the person who recommended it:
The War Room, Mrs. Lee (Gifted/AP Social Studies Teacher in High School)

21. A movie someone recommended to me that I ended up hating and the person who recommended it (but it's not their fault):
Something Japanese about a woman who has to learn how to cook while being trained like a ninja in the kitchen. Recommended by Ron.

22. Movie I recommend for everyone to see and why:
I think that everyone should see the Brazilian film Me, You, Them because it's about a woman who has been disappointed in love and so comes up with a revolutionary way that women can have all of their needs met by men in a committed relationship. It isn't the best piece of work cinematically but it is a particularly provocative conversation piece, not just between men and women but between women and other women and men and other men.

23. Movie I recommended for someone to see and still regret doing so:
I recommended Nurse Betty to my sister and cousin and they have never forgiven me for it.

24. Biggest movie let down:
G (Christopher Scott Cherot)

25. Biggest movie surprise (you liked it and thought you wouldn't):
Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins

26. Top three actors you would watch in anything:
- Roger Guenveur Smith
- Jeffrey Wright
- Don Cheadle

27. Top three actresses you would watch in anything:
- Frances O'Connor
- Julia Roberts
- Renee Zellwegger

28. Top three directors whose films you would watch no matter what:
- Alfonso Cuaron
- Julie Taymor
- Pedro Almodovar

29. Most overrated movie (please stick with stuff you've seen):
Office Space

30. Most overrated actor/actress:
Jamie Fox/Lisa Raye

31. Do you have a favorite screenwriter? Who and what is your favorite movie they have written?:
Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson as a pair

32. Three favorite movie quotes:
Too hard. Too many movies.

33. If you can remember it, worst dialougue in a movie ever:
Don't remember it.

34. Best dialogue in a movie ever:
Closer. Because it sounds like a play.

35. I can repeat every line from this movie verbatim while watching it:
Love Jones

36. Book you would like to see made into a movie and who you would like to see in it/directing it/etc.:
I think that books are just fine as books.

37. Favorite song from a movie:
My Man, Barbra Streisand's version from Funny Girl

38. Favorite use of a song in a movie:
We Are Men from Mulan

39. A musical artist you now love that you discovered by watching a movie and said movie:
Iron and Wine, In Good Company

40. Movie that you feel compelled to watch when you pass it flipping through channels:
Fried Green Tomatoes

41. A movie that you really related with in high school (like the maker was your kindred spirit/ these characters were your long-lost best friend): Only You, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Marissa Tomeii

42. Movie you loved when you were a teenager and thought you would always love, but does not hold the same place in your heart:
Dying Young

43. I was completely into __(name of movie)__ when it came out, I even thought about a t-shirt or action figures, but now I don't know what I was thinking.
No such movie.

44. I want to be _(this movie character)_ when I grow up:
Rose Morgan, from The Mirror Has Two Faces

45. Best movie character:
Gollum

46. Movie I could live in happily:
The Big Night, just for the food

47. Movie character soulmate (if only he or she was real and then you could live happily ever after):
Sam Shapiro, Adrien Brody's character from Bread and Roses

48. Deserted island movie (I know, why would you have a dvd player on a deserted island? just go with it): Saved this for last...still can't think of one.

49. Famous movie everyone's seen that I haven't:
All of the James Bond movies except the last one.

50. Movie I never want to see remade:
Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights or Jude the Obscure or Wide Sargasso Sea. No one gets them quite right.

51. Movie that inspires me:
Frida

52. Three pieces of movie memorabilia I own:
I don't believe in this.

53. A movie I saw and asked for my money back:
All the King's Men

54. Best movie watching experience in a theater (crowd rocked):
Jackass, the first one. Everyone was just as grossed out as her neighbor.

55. Worst movie watching experience in a theater (crowd sucked):
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I couldn't enjoy the movie as much because I was being sexually molested.

56. First movie I remember seeing in the theater:
I remember we saw Under the Cherry Moon...and that was a long time ago, but I don't know if it was the first one. The theatre we saw it in is now a porn theatre, though.

57. People I love to watch movies with:
Ron, because he always has something really "interesting" to say about the film and usually challenges me in one way or another about the film.

58. Fondest movie memory (home):
Does this count? Watching shorts in the middle of the night in the speech lab at Agnes Scott.

59. Fondest movie memory (theater):
The Island with Rajesh

60. If there was a movie that I can say might have changed my life, it was this one:
Nothing comes to mind. And I've been thinking through most of my 3rd period class. Plus, I can't take questions like this seriously.

I tag Mary and Mynna.

Calling it Home

Whatever it is that has kept me from writing, I am coming out of it. All around me there has been coming and going. With me, too. For a little while, now, I think I will be comfortable sitting in one place getting used to the surroundings.

I've moved twice in the past five months. I have had two or three relationships end, depending on how you look at it, in the past nine. I started a new job six months ago. In September, I fell head over heals for two little girls who belong to a friend of mine. I separated myself from them last week with more difficulty than I had anticipated. I started and stopped therapy. I've been caught up in steady motion and now I'm ready to sit down some.

I think renting a house with my mother and sister will help to achieve this tremendously. Already, I eat out less, spend more nights in--not counting this weekend when I've been knocked down by something of the severe flu variety. Still. Something happened wherein living with my mother again just made an enormous amount of sense. She, my sister and I all had three separate residences in various places around the city with three sets of bills and one day I just couldn't figure out why we were doing that when we could pool our resources and everyone could be a bit less strapped financially. My mother and I have not always gotten along, though, which is what made this decision blog-worthy. We are now in the honeymoon phase. I swear as incidents pop up, I will madly put them here. But for now there are just home-cooked meals, familiar cigarette smoke, and even an occasional packed lunch.

Plus I'm writing again. And the talking in the distant rooms does not even distract. It feels like home in this house.

I'm Thinking That...

There is nothing like a real job to make you absolutely aware of the unremarkable nature of your particular humanity.


I have been happiest as a student.


I voluntarily had my feelings muted. I regret it.


These days there is endless comfort in Scrabble. Sometimes three games in a single day.


My friends are all getting older.


More and more I am settling into womanhood much more easily than I had anticipated.


I long for a great romance but I believe that this notion is very much out of place in modern life.


I joined a book club of African-American women. I look forward to these conversations in a way that surprises me very much and my friends very little.


To be without passion for a man is like being hungry but not knowing for what.

I can't be mad forever.

Time By Myself?

A lady that I was talking to said to me that she didn't think I was ready for a serious relationship. I am afraid that what she thinks may be true. It never occured to me before she said so but the things I do are telling.


Essential-seeming qualities like patience, paying close attention, being weak or vulnerable (or both), and perhaps even being able to bare the waxing and waning nature of love are things that I can't wholly give myself up to.


I had believed that either you are or are not ready, one or definitely the other. But I think I am in some in between place. I can't figure out how to adequately describe it. It is sort of the think you're ready and wanting to truly love someone worthy of you place while being afraid that you could get really hurt and also not wanting to let go of all the just in cases just in case the love doesn't move in a way that makes sense or makes life good or satisfies, thoroughly.


This lady says in order for there to be room in my life for the things I think I want, I have to make room for them. I told her I thought it was possible to hold on to the safe things until the potentially beautiful and risky ones come along. It is possible, I told her, to still want quality even if you don't make yourself so lonely you could cry for it.

She told me that no one dies of loneliness--that it might be good for me. But people die alone and lonely all the time. I don't want to.

Pants on Fire

If you recognize the above then I am sorry for you. It means that you had, at least once in your life, a teacher who believed that creating something like this would help you to become a better writer and speaker of English. I am an English teacher who believes no such thing. But I teach this skill like it is sacrilege to forego it--with such fervor and seeming importance as I myself find it hard to believe. I have added articles and adjectives to the basic subject and verb structure of a sentence diagram today and as a result was asked by one of my brighter students the very same question I asked my graduate school professor of the History of the English Language when he introduced me to this, this...silliness: Why do we need to know how to do this?

I answered her as though I have been prepared all my life to answer questions I don't know the answers to.

I lied.

I told her that learning to diagram sentences would help her to understand the parts of speech better. I told her that learning to diagram sentences would help her to understand how sentences are formed better and so make her a better speaker and writer of English. And because you should be a trustworthy and upstanding person if you have my job, she believed me. I looked her right in the eyes and said to her words which will never be true for me.

What I could have said was that diagramming sentences can be fun, that it's like a puzzle you have to figure out with words and phrases, clauses and all of the grammatical pieces. I might have said that. It is that for me. I thought that it was ridiculous to sell it pretending it does something it doesn't do but I do like being given a complex sentence and being able to figure out the "picture" of that sentence. It makes me happy when I get it right. Brain teaser stuff. Like sudoku?

Anyway. I am an old-fashioned English teacher today. I pretend that breaking apart a sentence in this manner will help you to better understand how it then goes back together. I lie to innocent and not-so-innocent children about ways to improve their grammar. In this I do not buck the establishment. In this I do not want anyone saying about my students that they were denied a necessary portion of their grammatical education. So I persist.

I feel guilty, though. Like a follower. Like I'm not a revolutionary. But I've started now. Don't see how I can do a take-back.

Good Girls Get Flowers

If you were a person who knew me in the everyday, general sort of happenings of things--my students and colleagues, you understand--it wouldn't be a stretch to say that you would be surprised if you saw me become so spontaneously made happy by way of full-blown feminine, emotional hysterics by a random occurrence that you would say to yourself, "Well, now, I didn't know she had that in her!" Such a day and such an occurrence were this Friday past.

To make gross light of a situation that has by no means been close to goodness, it is enough to say that the teaching position in which I landed myself this school year has been unpleasant. The last few weeks, especially, as I claw tooth and nail to extricate myself from this place, have been rather a fright much more than once over. It hasn't been good for me. As a result, I have felt that my "teaching-game" has suffered because being in this place has made me feel that everything has been diminished by this employment. And yet.

Just at the beginning of my 4th period class, as my students were paper-ball fighting, begging to go to the bathroom, and updating one another on who broke up and made up while they were away at their elective classes, one of the office secretaries delivered me an arrangement of yellow roses with the slightest orange trim and little purple wildflower looking things with a beautifully tied orange ribbon with yellow polka dots. Lord Krishna, you would have thought I had been wholly unaware of the existence of a thing in nature called "flower" so outside the bounds of the teaching personality I have donned did I step when I was handed that loveliest of tangible tokens of appreciation and endearment. As those who don't know me well at all in my place of employment were quite surprised to see, I immediately burst into tears from the joy that simple gesture wrought in me. I was rendered absolutely feckless to really teach with the composure I am usually able to cloak myself in, no matter what atrocity has been rained down on me on any given day, for the next two class periods. That first class, being the ones who actually witnessed the spectacle I made of myself and my mad dash to the ladies room to get-it-together, were so stunned upon my return that they were entirely silent, actually conducting their research on famous authors like they were supposed to have done with not a single prompting from me to do so! Not quite able to keep a pesky tear from streaming down every five minutes or so, I busied myself with filling the white board with all the bibliographic directives they would need for their papers due in two weeks' time. I could feel them, I tell you, watching me to see if I would explode with emotion or feeling one more time so that they could believe that it had truly happened. That it hadn't, actually, been a dream they'd dreamed brought on by the agony they suffered from not having had the opportunity to piss from 7:30 am, when they left their lovely and not-so-lovely homes, until now at 11:00, when it was time for their scheduled, supervised bathroom break. (Scheduled and supervised, you see, because of the unfortunate incident of two male students and one female producing an amateur pornographic video during an unscheduled, unsupervised bathroom visit. Lost everyone the privilege of pissing when one freely needs to piss. Shame, isn't it?)

I didn't care about the tears, they could look all their fill--it was the hyperventilating that I did feel the need to control before paramedics had to be called in. (And fuck that. It would have been ABSOLUTELY horrible--have you ever seen the SNL skits "Appalachian E.R.?" Right. Nothing further to say about that.) All I felt was the most sincere surprise, the utterest of utter shock, and perhaps, a tad bit of validation that I was still, through the haze of evil I've had to wade my way through day-in, in this school-house, doing something right, or at the very least, meaningful for one woman's child. My bouquet was from a mother whose daughter I have taken under my particular wing this year, even though, often, the care I try to take with her seems to fall on deaf ears. This child--one I call one of "my children" raises my blood pressure on a regular basis concerning her choice of boyfriend alone. That aside, I love this child. I hadn't known that her mother knew that I loved her. And further, how could her mother have possibly known that I needed--really needed--that small token which was like a ruby encrusted tiara for being teacher of the year to me. I was full.

There are twenty days more, all things falling in line as they should, of work in this place with these children of mine--angels and devils all mixed in together--in this rural town. I shudder to think in whose hands I will be leaving them after I am gone. But, "it is what it is." (What the principal of this school-house consistently says in lieu of dealing with inequity, injustice, racism, verbal abuse, harassment, and the like from a certain segment of the population of both parents and colleagues of mine in this rural community.) It has been hard to see what good I might have done in this place, constantly confronted with the ill I do, apparently, as deemed by certain parties.

My roses are blooming, they are gloriously fragrant, and when they are gone, their memory will help the next four weeks go by with substantially less anxiety.

Plus!..."I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job..."

I am an English Teacher. I am good. I get flowers delivered which say so. Equivocally.

27...plus a day or two

It would seem I've accomplished nothing really important this past year. Last year at this time, birthday-ish, I said I needed a couch and a toaster and to fold my laundry. I still need all of that.

Isn't that ridiculous? But things HAVE actually happened to me.

I did finally get the degree in my hands from the grad school that I finished eons ago. Incredibly anti-climactic.

No longer have a roommate. These bills are kicking my ass.

Got a grown-up job much more easily than I believe you're supposed to be able to get one. Makes my ass clatter at least four times a week so much that I wish hillbillies would just fall off the planet.

Fell in love a few times. You know how that shit always manages to end up.

Was incredibly domestic by way of cooking up a meal for some man or other and watching him eat my cooking. No one died or got the runs, that I'm aware of.

Waited, waited, waited. And still haven't given that up. No change in the near future either, looks like.

Met some new people--always fun. Outgrew some old ones--never quite as easily done, that.

Discovered the best pedicure spot in town. I swear by Michelle's ability to cure cramps, heartache, boredom, water-weight gain, baldness, hammer toe (not on me, I saw her work on some cave woman's feet), etc., etc. Email me for her number, address, and whatnot. Sitting in her chair will make your entire week.

Had Thanksgiving and Christmas away from my family. Oh so refreshing!

Baby sat two little Indian girls all summer and learned all manner of phrases and food stuffs a la Hindi.

Linked back up with hundreds of old friends (actually 4) from high school who I never thought that I'd ever talk to/be with again. Words can't even describe.

Record low concert-wise. Can only remember one which is really sad.

My sight deteriorated at a significantly faster rate in the past year than in any other year before this one. Got that checked out. Still sexy as ever.

Freaked out an awful lot about turning 27 beginning almost immediately after I had turned 26. All that "it's the age where you have to decide" business. But it is a FACT that feminine biology begins working in a way that counters logic the closer you get to 27. It was my body turning against my mind, my intellect. Shit was real. No joke. Only now that there was no implosion at midnight on 2/18 am I starting to calm down.

I do know that what I've had is no longer enough. Everything good to you isn't good for you.

All that good for you can make you forget who you are. Roses still being roses and all. Actually a pretty powerful sentiment.

And have been told that I talk too much, am too outspoken, think I know everything, over-analyze and the like by all kinds of people. Never women. So that's the same, too.

My reluctant acquiescence on being a modern renewed. Seems I might be a character in a book. Can't wait for that to turn out.

Good to have some things carry over. Over and over more.

Wish you could've had some cake. The middle layer of icing was just...sinful. Thanks, GHP.