Filed under: blog business
Thinking of changing the blog address and title for the millionth time, since I rarely blog about teaching or the ideas behind this blog originally. Ideas?
Filed under: Uncategorized
Last night we met up with friends and had dinner at Redrocks Pizzeria (yum) and then headed down to my new favorite bar. I’m not going to name it; I want it to stay in business but I also want it to stay a neighborhood bar with awesome cocktails and free of assholes. Not that you’re an asshole if you read this blog–all ten of you aren’t–but I’m not even Yelping it because I don’t want it to go the way of my past favorite bars. While eating dinner, the snow started. Big heavy flakes. The kind of snow we never get in D.C.
“YAY! SNOW!” We squealed. When we left Redrocks, it was still snowing. We giggled and danced and slid around. Then, at the bar (drinking winter drinks!!!), we kept talking about snow. People not from D.C. make fun of how D.C./Maryland/Virginia deals with winter weather; people also not from D.C. don’t understand that ice storms, what we usually get, are terrifying and you can’t drive or walk on an inch of black ice. Yes, the city shuts down in a blizzard, but we’re also not Minneapolis.
I hate most of mid-Atlantic winters: grey, sleety, windy, cold. I freaking love snow. As John said last night, it’s nice to have a payoff for it being cold.
(I cannot upload an image right now, but you can see my recent Twitpics on the left.)
When I was in my early teens, I bought The Silver Palate Cookbook. This book was so far from my childhood reality of tuna noodle casseroles and chicken chow mein. My mother does not cook; were she to live alone, I imagine she would live off Giant bakery cake and icing, and possibly some Stouffer’s frozen entrees. I do not mean that as snobbily as it sounds, though perhaps I do; I don’t understand how someone is unable to boil water, or at least chop and steam some vegetables.
But how I learned to cook is still a bit of a mystery. I often helped my grandmother make dinner, but she was the one who decided what we would eat. My mother grew increasingly picky as she grew older. I was not, though I hate frozen peas. I thought I hated broccoli then too, unless it was covered in Cheez-Wiz. Vegetables came out of a can or out of a bag in the freezer. Mashed potatoes came out of a box. Sauces came out of packets. There were a few notable exceptions (like the occasional beef stew or roast), but food was packaged and salty. At the time, I had no idea we were poor. When I went to college, I realized most of my friends did not live off this kind of food, and many had parents who embraced the religion of The Moosewood Cookbook.
Confounded, I realized my taste buds were only partially the result of picky eaters and culinary-skill-deficient women. Food, I now know, is the best indicator of a family’s socio-economic status. A can of tunafish would, with some celery and Miracle Whip, feed the three of us. A can of Campbell’s tomato soup, six slices of buttered bread and three or four slices of American cheese singles would be a comforting weekend lunch. We were poor.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I stumbled across this poem in a recent issue of The Atlantic. Often my reaction to contemporary poetry published in magazines like The Atlantic and New Yorker is “I don’t get it.” Sometimes, however, I come across a little gem; something that hits me in the gut. This poem did just that.
I don’t think my students realize this, but my creative writing class has been what’s kept me hanging on this semester. On the days where I could not get anything else done, I could read their stories and poems and exercises; I felt a duty to them, a feeling that I don’t have in quite the same way towards my college writing courses. My creative writing students have been champs this term–I worked them hard and had high expectations, and for the most part, they met and exceeded my expectations.
On the exam day, we’re having a formal reading, which I had in mind as a carefully chosen piece, spoken the way the writer intended for us to hear it–and thus having practiced it some. We’re normally an informal bunch, but this will require standing in front of the class and READING. Not reading, READING. With EMPHASIS AND FEELING.
My students ask if they can dress up. Make it really formal.
“Dress up how?”
“Prom dresses!” ”Suits!” “Tweed!” (Likely influenced by this, which I sadly missed because I was out of town.)
I said sure, why not. I also demanded that they follow through, mostly so I don’t show up like a dope decked out. (They are sneaky sometimes.) Then another student pipes up, “Hey, you should read.”
Little fucker. He’s lucky that I like him and that’s he’s a good writer. Of course then the entire class starts making various arguments about why I owe them a reading. I stupidly mentioned that I submitted an essay, and they demanded that I read from that.
Now here are various arguments I have batting about in my head about this:
- This course is not about me. I am the Professor, caps intended, and that’s a role I accept half-heartedly, but I love the advantage it grants me.
- What if students hear my stuff and then say, “Crap, she’s allowed to teach us?”
- My essay–should I grant their wishes–is about a lot of stuff I don’t necessarily want my students to hear. But then again, if it gets published, it doesn’t matter anyways and I will have to face up. And most of my work is like that.
- I hate reading my work and tend to go into full-blown panic attack beforehand.
- They have a point, that they’ve been sharing with me and each other all term, and I’ve been solely the voyeur/enabler/organizer, and they might deserve to hear stuff.
I love that motley crew. One student describe the class make-up as zany. I’d have to agree, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
A few weeks ago, I met an editor after a reading. He said, “Our contest entries for this latest thing have been pretty crappy.” I said (boosted by the courage that only three pints of Founder’s Breakfast Stout can give you), “I got somethin’ for ya!”. I think that in that moment, most people around me thought it was the stout talking.
A lot of other sides of me have been doing the talking lately. In fact, everything but me has been doing the talking lately. For two whole years, in fact. There’s a lot behind that, but I have a feeling I’ll get to that in the Alphabet soon enough.
Anyhow, I promised myself I’d finish an old essay and submit it, once my hangover wore off.
I just pressed submit. I’m going to throw up. My fear isn’t rejection; I know rejection. Rejection is what I expect. Rejection is sadly comforting. If I get this published, however, I’ve got to own up to the fact that what I write about isn’t pretty, or cute, or comforting. If I get published, my family may see it. My students may see it. My colleagues may see it.
Time to own up.
Filed under: Alphabet: A History
(There were a lot of D’s I considered. However, A through C have been falling into “confession gulch”, as my wonderful thesis adviser and workshop leader used to call it. So I picked something different.)
We began pestering our apartment’s management company in December. We had lived together for a year, were engaged, and we wanted a dog. Scratch that. We really wanted a dog. I coveted other people’s dogs. I talked to complete strangers just to pet their dogs. I was the creepy old person without a kid at the playground, except at the dog park.
In February, we got the okay to move forward. We went a few times to the Washington Area Rescue league, getting to know some dogs, even before we got the okay. One day we met Tandy.
Tandy was in her own little pen, because she fought with all of her previous “roommates”. When we passed by, Tandy looked up at us as we opened the top of the split door, and jumped up to put her paws on the ledge. She had a ridiculously long body and short legs, and a big head. Her eyes and ears were surrounded by black fur; half of her long snout was black and the other side was white. The white streaks up the middle of her face, and then there is a little white blaze on the top of her head. We saw she had a pink stomach covered in black spots, like a cow belly.
.About three years old, she looked like she may have had puppies early; she was rescued from a kill shelter in Georgia, had a mild case of heartworms, and had been at the shelter for far longer than any of the other dogs there at that time. She is a funny mix of corgi, border collie, and possibly some hound. She didn’t bark, or jump around, she just stared at us, and stretched her neck and her long snout towards us. Hello, she seemed to say. I’m here. You can pet me if you want. She was reserved, wary. We took her into the playroom. She was disinterested in toys, but when I sat down, she plopped down next to me and leaned on me. She didn’t fuss, she didn’t wag, she just leaned on me. And looked up at me. Hi. I like you. Don’t you like me? My eyes went watery and my heart felt like it would burst.
We visited a few more times. When we got a copy of our lease and were ready to put in our application, I checked the web site; next to her sad-eyed mug shot was a big red flag: “Adoption Pending.” I went into Denise’s office and cried. Mama D, as many of us called her (but not to her face), was my adviser, mentor and then colleague; she embodied maternal support as well as fear and respect, thus terrifying most of her students upon first meeting. She also was a dog lover.
“You get on that phone right now,” she said. ”And you tell them she’s the only dog for you. Right now!” I sniffled, and started calling and left a message on the Washington Area Rescue League’s answering machine, about whether Tandy was still available and that frankly, she was our dog. Ours. Not anyone else’s. I sent in the application anyways. No one called me back, so I called again on Friday.
“Yes, ma’am, we have your application now,” the nice lady on the phone said.
“But where are we in line?” I asked.
“The other application fell through,” the woman said. ”You’re next. Can you come in tomorrow?” I may squealed at an ear-splitting pitch, but it’s possible that I just did that in my mind.
We went to WARL Saturday morning, and found Tandy once again. We walked her around, and she wagged some when she saw us. She wasn’t able to exercise too much as she was being treated for heartworms. We had a preliminary interview with WARL, and crossed our fingers. On the next Wednesday, we got the call. We brought her home the next weekend, and promptly renamed her Josie. She answered immediately to it.
A year and a half later, Josie is the one who wakes me up at ungodly hours, takes up the whole bed with her long body, hides and barks at thunderstorms, begs for belly rubs and treats, plays keep-away with her monkey, sleeps in the sun in her chair, and licks John’s nose with abandon. She has different styles of wagging, depending on the moment. She jumps and runs in circles and tackles us if we say “treats’, “dinner” (breakfast, not as much), “chicken”, “squirrel”, or “chafing”. (We’re not sure why.) She hates running for long distances, other dogs, being alone, and thunderstorms. She participates in group hugs, and sometimes herds when one of us is in another room and she wants us together. She thinks she’s human, and many other people think it’s possible too. The night of Nov. 4, 2008, she came with us down to the White House where a crowd gathered; many people shouted at us, “Hey! It’s Obama-Dog! Yay dog!” Yay dog, indeed.
In caring for a pet, you realize other things about your significant other, things that you know but forget when you’ve been with someone for a while, things you take for granted. You see the your partner has for the pet, and you realize they share some of that with you. Every time I see John run towards Josie and wrestle her down to rub her belly, or I see them asleep on the couch all curled up, I’m happy. I get wrapped up in my head, but Josie and John take me out of that. And sometimes a good belly rub or a scratch behind the ears or some tug-of-war with a squeaky monkey is all you need.
While I’m sure many people who adopted dogs into their families believe this, I know I’m right: Josie is the best.
Joining Everything in Between, Charlotte’s Web, Jade Park and Fog City Writer working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. It’s called Alphabet: A History.
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Previous letters:
Filed under: Alphabet: A History
…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. — Joan Didion
In the cab, my mother and aunt talked nervously. Actually we were in a taxi. My great-grandfather was a cabbie in D.C. for decades. But we were no longer in D.C. Here, these were taxis. They were yellow and checkered, like in the movies. We hailed it coming out of LaGuardia, and my mother and aunt were to help me move into my summer home in NYU dorms. University Hall and three unknown interns were to be my new home. My mother and my aunt would not shut up. This was more for them than it was for me, it seemed. I would have gone by myself if I could, but that was not going to happen. We rushed out of the tunnel, into the barely-there light streaming through the tall buildings. I craned my neck to look up and I saw a small patch of blue in between the skyscrapers. I didn’t feel confined; I felt free.
My previous experiences with D.C.—the city itself, not the region—were my grandmother’s stories of growing up in Northeast D.C. and my handful of trips to museums on fieldtrips or with my father. My one time into the city was when I was 18; my then-boyfriend and I went to some museums, watched the news crews surround the federal courts hoping to find Monica Lewinsky on her way out, then wandered through Georgetown in the late afternoon. There was a bomb threat somewhere that day and I came home late to a mother who was worried and furious, but that was nothing new.
But in New York, I would walk from Union Square to Times Square every day. Meandering through the green market, I saw vegetables I had never seen before. It took a trip into the archetype of urban life for me to see kale, resplendent and standing at full attention. Brussels sprouts like large, pale green marbles. I loved navigating the filthy streets, watching shop owners pull up the gates. One day I bought small, sweet strawberries and a bottle of balsamic vinegar. I ate the entire pint, doused in the tart syrup, feeling decadent and rebellious. My mother and grandmother would never do such a thing.
I loved the long sweaty walk to work, the soundtracks to my life blaring in headphones: Surfer Rosa, The Moon and Antarctica, a mixed tape I made that represented everything I loved and hated all at once, T’s greatest mixtape ever of ska on side A and funk on side B, a nod to a particularly schizophrenic night the previous spring. One weekend, T came down from outside the city, and we wandered through the East Village, eating pizza, sitting in Tompkins Square Park with the junkies, the combination of piss and flowers and car fumes all mixing around us. We talked about how one day we would figure our shit out, how happiness did really exist somewhere out of our reach, how one day we would get past all of this, how one day we might learn how to sleep.
I don’t know if we’ve answered those questions, ten years later. I tell myself I’ve made peace with those questions, and not knowing.
I was simultaneously a 60-year-old woman and 14-years-old all at once, and this is the only way I can resolve the manic love and lust I have for that entire summer, even though that was the summer I shattered like Humpty Dumpty. That summer was beautiful and shiny and sharp. I learned what it meant to grow up for every phone call promised bad news, and I learned what it meant to refuse to cope. I learned what it meant to lose a part of yourself and never get it back. I learned how to con, to use anyone and anything in order to convince myself that I was okay.
By the end of the summer, I no longer recognized myself in the mirror. Leaving the dorm by myself, I passed by my reflection and wondered why I had dark circles under my eyes, why I was so pale, why my eyes seemed unresponsive, as if I were someone else. I hailed a taxi and headed back to LaGuardia. The plane was delayed, and waiting in the airport, under fluorescent glare, I felt the earth falling away from me long before my plane took off.
Joining Everything in Between, Charlotte’s Web, Jade Park and Fog City Writer working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. It’s called Alphabet: A History.
* * *
Previous letters:
I used to read to find meaning in my own life. I would argue that most avid young readers, people who really get excited over books, do this; we search for some connection that tells us it is okay, that we too will survive and possibly even thrive. I’ve been in several discussions lately about how writers create narratives to make sense of life, and of course, The Paris Review’s TwitterFeed has had an abundance of quotes lately on this very topic.
Now I read to escape, to see how its done, to have a moment of beauty. This sense of connection rarely happens anymore, and I don’t miss it. I don’t miss making every book about me, the reader, and I like reading books where I engage because of the writing or the ideas, and not psychological connections.
When I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, I was sitting on a beach, reading this graphic narrative, getting made fun of for being a lit geek, and my stomach flipped a few times. My grandfather resembled the narrator’s father in many, many ways. He obsessed over the house and garden. He loved shopping and poetry. He and my grandmother were polar opposites. Sure, more than one marriage has been based off the partners’ quirks, and survived, and more than one heterosexual male in the world has liked shopping and maintaining the house. But something in Bruce Bechdel’s character reminded me exactly of my grandfather–not the least that he too sought narratives that made sense of life, and made life bearable, despite the burdens he carried and could not admit.
Last week I read Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries. Again, something locked on to me. I can’t get this book out of my head. When he read, he talked about how he had made some peace with his father, and how the idea that he is not the person in his books is bullshit. The first is something I can’t comprehend, though I admire it on some level and wish desperately for it on another. The second turns all of my writing notions upside down; there is no escape, not even in memoir, and you have to own it. That makes writing much more risky, and I love it, and yet I’m also terrified.
And now, I’m reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, thanks to Jezebel’s post yesterday. I read this, ran to the library, checked it out, and started reading. Oh. My. I have no clue what’s truly happening, but Merricat and Constance and Uncle Julian bear a surprising resemblance to a certain three-generational household in a creepy huge house in a nice little neighborhood where everyone stares, and the most functional one may have been the one you really had to watch out for.
So maybe I connect with books about home or lack thereof, and dysfunctional families–but I assure you, not all. (Mama Denise, where are you when I need you for a soul-crushing eyebrow raise, and reassuring pat on the hand?) I’m sure too, that in this period of change and introspection I’m experiencing, that I have a heightened sense of connection and empathy.
I find it reassuring in a way, that I still can connect with a book like this. My students discuss books and stories and poems with abject distance (okay, some, not all), and talk about how a text is “relatable” despite their dispassion. But now and again someone will come in, mind blown. Amazed. Often it’s with a text that I don’t know is capable of doing that simply because it’s never happened before to me, or students I’ve had thus far. And I love provoking that reaction–but often, I’m a little jealous too. I thought I might be too jaded to have that reaction anymore.
There’s hope for us all, I suppose.
