i'll let you know when i get there

1.  i will spend 120 hours of summer in room 502... teaching.  yesterday, when i made the quick decision, i was bummed.  i grieved the loss of every minute of those hours.  said goodbye to all of the intense photographing and reading and writing and working out and changing the world i had planned to do with that time. but today i feel better.  if i'm honest, i would have spent most of those mornings sleeping in for no real reason and spending money i don't have.  so, alas.  what's 20 more days of teaching?  it hardly qualifies as anything in the grand scheme of the universe. maybe i'll even enjoy it. 2.  eating boatloads of garlic Tzatziki dip right before an afternoon of student project interviews is not the best idea i've ever had. 3.  who exactly is  Nicholas Sparks?  like, really?  like, as a real person?

during my first Field Day five years ago, I was ravenous.  I purchased a tamale and dashed off to my classroom to devour it.  I gnawed my way through the corn husk for about 10 minutes, thinking it was some kind of strange burrito. kind of like the time i tried to gnaw through the edamame shells at a sushi restaurant for about ten minutes before i noticed everyone else throwing them into a dish on the table. welcome to the west coast, midwest white girl.  your stomach is probably still digesting those fails.

J cleaned out the fridge. me:  you.  you are awesome. J: i know.  it's crazy, isn't it? me:  i mean, how do i even handle your awesomeness?  it is mind blowing. J:  that's why i have to work out.  so that my amazing, bulging muscles can contain my awesomeness.  it would erupt, ripping a normal man apart from the inside out.

it is hard, sometimes, to know who to listen to. voices echo down the corridor coming back from dreams or coming back to the moment from somewhere within. sometimes it is a very long hall full of familiar voices strange voices wise voices hollow voices it is hard, sometimes, to know which to listen to. a weekend of ghosts: revived by some haunted by others i am happy it is not a natural happy yet it is a happy i have to choose multiple times a day it is a happy against the threat of so many things that would prevent its possibility it is a happy that resists me, sometimes a happy i have to fight and negotiate for and some would say that it is not happiness, then-- that happiness is supposed to be easier than that. i/do you disagree./? the strangest dreams have me waking up on edge- and so this morning began: morning commute, chugging down a diet mountain dew before a drop of water even enters my body.  nodding my head to npr as though i have the sl...

Henry Simon Patrick Good was an alone sort of boy.  He was the kind of boy that you might find cleaning off his goggles with a tissue or staring at the fish tank while the other kids munched on cookies or squirmed and writhed their hands in their air to be called on.  He was the kind of boy who kept a collection of chewed bubble gum on a tinfoil pie plate in his closet.  He was the kind of boy that others seemed to slowly edge away from, not out of fear or a very clear disgust, but out of a general sense of "he is not like me."  And Henry Simon Patrick Good always- ALWAYS- wore goggles. Simon and Patricia Good were the good kind of parents.  Patricia was the good kind of mother who read stories out loud to Henry, even when he was still in the womb, and Simon began to build a two story tree house in the old Oak tree as soon as he learned he would be a good father.  They were the good kind of parents who, even when Henry didn't speak a single word, much les...

Out of a long list of famous poets to choose a poem from, so many of the girls want to recite Frost.  I want to shout at them: STOP! You have no business with Frost!  What do you know about nature or looming mortality or old age or youth?  Stick with the shocking or haunting poets.  Stick with the lovers.  You are not old enough to know about life. Which is probably not the best attitude for a teacher to have.

Remember when S presented her last poetry recitation as my student and brought a handful of her classmates to tears?  "After Auschwitz" by Anne Sexton.  you know you're completely legit when you can recite a poem containing the line:                    "And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus" and not a single adolescent person in that room snickers or even breaks eye contact. That's how you know. Remember when i was a student- rapt attention- could not avert my eyes.... i did not dare break eye contact, afraid i would miss something.  i wanted to consume everything- to see every syllable.  there was that moment- that beautiful, perfect, outside of time moment- "i gave you all" where Jose acted King Lear so convincingly that I almost cried. "i gave you all." and even after reading hundreds of pages on the play, and producing about 20 of my own, that was the closest i ever felt to lear. ...

upon finishing The Crucible: student 1: john proctor is a true homie. me:  what makes him a true homie? student 2:  he took a bullet for the whole town.

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being Perhaps not to be is to be without your being, without your going, that cuts noon light like a blue flower, without your passing later through fog and stones, without the torch you lift in your hand that others may not see as golden, that perhaps no one believed blossomed the glowing origin of the rose, without, in the end, your being, your coming suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life, blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze: and it follows that I am, because you are: it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we: and, because of love, you will, I will, We will, come to be. -Pablo Neruda

A:  i'm at work right now and i don't want to do a damn thing.  nothing at all. me:  me neither.  two more hours sounds so wretched. A:  ughhh doesn't it?  it's like an eternity of puke. also: RBC: Everything in life is an experiment. me:  are those words from your boss' mentally demented brother? RBC:  yep.  he is so odd.  he wants to set me up with a doctor he knows in san diego. me:  what kind? RBC:  a peruvian kind.  i don't know.  some type of physician. me: sounds like he probably smells good and knows witchcraft. RBC: what? me:  That's what a peruvian physician makes me think of. also: i've been having really good days and then -BOOM- FEELINGS make themselves known.  wretched, illogical FEELINGS.  like a gross burp from the past.  indigestion.  heartburn. process. process. and also too: regarding the way that some people say "boom son" to excess: me:  what ...

A few occurrences leading to general terror: Occurences: 1.  May Crowning ceremony.   (for me, already a strange mix of emotions concerning the whole ordeal)  there is this speaker there who i'd heard of for years- she was making a name for herself as a christian musician even back when i was in the extremes of my religious devotion.  now she is standing before all of us in all her in-your-face-chaste glory- just beside herself with giddiness and zeal over her love affair with the lordjesuschrist.  just beaming.  true passion.  quirky- a christian zooey deschanel.  i can't decide if i love her for her quirkiness or despise her for everything else that she is. because everything else is so much of nothing. she tells a mother theresa miracle story where she thought that god hadn't answered her prayer but it turns out he just had other ways of answering that were far better than any of her plans because he always knows best (always always)....

1. i cannot remember a day without a cookie. it's been such a long time. 2. i have not smoked in eleven days. and counting. 3. i cannot focus on anything. 4. i have never heard that "call me, maybe" song in full, yet parts of it have been looping in my mind for days now. i don't even know who sings it. unacceptable. i plan to never ever hear the whole song, much like my avoidance of the whole twilight phenomenon. 5. i should not be allowed to watch the news or read the newspaper until i am at a severely apathetic age where humanity does not phase me anymore. 6. on my mind: camera, looming paper project, retreat, summer, john proctor, healthy living 7. i read this part of Best Non Required Reading (2006?) where they asked some scientists to comment on something that they believe in but cannot prove. Some of the most intriguing responses, to me, involved: true love & that time does not exist 8. what the hell, humans? what are we? what are w...

Scatter brained I feel all sides of it A million ways a day Remember Reminder Focus Distraction On distraction Focus Scatter I am not my brain It is a fallible thing A trained pony trained to say neigh Or to obey Lifts its hooves to a repeated beat Who is the drummer, boy? Who's calling your shots? What makes you prance? Who exactly is in control here? Who's outside it to call it a pattern? Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiio u Blinders to the periphery Terrors over there Little glimpses all the time Comfort in some steady rhythm Hollow drum Focus Focus