So there's this young lady...

It's been a busy past few days, with my library, teaching, and social schedules conspiring to overpower my writing schedule. I write when I'm relaxed and have time to sit with my thoughts and ideas without other tasks intruding. While I might have a lesson plan in one window and the reds game in another, I never multitask with writing.

So I'm taking the few minutes I have before leaving for a long day at the library to drop in here; give a status update.

There are some days (weeks, months) when it seems obvious that nothing is going to happen. Nothing will change, and nothing will interrupt whatever routine I've set up. But there are other days (weeks, months) when I feel that potential: of the millions of things up in the air, they might fall down a little differently. Settle in new places. And I have that excitement of thinking about those new places. Maybe nothing will happen or change, but that potential is enough to give me a bounce in my step.

"A messy room is a messy soul."

~ Nana

It's so hard to make the big changes - careers, lifestyles, and life paths. It's hard to go from a person who goes about things just one single way to someone who goes about things a completely different way. Me, I've always liked clutter. Chaos surrounds me, whether it's piles of graded and ungraded papers or paid and unpaid bills. There are pens and rubber bands, too. A couple pairs of scissors. A paper shredder that's jammed and a stapler that no longer staples.

My version of cleaning involves me sitting in the middle of the floor, sorting and resorting, ending up with a stack of papers to throw away but somehow with no less volume in the end. I can hide stuff, though. I can make piles upon piles to put in corners; I can load my closet with egg crate cartons overflowing with old folders and binders and other things I can't categorize.

"A messy room is a messy soul" - this is what my nana says. She asks me about my apartment, if I'm keeping it clean. She must notice the hesitation before I reply, "It's ok." And she would also notice, if she visited, that my "cleaning" was actually just "stacking."

Back when I had two rooms - one at my mom's and one at my dad's - the one at my mom's was the disaster area. It was the one with sketches taped all over the walls and ten unfinished journals stacked next to my bed. It was the one that had the occasional visit from a mouse or scary spider. The one at my dad's, on the other hand, was spot free. Nothing was out of place; but then again, I didn't have all my stuff there - only the bare essentials. No furry creatures dared make an appearance in that room. While the room at my mom's would seem to be the more natural fit--chaos! clutter!--I felt equally comfortable in both rooms.

Me and my messy soul. A part of me must think it true. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it so much. But like I said before, it's hard to make the big changes. I can take the garbage out each week; I can keep my dirty dishes from piling up too high; I can push things into corners. Unfortunately, my rooms and my soul have never been and will never be immaculate (or, let's say, "neat").

When she moves like she runs...

A few years ago, when I lived with a roommate, we developed a routine of running two or three mornings a week. After about 30 minutes, we came back to the apartment, put on a pot of coffee, and got ready for work while blaring one of our cds from a small player. The music was usually upbeat: The Shins, Killers, and Loving Spoonful (save the Coldplay, Elliot Smith, and Cat Power for the evenings). But my favorite cd to listen to in the mornings was Neko Case's great "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood," particularly the second track:

Running gives me energy and confidence. What's ironic is that I'm more likely to run when I'm already feeling pretty good about things; but it would make more sense to force myself to run when I'm feeling less than good - get that energy back; regain confidence.

Anyway, I just returned from a power walk around the neighborhood. I had a good day grading midterms, pleasantly surprised by some of the exams.

"Silence is a text easy to misread."

~A.A. Attanasio

I've had a good past couple of days (I wonder how normal it is for people to constantly reflect over time spent and make evaluative judgments as to the quality and worthiness of that time?  Is it a writer thing?  Is it an introvert thing?  Or is it an everyone thing and I just didn't realize it?)

Thursday night I met with an informal writer's group ("SHORTS"). We sat around sketching ideas and pieces of stories. It was an interesting dynamic, sitting outside at a bar that became progressively louder as the night went on. That noise and patrons' distracting conversations (one girl loudly declared that she "for real hates the word 'zero'!") were at times hard to overcome. But, then, silence and quiet exert their own kinds of pressure and distraction.

Friday I met up with friends at a local Thai restaurant, where I had some of the best pad thai I've ever eaten - probably because I didn't have to pick anything out of it.  

Best of all, today I'll see my dad again.  Woo!

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Amy Bloom's "By and By" is a short story told from the point of view of a young woman who saw her best friend kidnapped. (Only later is it determined that the best friend was killed, too). It isn't a happy story. The narrator describes what happens, physically, to the heart and body most-mortem; she's very detached yet clearly very affected. The last paragraph is my favorite:

I don't miss the dead less, I miss them more. I miss the tall pines around Lake Pleasant, I miss the brown-and-gray cobblestones on West Cedar Street, I miss the red-tailed hawks that fly so often in pairs. I miss the cheap red wine in a box and I miss the rum-and-Coke. I miss Anne's wet gold hair drying as we saw on the fire escape. I miss the hot dog luau and driving to dance lessons after breakfast at Bruegger's Bagels. I miss the cold mornings on the farm, when the handle of the bucket bit into my small hands and my feet slid over the frozen dew. I miss the hot grease spattering around the felafel balls and the urgent clicking of Hebrew. I miss the new green leaves, shaking in the June rain. I miss standing on my father's shiny shoes as we danced to the Tennessee Waltz and my mother made me a paper fan so I could flirt like a Southern belle, tapping my nose with the fan. I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides, and all four parts, is their reliquary.

I wrote some fiction last night; it's a start. To get back to that place where made up ideas flow, where I don't feel silly describing someone who doesn't really exist, will take time. I've been in the "truth telling" mode for quite a while!

My Hallmark Card

It's useless to worry about things you can't control. And where you have a choice, always side with optimism and kindness.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd"

~ Voltaire

In preparation for today's midterm, I asked my students to read a short essay by Shoba Narayan called, "In This Arranged Marriage, Love Came Later." Narayan, a young woman who grew up in India but was educated in America, describes how she married a man selected by her family and only grew to love him later:

Stupid and dangerous as it seems in retrospect, I went into my marriage at twenty-five without being in love. Three years later, I find myself relishing my relationship with this brilliant, prickly man who talks about the yield curve and derivatives, who prays when I drive, and who tries valiantly to remember names like Giacometti, Munch, Kandinsky.

Narayan concludes by explaining how her friends are "appalled" but "intrigued" that she let her parents choose her husband, quoting her friend: "How can I get my parents to pick out my spouse when they don't even talk to each other?"

On the midterm, I asked students to argue their opinion about arranged marriage: Could it work in the States, why or why not? My hope is that they see the gray area, that it isn't really a yes or no question.  But I keep going back to this idea in my head that I want them to take risks but also conform to a certain set of rules. (I posted my sample response a couple months ago).

Part of me feels like I'm playing a subversive game of politics. While I try to stay neutral in the classroom (this was especially tough last fall!), I don't share the conservatism that most of my students possess. My worldview tells me to break things apart, see things from different perspectives, and that these varied perspectives should be held in high regard. I won't try to define the conservative point of view, but "varied perspectives" are not as important; my ideas of "right" and "wrong" aren't as solid as those of my students. When I challenge them to seek out those different ways of looking at things, perhaps I'm also challenging their worldview, just as they continually challenge mine.  

I want them to use writing to explore and to dance around. My job is to teach them to use basic writing skills to communicate. But maybe I should liken it to learning how to drive when I was 15 or 16 on my mom's little Honda Civic with manual transmission. It took a while because I had to pay attention to so many things in addition to the clutch and the gears. But today, while I can easily drive an automatic, I love driving my little Toyota with the stick. I hope to teach them how to write with a manual transmission where they know how to select their own gears.

Ha. I sat down thinking I had nothing to say.