Warning: Rant

At 6:30 pm, D and I sat down to watch the CBS Evening News as we most often do.  In the middle of the headlines/teasers for the night's stories was something close to the following:  surgery can cure diabetes.  D actually stood up and raised his hands in the "touchdown" formation.  Being Ms. Skeptic, I said, "Type 1 or Type 2?"  There may have been an expletive in there; I can't quite recall.

Needless to say, the segment was on gastric bypass/ gastric sleeve surgery intended for people with Type 2 diabetes, or PWD2.  As a mother of a six-year-old PWD1 and wife of a forty-year-old PWD1, I am up to here with the general conception that diabetes is ONE disease.

It is most assuredly not.

Type 2 diabetes can sometimes be prevented or even reversed.  Type 2 diabetics are typically overweight or even obese.  Type 2 diabetics are not typically insulin dependent.

Type 1 diabetes cannot be prevented.  Type 1 diabetics can be any size person.  Most that I know are in enviable shape.  Type 1 diabetics are insulin dependent.

Type 1 diabetics will DIE if they do not have their insulin.

Type 1 diabetes cannot be controlled by "diet and exercise."

Why does this piss me off so much?  Because when a reputable news source headlines their nightly news with a "surgical cure for diabetes," I want to see an artificial pancreas that works.  I want to see FDA approval of islet cell transplants.  I want to see my daughter's stem cells, which we pay to have stored each year, cure her.

I don't want to see her lose the feeling in her fingertips because she has tested her blood sugar for thirty years.  I don't want her to take one more effing shot.


So please, if I may be so bold, be precise with your words.  1 or 2.

Catching Up: Weeks 4 & 5

This semester is going by so quickly!  And just so you know, I have switched topics for my critical paper.  Instead of writing on the use of poetry in the composition classroom, I am writing on the poetry itself - doing more of a critical analysis.  This will focus on hybridity and/or pluralism in American identity as represented in poetry.  Specifically, I'm looking at Agha Shahid Ali's A Nostalgist's Map of America (remember him?), Robert Penn Warren's Audubon:  A Vision, and Louise Gluck's Averno.  All three are wonderful books - check them out!

Now, am I giving up on the critical thinking through poetry experiment?  No!  I continue to use this technique in my classes.  Last week we read and researched Warren's "Tell me a Story," and this week we are using Kim Addonizio's "Scary Movies."  Overall, this warm-up strategy is still working well, and my students are being exposed to poetry and poets they might have never read otherwise. Our in-class discussions are productive and continue to be relatable to writing in general.  Take Tuesday's class:  one student blogged his "story" based on Warren's poem.  It was VERY brief and had no detail.  We ended up having a good talk about showing, not telling, and emphasizing that showing is necessary in academic writing as much as it is in creative writing. 

I am putting off this topic until the end of the semester so I can gather data from the entire experience, rather than trying to force a paper out of half a class.  I plan on writing this paper and trying to publish it at a later date.

So...identity - hot topic.  Controversial topic.  And something I have been fascinated with for just about ever.  Wrote my master's thesis on it using Salman Rushdie novels.  (Which you should read, of course!  My favorite is The Moor's Last Sigh.)  Right now, I am examining the poetry mentioned above with regards to the speakers.  Each of them are living on the edges of several different "worlds."  How they reconcile, or do not reconcile, those worlds to form a cohesive identity is my area of interest. 

Week Three: Waxing Nostalgic

Regarding Rumpelstiltskin:  did you know that, at the end of one of the Grimm versions, Rumpelstiltskin actually tears himself in half?  He has a fit, stomps his foot into the ground so far that he can't get it out, and his solution is to literally divide himself.

Are we doing our children a disservice by "Disneyfying" folk and fairy tales?  What are the consequences if Hansel and Gretel are not going to be eaten by the witch, but instead, say, lose their cell phone privileges?  What if Little Red's grandmother is not eaten by the wolf, but is instead, say, locked in a closet?  Is the lesson learned?  Do we coddle our children, even in their stories?

Should my six-year-old understand that Snow White's step-mother wanted her step-daughter's heart ripped from her chest and presented to her in a beautifully crafted wooden box?

These are some of the ideas my classes discussed as a result of their research into Maxwell's poem.  Good discussion; interesting topics.

Then, we read this week's selection:  "Snow on the Desert" by Agha Shahid Ali.  The poem is from the book A Nostalgist's Map of America.

When I picked this poem, I did so knowing full well that it is (for my students) long.  But it is so beautiful and compelling (for me) that I wanted to try it. 

One of my students compared the imagery of the fog opening and then closing as the speaker's world closing up, and several others mentioned liking the idea of driving through the desert knowing it used to be the bed of an ocean.  Everyone got that this poem was about the relativity of the passing of time.  If you're reading this, I hope you read the poem and get what I'm writing about.  If you haven't yet, let me give you the first lines:

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.

“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes,” he said, “especially on a clear day.”

I don't think I'll ever look at the sky the same way again.  How much do I want to write a poem that does this? 

Back to my classes though - I found that many of my students have never actually been to a desert.  It is so much a part of my upbringing, going camping across the southwest, growing up in Southern California, that it is hard to believe that less than 10 of my 75 students can visualize driving across a landscape so desolate that one doesn't need to be told it once was a sea to believe it.  Pictures do not do the desert justice.  It is something one has to experience first hand.  I wonder how many of these students will ever actually go.

There were plenty of opportunities for research in this poem for students of all areas of interest.  Some of the things they are looking up are the Bangladesh War, singer Begum Akhtar, the Papagos, saguaro cactus, and the book (?) The Desert Smells Like Rain.  Can't wait to see what interests them come Tuesday.

Now...is this working?  Yes.  The poem warm-ups are putting my students into the thinking mode.  They are actively engaged from the beginning of class:  reporting their research, listening to the new poem, blogging, reading and listening to the blog entries.  This has translated into more actively engaged students overall.  Today, we did our first whole-class critique of a student's first draft, and I got better responses than is usual. 

And...I'm reading poetry not just for my own enjoyment, but also for my students' range of experience.  Perhaps we'll get some new readers of poetry?  Perhaps someone will venture out to the desert and feel the passage of time.

Liar, Liar, Pants on...

Week two:  poetry experiment.  So this week my students returned with their research on Moore's "Baseball and Writing."  Elston Howard was the first African-American to be on the Yankees.  He held all kinds of records, and he played in ten World Series, winning six.  A-mazing.  This is just one thing they learned.  We discussed how writing was similar to baseball in that writer's block is an "injury" one must treat, that writing is difficult, but worth it, and that, again, reading effectively is a process and a practice.

Then came Thursday.  I have all kinds of fantastic poets on my reading list for this semester.  These are writers whose poems examine American identity with artful thought.  But I could not find a poem that I felt was appropriate for the second week of teaching my freshmen.  One of the reasons last week's poems were what they were was for their "ease of use."  Establishing trust in my classroom is the most important thing I can do in the first few weeks.  No trust equals no results.  I didn't want to drop an emotional bomb week two.  So...I spent three hours Thursday morning searching for a poem about identity that was not too heavy, man.

Then, I found Glyn Maxwell's "Rumpelstiltskin."  What a fantastic little huge poem.  We read it.  Then they blogged.  We talked about lying, living two lives, privacy issues including OnStar and GPS, color theory, what nurses need to know about patients who lie and the reasons they lie, what teachers need to know about students who lie and their reasons, the nature of signifiers (!), and the relativity of truth.  Yes, yes we did.

And...at least 50% of my second semester freshmen have never heard of Rumpelstiltskin.  Seriously.

Tuesday, I expect to hear about how knowing the folk tale makes (or doesn't make) a difference in understanding the poem.  I expect to hear about spinning straw into gold.  And I expect to discuss the importance/significance of naming.  Most of all, I expect (hope?) to hear interest in their voices and to see passion for learning in their eyes.  How fantastic.

Week One Critical Paper or What Percentage of College Freshmen Despise Poetry?

So I've decided to document my progress on my critical paper using this blog.  For those of you who are not Converse College MFA students...in the third semester, we are required to write a +/- 25 page critical paper on some aspect of our chosen genre.  I am a poetry student and a composition teacher, so I thought it would be a great idea to try to combine the two.  Here's my snappy paper title:  Using identity themed poems to encourage critical thinking in the composition classroom.  Huzzah!

There are two reasons why I went in this direction instead of analyzing a specific poet or group of poets.  One:  one of my classes last semester came to the conclusion that they don't like poetry because they "have to think about it too much."  Two:  critical thinking is necessary for good writing, and many of my freshman composition student need help in this area. If I'm honest, that's an understatement.  Businesses regularly lament the lack of writing skills of their newly graduated hires, and the rest of the university regularly asks us folks in the English Department just exactly what we are doing with writing, 'cause their students can't.

Week one:  I presented my idea about using poetry to encourage critical thinking.  I gave a survey to my students asking them about their experiences with poetry and research.  My students inwardly (and outwardly) groaned.  I assured them they would not be graded on their analysis of the poems.  We would be using poetry as warm-up exercises to get into the critical thinking/writing mode.  They felt a bit better. 

On Tuesday, I read Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry" and had the students blog about their responses to the poem.  That went OK.  They "got it."

On Thursday, I read Marianne Moore's poem "Baseball and Writing."  They didn't "get it."  I discovered something wonderful, though.  After the first reading, every student understood that the poem talked a lot about baseball, and that there was supposed to be some connection with writing.  Their blogs showed that they "got" more than they thought they did.  And I was able to explain the process of reading actively without having read a single chapter in our textbook.  Read the piece through once.  Write down what you understand.  Read it through again.  Look up what you don't understand.  Read it through again.

The fact is that many students stop reading whatever is required for their courses because they don't "get" the first few lines.  Ethics, philosophy, logic, sociology, and psychology texts may seem to be beyond their understanding, and so they stop reading.  I contend that if a reader can simply read through a piece once without stopping and ignore what they think they don't know, that reader will be able to write down something about that piece.  That something will then be clarified on the second read, or possibly the third.

This is when my students say, uh-huh.  Right.  I barely have time to read all this stuff once, and you're asking me to read two or three times?  And I say, yes.  That's what it takes until you become a better reader, and becoming a better reader will help you become a better writer.  That's the goal.

Assignment for next Tuesday:  write down one idea, word, phrase, or name from "Baseball and Writing" to look up.  Look it up.  Report back to the class.  The idea behind this assignment is to get my students to take a small second look at the text through research.  We'll see how it goes. 

At the very least, I had fun introducing myself to my classes and going over the syllabi for the first time in a long time, I got to share some poetry with composition students, and I got them thinking right off the bat.  Yay me! 

For the Love of Books

I'm back from my third of four residencies at Converse College, and, once again, I have nothing but good things to say.  Hilarious readings by Leslie Pietrzyk and Keith Morris reminded me once again that literature is for everyone.  Informative lectures by Susan Tekulve and Denise Duhamel pointed out the writing opportunities inherent in travel and the craft involved in using humor in poetry.  But the session that I want to elaborate on here was presented by Betsy Teter on small press publishing.

Teter is the editor of Hub City Press, a nonprofit organization that "publishes well-crafted, high-quality works by new and established authors, with an emphasis on the Southern experience."  There has been much talk about shopping local and buying from local artists, artisans, and farmers since the Occupy Wall Street movement began.  Whatever your opinion of the Occupy phenomenon, it is worth noting that authors are among those who can benefit from this trend.  Small presses are committed to publishing literature, and they are committed to promoting authors they believe in.  This may or may not come along with commercial success.  The books published by small presses and sold in independent bookstores like Hub City and Quail Ridge Books are largely not promoted or sold in the two big booksellers left in the US.  In other words, your patronage of independent booksellers directly affects the writers working in your communities.


Some of the practical advice Teter offered to us were questions to ask small press publishers such as:  Do you send out galleys?  Do you send out review copies?  How many review copies do you send?  Teter's explanation of her process of sending review copies to get buzz going for a book was informative, and it showed her dedication to the authors Hub City publishes.  When (yes when!) I publish a book, I can only hope that it is backed with the enthusiasm Teter showed in her presentation.


Read local.  Buy local.  Love books.

Notes on the Lockdown

When I was about eight years old, my mom, my brother, and I were forced to lie face down on the floor of our local post office by gunmen armed with pistols fitted with silencers.  Maybe this is why I took yesterday's lockdown at ECU seriously.

Maybe it's because I grew up in Los Angeles.  Maybe it's because I have been around responsible gun owners all my life and have been taught gun safety.  Maybe it's because, as a former high school teacher, I have been through lockdown training.  Maybe it's because this picture


looks enough like a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder that I'm glad someone cared enough to call the police.

Maybe none of that matters.

What matters is that this is the world we live in.  People do terrible things to each other.  And while I recognize the openings for debate here, there isn't a whole lot we can do about it.  What we can do, however, is take threats seriously.

I like to believe that I have a healthy sense of humor, but I don't think that any part of yesterday's lockdown was funny.  Yes, it turned out that the man was carrying an umbrella, not an assault rifle, and thank goodness.  But trivializing the situation while it is happening is going too far.  While my students and I sat on the floor, by the cinderblock wall, out of the line of sight of all windows, we read posts on Twitter and Facebook, trying to keep abreast of what was happening.  Out of a stream of 140 or so posts to the local news channel's breaking story about the lockdown, I'd say 70% of them were people fighting with each other about whether or not ECU had sent them an alert email, 20% were rumors about hostages, the number of gunmen, and where the police were, and the remaining 10% ridiculed students and police and noted how stupid people were in general.  Several times, I had to calm my students down.

After we got the all clear alert, another professor asked me what I had done for the close to three hour incident.  I replied that I had sat with my students on the floor of my classroom.  This professor wanted to know why we were sitting on the floor.

I was stunned by this question.  But it did explain why, at about hour two, we began to hear people walking around in the hallway and talking on their phones.  We also heard people in another classroom watching YouTube videos, loudly.  By hour two, enough people had Tweeted and Facebooked and texted and emailed that they were bored with the whole situation.  And, apparently, there are lots of people who don't understand that walking around and making noise during a threat of this kind makes you a target.

I do not suggest that we live our lives in fear.  I do suggest that we practice reasonable caution.  Since I was the teacher, whatever my students' ages, I was in the position of authority.  I felt responsible for their safety.  As such, when the alert came in at 10:11 am, I directed my students to sit on the floor, turned of the projector and the lights, and asked everyone to remain quiet.  They did.

Until the noise from the rest of our floor could not be ignored.  Then my students started to get up, walk around, talk.  What if the umbrella had been an assault rifle?  Closer to my point, no one knew that it wasn't an assault rifle until hours after the all clear.

Maybe I should just take heart from the apparent fact that there are plenty of people who did not believe that the threat to students, faculty, and staff at ECU could possibly be real, and that there are still people out there who don't know what to do in the case of a lockdown. 

Oogeds!

CAPTCHA terms of the day:

nathoad n. a natty toad  OK.  That was lame.  I don't know why, but when I saw this CAPTCHA, I immediately thought of Mr.Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland, based, of course, on The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.  Why is it again that some of my favorite childhood books described people (or anthropomorphized animals) in places that were completely unfamiliar to me?  "A pastoral version of England" (thanks Wiki) is about as far as you can get from Gardena, CA.  We set traps out for rats.  Yes, we did.

orsabi slang a question meaning do you want soy sauce or wasabi?  Lame again.  I just can't resist these things, though.  This CAPTCHA also brought to mind Obi-Wan Kenobi AND "savvy" of Johnny Depp/Captain Jack Sparrow fame.  An interesting combination, that.

demancol n. This is, quite obviously, a new drug that will either bring out/tone down your inner demon or make the government's no-call list actually work. 

oogeds Any takers?  All I've got is a vowel switch for kicks of "eegads!" which makes as much sense as the rest of these.

And so, if you're still reading, this was my Sudoku, or "mental aerobics," for the day.  If only actual aerobics were this much fun...

Front Porch Art Show

I spent last weekend with some girlfriends of mine in Norfolk, Virginia.  Now this is a cool town.  We watched the Admirals win a hockey game (tickets only $20!), ate fantastic tapas at Bodega on Granby Street ("Little Plates, Big Drinks!") and seafood at AW Shucks, and went to an art "show" in the Ghent district near the Virginia Zoo.  This "show" is one of the Best Ideas Ever.

For you, my fellow artists and crafters out there, think about this scenario:  you don't have to pay an entrance fee, pack up, drive, set up your booth, display your wares, and hope to your favorite deity that someone buys something.  You are selling on your front porch.  The entire neighborhood - at least ten blocks - is selling art and crafts on their front porches.  Now, I'm not so naive as to believe that this would work everywhere. My front porch might as well be on Europa.  But this show was just so...nice.

There were people walking around with their dogs and their kids and their friends, looking at (and buying!) art, and the artists appeared, overall, to be relaxed and happy with their front porch experiences.  Most were having a glass or two and offering one to whomever happened by.  My good friend Kelly gifted me with this print by artist Jennifer C Hilliard:

Such an amazing talent.  I have linked her work to this blog.  Check it out!

I'll close by paraphrasing a recent Facebook post by my friend Jennifer Thielen:  If you really want to occupy Wall Street, buy from your local merchants, artists, artisans, and farmers.  As romantic as the idea of the starving artist is, well, ya know, tapas at Bodega are really nice, too.  : )

"Fall in love and have lots of sex"

This was Sir Salman Rushdie's advice for the freshman who had the nerve to get up during question and answer after Sir Rushdie's lecture Wednesday night and ask, "Um...I've been, like, sitting there, listening, and trying to come up with a question to ask you, and, um, like, I would be honored if you could give me some advice for my next four years and for, like, life."  After a (for me, anticipatory) moment, Sir Rushdie smiled and graciously responded, "Fall in love and have lots of sex." 

Rusdhie's lecture was nothing short of phenomenal.  Its title was "Public Events, Private Lives:  Literature and Politics in the Modern World."  He began by briefly examining America's obsession with "trivia" as opposed to the "news."  His humor in this examination; asking what Kim Kardashian actually does for a living, mentioning that Paris Hilton's 15 minutes, although over, greatly increased the name brand of her family's second-rate hotel business; set the tone for the evening.  Rushdie had the audience listening and laughing while examining very serious issues revolving around writers and their work in today's world. 

Rushdie raised the question of whether or not it is a writer's responsibility to address politics in his/her work.  He prefaced his argument with the statement that he would no sooner tell a writer that he/she should always include politics than Rushdie would tell the writer that he/she should never include politics.  However, he went on to point out that, in this information age, it is almost impossible to write a character who is not, in some way, directly affected by politics.  One of his examples was that Jane Austen was writing during the Napoleonic Wars, but she never mentions war at all.  Rushdie argues that the war did not affect her characters.  "One's character determined one's fate."  Rushdie argues that, today, one's fate is no longer determined by one's character.  For example, outside forces determine whether or not you will keep your job, regardless of how strong your work ethic is.  Therefore, modern writers almost cannot avoid writing "politically." 

He said it a lot better than I am relaying it here.  But the end result of Rushdie's lecture was, basically, telling writers, and everyone really, to speak up and speak out. 

I encourage you to read Rushdie if you haven't already.  When I read his novel The Moor's Last Sigh eleven years ago (!), it changed my life, literally.  Rushdie writes about being hybrid, or his word from his lecture "fragmented," in one's identity.  When we limit our definition of ourselves to "one thing," we narrow our vision and limit our capabilities.  Rushdie grew up in India, a society of caste and strict religious definitions, and his characters rebel against the small boxes their societies put them in.  In many cases, the characters are not successful in their rebellions.

Are we free, in today's America, to be who we are?  Every part of who we are?  Or are we forced to decide?  Do "identity politics" limit the scope of what we can do and how we are perceived?  Even worse, do identity politics limit how we perceive ourselves?  This concept of being plural in a society that wants me easily labeled and filed is something I have struggled with since I can remember. 

So, today, I am writing this blog not only to laud Sir Rushdie's lecture here at ECU, but also to speak out.  I am tired of boxes and limits and pigeonholes. As Rushdie said (quoting Saul Bellow), "For God's sake, open the universe a little more!"

Are you a glombrob?

Just now, I posted a comment on one of my students' discussions blogs, and the CAPTCHA word that came up was "glombrob."  First, doesn't that sound like it should really be a word?  Glombrob:  would it be a noun or a verb?  n.  a brob, or blob with some definition (because of the hard r sound), that gloms on to...a person?  v.  the act of a mob of bees glomming on to a person or idea...no, probably not.  I'm going with noun for now.

I often cannot read these CAPTCHA phrases, and therefore am sometimes mistaken for a spambot.  Ok.  How does that last sentence even make sense?  In my effort to write this blog, I searched for the term used for those nonsense words that you have to type in to prove you're not a computer.  CAPTCHA actually stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart," hence the all caps. Didja know that?  Kind of convenient that it also sounds like "capture."  Then I had to look up the word "turing" which I will not attempt to explain in this post.  Then there's the fact that there are actually such things as spambots, and that I can be mistaken for one if I fail to read the word "glombrob" and correctly type it in.  Perhaps I'm showing my age a bit, but really?  I'm picturing a bunch of tiny robots that smell like potted meat running around, breaking into people's blogs and posting things like "Your mama dresses you funny." 

And by the way, spambots are web crawlers that harvest email addresses which are then sold and used to send spam.  Let's look at the language here:  web crawlers and harvest.  Forgive me for tangenting (and yes, I'm giving tangent verb status) to the Matrix.  Wherein Keanu Reeves is the chosen one.  Yikes-o-rama.

So...make an effort to use your CAPTCHA phrase today, and you, too can be a glombrob:  n.  a person who gloms on to a blog and/or blog topic that contains numerous misspellings and/or mistaken ideas.

Why Hurricane Irene made me think about John Cusack...Yep

With apologies to Mark Twain:  Letter from the Earth:  humans are not in charge.

Well, dang.

As I write this, the water in Tranter's Creek is receding.  Our small pier has floated away, several large trees and their branches are lying around the yard and on our outbuildings, our power is back on, and the mosquitoes are breeding.  On the way to work this morning, I saw houses destroyed by falling trees and branches, storm debris everywhere, and wood neatly cut and stacked on curbs awaiting pickup.  In my first class this morning, one of my students talked about losing her car to a tree, and another student talked about losing her home to the Pamlico River.  On the news, people in Vermont and in North Carolina are stranded on little islands that did not exist before Irene.  Roads are washed away.  Homes are lifted off their foundations and destroyed.  Patterson, New Jersey is flooded.  People across the Northeast have lost everything they owned.  Some have lost their lives.

Lately, it seems that just about every day, nature brings her fury.  We are inundated with scenes of destruction through our televisions, our computers, and our phones.  What amazes me is that we refuse to give up.  We humans are determined to go on, to rebuild, to live our lives despite, or perhaps to spite, Mother Nature. 

I'm a bit at a loss here in this post.  Thoughts of 2012 keep crossing my mind, and not just of the Mayan apocalypse variety that people are talking about every time there is a major natural disaster these days, but also of the film variety with John Cusack, who I have loved since Sixteen Candles.  And what does that have to do with the price of apples?  I don't want to make jokes or make light of Hurricane Irene.  I know what it did to people and their lives.  But my brain just...goes...there.  John Cusack playing a dork and wearing a light on his forehead.  And perhaps this is what we humans do in response to not being in charge.

Or perhaps the synapses in my brain are faulty. 

Help me Dexter Morgan...you're my only hope.

***SPOILER ALERT***
If you have not seen episode one of True Blood season 4, and you plan to, do not read this post!!!






In an earlier post, I admitted to being a big fan of all things vampire.  So it was with much excitement that I waited for the start of last night's season opener of HBO's True Blood.  Let's leave aside the fact that the writers chose not to follow the  perfectly good, and sufficiently full of HBO level sex and shock value, plot line that Charlaine Harris laid out in her Sookie Stackhouse series upon which the show is based.  We pretty much knew that was trashed after Lafayette got, well, not dead in the first season.  A very happy choice - love his character!  But last night's episode...seriously?  To quote "My Sassy Gay Friend" (whose videos you might want to check out on YouTube), "What, what, what are you doing?"

For those of you who have read the books, when Claudine showed up at the end of last season ostensibly to take Sookie away to Fairy Land, and she was decidedly NOT Claudine-like, I knew that something was truly amiss.  Why take a character whose curves would thwart a Ferrari and turn her into Earth Mother?  Last night, as D and I sat watching the first few scenes of Fairy Land, we turned to each other and said, simultaneously, "This is like that episode of Star Trek.."  Remember the one where all the aliens were young, beautiful, and totally naive?  There's one in the original and one in Next Generation - take your pick - that was Fairy Land.  Cheese city.  And then...they served everyone "light fruits."  Glowing orbs of honey colored light shaped like persimmons and served by beautiful fairies in GrecoRoman attire.  I am not making this up.  And of course, if you ate of the fruit, you would lose all track of time and could not leave Fairy Land.  Hadn't these people read the Odyssey?  The myth of Persephone?  The Bible?  Seen Percy Jackson?  Think once, think twice, think...don't eat the fruit.  Although, in Eden, A&E did gain knowledge, but that's a post for another day.

Then...the fairies turned evil and Sookie ended up somewhere in Joshua Tree and she had to jump into a deep abyss to get back to Kansas...I mean BonTemps...where...wait for it...an entire year had passed.  This weak plot point/cop out served to allow the writers to fast forward through BonTemps time and completely change everyone's basic character.  Andy Bellefleur is addicted to V?  Sure.  Jason is the responsible cop?  AND he's responsible for all of the inbred inhabitants of Hot Shot, even though Crystal is nowhere to be found?  Um...ok.  Aunt Petunia Dursley (Fiona Shaw) plays a witch who brings her parakeet back to life only with the addition of Lafayette, who is apparently a powerful brujo, to her coven...wait...did I say Aunt Petunia?  From Harry Potter?  Yes, I did!  Bill is the King of Louisiana?  Yep!  His hair is cut differently, even though vampires' hair stays exactly the same as when they die according to this mythos.  Ok, I know that was a geek moment.  Eric owns Sookie's house because he was the only one who knew she wasn't dead...  I can't go on.  The sheer amount of cheese is overwhelming.  Oh!  I almost forgot!  Tara is a lesbian cage fighter named Toni!

!!!!!

!

There are only three television shows that I actually set aside time to watch regularly.  All three have short runs:  RuPaul's Drag Race, Dexter, and True Blood.  Psychoanalyze as you will.  Perhaps the universe is telling me I need to do something else on summer Sunday nights.  Sookie!

Shabby Chic Cuff Bracelet OR my very short attention span...

Ok.  First - time goes WAY too fast.  What, exactly, have I been doing for the past week?  Yikes.

Second - new upcycled idea:  cuff bracelets.  Here is one I love.

I came across a few petite small (PS)  button down shirts that had seen better days at a yard sale a few weeks ago, and I liked the fabric.  First thought:  flowers!  The pastel colors and design of the fabric would make more "shabby chic" flowers than I have made in the past, but I thought that would be pretty.  As I was deconstructing the shirts, I noticed the cuffs just laying there.  Perfect!  Bracelets.  So...what do you think?

I left the bodices intact and will make little girls' dresses from them embellished, of course, with contrasting flowers.  I am looking forward to getting started on those.  The sleeves were made into flowers.  

Next time, paint a bluetick!

Yesterday afternoon, I went to my first Umbrella Market of the 2011 season.  I was mainly selling my upcycled fabric jewelry, but I also took a few paintings that are reaching their expiration date.  We only have so much room for painting storage here at Dragonfly Landing, and when canvases have been around for a year or more, I figure they're not going to be bought, and I paint over them.  Reduce, reuse...you know the drill.  Painting has taught me objectivity.  This is a visual art.  The impact on the viewer is almost always immediate, whether it is negative, positive, or indifferent.  And the viewer will tell the artist exactly what he/she thinks.  Reactions like, "What the heck is that?" thicken the skin, and, happily, have helped me to become a better painter and a better writer.  I'll get back to that idea.

This painting

has been commented on over and over again.  If a viewer reacts to it, it is either to tilt his/her head to see if the painting is hung right side up, or it is an instant smile.  Light in the eyes.  Happiness just to see this painting.  That makes me happy.  And yet, the painting is once again hanging out in the lodge.  I have shown this at at least six different art shows, but it is still homeless.  It wins the prize for the painting that was almost sold. 

Last night at the Market, one woman said, "If only the dog's coat were a little darker.  Then it would look exactly like my dog."  Another asked, "So, you have a lab?  I have two.  They do this all the time."  Another, "Doesn't that look just like Jojo?  If you painted a bluetick like this, you'd have sold it."

Art in all of its varied forms is intensely personal.  While a painting or a poem may appeal to a wide audience, that audience may not "buy" it.  Perhaps the color is wrong.  Perhaps the words don't ring exactly true.  The artist has to step back and look at the piece without being personal.  I have to accept the fact that this painting of my beautiful Napoleon might be painted over.  The story of his life does not apply to hanging a painting on a wall.  A poem I write about people and places important to me might be deleted or left to molder in a pile of papers to later be thrown away.

Stephen King says that you must kill your darlings.  Be willing to eliminate that which you have created in your writing to make the story more compelling, more effective.  Good advice, I think, but I believe I'll hang on to this painting just a little longer. 

Talk about Sentimental

Craigslist post:  One Sealy Ortho Rest baby mattress for sale.

Sigh.

Yesterday, I took down the crib that A and C slept in.  A very few screws and carriage bolts held together what was at once a simple, wooden bed and a complex symbol of hope, fear, love, and family. 

I remember setting up the crib for the first time.  The delivery man had brought it a few days earlier than expected; he hauled the huge box up into the house by himself.  D and I sat on the floor of the nursery, freshly painted a light sage green with murals of the myth of Aurora and scenes from Winnie the Pooh, trying to figure out the cryptic directions.  After figuring out how "A" went together with "X" and not swearing too much, we stood before an empty crib.  I imagine that we held hands, felt a swell of emotion and the swell of my belly, grinned at each other.  We wondered how to keep the cats out of it.  Secretly contemplated if there was any truth to the cat taking the baby's breath tale. 

Both of our children's sleeping bodies occupied that small space, quickly growing to fit and then outgrow it.  The crib has now been converted to a double bed where, again, the babies seem so small.  D is ready for t-ball and Pop Warner; I'm waxing nostalgic over the thought of never buying diapers again.  I imagine myself, after Cyrus is potty-trained, sniffling at Huggies coupons.  My goodness.

Poetry - no secret decoder ring required.

As I sit here at my kitchen table, looking out at the riot of greens that is my front yard and the deep brown creek just beyond, listening to my children breathing on the baby monitor, it occurs to me again that I am  one lucky woman.  I just finished my second, ten day long, MFA creative writing residency with Converse College.  While I was gone, my husband's parents and my mom took care of our kids while D was at work.  They ferried the children back and forth to school, fed them, clothed them, loved them.  D was a single dad at night, bathing, cleaning, readying, feeding, and again, loving.  All of this so I could fulfill one of my favorite dreams - becoming a writer.  I am so thankful.

Residency was a wonderful experience filled with great writers, lectures, readings, and sessions with friends on the covered porch of our dorm.  Dorms, by the way, ain't what they used to be:  an elevator for a three story building; a full kitchen with stove, microwave, full size refrigerator; one bathroom for only two people.  I am finding it a little difficult to process everything at the moment, so I will just mention one person today, and I'll elaborate on the others in later posts. 

Many people do not like poetry.  Their experiences with it in junior high and high school were enough to put them off from it for the rest of their lives.  I hear this from my students almost every semester.  Stories of feeling stupid, feeling like a failure, because they could not grasp the ONE concept that the teacher felt was conveyed in the poem.  Poetry was a secret language that required a decoder ring not just anyone could buy.  If this sounds like you or someone you know, I recommend that you check out the poetry of Suzanne Cleary.  This poet's reading had us in tears...from laughing so hard.  I won't give too many specific details, but the title of the first poem she read is "Sausage Candle."  Yep.

Poetry can be fun.  It can also be intense, quiet, informative, moving, long, short, about beautiful things, and about the ugliest things in the world.  Most importantly, it is about language; it is about words and how we use them to communicate with each other.  Through Converse, I am falling in love with poetry once again.

How is love like a corn dog?

This morning, I had the privilege to work with the kids in my daughter's mixed preschool and kindergarten class for a few hours.  And while my volunteer morning started on a somewhat sour and totally asinine note - instead of simply passing by the front desk, I actually remembered to sign in for my hours and was promptly rewarded with a tardy slip for 8:32 (school starts at 8:30) - the rest was at once enlightening and hilarious. 

My idea was to get the kids to write a poem about an abstract term using their five senses.  I started by giving them paper bags with oranges in them.  The kids then felt and smelled what was in the bags and described the contents.  "Squishy," "rubbery," "round," and "smells like oranges" were the most common answers.  Later, I worked with two kids at a time to write their own poems about either "love" or "friendship."

"What does love smell like?" I asked, my adult brain trying valiantly to ignore the answers I would get from my high school or college students...or my husband.  "Flowers" was pretty common, as was "strawberries" and "mom's shampoo."  Awww.  One little girl said love smelled like tortellini, her favorite meal.  I suddenly remembered I had only had a small Greek yogurt for breakfast.

Banishing those inappropriate adult, albeit juvenile, responses from my mind again, I asked, "What does love smell like?"  Some expected answers were "cake" and "chocolate," but my favorites were "spaghetti" and "corn dogs."  The girl who answered corn dogs was immediate with her answer and totally sincere.  Who doesn't think love smells like corn dogs?  Isn't that universal?

While some of the kids' answers proved that my acting skills are still pretty much in place, some of them, well, I'll let them speak for themselves.  Over and over, when I asked what love and friendship looked like, the kids answered "family." 

That got me thinking.  When I was a kid, what would I have said love smelled like?  tasted like?  I'm pretty sure my answers would have been pancakes and make-your-own ice cream sundaes at Coco's.  Making pancakes with my mom was a happy event, a content event.  And I remember it fondly to this day.  She would spell our names in pancakes, or make dinosaurs, or aliens, or whatever we were into at the time.  The smell permeated our little house for hours.  And since going out to a restaurant was a rare occasion, the opportunity to slather on chocolate syrup and not having to wash the bowl was joyous indeed.  Isn't that why so many of us have trouble with food as adults?  We equate it with love?

Ah...but the innocent minds this morning really taught me a lesson I thought I had learned well enough.  Love and friendship should look like family.  I only hope that that is what my husband and I are giving to our children. 

I'll leave you with A's poem.

Love tastes like cherries
sounds like birds tweeting
smells like milk
feels like the wind blowing
and looks like family.

Addicted to Vampires

I have a bit of "downtime" (if any mother of two small children can call it that) between semesters, so I'm doing a bit of light reading.  After trying to get into Black by Ted Dekker, and I did try - got to page 193 out of 410, I decided to go back to a tried and true good read.  Since the last (sob!) Harry Potter movie doesn't come out until July 15 and Season 4 of True Blood begins on June 26, I settled in with Charlaine Harris' series.  Sookie!

Ever since being scared out of my ten-year-old mind by a scene in an old vampire movie where a priest stuffs his vampire's victim into a furnace, I have had a love affair with all things fanged.  I read all of the Anne Rice books and saw the movies.  And yes, I'll admit, I do own the entire DVD collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and since there are no books to that series, I do own many of the comics as well. 

Then, a little over two years ago, along came Season 1 (I was a little late on the uptake) of something called True Blood.  My husband, brother, sister-in-law, and I watched the entire season in the course of two days, literally.  I had to have more.

Lo and behold, the HBO series was based on books!  I could not put them down.  I bought and read every single one of them, and I have read them all now about three times.  This series, while admittedly a "beach read" and something that, since I am a certified Prairie Home Companion  English Major, I have to dub a "guilty pleasure," is smart.  Harris manages to present vampires, werewolves, fairies, and other supernatural beings in a storyline that is fun and suspends disbelief.  She tackles prejudice (much as Rowling does with house elves, muggles, squibs, werewolves, etc) by showing humans' (often violent) reactions when vampires and shapeshifters "come out."  She also examines class structure, and prejudice in class structure, by writing her main character, Sookie Stackhouse, as an intelligent, strong, telepathic young woman from a backwater Louisiana town who never went to college and is...a waitress.  All while giving her readers a nice dose of soft-porn. 

I am already on book three, Club Dead, again.  Can't wait to see what direction HBO takes the characters this season!

What a Bargain?

Ok, it has been over a week since I've blogged...and since my goal is to try to write something every day (practice, practice!), here we go...

First, let me say that I love magazines.  There is something about them that the Internet will never replace for me.  Of course, I will never replace my entire library with ebooks either, so...big surprise.  Anyway, I received my complimentary copy of Country Living (May 2011) in the mail yesterday, and overall, I'm more impressed than I thought I would be.  It's a bit oversized in width which makes it feel fancy, and the information to ad ratio is actually pretty good.  And...it is titled "The Bargain Issue"!!  Be still my beating heart.  I could not wait to see what I could get for less. 

This issue covered a wide range of bargains, from fancy nail files for $1.75 to a house in Wilson, NC listed at $76,500.  But the article that caught my interest the most was "Family Values."  This is about a Charlotte, NC (woot!) designer named Lynn-Anne Bruns who decorated her house with "flea-market finds."  So you know, I'm all about that. 

Bruns' home is, indeed, eclectic and beautiful.  I would expect nothing less from a fellow bargain hunter.  But when I saw that $799 was paid for a bed and $2000 for a couch, I had to say...whoa Nelly.  While getting a $9000 couch for $2000 IS a great deal, they still paid $2000 for a couch.  I had to pinch a penny just to keep from feeling like my credit card had just been hacked.  (Which it was.  For real.  But the company caught it before any major theft, thank goodness.) 

I had to find out more, so I read the article instead of just looking at the pictures with captions.  The following quote told me everything I needed to know:  "All told, Lynn-Anne figures the renovations tallied around $350,000."  This in regards to the house the family purchased in 2006 which "needed extensive work to comfortably fit the whole gang."  Maybe it's because I grew up nervous about money, maybe it's because my husband and I are both in education, maybe it's because my leather Lane couch, chair, and ottoman cost me $150 total on Craigslist...whatever the reason, the idea of spending $350,000 on anything just about makes my heart stop. 

Much like the segments on morning talk shows that showcase Cute Summer Outfits for Less than $100!!! where a pair of pants costs $45 and the shoes don't count towards the total (only $60! can you believe it?), this issue failed to wow me in the bargain department.  I am, however, going to try the recipe for "Breakfast Casserole with Turkey Sausage, Mushrooms, and Tomatoes."  Yum.  It must be time for breakfast...I might even pay for the year's subscription...