Quasi-Daily Writing – April 15, 2012

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I was just thinking about the commandment in the Old Testament: “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.” Also, in Genesis, it notes that, during the creation process, that God rested on the seventh day. I understand that weeks can be very hectic, even with church and families and whatnot. But I had another thought today.

Today is one of the most gorgeous days I have seen in a long while. It’s sunny with a few clouds, beautiful breezes, and it’s lovely-warm outside. I have the doors and windows open in the house, breeze sweeping through and freshening the air, cleaning out the stuffiness and filling my house with the lightness of spring. If for no other reason, I think that commandment holds true for no other reason than for the opportunity to sit back, relax, take in, and appreciate days like this.

Day like this fill me with a profound sense of beauty, peace, happiness, and love. Days like this make me feel like leaping and shouting for joy. How does the song go? “I wanted to ring out the bells and fling out my arms and to sing out the news!” I am guessing that part of this elation is also the sense of freedom that I feel, what with my grading all done and filed away, the sense of accomplishment that I feel at having a clean desk back at school. I am supremely content in this day.

And that is a wonderful thing to be able to say! ^_^

So. You’re now a Pensieve.

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I’m angry. I’m unbelievably, bloody angry! And I’m getting angrier by the minute. I JUST started Romeo and Juliet yesterday; we read the first half of Act I, Scene 1, and my principal has already gotten 2 phone calls this morning from parents about the translation in the No Fear Shakespeare book. Did I not tell them that this is the version the kids would be reading? Did I not suggest that you look at the book beforehand? I know life is busy. God, don’t I know it? I didn’t write the book. I bought it two years ago with administrative approval! I bought it to HELP YOUR CHILD BETTER UNDERSTAND SHAKESPEARE! The man was not a saint! He was a human and a writer who knew his audience. His jokes are dirty! And now you want me to CENSOR Shakespeare? Really?!

And I don’t just feel angry. I feel GUILTY! I feel like I should have foreseen this and cut it off somehow. And I probably should have. I should have remembered that some of my kids are intensely sheltered, like I was, and that this might have embarrassed them to read and talk about in class. I should have known they’d report it to their parents. I should have given parents another heads up on the book before we started yesterday. I should have done better!

How can I make it right? How can I fix this? I feel awful. I feel like running into the stairwell and crying and hiding for the rest of the day. I’m embarrassed; I’m humiliated; I feel like a horrible teacher; I’m angry! But you know what? Here’s what I’m going to do.

When my advanced classes get here, I’m going to sit them down and talk to them. I’ll tell them that I’ve been made aware of some concerns and disapprovals, and that, in my excitement to get started with the play, I failed to take all of their feelings into account. I will express my regret, apologize to my students, and ask them to forgive me, and I will tell them that I will figure out a way to balance and make it right. I will be honest with them that I am upset and angry, but that I am not so at them. I am angry and upset with myself for it all and for possibly embarrassing anyone or setting anyone at odds with their families.

It’s all I can do.

So that’s what I will do.

I’ll cry about it later.

Quasi-Daily Writing – March 31, 2012

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“On Fountain Pens”

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I love fountain pens! Absolutely adore them. When I write with fountain pens, I find that my words are prettier, more stately. They were made for letters, notes, calling cards, and the like. I could easily see myself sitting at a secretary of a morning, replying to mail. A few acceptances here, a few declinations, a letter to my mother, a congratulatory note to a friend. It’s why I am working to get back into letter- and note-writing to my friends and family. It’s a beautiful skill and habit. I very much enjoy what I see and feel when I write. I also love receiving letters in the mail that are NOT bills or the like to be taken care of. I know that I am remembered and cared about through those letters.

Part of me – a huge part – loves to see my mind poured out on paper. I love the evidence of my thoughts. I have told some that, a great deal of the time, I feel less than adequate mentally because of

Part of me – a huge part – loves to see my mind poured out on paper. I love the evidence of my thoughts. I have told some that, a great deal of the time, I feel less than adequate mentally because my brain doesn’t move at the same pace as others’. It often takes me a long time to consider concepts and ideas before I can reach a conclusion or opinion about them, and there is no physical evidence of that process. So I fear that people often think I’m not thinking or that I won’t think about things. When I write, the evidence of cognitive thought is there on paper. Proof that I actually do think! Amazing, huh?

Quasi-Daily Writing – March 21, 2012 – “Remembering Puppy Love”

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“Remembering Puppy Love”

I have been getting an excellent lesson in love and longing over the past week or so and didn’t even realize it. My “duty period” is 7th grade lunch. Over the past few days, the students have changed up seating arrangements for the last quarter of the school year, and I have noticed a new (to me, at least) couple. She’s the only girl at the table but she sits right next to a boy who has been a relative thorn in my side through lunch all year. And, now, he’s as docile as a lamb. They sit close together, his head bowed so he’s shorter than she is, and they talk very quietly together all through lunch. I don’t think I’ve seen either of them eat since I noticed them. They just concentrate on each other, holding hands underneath the table where they think no one will see. It’s utter tunnel-vision, to the exclusion of everyone else at the table.

A few points to this.

1: I have never seen this boy so calm, so quiet, and so attentive to ANYTHING or ANYONE since I have known him. The girl he is with isn’t one of the “pretty” cheerleaders. She’s a dark-haired girl with large, sleepy eyes, and a very low-key air about her. Perhaps she is rubbing off on him – a “gentling influence”, might we dare to suggest?

2: One day, when he wasn’t at school (or at least not in the cafeteria), she sat in complete silence for the entire half hour. Didn’t speak to anyone that I noticed. And on her face was a look of…loss. Of longing. He wasn’t there and she wanted him to be. Desperately. I saw her look around a time or two and I sensed a lonesomeness with which I am intimately familiar. Her other half was missing and it was painfully obvious that she missed him.

3: When they are together, their focus is together. Yeah, they may comment about others in the cafeteria but his attention is on her and hers on him. He doesn’t leave her. Now that the weather is warm once more, the boys and girls can go outside to play after they eat on their respective days. Normally, he would jump up and head out to play basketball or what have you. But no. He doesn’t leave her side. She is his whole world for that half hour that they have to be together and talk about whatever they want and hold hands (surrepitiously, so they believe).

I started thinking about that today and what a beautiful lesson it is. I want to always be that way with the man I love. I want to be gentled by him. I want to always miss him deeply and horribly when we have to be apart. Now, I am a rather independent person (comes part and parcel of being an only child) but I want to always feel like part of me – part that is IMPORTANT – is missing when he is not around. I even want to always feel that ache that isn’t soothed unless he’s there.

I want to focus on him when we are together. I want that tunnel-vision where he fills all of my eyes and is all I can see, feel, do, hear, etc. I WANT that! I know that, beyond the initial puppy love, something like that takes time and intentional to cultivate, and I have found that I want to work at that. Much harder than I have been.

I want that puppy love feeling. As a friend suggested, it may just even be that it’s second-nature now so that I don’t notice it. But I want to be intentional about it.

**EDITED**

Quasi-Daily Writing: February 16, 2012 – Another Apple, Another Point of Bliss

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So I guess I really am an apple-for-the-teacher kind of girl. I made myself as cute as can be to the cafeteria ladies today to beg an apple from the service container waiting for the 6th graders after I finished 7th grade lunch duty (why DO the youngest children eat last, I wonder?). I bit into it and that cold sweetness burst in my mouth, causing a dumb grin on my face, I just know it. There’s something about a sweet, chilled apple that just makes me happy and relaxed and cool and…ahhhhh!

And I needed that moment today. It’s not been a particularly difficult one, just busy and tiring and worrisome. All I want to do is crawl back into bed and sleep away the rest of the day. It may be the grey skies, it may be the rain, but something is pulling me down, trying to curl around me and keep me there with it. Hopefully, it won’t.

Quasi-Daily Writing – February 10, 2012

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Author’s Note: It’s a rare and odd thing when I am inspired by myself or, more accurately, something that I own. Perhaps it is arrogance, perhaps it’s just early morning bleariness but here you have it. And, yes, entirely fictional paper bullet of my brain. It came to me while brushing my teeth, if you must know. ^_^

She snuck quietly from bedroom to bathroom without incident, not wanting to have to bother to put on her clothes for just a quick trip. She made it, unseen and unheard, took care of business, and then made ready to leave again. Opening the bathroom door quietly by degrees, she poked her head out and looked around to make sure the coast was clear. She was in nothing but her underwear, after all. The black bra was simple enough, no decoration. No, what drew the eyes were her panties.

They were cheeky little concoction of silken leopard-print interspersed with the turquoise eye of a peacock’s tail, the same color turquoise as the lace that edged the little undergarment. They sat low on her hips, accentuating the S-slope of waist to hip and showing off the darling little dimples in her lower back; they also hugged her derriere, the lace showing off a curve that inspired the imagination what else lay beneath.

Naturally, she never thought of these things when she put them on; she just wore them because she liked them, because they made her feel pretty. Of course she didn’t think about the men whose brain might be broken by a bit of silk and lace. Especially not the one who saw them that night. He’d slipped out of his room much as she had hers, trying not to wake anyone for sound travelled quickly. He exited his door, just as her head was turned the opposite way, as she slipped out of the bathroom. He paused upon seeing her, his eyes taking in all facets of her body in those undergarments in less than 10 seconds.

Unfortunately, where he paused was right where the floor creaked and, as it groaned, she paused. No. Froze is more the appropriate verb. Slowly, ever so slowly, her head turned to look at him over her shoulder. As Juliet once said in far more verbose terms, she was glad that it was dark and he could not see her blush. In the shadowed hall, they just stared at each other for a minute until, finally, she reached up and pressed a finger to her lips in the gesture that every person has known since childhood.

Don’t speak. Don’t make a sound. Don’t move.

And, with that, she was gone. Back down the hall, into her room, the door closing quietly. Meanwhile, he was left to ponder how turquoise and leopard-print could make such a pretty pairing.

Quasi-Daily Writing – February 6, 2012

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This has long been on of my favorite songs. As a little girl, I used to watch the 1965 “Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” with my mother, and this song has stuck with me over the years. I find that it’s rather apropos for me, truth be told, with the imagination that I have developed all my life. When I was a child, my favorite thing to do was play pretend, insert myself into stories, into movies, into games. But, then again, if you’ve been reading this blog, you know that.

Some of my most fun moments as a girl were when I’d imagine a world all my own, and play out stories with characters and friends that only I could see. It was freeing, it was fun, it worried my parents understandably, but I loved it. Imagination is a power that I reveled in and that I will never give up. I only hope that I can pass it on to my own children someday.

Jan. 17, 2012 – A Broken Camel

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I don’t know if I can do this. Between the rigors we are put through, the responsibility of education (academic, moral, ethical, social, etc.), of keeping our own current as well as our students’, now with this new evaluation tool…I think this may break me. Starting next year, we are to be evaluated five times a year from a 20-page document, with algorithms to determine our effectiveness like the meter on a wattage reader. 90 days to improve if we are found wanting, or likely be sacked. Gathered together into a pen like so many black sheep to be picked which is to go to slaughter when it comes time to RIF. It’ll pit us against each other, which you KNOW is what will happen.

I’ll be honest, I’m almost in tears and have been almost all day. I don’t know if I can do this, live under threat of losing my job every day because an algorithm deems me “ineffective”. I’m scared, I’m stressed. I’m trying to work with the rules THEY GAVE US. With the tests THEY MAKE US GIVE. All I want to do is hide myself away in a corner and cry. The six years of schooling, the two years on professional probation, the hundreds of hours I spent working and piecing together and preparing that portfolio that proved I could teach. Again. The hours that I spend day after day trying to do my best by my students. It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough.

But what else can I do? Is it odd for me to say that I don’t feel qualified to do anything else? I could work in a law firm, yes, I’ve done that before. I could work in a bookstore, if they’d have me. I could be a waitress. But could I support my family doing those things? Without anyone having to worry or fear? I think I would enjoy editing or proofreading for a magazine or newspaper but there aren’t a great many of those looking about right now, at least not in my area. I’ve checked. Everyone says they want “experience”, but how do I get it without being given a chance to do so?

I’m confused. And lost and scared and unsure of what to do next. Sticking it out and plugging away is what probably makes the most sense to people. And yet…does my future hold a possibility of anything different. The truth is that I do not like what I do all the time, much like anyone else. What I am not sure of is whether or not I like the great experiences I do get enough to go through all this. And that scares me more than a little.

**EDITED**

Quasi-Daily Writing: January 16, 2012

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On the TV is “History’s Mysteries: The Legend of Arthur and the Knights of Camelot”. As I listen to this, I begin to wonder back to my childhood, to a time when I truly believed that chivalric knights and princes on white horses existed, and that, one day, one of them would find me, recognize that I indeed had worth, and carry me off to love me for all of time. Just like the fairy tales. Even despite the fact that, for a while, I found the villains far more alluring than the princes. But what can I say? I was five at the time.

As I grew, I began to grow out of that attitude, finding no evidence of such princes and knights in the world around me, at least not amongst the males who mattered: the boys at school. They had never heard of chivalry or even good manners, it hardly seemed to me. Thus, the dream of the prince on the white horse began to fade as I realized that I couldn’t wait around for him, punctuated by several failed attempts to find said prince from the meager stock I had available to me.

As I progressed through high school, regarding myself as little more than an old maid. It may seem odd that I thought of myself as such at 17 years old but I had been much a mother figure to my friends all through school that, truly, what else could I think of myself as? Ironically enough, it didn’t bother me. I didn’t need the prince now. I would journey to lands far away on my own, build my own new life. On my own, no prince required.

As I began college, I began to meet men with this fleeting dream called “chivalry”, young men who wouldn’t let me walk back to my dorm alone, who defended me against naysayers. Then I began to dream again, ever so slightly, that one of those chivalrous men might be for me some day. Five years and what (I thought) were four possibilities later, I came to the point where I was content to live and stand alone. Or so I thought.

Needless to say, my prince did come along, though he did not lift me up onto his horse but met me where I was on earth. I reminded him how to fly and he encouraged me to dream. So…just because you cease dreaming it, doesn’t mean that the dream isn’t real, isn’t still there.

Quasi-Daily Writing – December 30, 2011 – What’s with all the apples?

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So this will be yet another musing upon ecstatic, probably carnal-in-some-way moments. Imaginations are encouraged.

So many of my ecstatic, epiphanic moments lately seem to have to do with apples. In this case, I was in the bathroom sitting with the hubby while he shaved and showered, just because I wanted to be near him. With my iPhone, of course, clicking through Facebook as I sat. I suddenly garnered a want for an apple. I knew there was one in the fridge, that he had eaten its twin the night before and been disappointed with it. Still I wanted it and hoped for more success. So I ran to the fridge, garnered the poor doomed apple, and hurried back to the bathroom. And, as it happened, I lucked out. It was crunchy and sweet and intoxicating and soon I left off the iPhone altogether and stood up to do a little dance while I ate my apple, eventually coming to rest against the towel rack. I felt exceedingly lazy and rather happy; and then I caught myself in the mirror. The angle of my body, the arm resting languidly over my head, the apple at my mouth…I suddenly began giggling and said to the husband, “Look!”

He looked in my reflection’s direction and smirked. “Yes, Eve, you’re very pretty.” At which, of course, I played my part and offered him the apple.

“No! No! That’s how we all go into this mess in the first place, remember?” he laughed. I just batted my eyes.

“But I know so many nice things now,” I protested before taking another sweet bite.

Yes, yes, blasphemous and whatnot, I suppose some would say. But it was fun and I enjoyed the way I looked in the mirror with my hair tumbling in its curls over my shoulder, the red highlights standing out in the bathroom lights. It was one of the moments of contentment with myself that I have come to treasure. I leaned against the towel rack and finished my dear apple down to the very core, contemplated having a friend of mine take pictures of me like this some day, and just enjoyed that ecstatic moment in peace. Which the hubby didn’t mind at all, me or my reflection.