sara e

Daily Calendars

2011-01-17T07:32:00.003-06:00

I don't know at what point I'll eventually have to start saying, "I used to have a blog." But, not today. I was just sitting at the empty kitchen table with nothing that could be distracting anywhere in the vicinity. I've been procrastinating for a straight week in terms of grades/planning for school, so there I sat with my newly-repaired briefcase staring me in the face. I couldn't bring myself to actually open it.

Instead I found myself whispering the words, "Cuantos botellas de vino tomaste anoche?" In 2006 I had a daily calendar that provided a Spanish phrase of the day. Of course anyone knows that you can't actually learn much (of a foreign language or vocab, in general, anyway) by looking at something one time and then moving on to something new the following morning. This is the only phrase I remember. I was so amused by it that I kept the slip of paper and pulled it out from time to time when I needed a laugh. Translated, it says, "How many bottles of wine did you have last night?" I just love that the units they chose is bottles. If anyone had more than one bottle (or in my case, half a bottle) of wine on a given night, I'm sure they would be too busy vomiting to actually answer the question.

That same year was the year I discovered the daily calendar of poetry. It was probably the best thing that ever got discontinued. Matt Parks had it, and it wasn't very practical, considering he never tore out poems that he liked. So if the first poem he liked occurred on January 20th, it looked like it was January 20th for the rest of the year. I would catch up on all the good poems whenever I went to his house, and I remember one specific time sitting on the front porch with the poems and a jug of orange juice. I got up and put both back inside, but Matt decided he also wanted to look through the poems. It was a solid five minutes before he emerged again. Holding the calendar he asked, "Did you put the poetry in the fridge?" Still one of my favorite questions I've ever been asked.

2010-12-15T12:28:00.002-06:00

The lady at Sephora convinced me to spend over $100 on new face products, which I've been using the last couple of days. This morning I saw my students for the first time since last Friday, and the first/only observation I received was, "You look tired...or sick...or something." Returning products tomorrow.

Missing: Yearbook

2010-12-09T06:09:00.002-06:00

Well, I just walked over to my bookshelf to grab my senior yearbook so I could show my juniors my senior page that my mom created for me. We're studying the American romantic writers currently, and my senior page has one Henry David Thoreau quote and one Ralph Waldo Emerson quote. Unfortunately, my yearbook isn't there. I have no idea where it is. It lived on that shelf for years. Big deal? Trying not to think about it right now...

Trees by Joyce Kilmer

2010-11-06T12:47:00.004-05:00

I am requiring my creative writing students to memorize poems from poetryoutloud.org, which is the website for a national recitation contest. There are hundreds of poems to choose from which is awesome, because I've found some poems/poets I wouldn't have otherwise come across.

I think Joyce Kilmer would have been my best friend if I lived a hundred years ago. Here is a short poem by him. The last couplet is the best.

Trees

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

Just Testing the Water

2010-11-03T18:28:00.004-05:00

Well, now I just feel like it's been so long since I've written that I have no idea where to begin. Okay, how about here? A few entries ago I made some short-term goals for myself: to see the giant sequoias and to plan a spring bulb garden. I accomplished one out of two, which I think is pretty good considering my time constraints recently. I filmed a brief (10 second) video while in the woods just stating where I was, my age, and that I completed a life goal. But for some reason I'm whispering, and it seems kind of like a scene out of the Blair Witch Project, so I opted not to post that one.

"Lanyard" by Billy Collins

2010-09-12T11:13:00.002-05:00

I went in to school yesterday (Saturday) to get some work done. I have about 1000 papers to grade (I seriously think that is true... no exaggeration), as well as a week's worth of lesson plans to finish by Monday, and I thought I would get more done if I was at school. I started with creative writing. I browsed the Intro to Poetry book and pulled some things out for Monday and decided I needed something a little more interesting for the remaining two days. I wound up spending the next hour at watching Billy Collins read poems in my dark classroom, finding clips to show to my class. I feel confident I could have accomplished this in 20 minutes, but I couldn't stop watching. I take great joy in the fact that watching Billy Collins read poems is now in my job description.

I knew I wanted to share this on my blog as soon as I saw it, and I thought about waiting until Mother's Day, but that's an awfully long way away, and I may forget about it by then. So I will post it now. Enjoy.

2010-09-02T06:01:00.001-05:00

all too familiar.

Word of the Day for Wednesday, September 1, 2010

anacoluthia \an-uh-kuh-LOO-thee-uh\, noun:

Lack of grammatical sequence or coherence, esp. in a sentence.

2010-09-01T21:15:00.002-05:00

Sooo busy. Sooo tired. I brought home 120 papers to grade (autobiographical paragraphs for four classes... thirty per class), then at about five o'clock I thought, let's be reasonable. Let's aim for one set of thirty tonight. Now it is 9:15, I have graded exactly zero papers, and I am about to watch an episode of 30rock and fall into a deep sleep. Discipline. Discipline.

2010-08-12T22:07:00.002-05:00

Today was the big day. First day for students! At last count, I have 178 of them. It was just a half day, so we only had about fifteen minutes with each class, which really isn't enough time to do much more than take role. I'm sure this year is gonna be a difficult one, but I'm also SO excited to have my own classroom with my own lessons (and a paycheck, too). Of course I'm excited to have seniors for several reasons; besides having great literature (British, primarily), they also always win the pep rallies, and I like to be on the winning team. I'm sure I'll have more school stories after next week when we actually have class.

What I'd like to talk about now is where I went after school. There is a depot for metro teachers called "The Pencil Box" which allows all metro teachers to come once a semester and collect EIGHTY items FOR FREE. You know those big boxes in Kroger where you can drop off school supplies? Have you ever wondered where they go? Well, this is where. I got twenty binders, several pairs of scissors, construction paper, pens, highlighters, file folders, and the list goes on and on. You could tell when a company made a large donation (like when you see two hundred boxes of the same brand of markers in a huge stack), but you could also tell when an individual dropped off a random box of markers that was different than all the others. So I'd like to throw out a thank you into cyber land to whoever provided me with my name-brand markers. Man, what an awesome place for teachers on a budget.

When I came home, I sat in my HOT house with no electricity for a few hours before going to my fiddle lesson. It's been a jam-packed day, and I'm ready for some pre-bed 30rock before I sleep very deeply.

Plans

2010-08-05T19:07:00.002-05:00

I feel like everyone I know is feeling anxious about plans. That they don't have one, that they might have the wrong one, that it's not working. I think it's good to have a plan and to work towards getting there and, in that way, be an active participant in your life. But I feel like I just need a break from plans for a hot second. I decided in the fall of 2006 that I wanted to teach, and it's been a long road, but I'm finally here, and I would like to just sit and enjoy its coming to fruition (is that how you use that word?) for a bit. Vocational plans take a lot of consideration and energy, and I just hope to God that I don't have to think about switching careers any time soon. I would like to have smaller plans, like getting to California to see the giant sequoias. I would like to plan my spring bulb garden. Yes, those are my two new plans. It needs to be fall.

new number

2010-07-21T09:55:00.003-05:00

So in my last post I mentioned that I never ever get hit on in bars. Of course the one time I make that statement is the same week that I actually got hit on in a bar. Last night I went with Gray to the Gold Rush around midnight for a beer/snack. We were sitting at the bar, and right after our food got there, Gray left the bar for a minute. This random guy promptly is like, "So I see you went for the grilled cheese." And I was like, "Yep. Best value meal on the menu." And then he made a couple other food-related comments before handing me a piece of paper and said, "That's my number. You can use it if you want." So I said thank you and then he left. Then Gray came back to the bar. Here is the conversation that followed.

"Well a lot happened while you were gone."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, this guy just gave me his number.

"No shit?"

"Yep. What do you think? Should I call him?

"I don't know. What do you think?"

"I'm thinking I probably don't want to call the kind of guy who's hanging out at the Gold Rush after midnight on a Tuesday."

"Sara, we're hanging out at the Gold Rush after midnight on a Tuesday."

"I know that. But we're obviously the exception. How about this? I don't want to call a guy who would hit on me while I'm at the bar with another guy."

"It's not like I'm your boyfriend."

"Yeah, but he doesn't know that."

"Good point."

I put the number in my wallet and Gray was like, "So you're keeping it?" and I told him yeah, if for nothing else than to have an artifact to prove that I did get hit on in a bar one time. Dreams do come true! Actually, I do like to have random achievable dreams. My first one was to obtain a Colorado license tag (already achieved this). So then my next dream was for someone to surprise me with a new violin bow that had a bow (ribbon) tied around it. This never happened and is probably never going to happen, so my new dream (and by new I mean I've had this dream for 3+ years) is to have a stranger send me a drink from across the bar without ever approaching me. It happens in the movies.

How We Met

2010-07-18T16:21:00.003-05:00

Paul was over the other night, and we were talking about guys hitting on girls in bars. It was a pretty short conversation because he doesn't really hit on girls in bars, and I could only think of a couple of times EVER that I've gotten hit on in a bar. But I did remember how I had been informed several years ago that it was 80s night at the saloon in Boone, and so I went to the thrift store and bought a green, off-the-shoulder, velvet mini-dress that looked awful and put on some maroon lipstick before walking in to discover that I was the only one who had gotten the 80s night memo. I stayed anyway, and then I actually got hit on, and then that guy became my boyfriend a couple of weeks later. And Paul said something along the lines of, "Man, that would make a really great story to tell your kids about how you met."

During one session I had with Iva (Iva is my former therapist I bring up from time to time) after the worst breakup ever, she encouraged me to try to detach myself from the situation and try to see it as an experience. I think another way to say it is that it's helpful to step back and just see some things as a good story. And I think I'm getting better at this.

I told Paul that I actually think I could pull a good "how we met/how we started dating" story out of every relationship I've ever been in (starting in college, maybe).

Okay, so I wrote the rest of blog by actually going through my six boyfriends and extracting a good "how we met" story, but now I'm thinking it may be too much information to publish, so I'm not going to post the rest. If you're interested, you can e-mail me, and I'll send it to you. Or you can call me. I like to tell stories.

Caroline Grace

2010-07-17T08:10:00.001-05:00

I am supposed to be walking out the door for work right now, but I wanted to post this real quick! This is my new niece, Caroline, whom I met for the first time this week. She's enjoying (or not complaining about, anyway) her new baby blanket!

I came to the woods

2010-07-13T15:48:00.002-05:00

So one part of me that I'd like to drag into the courtyard and shoot is my general worry. I tend to feel nervous a lot of the time, and I hate that about me. But oddly enough, being in the woods might just be where I feel the most safe. I guess a lot of people are nervous about the woods, but for whatever reason, I only have positive feelings about being out there.
Last summer I did trail work at Warner Parks, and it was HARD but rewarding. I've been meaning to volunteer out there this summer, but of course time slips away, and I haven't been (another part of me I'd like to drag into the courtyard and shoot). However, I had a teacher in-service this morning that took place at Warner Parks. It was so strange to be out there with all these strangers doing "icebreakers." It was such a beautiful rainy morning, and the rain cooled it into the 70s, but of course my new co-workers wanted to do all our activities inside (as opposed to the covered porch). We had an hour and half for lunch before finishing the day back at the high school, and everyone broke into factions and went to various restaurants, but I stuck around the park by myself. I went to the garden first and admired the okra and zinnias, touching everything. Gardening is such a nice tactile thing. My hands still smell like the dill plant I decided to pet.
I noticed that the door to the barn was open (brown recluse land..my least favorite spot in the park), and so I stepped in to find my former boss and this year's crew (all boys this year!). They were disassembling and cleaning the weed wrenches, and we chatted about all the work they'd done this year (tons apparently. All the trails were closed after the floods, and there were apparently mud slides, hundreds of trees down, etc etc). I left them to their work and hit the closest trail. And then everything felt right. It's like the woods are my giant security blanket. I walked around whistling and for the first time in a couple weeks, I really felt like things are going to be okay.
"Either Way," the Wilco song, has been nice too:

Maybe the sun will shine today
The clouds will roll away
Maybe I won't be so afraid
I will understand
How everything has its plan
Either Way

Divided

2010-07-11T11:57:00.004-05:00

I've been browsing my Billy Collins poetry over the last few days. A few of his poems will always be at the top of my list, but the great thing about re-reading poetry (or anything, really) is that a poem jumps out at you that you'd never noticed before. I must've flipped through this book fifty times, but I cannot recall ever reading this poem (though I'm sure I have). I'll share it:

"Driving Myself to a Poetry Reading" by Billy Collins

Halfway there I pull on the headlights
and drift down the road, blazing
like the other cars in the weekday dusk.
I find something on the jazz station
and listen to the chords shifting
under the music like the many gears of the song.
The autumn air is cool and I can see
a few early stars through the windshield,
but like Caesar's Gaul, I feel divided.

There is a part of me that wants
to let go of the wheel, climb over the seat
and fall asleep curled in the back.
This is the part I would like to see
blindfolded some morning, dragged
into a courtyard, and shot.

Another part of me wants to be up on the hood,
a chrome ornament in the shape of a bird
leaning aerodynamically into the wind.
And now I can feel my voice begin to fly
ahead of the car, winging it into the night,
searching the landscape below for a podium,
a shaded lamp, a glass, and a pitcher of water.

This is the part I will still wonder about
when I am dying, staring up at the ceiling.
the part that is eager to perch on the rim
of that glass, wet its hard little beak,
and begin singing every song it ever knew.

I've tried to write a paragraph about how I feel about this poem literally four times now, and I keep deleting the whole thing and starting over. Several folks have been encouraging me to write lately, but it's not coming easy this week. I've been trying my hand at poetry, and it's SO BAD that I gave up on training myself and decided I would try to train my typewriter instead (I've been typing up classic poems on the typewriter in the hopes that it will facilitate great poems of my own sometime soon). I will keep you posted.

I'd just like to say that I like the simplicity of Collins' language. The phrase, "I feel divided," is beautiful.

Jokes

2010-07-07T07:45:00.002-05:00

I guess sometimes what you need is a good cat joke. There were about eight of us sitting around a table with some drinks, and one thing led to another, and we found ourselves making up cat jokes for 20 minutes. My favorite that someone else made up was:

What do you call a cat that likes little kittens?

A purrrrvert.

And I think the best one that I came up with was:

Why did the cat sue the doctor?

For meowlpractice.

I'm laughing thinking about these, but then again, I've always been the one who laughs at her own jokes. I challenge you to come up with better.

The Bargain Vet

2010-07-06T13:54:00.003-05:00

It was time for Silas's annual visit to the vet, and I've been delaying it because it is so damn expensive. Last June, between the check-up and the urinary tract infection, I spent (gulp) six hundred dollars. That's right. In one month.

Of course, one year later, Silas has peed in the house a couple times, and I was confident that he once again had another urinary tract infection. In an effort to minimize costs, I decided to take him to the vet in the hood. It was best part of my day. Let me just tell you:

This vet is in a shopping center with an auto parts shop and a korean restaurant, and though I spelled out my dog's name letter by letter, it managed to be recorded as "Silias," which sounds like that disease where you can't eat hardly any food. So I explained to the vet (the only guy who works there) what's been up with Silas, and he's like, "Well let's go get a urine sample." So I walked with him out a door which I presumed would lead to a lab room or something, but instead it led to a gravel lot. The vet had grabbed one of those paper trays you would put a pronto pup in if you were at a baseball game. I'm not saying it was a medical receptacle that was like a pronto pup tray. I'm telling you it was a straight up red and white checkered pronto pup tray. We led Silas to a rock which he gladly peed on while the vet stuck his arm underneath him. It was so great.

The good news is that the test was negative. The bad news is that the vet thinks he might be acting out since he only does it when I leave, meaning as long as I leave the house, this may still be a problem. Great. The OTHER good news is that this vet was over four hundred dollars cheaper than my original wallet-raping vet.

Themes

2010-07-05T09:20:00.002-05:00

Scotty, the pastor at Christ Community in Franklin, once said something like, "We need the gospel every day because we forget the gospel every day." So true. The number one thing I wish for myself is that I could remember and practically apply the Gospel like second nature. It seems impossible so far.
During my stretch of unemployment back in the winter, the best thing that happened was discovering Tim Keller's sermons (free!) as a podcast on iTunes. There are about 35 or so you can upload. I worked through all of them during my knitting kick, and they've become my daily dose of the Gospel. There are probably about ten that I've listened to upwards of six or seven times, and they are such a valuable resource to me.
I've been thinking about themes lately. My current favorite biblical themes is the idea that things are never as they first appear-- sometimes for the worse, but usually for the better. I think of Jacob who waited for seven years for Rachel, only to wake up in the morning next to Leah. But I also think of the last becoming first and of course, the crowds who surely thought Jesus was dead, that all was lost, only to be so profoundly wrong come Easter morning.
Tim Keller (in the "Praying Your Fears" sermon) tells the story of Genesis 15 in which God speaks to Abraham, promising to bless him. And Abraham asks, "But how do I know?" and God tells him to build an alter and to bring several animals cut in half. Tim Keller explains that Abraham would have understood this to mean that he would be making an oath to God (In that time, when you took an oath, you slaughtered several animals, then walked amongst them, essentially saying, "If I break this oath, may I be as these animals-- slaughtered and left in the wilderness. Pretty intense). So Abraham did as he was told, but to his surprise, he wasn't the one making the oath; it was God who, in the form of a smoking torch, passed amongst the dead animals, indicating that he would never forsake his covenant with Abraham. That story moves me almost to tears every time I think of it. It is so contrary to what we think about when we think of the "Old Testament God."
Back to Jacob. In another sermon ("The Struggle for Love," I think) Tim Keller points out that any time we put all our hope and expectations into an earthly thing, we're always going to "wake up next to Leah." I've been in love with a verse in a Leonard Cohen song for a few years now. It makes everything better:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Poor Leah.

And I'd Like to Check You for Ticks

2010-06-15T07:53:00.003-05:00

Sometime last week, Paul asked if I wanted to help out with the short film they were filming this weekend, and I responded, "As long as you don't make me wear a dress covered in ticks," which was a reference to the last time I helped out with a project. Then I realized I never wrote a blog about that. I feel like it's a story that cannot be allowed to slip through the cracks.

About two years ago, Paul said something like, "Hey, you have a violin, right?" After saying yes, he asked if I wanted to be in a music video. I then explained that I'm not very good at the violin, and he said it didn't matter. As long as I could move the bow up and down, I'd be fine. So I showed up Saturday morning at our first location, Clark's house, where there were three "real" strings players and two "fake" strings players. Beyond being real strings players, these girls knew the song by heart, whereas I had never even heard the song. So my beautiful friend Katie (a real strings player) asked me if I wanted to see "the charts," to which I responded, "Nah. I don't even know what a chart is."

We were put in these beautiful pink vintage nightgowns and positioned onto a couch with our instruments for take one. I was told just to try and match the bowing to the real violinists but that the notes didn't matter. Of course they played the song perfectly, and I was playing some sort of atonal nonsense. You have never heard a worse sound in all your life, and the whole room was laughing. Don't worry. This only went on for the next seven hours. I think I said something like, "Oh my God. I feel like a make-a-wish kid where all I wanted was to dress pretty and pretend to be one of the real musicians."

We did a few different takes in various parts of Clark's house before moving on to the next site. We did a shot in a barn and then someone decided it would be a good idea to do another shot in the woods adjacent to the barn (see above picture). We were positioned and probably went through the song two or three times for a total of fifteen minutes or so. Afterwards we loaded up and headed to our next spot. We had been there ten or fifteen minutes when I asked if anyone else felt like they had a little itch/tickle thing going on. Of course not. Then whoever was standing next to me looked at my arm and said, "Oh you've got a little guy on you. It looks like a little spider." I looked down and said, "That's a baby tick." Then I looked down at my dress, and it was covered in them. I apparently had been standing in a tick nest when we were shooting in the woods. The next few minutes are kind of a blur. Total panic, probably some screaming. I ran into the bathroom and just started ripping my clothes off. I am not exaggerating when I say there were well over a hundred EVERYWHERE. On my dress, on my stomach, on my bra and underwear. I was standing in the shower, panic still well underway when Clark came in. The only point of our conversation I remember was, "I am NOT putting that dress back on," which I said ten times or so. Everyone else went to lunch while I picked the ticks off my undergarments. Paul and Clark were outside with my dress where they had wrapped their hands in masking tape, and were rolling their hands across the dress to get all the ticks off (Yes, it was that bad).

I eventually acquiesced, put the dress back on, and continued on with the day. I was convinced I had lymes disease for the next seven day. The odds were totally against me! One tick, maybe you'll get lymes disease. One hundred ticks, you definitely are getting lymes disease. But amazingly I didn't. I feel like I am constantly putting myself in situations where I get ticks (wilderness camp, collecting herbarium specimen, trail work, etc etc) and that I am significantly more calm about them than the general public, but that day I was A TOTAL WRECK. However, I will also say that besides that hour long fiasco, it was easily one of the most fun days ever. You can watch the completed music video here. Luckily, as I mentioned before, there were two of us who were fake strings player. Thank God Jordan was there with me! And speaking of Jordan, she and Matt have a new blog dedicated to their travels. They're both great writers, and you can check them out here.

vague outline

2010-06-13T22:14:00.003-05:00

The task of reporting all my updates seems too overwhelming to even attempt. But I bet I can make it easy. 1) I have a new niece. 2) I moved to Nashville. 3) I started a summer job. 4) I got hired to teach for the fall. That is a vague outline.

I intended to write yesterday morning, but a stray dog went trotting by my yard, and I spent my 30 minutes of blog time trying to find and catch him. I failed. Then last night I saw ANOTHER ownerless dog (this one did at least have a tag), and I tried to track him down too, but he also disappeared. I told James we had to try (we had exactly 8 minutes before the start of our movie) because it makes me sad to see aimlessly wandering pups. Then I said I felt like the dogcatcher in the rye. But I'm obviously really bad at being a dogcatcher.

I got the sweetest typewriter at a yard sale this weekend (light blue smith corona sterling from the 60s or so) and so I just decided to type a letter to a friend back in Boston. i felt like such an idiot as i went back and forth from typing on the typewriter to wandering to my computer to google, "how to make an apostrophe on typewriter." it took me until the third paragraph to get it right.

cold.

2010-05-13T06:24:00.002-05:00

Well, it was hot for a minute, but now it's been cold again. As in, 30s at night, and the daytime high was 50 yesterday. Of course I feel like this isn't how May is "supposed" to be, and I walk around saying Why is it cold? or just Brrrrr 1,000 times, annoyed that I'm not wearing summer dresses. But I had a really fabulous moment a couple nights ago when I decided to put on my flannel pajama set and turn the heat on. I found myself smiling and feeling giddy, and I realized the smell of the heater + flannel pjs make me think of Christmas. I love Christmas. I lit my fraser fir candle (best candle ever. by Thymes. buy one.) and fell asleep on the couch dreaming of Christmas songs and candy.

Cool weather is also very pleasant for bike rides and my job. I remember last summer (when I did trail work) looking at the forecast every morning and thinking Please don't let it get above 90 and then shivering throughout all of lunch which was in a room set to 80. Yesterday I walked to get a coffee during lunch, gripped it with both of my hands, and relished every sip of the warmth with the hood of my jacket up. I will be pining for those moments soon enough, when I'm in the Tennessee mornings again.

Reduce Reuse Recycle

2010-05-02T17:34:00.002-05:00

Back in the fall, my upstairs neighbor and I were walking in the door at the same time, and she mentioned that she was getting rid of a couple of chairs and wanted to know if I was interested in them before they got tossed. I told her I'd come take a look. They're nice and sturdy wooden chairs, but they also happen to be upholstered with browned fabric featuring turkeys playing in the woods. My initial instinct was to pass, but then I remembered that I essentially have no furniture and two chairs are probably better than zero. So I took the chairs and have been sitting on ugly turkeys all year until today.

I went through my closet earlier this week to pull things out that need to be given away. I came across a dress I have had since high school. I love the pattern, but the style was not doin' it for me anymore. Then it occurred to me that they would make a really nice seat for the turkey chairs. I ripped off the turkey fabric, cut up my dress, and reupholstered the chairs this afternoon. Reused chairs, recycled dress...feeling pretty good. The third shot is what remains of the dress. It might make a nice apron for a doll?

This is it

2010-05-02T16:17:00.004-05:00

Today is approaching hot. I was just sitting on the balcony with Silas humming along to some music and thought, "This is it." It's a positive statement. Like an I've waited all winter, and finally This is it. I have a really good friend from college named Drew, and one summer he had a house with a tire swing in the front. I was over there hanging out in the front yard, swinging, and that's when Drew took a sip of beer and declared, "This is it," nodding, with a large smile. Ever since then, I like to declare warm, carefree afternoons as being "it."

The house Drew lived in prior that one was across the street from a prison. I collected about half of my herbarium specimen behind their property and really enjoyed writing the location on my notecards as "across the street from the prison." Weekend fun over there usually consisted of building a fire, though I do recollect sitting on the roof during warm days as the boys practiced their shot with bb guns aimed at beer cans that had been stuck upside down on sticks they had lodged in the ground throughout the backyard.

I think a major thing I appreciated about Drew was that you could just announce, "I'm coming over," and that would be totally fine. You were never intruding, and there was never any pressure to have a big plan. Building a fire or sitting on the porch listening to music or inspecting the buckeyes, lilacs, and maples on their property was typically enough. I've heard several friends in Nashville complain as of late that people in Nashville are too "activity oriented," and that time ends up being more about what you're doing rather than who you're simply spending time with. Like, if your plan ain't good enough, no one's showing up. So I would propose calling up a friend on a Sunday afternoon and announcing that you're coming over. They'll get used to it.

2010-04-29T06:57:00.002-05:00

Earlier this week James and I went to P.F. Chang's (our achilles heel of chain restaurants) and seemed to spend the entire dinner discussing whether free will exists or not. We both agree that God knows everything that is going to happen. Then we diverge. I don't see how God knowing the future interferes with my free will, but James thinks if it's known and "fixed," then we don't really have free will. We talked around and around what it means that our future is known until the waitress brought us our fortune cookies. And by fortune cookies, I mean "advice cookies," because that is all they ever seem to be these days. I opened mine (which said something along the lines of, "Relax and enjoy life.") and had already eaten my cookie before James had gotten to his. After employing the "slam your fist on the air-tight bag" method that all boys seem to use-- what is with that?? it was discovered that there was, in fact, no fortune for James. My immediate response was, "How's that for free will?" We could both go home happy. I got my fortune/advice and was fine with it, and James didn't have to lose sleep over his future since, according to the cookie, it's not known.

I will end this portion by sharing the most memorable fortune I've heard of anyone receiving. It wasn't mine, but it said, "Pain and suffering will follow you throughout your miserable life." Someone at the factory was having a bad day, I guess.

After dinner, I insisted we go to the card store to get Mother's Day cards while we were already at the mall and before all the good cards got taken. We started in the Papyrus section. Their style is a fancy cover which opens to a simplistic note on the inside, such as, "It is a joy to have you as a mother. Happy Mother's Day." Or maybe just, "Happy Mother's Day." This is what I usually go for, opting to write my own extended note on the blank side. James found a card pretty immediately and went to pay for it. I scooted into the next section which has the longer messages. I started reading the first one I grabbed, and by the time James came back I was standing there crying. "It's just so sweet!" I tried to explain. James was speechless. This is apparently just how I am these days. Hopefully the card really is that touching and it wasn't just pms speaking, because mom, that's the card you're getting!

Business

2010-04-16T07:52:00.003-05:00

I received my first (and maybe my last) pack of business cards yesterday from my boss. I must admit, it feels very exciting. Of course, there is one small problem: I only have about six weeks before they are obsolete (If you didn't get the memo, I'm leaving Boston at the end of May. To where? Not exactly sure yet..). I also received my first online blurb! You can read how amazing my credentials are here.

my kind of day/my thing

2010-04-13T06:21:00.003-05:00

Two people within a week told me they had a "sara little" kind of day. Two other people said they were trying "my thing." I had about two seconds after each one of these statements to try and figure out what they meant by it before the person would launch into their explanation. Apparently, having a sara little kind of day is the kind of day where everything goes wrong. And apparently, my thing is waking up much earlier than needed to simply enjoy the morning.

I feel like I need to pause and tell people that I have a good life. I guess I tend to tell stories of freakishly bad things happening because they make good stories. Also, in sixth grade our guidance counselor had me and about eight other girls from my class come to her office and say one nice thing and one less-nice thing about each person. And I was MORTIFIED that people thought I bragged. CS Lewis talks about falling off the horse to one side and getting back on only to fall off the horse to the other side, and perhaps that's what I've done. I'm so paranoid of bragging that maybe I've become self-deprecating? I don't know. I have mainly good days filled with mainly good things (did that sound like bragging?!), but I like to make people laugh, so I talk about how in one day I lost my drivers license, cash, debit card, and student i.d. and started crying when the bartender asked me what I wanted to drink rather than a flowery tale of my nice day at the park. Which is stupid. I am going to spend more time talking about my nice times at the park.

I will say that I am very pleased that when people refer to "my thing," they refer to getting up early in the morning. I presumed they meant that they started taking their temperature a lot or they started to only buy the cereal that's on sale that week.

Today is Tuesday, so I'm awake extra early (trash day. Silas can't stand it).

I came home yesterday to find that Silas had destroyed my block of violin rosin, and I can only assume he ate some portion of it (it was mostly in little pieces stuck to his bed, his fur, and the hardwood floor). It's made of pine sap, which is natural, so I wasn't extremely worried. I googled it. The first thing I read (posted by a random person) said it was extremely toxic and to get him to the vet right away. This was not what I wanted to hear, so I looked for a different posting. Eventually I came across one that said he'll be fine and that I should give him half a cup of milk to counteract any toxins in the rosin. Silas loved that solution. I'm sure he thought he was being rewarded and would now love a rosin and milk snack every day. He is completely fine.

And now, part II: my nice at the park.

I think this is going to take some practice.

2010-04-11T13:37:00.002-05:00

I made James walk with me after church to our "prize garden" because it is ablaze in glory right now. This is the house where countless people stop to thank you for providing such a "gift to the neighborhood." It truly is. Of course, I can't really take credit. It's not my house nor my design. But I pull weeds and water and planted a large amount of these bulbs, so my heart does swell with pride whenever I look at this place. The white tulips are my favorite. Hyacinths make my face itch.

It seems my gardening days are coming to an end. I'll leave at the end of May, though to where, I'm not exactly positive yet. Probably somewhere in Tennessee, though my life occasionally pulls me elsewhere at the last minute, which is why I always hesitate to tell people my plans for any future beyond the next two weeks. So many unknowns... My friend, Meghan, told me yesterday she thinks I've displayed nice composure about everything, which I found kind of surprising. I guess the impressions we give don't always match what's going on inside ourselves. It's good to know that if I can't actually feel calm, I can at least fake it. Of course, spring and sunshine makes everything a little easier.

All Done

2010-03-29T08:38:00.002-05:00

I was knitting along at a leisurely pace (baby's not due until July) until I was invited to a baby shower which was this past Saturday. I decided I would give them this baby blanket, and I could make another one for my brother by July. Easier said than done. My hands were cramping, and I stayed up until 2 in the morning Friday night to finish this. But, all's well that ends well. Here are some pictures I took.

The first one is my artsy shot. The second one just shows the finished product, and the third shows my homemade care tag I made out of a grocery bag. I bought the bird hole punch at Michael's for a dollar.

My only problem was that after I finished, the sides were curling in pretty bad. I tried to avoid this by knitting a border, but it didn't work. There are tons of knitting advice message boards, and nearly all recommended wetting the blanket and laying it flat to dry, but I obviously did not have time for that process since the baby shower was eight hours away. It occurred to me that ironing it would probably do the trick (the blanket is all cotton), but the next dilemma was that I don't actually own an iron (I refuse to buy clothes that require ironing). But I DO have a flat iron for my hair! So I turned it on and clamped all up and down the borders, and it worked perfectly. Excellent fix.

Investments

2010-03-19T07:04:00.002-05:00

My boss's method of planting bulbs (the best, I think) is to group 8 or 10 bulbs together, making sure the groups you plant near each other blend nicely color-wise and keeping the shorter things more towards the front and the larger stuff more towards the back. Simple. Occasionally we would find a stray bulb in the bottom of a box and not knowing what color/height it would be (all tulip bulbs look just alike) she would donate it to someone on the crew. So I slowly collected about twelve or fifteen daffodil bulbs this way, which I planted in my front....(looking for the right word here...not "yard," not "garden")...box. We have two cement boxes (the best I can come up with) that each house a rhododendrun, leaving a little bit of space of bare mulch towards the front. This is where I decided to plant my stray bulbs last November. It gets pretty much zero sunlight, so these bulbs are a couple weeks behind others that have been exposed to warmer soil. I'm starting to get paranoid that they won't ever grow, but every day I faithfully inspect the dirt. It's like checking the mail. Anything today? Nope. I like the idea that they will continue to bloom for the next several springs, despite the fact that I won't be there. Other plants require such attention and care, but bulbs are easy investments.

I've been lamenting the fact that I've never had my own personal garden. I had the space last year (Margaret did a great job at our old place), but not the money. I get annoyed moving around for a few reasons. 1) it is expensive and usually stressful, 2) I am more intrigued by the idea of having a home than I am by the idea of wanderlust, and 3) it's hard to invest in a place you know is only temporary. I am starting to fear that I will be fifty years old before I have an apple tree that produces apples. The first thing I will do when I buy a house is plant an apple tree.

Baby Blanket Phase 1

2010-03-11T08:20:00.003-06:00

I have graduated from scarves! This is my first non-scarf project. It will eventually become a baby blanket for my soon-to-be niece (Daniel and Amy are having a girl!), but it is very slow coming. This is approximately four or five inches of work, and it's probably taken about five hours of work.

Spring Spring Spring

2010-03-10T10:15:00.002-06:00

It seems that spring is very nearly here. I've been out gardening for a few hours each day this week, and each day I feel I'm experiencing a sort of seasonal confusion for most of the day, with a few moments of knowing it is spring sprinkled in. We ended the fall with raking. Every day, bags and bags of leaves. And now we are starting the spring with raking. I guess there were some leaves hanging on in December that have decided to drop between then and now, so there are still leaves to bag. So for most of the day, it feels like I just fell asleep for a long time, but it's still November, and I'm still bagging leaves (this notion is intensified by the wreaths and other Christmas decor people in Cambridge still have up). However, underneath all the leaves we are starting to see the first of the bulbs. The crocuses and snowdrops are already in bloom, and the tulips are pushing their long leaves up through the surface. And this little bit of green reminds me that it's actually spring. And then I experience a comfort that lies outside of the financial/social/health realm. I really can't explain it, other than by saying new growth and sunshine provides this foundation of happiness that I love.

Meat Mishaps

2010-03-04T15:13:00.003-06:00

Sometimes I like to pretend like I have a grasp of what's going on, and then I am reminded that I don't. When I envisioned moving to Boston, I pictured myself getting dressed up and going to swanky bars and restaurants, and really that's just not how it is (which is fine. It's just different than I expected). So last weekend, I told James we should have dinner actually in Boston (rather than Somerville) and it should be at one of those establishments I had envisioned last summer. So we go to this restaurant that fit the bill, and in a rare moment, (no pun intended) I craved steak. "Steak Frites" was an item on the menu, and for some reason I envisioned steak tips. Then they brought out a giant steak on a pile of fries, and after the waitress left, I told James that I thought I was getting lots of little pieces. He responded, "You thought steak frites was lots of little pieces of steak?" I said, "Is it not? Then why is it plural?" At that point James reminded me that steak is actually singular...it's the 'frites' that are plural. This is what i get for studying Spanish instead of French. And for not reading the description on the menu.

I don't like raw meat (more on that front in a moment). I usually order my burgers medium well, but since I thought I was getting lots of small pieces of steak I ordered my steak frites medium, assuming they would come out medium-well. However, since I had one giant steak, of course the chef erred on the side of undercooking. I cut into it and red liquid (like so red it was almost purple) started oozing everywhere. I paused, looked up at James and asked, "Is that blood?!" He calmly replied yes, and asked what else it could be. "I don't know! Marinade?!" We sent the steak frites back and it did eventually come out medium-well. If only the chef had cut my steak into little pieces for me, it would have been just what I wanted.

I used to never eat meat. Then I had a fateful corndog and it was all downhill from there. But I refused to cook meat because I could just hear the salmonella plotting, "Let's hide here on the kitchen faucet. She'll be dead by Sunday." With the advent of clorox kitchen wipes, I feel better about that now. But I am also extremely paranoid about not cooking my meat long enough. So a couple months ago I bought a meat thermometer. I promptly decided it didn't work, but it was like a placebo, and I stabbed it in every piece of chicken and pork I cooked anyway. It always read about 30 degrees less than what it should be, and though the chicken was white all the way through and dry as a bone, I still found myself saying, "But the thermometer says it's not done!" So I guess it was kind of a crappy placebo.

Well, I bought a new thermometer today. It's digital. I considered testing it by taking my own temperature, but I was afraid I would accidentally stab my tongue (it really is quite sharp). Instead I just turned it on and it read the temperature of the room which was set to 65. It read 64.8, and I am feeling fabulous about the chicken I will make tonight! If anyone is wondering, the thermometer cost $14.99, is by OXO, and I found it at TJ Maxx (my happy place).

Morning Song

2010-03-02T16:06:00.003-06:00

I found myself humming a song this morning that I learned in my fourth grade music class. My beloved music teacher went through this phase where she taught us songs in other languages. Like, really foreign sounding languages. And oddly enough, I can't really recall any other songs but two of those (besides the classics we sang for holidays). I'll spell this phonetically, but one said "Obwasimmi sa nana, obwasimmi sa" over and over again in a really jovial manner, and it involved sitting in a big circle and passing shoes around. It translated to something like "Grandmother, I smashed my foot on a rock." Don't ask me how I remember this.
So anyway, after I had taken Silas this morning and was trying to get out the door I realized a giant smear of blood on the kitchen floor, then noticed a trail of big spots leading up to it. In a panic, I looked up at Silas, who was contentedly drinking water, and completely oblivious to the wound (that was probably life-threatening, in my eyes). I noticed pretty quickly it was coming from one of his hind feet, and at that point, I realized he was probably going to bleed to death if the only way of preventing blood loss was to grab his foot. See, Silas thinks that human contact with his back feet means clipping his insanely long dew claws, and it is humanly impossible to get hold of his back feet with just one human. I was only one human this morning and was following my bleeding dog back and forth across the apartment (think Bugs Bunny/Wiley Coyote) singing my fourth grade unknown language tune. It felt appropriate.
Eventually I just had to give up because I was late and Silas had stopped bleeding (and had never even acknowledged that something was hurt anyway). I texted my roommate an hour later to make sure he was okay, and the report was good. He was barking profusely at the garbage man. He must be okay.

Troubleshooting

2010-02-23T09:02:00.002-06:00

I feel like it's smart to have one tried and true solution to problems. For example, I always set my oven 25 degrees lower than I'm instructed to because my oven has a tendency to burn things. I always bang my fist on the dashboard when the lights won't come on, because when it worked the first time, I figured it would always work. This reminds me of being little and getting really annoyed whenever I told my mom I wasn't feeling well, because until I was about twelve years old, she would always ask, "Do you need to go to the bathroom?"

I don't understand a lot about computers or any other electronic device, for that matter. I know how to use the internet, word, and I feel pretty competent with iTunes. But when something goes wrong, or if I need to do something specific (embed sound in a powerpoint, transfer videos from my iPod!), I am rather clueless. And if something breaks, all I know to do is turn the thing off, wait a second, and turn it back on. The good news is that this usually works. It always works if I've lost my wireless signal at home, it worked on the fax machine and giant copier at work, and though my computer was being really stubborn yesterday, I finally restarted it into submission this morning.

My iTunes decided to stay stuck on 0:00 no matter how many times I double-clicked on a song. The play button would turn to pause, indicating it was playing, yet the song stayed stuck and refused to move forward, even when I dragged the cursor halfway through the song. First I closed iTunes, reopened it, and hoped for the best. Nothing. Then I restarted my computer. Nothing. Then I restarted it again. Then I half-heartedly searched for an solution via google, but didn't want to try anything that involved uninstalling, checking for blah blah blah, etc. It's kind of a big deal because I listen to podcasts for a significant portion of my day nearly every day. I was hoping my iTunes had magically fixed itself overnight and tried to play a song this morning, but of course, nothing. I decided I would settle for watching my current trashy TV show which is available on vh1.com, Secrets of Aspen. The episode started, but NO SOUND. I clicked my volume buttom, and it showed that it had been muted. So I hit the unmute button, but nothing happened. I opened system preferences, went to volume, and the mute box was checked, but it was gray and wouldn't allow me to uncheck it. I did what I do best: restarted the computer, and suddenly I have both iTunes and volume. Take that, computer!

sticking with pictures

2010-02-17T11:44:00.004-06:00

Well, my video worked for about three hours as far as I can tell. Now I'm back to the "video is currently unavailable" message. It's no real loss. Trust me. But if you happen to know what the problem is, I would love to learn.

So I decided to post a few more pictures.

The first is a partial view of my living room, taken on the other side of the french doors. We could call it "a few of my favorite things." First there's Silas, who happens to look headless in the picture. There's also two scarves I'm currently working on-- both shades of green. Of course there are tulips, my favorite flower, and unfortunately my favorite blanket from Anthropologie is mostly hidden. Sorry the floor is dirty. Salty would be a better description. I just don't see the point in mopping as long as it's still sloshy and salty out.

Next is obviously just a close-up of the table's contents.

Finally is a picture of Silas taken a few days back. I was so good as a new dog owner to never allow him onto any furniture what-so-ever. Then last Christmas I thought it would be nice to get him on the couch at my parents' house (only while I was also on the couch). Then about a month ago I decided to let him on the couch at my apartment. And now he is suddenly king of the couch. Months of training undone. It's my own fault. Though in all reality, he typically does not get on the couch unless invited.

2010-02-16T17:05:00.002-06:00

So you may recall me writing about getting my very first iPod this year in an earlier entry. Well it's taken me between then and now to figure out how to a) shoot video without holding my hand over the lens (still kind of working on it) and b) how to transfer it to my computer. Actually, I really don't know if this is going to work or not. I just tried to play it and it said "video not currently available." Maybe it will change its mind once I hit the publish button.

I was bored today and decided to take the camera out when I went out with Silas. This is a boring video. But there's snow!

house fauna and scarf

2010-02-11T11:21:00.003-06:00

It's been a while since I've uploaded any photos, so here are three for you to enjoy. The first is my captured mouse, hanging out with his applejacks and poop. Update: mouse was released and it only snowed an inch, so hopefully he survived and moved on to someone else's cupboard.

The second might be my favorite picture I've taken in a while. There was a bright red cardinal on the tree outside the door to the balcony yesterday, and I snapped several zoomed in pictures but then took a step back for the one I've posted here. I love having "framed" shots, and in this you have the frame of the photo itself, the frame of the door, and the frame of the pane the bird is within.

Finally is the scarf I've been knitting! As a child I was really proud of how fast I could braid a tiny section of hair, then I channeled that into braiding and beading friendship bracelets, and now finally I've graduated to knitting. I did feel about 75 yesterday as I watched my favorite Fred and Ginger movie (Shall We Dance. It has all the best Gershwin songs: "They Can't Take That Away from Me," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," and "Who's Got the Last Laugh Now") while knitting a scarf with giant needles. I suppose I am an old soul.

I had no idea how time consuming knitting is until I got started. I bought yarn to make a scarf for myself as well as yarn to make a scarf for James. I thought I would make my scarf first (while I was still practicing), and then I would be good enough to make a decent scarf for James. Well, after I had been knitting my scarf for seriously about six hours and realized I only had about four inches of scarf (I did unravel and start over twice), I panicked and realized I wouldn't have time to finish both my scarf and James's scarf by Sunday (the goal was to have a present for Valentine's Day). So I unravelled my scarf once again and got started on James's (black yarn). Then after I had been working on it for about 10 hours off and on I decided that it looked too crappy for anyone to wear and that James really isn't the knit scarf kind of guy anyway. So then I unravelled that and got started on my scarf once again. It's chunky and blue, and I am finally getting the hang of it. Though now I have no present for James. I hate Valentine's Day.

My New Pet Mouse

2010-02-09T17:10:00.002-06:00

I haven't had many success stories lately, but today I have one! You may remember me mentioning a mouse problem we were having back in December. When I came back from break (though, who am I kidding, I'm still "on break"), I created a no kill mouse trap based on one Deb used at the nature center. All you need is a five gallon bucket, screen (like for a screen door), and duct tape. You tape the screen around the outside of the bucket and put a dollop of peanut butter in the inside of the bucket. The idea is that they can climb up the screen to get into the bucket, but then they can't get back out. I put the bucket into the cabinet where I had mouse suspicions, and after about three weeks, I caught the mouse!

Now I have a new problem. The idea is that you carry the bucket outside where you humanely release the mouse. However, we are supposed to get about 8 inches of snow tonight, and I am feeling guilty about putting the mouse outside. My mouse trap may have become the house for my new mouse pet who will live in the cupboard. What am I to do??

Time Travel

2010-02-03T15:35:00.003-06:00

I have this thing where I don't like to use things up. Of course I use things up in the kitchen (vanilla extract, baking powder, and chocolate chips), and I do go through hair products (oh how I love my Bumble and bumble), but even now as I made a cup of tea, I considered choosing a different flavor than my current favorite (Tazo Passion) because it's almost out. I think it primarily comes from an economic standpoint. I spent about seven dollars on that box of tea, and I want it to last!

I think of this today because I came across a glass bottle of J.Crew body spray I have had since high school. I used to wear it all the time when I was sixteen or seventeen (almost ten years ago!). However, they discontinued the line, and out of fear that it would be the last bottle I would ever own, I decided to only use it rarely. This soon became using it never. I have moved God knows how many times, and I pack up the bottle each time and put it in my new closet (in my current situation, free-standing cabinet since apartments in Boston don't have closets. I don't understand).

Today I was sifting through the various objects in there looking for a new stick of deodorant when I came across the nearly-full bottle of body spray. I pulled it out and sprayed it twice directly on my neck. I distinctly remember telling people one of the major reasons I like the spray was because it wasn't as strong as perfume...it was more subtle. Maybe it has fermented or something over the last eight years. It just about knocked me out. I was coughing. I haven't sprayed anything onto my body in years (with the exception of the toughactin tinactin I had to use this summer), and it really is strong. But it's very strange because it smells exactly like me and the things I did, like the high school me that no longer exists.

I could write a hundred blogs about how I've changed since high school, but that would take a long time and include lots of heavy shit probably, so for now I will just say that since high school, I have definitely become a person who does not wear body spray, perfume, or even scented lotion. And yet I tote this little bottle around. I typically am not one to carry things around for nostalgia's sake. This was a problem living with James Wallace who wanted to keep EVERYTHING, including ticket stubs and envelopes and old cassettes and a collection of beer bottles so that it chronically looked like we had a party the night before and didn't want to clean up. But I think I will hang on to the bottle and spray it every couple of years when I want to lie down and let my mind go to a place where my only goal was to live in the mountains and my biggest problem was that I accidentally dyed my hair the wrong color again.

the breakup

2010-01-23T09:47:00.003-06:00

I am officially done with the Twilight series. Thank God. I mentioned to James last night that I had added the first Twilight movie to my netflix queue, and he furiously responded, "Why?! You know you're not going to like it! It's gonna be worse than the book!" I thought for a second and said, "You know when someone breaks up with you, and you go to the bar you know they're going to be at, even though you know nothing good will come of it? It's kind of like that." Yes, finishing Twilight sort of feels like a breakup. I have the last Harry Potter book sitting around, but I don't want to start it yet. I'm not ready to court other books yet, and I don't want Harry Potter to just be some rebound book.

I Have Problems

2010-01-20T10:34:00.002-06:00

How long has it been since my last post? Two days? In the meantime, I have read the entire second book (New Moon) and am halfway through the third book (Eclipse). I just need the series to be over so I can go back to having a life. But I will not have a life one second before these books are completely read! It is actually painful for me to sit here and type this blog, knowing that I could be completing the third book right now. But I am forcing myself to be remotely reasonable.

This morning I had to run to PetSmart to get Silas some dog food, and TJ Maxx is conveniently on the way. I decided to pop in for a quick browse. I didn't buy anything, but I came to the small book section that was completely filled with both hard and soft cover books from the Twilight saga. Let me first remind you that I already have the first three in my possession, and the fourth will arrive tomorrow (thanks Mom!). Yet I was still standing there staring at them. I have paperback copies. There was a hardcover box set, and I thought, It would be nice to have a box set. I quickly realized I was being ridiculous. Then I thought, Maybe I should buy the first book for a friend. I need to share this source of happiness. After I'd been standing in front of the display for about four minutes, I then eyed this Twilight "movie companion guide" or something that had stills from the movie and interviews with the actor. I don't want to buy this...but I might flip through it for just a second. After leafing through for a minute or two I heard footsteps behind me and was immediately embarrassed, so I quickly set the book down and walked away from the giant display which offered not one thing I actually needed. I was...sad...to walk away, at which point I said aloud, "I have problems," and exited the store.

I Take It All Back

2010-01-18T08:55:00.002-06:00

In an earlier entry I talked about my recurring vampire dreams and said, "I am not a Twilight person." Well, last week I happened upon a paperback of the first book and decided to go for it. Everyone talks about it, I'm certified to teach middle school English, and I just felt like it was something I should do. I maybe read thirty pages the first time I picked it up, then 100 pages the next two times, and then I think I read about 300 pages last night. Like everyone else in the world, I just could not put it down. It was the first very plot-driven "page turner" I've read in a long time, and I very much wanted to know what happens next.

Between last night when I finished the book and this morning, I've tried to pinpoint what it is that people love so much about the book. It's essentially a romance novel for teens with life-threatening incidents. She just happens to be in love with a vampire. Guys out there roll their eyes at this, and I think the primary reason is that the book is through Bella's (a girl) eyes. Edward (the vampire) is really not much different from other superhero figures that guys love (he has superpowers which could be used for evil, but he chooses to use them for good). In my film theory class in college we talked about feminist theory, and it was brought up that perhaps guys don't like romantic comedies because they are forced to identify with a female protagonist, rather than because the content isn't appealing. Guys don't want to do this. It would follow that guys can safely watch Superman because the viewer identifies with Clark Kent, and that guys would be much less interested in Superman if it were told from Lois Lane's perspective. Just a theory (A theory Stephanie Meyer must recognize; she is supposedly writing a parallel novel to Twilight which is, in fact, told through Edward's eyes).

And now, why do girls swoon over Edward?

1) He is "unattainable." He doesn't even speak to other kids at school, much less want to be romantically involved.

2) He is mysterious. There's always something he "can't say."

3) He is dangerous. Not only is there a possibility he will cave and attack her, he also drives very, very fast.

4) He is an extreme romantic.

5) He is a guardian, vowing to protect her for all time.

6) He is very capable of oh, everything.

7) He's totally hot.

I feel very sorry for the middle and high school boys who now have to compete with this fictitious idea girls have in their heads for what the dreamboat is supposed to be-- a superhero. In my days it was Leo from Titanic. Anyway, it annoys me that Bella is a chronic damsel in distress, needing him for everything (except she can apparently COOK well-- how lovely and domestic!), while the only thing she provides for him is an object to love (he doesn't eat human food, so her one talent goes to waste).

Regardless of my complaints, I have to say that I am hooked and plan on picking up the second book in the near future. Perhaps Edward will turn out to have at least one need which Bella can fill (other than sex, please).

Oblivion

2010-01-12T10:28:00.005-06:00

Here is the thing: I have plenty of time to blog as of late. However, I have absolutely zero updates in my life, so my blogging well has run dry. I am open to suggestions.

In an attempt to dig up some material, I flipped through a notebook I was keeping last year. It's different from my journal, because I carried it around with me and would just jot random thoughts and conversations down. I need to start doing that again. So anyway, I had recorded my first conversation with my favorite middle school student from last year. I am probably not supposed to say his real name, so I will call him....Billy. Billy was extremely smart and consistently scored very high on all tests. Billy was also diagnosed with Asperger's, and typically kids with this have one special interest they really latch onto. Billy's special interest was an alternate universe he had half created in his mind, half taken from a video game. It was all he ever wanted to talk about. The conversation went as follows:

Billy: Do you know what my name is in Imagination Land?

Me: No. What is it?

Billy: The God of Neutrality

Me: Wow. That's quite a title.

Billy: Even though it sounds bad, I'm on the good side.

Me: Really? I figured the God of Neutrality couldn't pick a side.

Billy: It's just a name. I have 78 allies. Do you know what "immortality" means?

Me: That you never die.

Billy: No! The other meaning! Killer aliens! Do you know my super power?

Me: No.

Billy: It's called "oblivion."

Me: I think I have that too.

Adventures in Snow

2010-01-07T08:00:00.003-06:00

I made it back up to Boston last Saturday night with my best friend from college, Rachel, who agreed to make the trip with me so I wouldn't have to do it solo. From Memphis, it's about a 21 hour drive. However, Rachel first drove three hours to Memphis from Arkansas, so for her it was actually 24 hours.

When we got into town it was lightly snowing and apparently had been doing so for a while. Driving down my street I said, "Please let my driveway be clear, please let my driveway be clear," but of course, it wasn't. The problem is that my driveway is up a slight hill and my car is rear-wheel drive and therefore refuses to go up hills when they're icy. Another tenant had gotten her car all the way up to the top, so I put my car into low gear and gave it a go, but no dice. I parked on the street and put my visitor pass in the window (to get a resident permit from the city you have to have Massachusetts tags. To get Massachusetts tags is not feasible because my car actually isn't in my name. Additionally, I would have to get MA insurance. Yet another illustration of how the north makes everything a pain in the ass.) The snow didn't stop for about 24 hours, and when all was said and done, I'd say my backyard got about seven inches. It doesn't really get any sun, and it's stayed in the 20s the last several days, so it's all still there. Except Silas has been running around like a crazy dog, and now it looks like a giant vat of fresh meringue. I wanted to post some pictures, but I seem to have misplaced my usb cord, so my food metaphors will have to suffice. (sidenote: everything always looks like food to me. Earliest example was in 9th grade biology when the frog I dissected was TOTALLY pregnant, and I said all the eggs looked like a side of minute rice.)

I ignored the snow the first day since we could get everywhere by foot or by subway, but I then decided I should probably go ahead and shovel the driveway since I realized, to my disappointment, that it wasn't going to shovel itself. I've never had to do this before. It doesn't snow in Memphis or Nashville really, and the campus staff always took care of icy pavement when I lived in Boone. My neighbor has a snow blower. That's what I need. It's like a mini lawnmower thing that shoots the snow off the path. It took him less than 10 minutes and an extra layer of salt, and he was done. I worked outside for about an hour. The bottom layer of snow was packed down and had turned to ice which is impossible to shovel with a plastic shovel. It was my exercise in futility, though it did feel good to be outside working with my hands (my back, actually) after not having done so in about a month. I was actually sweating though it was about 20 degrees outside. I really wanted to get a picture of my driveway up here, because it's quite hilarious to think that its current state is AFTER i shoveled and salted it twice. Additionally, I have ice going all the way around my tires.

I need real tools. Either a blow torch or a real scraper (with the long wooden handle and flat metal piece-- essentially a hoe that's straight on the end instead of bent). I did successfully clear all the snow off my car. My mom gave me a fabulous ice scraper that's actually like a fleece oven mitt with an ice scraper sticking out so you don't have to get your hands wet while scraping. And while I'm sure it will get use in the future, I decided the most efficient strategy would be to turn my shovel upside down and use it as a giant ice scraper. I had that puppy cleared from hood to trunk in less than five minutes. Hooray for small accomplishments!

Silas lives, post-choke

2010-01-05T07:30:00.003-06:00

I guess you know your vacation is getting lengthy when you can afford to lose track of what day it is. I may have forgotten what today is, except that it has to be Tuesday, because Silas hates Tuesdays. He can hear the trashmen from a block away, and his barks grow louder and more distressed the closer they get. They've been gone for over fifteen minutes now, but Silas is still keeping post at the window, his breath fogging it up, because he knows the recycle men can't be far behind. What's a dog to do?

Silas almost died last week while we were in Memphis. I was watching Up with my parents, and Silas was freaking out because people kept parking in front of our house (neighbors were having people over). He ran to the kitchen and must have gobbled his food way too fast, because I heard some pre-throw-up noises a room over. I ran to the kitchen to make sure he would either stay on the tile or go out in the yard if he was going to throw up. He threw up in the kitchen. Then he ran to the den and threw up again (carpeted; against the rules), and then I successfully got him out the back door. I went with him, and his stomach was still heaving, but nothing was happening. His mouth was wide open, and he started shaking his head back and forth, but still nothing happened. It quickly became obvious that he was choking. I started screaming to my parents that something was wrong, and my mom briefly ran outside and tried to sweep the back of his throat with her fingers before running back in to call the emergency vet. My dad and I were outside with Silas, and I was hitting his back, telling him to cough (not in his vocabulary, ps). Then I tried to give him the heimlich (sp?) maneuver, which, though I've gone through first aid/cpr training three times, I had never learned to perform on an animal. It apparently doesn't work. I was trying to lift him up and get my fists under his belly at the same time which is really hard when your dog weighs almost as much as you do. (My grandfather later told me I should have lifted him up from his back legs and just shook him, which probably would have been just as good a guess as canine heimlich).

After this fiasco had been going on for one or two minutes, Silas just collapsed on his side, mouth still open. He was making a terrible noise (I don't think it could even qualify as a wheeze), and I was telling him it was okay, and then I tried to see if I could reach my hand in his mouth which was covered in foamy slobber. My first attempt yielded nothing, and on my second attempt, he bit me. At this point my dad said it was time to go to the vet, so we lifted him up (I had his head which must contain half his weight, and my dad had the rest of him) and carried him to my mom's Ford Explorer. I got in the back with him in my pajamas and house shoes, and his eyes were rolling in the back of his head, when he rolled over and coughed once. A piece of dog food flew out, and then he was completely normal. Fastest recovery time ever. We were still in the driveway. My mom called the vet back for the "Oh, nevermind" call, but of course they manipulated us into bringing him in anyway. (As my friend Curt put it one time, vets are terrible people, and they know you love your dog and that you don't go home and pet your wallet in your free time.) They fed us some hubbub about a condition large dogs get sometime, and one of the symptoms is difficulty throwing up, so my mom and I went ahead and took him in. All the other animals were dying or dead, and then there was Silas, wagging his tail, trying to get the most depressed citizens in Memphis to pet him. Unsurprisingly, we paid a chunk of money for the vet to tell us he was okay. On his form, she diagnosed him as "post-choke." Then they offered to x-ray his esophagus for us, which we declined.

I was a little nervous about feeding Silas the next couple of days, but my mom told me I wasn't allowed to starve him to death for fear he might choke. So Silas lives! And he gets to eat. I would also like to point out that I didn't cry a single time throughout the entire debacle.

Adult Arts & Crafts

2009-12-14T08:39:00.002-06:00

Last night we went to the "Lessons and Carols" service at the Episcopal church we've been attending. One of the verses sparked a memory of my undergraduate "New Testament" class in the Religion department. Honors students were required to have so many honors classes, and the new testament class seemed like my best option that particular semester. It was the first and last class I took in the Religion department at App State.

Our professor was a Freudian Southern Baptist. He didn't call himself that, but I think it's a fair description. Our required materials included 1) a Bible, 2) construction paper, and 3) glue. His approach was very...interesting. He would ask us all to read the same verse silently. Then he instructed us to interpret the verse by tearing out shapes of construction paper and gluing them down onto another piece of construction paper. The trick was to NOT think about what you were doing. You were supposed to let your hands take control and not until all the shapes were glued down were you supposed to "interpret" what your hands had done. He loved the subconscious. I didn't speak out much in this class.

So one day our verse was the famous In the beginning was the word...Out of darkness came light... verse. PS I should mention it's impossible to not think about what your hands are doing. Your hands require instructions from your brain in order to move. So I start tearing out shapes. I went with a circle first. I don't remember why exactly. Then I moved on. How can I represent "word?" I decided on a long rectangle because if you were to cut out a line from a book, that's what it would look like (I'm not the most visually creative). Then I decided for the "out of the darkness came light" I would first do a doughnut (the hole representing darkness), and then finally another circle since I had one left over from creating my doughnut. I arranged them in a diagonal, descending line in the order just described: circle, rectangle, doughnut, circle.

The professor walked around class observing our work. He looked over my shoulder for an uncomfortably long time, and then asked if I would present my work to the class. Nervously, I agreed. I'm sure I gave a slightly more reasoned description of my artwork (this has been about seven years ago!), and when I was done the professor said, "Thank you. That was very radical, controversial, and phallic. You may be seated." Really? Because I would have described it as elementary and semi-symmetrical. But radical, controversial, and phallic is a lot more fun. And that's when I became the cool girl in Bible class.

No One Memorizes Poems Anymore

2009-12-08T12:38:00.003-06:00

When I decided I wanted to go to Mexico for a while, I knew I needed to brush up on my Spanish. And I knew I have zero discipline for memorizing rules of conjugation via textbook. So I decided to learn Spanish poems by heart thinking this would help. This is difficult, because you have to memorize the English and the Spanish. It's memorizing double. I started collecting Neruda's poetry and would lie in my bed repeating the same lines over and over. I just remembered all this the other day. I couldn't remember the poems though. So I started paging through the books until I came to one I had spent time with. After glancing at the first line of the Spanish version, I quickly closed the book and most of lines came back to me. Only I didn't know what I was saying anymore. Here is the English version of the first Neruda poem I memorized:

I Will Return

Some other time, man or woman, traveler,

later, when I am not alive,

look here, look for me

between stone and ocean,

in the light storming

through the foam.

Look here, look for me,

for here I will return, without saying a thing,

without voice, without mouth, pure.

Here I will be the churning

of the water,

of its unbroken heart,

here, I will be discovered and lost:

here, I will, perhaps, be stone and silence.

It's even nicer in Spanish. I would type it out except I don't know how to get accent marks, so it's pointless. I started to get lazy and would then only memorize specific lines instead of poems in their entirety. Then I gave up on the Spanish poems altogether but still memorized a few English ones. Here is one by George Macdonald:

Lord, what I had once done with youthful might,

Had I been from the first true to truth,

Grant me, now old, to do--with better sight,

And humbler heart, if not the brain of youth.

So wilt thou, in thy gentleness and ruth,

lead back thy old soul, by the path of pain,

Round to his best--young eyes and heart and brain.

And finally, the last one I memorized over a year ago by Lord Byron.

So we'll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself must rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.

let it snow, let it snow

2009-12-08T12:17:00.003-06:00

We got our first snow over the weekend. Luckily, my landlord had put a bucket of salt and a snow shovel inside the stairwell just a few days beforehand. You know, this is my first time to live somewhere where it's expected to own a snow shovel. Actually, I take that back. It snowed a lot in Boone my first two years. But I was living in the dorms, and the university took responsibility for the sidewalks (though there was one spot next to the people statues on the east side where people were always busting ass no matter how many times it had been salted).

Silas loves the snow. I only remember it snowing once last year in Nashville, and it had melted by noon. His only hesitation was where to pee. He's learned that he's supposed to pee on the green blades of grass. So after some deliberation (and encouragement from me), he peed on the snow, drilling a hole straight down. Later I let him come on the balcony with me as I shoveled the snow off, and I looked up from my work to see Silas peeing on the snow on the balcony. He looked confused when I scolded him, not understanding the difference between peeing on the snow in the backyard and the snow on the balcony.

Most of the snow has melted by now, and I'm hoping it'll stay clear for our drive next week!

Oh No

2009-12-05T14:26:00.002-06:00

I actually wrote this entry Saturday but forgot to post it until now.

I've had a nice Christmas-y day. I woke up and lit my Christmas candle (bought in lieu of a tree), turned on Pandora's Christmas station and drank coffee and wrote in my journal. Then James and I went into Harvard Square to the Christmas fair at the church we've been going to recently where I got a few books for $1 a piece. Now that I'm back home I thought I would make some cookies. I just set the dough in the fridge to chill for a while and decided to get a head start on the icing, which is just a mixture of milk, vanilla, and powdered sugar.

I keep my sugar (granulated, powdered, and brown) in a lower cupboard. As I picked up the bag of powdered sugar, it started spilling out the bottom of the plastic bag it came in. Upon closer inspection, it appears that a critter has chewed out several holes in the bag. I live on the second floor. There aren't supposed to be rats up here. But I can't help but assume I have some giant Templeton (that's the rat from Charlotte's Web) on a sugar high lounging around my cupboards. And so it begins. I can already taste the rat-borne illnesses incubating in my body. Dear Mom, please include a mouse trap in my stocking. Or a kitten. I've been thinking that Silas might like a kitten around the house anyway. It should look like this:

In Other News

2009-12-02T13:57:00.002-06:00

I have recurring dreams about vampires. And I am not a Twilight person. Never read the books, never seen the movies. But I'm always being chased by vampires. And last night one cut me with a sword that had vampire blood on it, so I too became a vampire (being a vampire is more like a 'condition' in my dreams that is passed on by unclean surfaces. where's a clorox wipe when you need one?). So anyway, I had this understanding in my dream that I actually had until midnight before it would permanently "settle in." Luckily, Dumbledor (I am a Harry Potter person) showed up and said he would help me. I remember the first step was to legally change my name to Oliver. Then, I went to some exclusive event as Oliver, which I can only assume happened because of my following the media concerning the party-crashers at the White House. I remember it was getting awfully close to midnight, but I got no resolution. I never get resolution in dreams. So frustrating.

Grown-Up Spelling Bee

2009-12-02T06:49:00.002-06:00

When I was in fifth grade, I came in second place in the school-wide spelling bee. I don't remember any of the words that allowed me to move on to the following rounds; I just remember there were several I had never heard of, but I kept guessing pretty phonetically, which got me to the final round. My final word was gopher. I knew that word. But for whatever reason, I drew a blank and spelled it the dumbest way possible: G-O-A-F-F-E-R. Like goat + heifer, but with two f's. Humiliating. I think this also should be maybe be mentioned as the contest that started my "second-place" streak. In seventh grade I came in second place for one of the competitions at Wordsmith, the writing contest that tries to make academic kids feel cool by naming the individual events after athletics, such as "The 40-word dash." In ninth grade, I entered a city-wide essay contest through the Commercial Appeal in which the winner won a trip to Ireland. I came in second place and got a plaque. I think the prizes should have been distributed more evenly.

Anyway, back to the spelling bee. I fancy myself a pretty good speller and have been intrigued by the weekly spelling bee that takes place at perhaps the best bar/restaurant in my neighborhood. James and I went last night for the first time and both signed up. During the first round, I had only heard of maybe half of the words. James got out on "seraphic." I got "cataleptic" and moved on to the next round. My next word was "scopate," which I had never heard of, but guessed correctly again. If you're wondering, it means, "having to do with a brush." This put me in the third round with five others (competition started with 30). I was less nervous at this point, which made me realize that I wasn't nervous about losing-- just losing too early on. My word was "telamon." It has something to do with Greek statues or something. But it sounded a lot like Telemundo, the Spanish video series we had to watch for Mrs. Walburn in high school, so I went with the Spanish pronunciation of t-e-l-e-m-a-n. Looking at it all typed out, that was a pretty stupid guess. It looks like the name of a character made up by T-mobile or something. Oh well. It was fun, and I was really nervous. But in a kind of exhilarating way. I realized that I don't do things that make me really nervous anymore. Besides going to the doctor and the alpine slide.

Joys of Gardening

2009-11-22T16:23:00.003-06:00

I remember one day last spring when I was completely overwhelmed with the internship and grad school, and I was talking to my mom and told her that I would probably feel better if one single person at least acknowledged that I was working really hard. In short, I thought a touch of recognition might help get me through the school year (juvenile, I know). She told me I was probably pursuing the wrong career. It is odd. Teachers do amazing things, but the students typically don't realize this until they've been out of school at least a few years, if ever.

Surprisingly enough, gardening has been the exact opposite. Cambridge has a lot of foot traffic, and I look forward to working in front yards, because passer-byers frequently stop to a) generally admire the garden you're working on or b) ask you a question about their garden at home. ("Do I have to mulch after planting bulbs?" "Do I cut everything down now?" "What is the name of that shrub?") There is one woman who has a truly amazing bank garden (meaning her front yard is fairly steeply sloped), and she told us that someone actually wrote her an anonymous letter thanking her for keeping such a beautiful garden because it gave them something to look forward to every day.

A surprisingly large number of people assume that I am the owner of the house, and regardless of which house I'm at, I always say, "Actually, I just garden here. But it's a nice place to pass some time," which is typically true.

Last week I was cleaning up some beds in the front of a house, and a man walked by and commented on the garden and the nice amount of perennials, then wanted to know the name of a shrub (I never know names of shrubs. Unless it's a holly, I don't know.). We shared some small talk and he asked if the job lasted through the winter, and I said no, that hopefully I'd find something to do during January and February. He kind of paused and said, "Well you know," at which point I was convinced he was going to hire me wherever he worked, but then he continued: "if you have some free time, you should check out the cactus and succulent club." It's not a job, but it's the first club I've been invited into in years.

Fall Clean-Ups and Spring Investments

2009-11-11T19:20:00.002-06:00

There's only one reason it's been a couple of weeks since I've posted anything: I haven't been able to think of anything I want to say. Say publicly, anyway.

It did occur to me the other day that I have not stopped spending at least one hour per day actively looking for/applying for jobs since March. My gardening job is fading and will be done by the first week in December. In a fearful moment, I looked up unemployment benefits online. In sum, I don't think I get any. I once looked into food stamps a couple years ago, but those didn't work out either. They asked me five times if I had any children or dependents. I didn't. Now I think, If only I had a kid, all my problems would be solved. A kid or a job.

Well, it's November. September-December is the best. I'm currently staring at my cup of hibiscus tea, waiting for it to cool. Warm beverages make everything better (Actually, that is a scientific fact I learned on Radiolab). We've been doing tons of "fall clean-ups" for work, which means cutting down perennials, tossing annuals, and raking leaves. About half the people we clean up for also want bulbs planted for the spring, and that is my favorite part. See, all other planting jobs consist of bringing plants in from the nursery, and the people we work for (almost all Cambridge residents) receive instant transformations from a blank bed into a completed garden. Instant gratification. Someone could literally decide on a whim they want a garden, and a couple days later get a full one. Doesn't this seem unfair? Maybe it's just me. Anyway, nobody gets tulips on a whim. Everybody has to decide in the fall and then wait until April. If I had a lot of money and time, I think it would be really fun to go around and plant bulbs in random places. You would get to have a secret for the entire winter, and then it would be a fantastic surprise. I had a children's book called Miss Rumphius which was about a very adventurous girl who grew up and felt she needed to contribute something to the world. So she set out on her bike and threw flower seeds all over town and mountainside, and everyone laughed at her until all the flowers bloomed. That's what I'm talking about.

The Defeated Pumpkin

2009-10-27T06:40:00.002-05:00

I bought Silas a pumpkin costume at Target, but the only thing that remotely fit was the headband. I bought a large, but I am sure it would only fit a 30 pound dog. Silas is relieved. Poor pumpkin puppy.

Half-Sentence of the Week

2009-10-22T19:57:00.003-05:00

I've been reading, both fiction and non, more than usual this week. I've read a lot of words, but I want to write the sentence that for whatever reason, I have thought of more often than anything else I've read this week. Actually, it's only half a sentence. It's found in a story called "Flyboys" by Tobias Wolff:

"I was a boy who didn't know he would never build a jet."

Lesson (Not Quite) Learned

2009-10-19T06:25:00.003-05:00

When I worked at the restaurant in college, there was this giant tea brewer that probably made between four and a half gallons or so at a time. While the tea was brewing, you would get out the pitchers and leave two empty and fill the other three with giant scoops of sugar. Then when the tea was done, you would stand there, filling up the pitchers one by one by opening the spout at the bottom. However, since the last pitcher only filled about halfway, you would leave the spout open and walk away, doing something else while the last few drips made their way out. Finally came the important part. We ran through this process twice, and before you started the next batch of tea, it was necessary to lift the spout back up or four and a half gallons of tea would end up on the floor. I'm sure you see where this is going. I remember walking back over towards the machine after working at the restaurant for a few weeks, then promptly turning around to get a mop. I was mortified. Maybe you haven't seen four gallons of liquid on the floor before, but it is a lot. A co-worker walked up and said, "Don't worry. Everyone does it once." The idea being that after the first time, you are so traumatized that you are forever more careful with the machine. Well, I think I did it at least three times. Maybe four. Enough times at least that when my friend Steve did it, he walked over to where the rest of us were standing and said, "I just pulled a Sara Little."

I stopped crating Silas when he was about seven months old, satisfied that he was definitely potty trained. Before leaving the house every day, my roommate and I would close our bedroom doors, make sure there was no food on the counter tops, and make sure no socks or shoes were lying around. I thought that was pretty good until I came home to find Silas had eaten a book I had received for my birthday that was sitting on the coffee table. It was a very old, leather-bound book on identifying trees, and I was pretty upset (though not devastated. You learn the art of detachment quickly when owning a puppy). I remembered the adage that Bush Jr. couldn't quite spit out that time, the old "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice..." and resolved that I wouldn't be fooled twice.

The next incident was sort of a joint effort between the two dogs. I had my collection of Cook's Illustrated magazines on the breakfast bar that butted up to the window in the "dog room" where we left the pups during the day. Penny learned how to jump up on the breakfast bar to look out the window, sending my magazines to the floor (except the couple that landed in the water bowl) where Silas promptly got busy chewing. There were some salvageable scraps.

All the incidents after that sort of run together. It's to the point where you can tell how often I read a book by how many gnawings it has survived. The cover is always the first to go. Next the spine, then large chunks off the edges of pages. Leaving a book out is just something you do when you're in the middle of a book! Who reads a few pages, then returns the book to the shelf? They even request that you don't do that at the library. I remember a friend from high school who would scold me for dog-earing pages in a book. If only he could see what happens now...The reason this is being written today is because yesterday I left out my huge book of selections by C.S. Lewis which is now missing a back cover. Paperbacks suffer the worst. I returned it to the shelf and pulled out my (signed!) collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff, which is at least hardback. Silas got the paper cover, but the hard cover is still mostly in tact.

New Hampshire

2009-10-13T06:29:00.003-05:00

It's difficult to explain my feelings about living in Boston/Somerville. As most of you know, I have some complaints (starting with the drivers, quickly moving into cost of living). However, the city's shortcomings are made up for by its close proximity to a thousand cool things. The Northeast is so beautiful, particularly this time of year. For every chunk of concrete in Boston, I've seen a lovely fall tree somewhere else. We've had several day excursions I haven't posted anything on, so I am going to start with the most recent: this past Sunday's visit to New Hampshire. I hadn't really ever heard anything about New Hampshire. Living in the South, I had heard about Vermont and Maine. New Hampshire just gets skipped over for some reason.

We left Somerville around 8:30am and arrived in Keene, NH at 10:30. Keene is home to Keene State College which has about 5,000 students. Keene was actually everything I had hoped Bennington, VT would be but wasn't: quaint downtown with lots of restaurants and shops, bordered by low mountains on either side. We ate breakfast at The Stage, not to be confused with the honky-tonk on Broadway in Nashville. James said arriving in the downtown on a Sunday before noon was the best travel idea I'd ever had (meaning no stores would be open and I therefore couldn't shop).

We left Keene and arrived at the trailhead (called the Dublin Trail) to Mt. Monadnock in less than an hour. It was definitely peak leaf weekend, so the mountainsides were beautiful. The final dirt road (picture above) was easily the prettiest road I've ever seen. I think it was called Old Troy Road, and the turn for it was opposite the Dublin Country Club.

I chose that particular trail for two reasons: 1) of about six trailheads, it appeared to potentially be the least crowded since it was one of two that didn't leave from the state park headquarters. 2) I read that the final ascent to the summit was less steep on this trail. Well, even the "least crowded" trail still had a filled parking lot (perhaps 30 cars?) with cars also parked along the dirt road. Luckily, it seemed the other hikers had gotten an earlier start, so besides just a couple other groups going up, most people we saw were heading down. There were lots of pauses on the way up. Pauses to take jackets off, pauses to put jackets back on, pauses for water, pauses for pictures (which can take a while when using the timer feature), pauses to scout for driest footing, pauses for breath, and pauses to be amazed with the woods in October. Looking up, most things were yellow and green. Looking down, most things were orange and red.

The nice thing about the trail was that about 2/3 of the way, you get a really nice view of the surrounding towns and mountains (the same view from the summit, essentially). The final bit is all stone. No more trees, meaning no more protection from wind. I should also mention that on the way up, I made fun of James for using a walking stick, so he abandoned it. Of course, by the end of the descent back down, I was the one relying on the walking stick. I am constantly humbled. And now I am all about a walking stick.

The walk down was both more enjoyable and more annoying, simultaneously. More enjoyable because you knew the hardest was over; it's all downhill now! More annoying because there was more company-- in our case a couple who wouldn't shut up about how Barbara brought too much food and that she had to take at least $100 worth home. I realize it took me one line to type out the entire gist of their conversation, but it took them about twenty minutes to discuss the ins and outs of the food (and wine) that Barbara brought. We eventually just gave them a head start so we wouldn't have to listen to them anymore.

I am about to have to leave for work, so I will quickly sum up my final thoughts: Go to New Hampshire in October! The hike to Mt. Monadnock is very doable (about 2.2 miles each way), though I was definitely sore the following day. Keene is a great place to kill a few hours (or just one hour if you go on a Sunday morning). We also stopped through Peterborough on our way home for dinner. It's smaller than Keene and is mainly filled with art stores. We ate at the Acqua Lounge which was very tasty, though on the pricier end. However, splitting an entree made it more affordable. More weekend trips will be posted soon!

Around Town

2009-10-07T10:44:00.005-05:00

You know those days when you wake up and it's raining outside, making it very dark in your room, which makes you think to yourself, I really wish I didn't have to go to work today...

Well, my current jobs allows that thought to come true. When it rains in the morning, we call it a day. Ah, the perks of being a gardener. Don't be too jealous. Obviously, when you don't work, you don't get paid. But I'll worry about that later. So far today, I have made buttermilk pancakes, driven to the cvs where I pondered getting a flu shot, then just browsed greeting cards instead, chatted with my mom, and edited some pictures on my computer. I love rainy weekdays.

I decided I should post some pictures of life in Boston.

1) James's birthday present to me: an old 3 speed Raleigh sport bike, complete with the original bell and Brooks saddle, plus new basket. I love this bike but am not very brave. I feel like there's a good chance I will die when driving in a car (enclosed in a ton of steel), and I know I will die riding a bike in traffic. Luckily, there's a bike path that leads straight to the T one street over from my house. That's why I'm so happy in the picture! I need a better picture of the actual bike...

2) Fenway! I feel like getting into a Red Sox game is a major accomplishment (for which I cannot take credit for). The game was pretty terrible (we were in the 7th inning within about an hour), but the hot dog was delicious.

3 and 4) Arnold Arboretum shots. I'm glad I checked it out, but within about 15 minutes of being there I thought Why spend an hour driving across town to go to the fake woods when you can drive 20 minutes out of town and be in the real woods? I prefer the real woods.

5) James blowing out candles (only 24! I was one short...) on the finalized product of the "Adventures in Cake" entry.

6) My hundred pound pup with the gentle leader and shortest possible leash. This is once again on the bike path. It doubles for a dog park during the day.

The Road to My First iPod

2009-10-03T19:40:00.003-05:00

Okay, I realize that everyone has had iPods for the last hundred years, but I just got my first one last week. I had always thought Hmm, an iPod...That seems pretty cool...But I should probably just replace the chacos my dog ate...again. I don't know. It's just always seemed like there was something I needed more than iPod.

The first itch I had was in the spring/summer of '06 when I was working at Lakeshore. I spent a lot of time pulling weeds in the garden and walking up and down a dirt road. I didn't get an iPod. Instead, my mom loaned me a portable dvd player that also plays cds. Slightly smaller than my current laptop, it was a like a small step above hauling around a boom box but a far cry from an iPod. I feel like 99% of portable dvd users are under the age of 12, and they are used to play Toy Story on the way to Grandma's house. I wonder how many other gardeners had portable dvd players sitting in the dirt in 2006. Five?

The following summer I once again found myself pulling weeds for many more hours a day than I had the previous summer. This time I was really in no position to buy an iPod. I distinctly remember wondering at one point How would one go about making $7 last ten days? I don't remember how I made that happen. It probably involved two boxes of cereal. But I saved up for a gadget that came with an armband and the following day at work, a co-worker said, "That's the biggest iPod I've ever seen." I responded, "That's because it's actually a $12 am/fm radio." Because of the extremely metropolitan location of this job, the radio picked up exactly one channel. It involved "Wakin' up with Whoopie" and lots of Beyonce. Whoopie Goldberg is so cheery.

Now that I am gardening yet again, I decided I really want an iPod. I chose the silver nano. So far, it's pretty awesome. I love laughing when I'm at work! That's what the podcasts are for. Two complaints: I keep it in my pocket and I'm always accidentally pushing a button or adjusting the volume. Is there some sort of "lock" feature? Also, my left headphone is broken, and I have this secret hope it will get better without me having to go back to the store. It's just like my theory about feeling sick/avoiding the doctor. I should take it back.

all over the place

2009-10-02T15:51:00.002-05:00

Whenever I've looked and looked for something yet still can't find it, James usually says a favorite little aphorism of his: "Well, they say three moves equals a fire." I like that the explanation takes the blame away from me. I didn't personally lose it..it was lost in "the fire." I don't know what seven moves equals-- the number of moves I've made since graduating in December of '05 (not counting the across-town move within Nashville). And if three moves equals a fire, I would say owning one dog equals at least a major robbery (in which the robber has a weird foot fetish, primarily stealing shoes and socks, along with the occasional pair of underwear, and performs an annual ritual involving the destruction a book). Between the fires and the robber, I have lost tons of dishes and silverware, a papisan chair, an s video cord, a borrowed tv, a couple of rugs, a few remote controls, three pairs of chacos, and all sorts of clothing, including a beloved blue hoodie with fleece on the inside. Please come home, blue hoodie! (Sorry. That was reaching outside of the fire/robber theory and over into the theory that claims my clothes run away from time to time but can be coaxed into returning home.)

Anyway, now that it is officially October, I am happy to say that neither my space heater nor my collection of warm socks has been consumed by the fire/robber. This is how I use my space heater in the morning: Wake up in the morning, hit snooze, lean over the edge of the bed and turn on the space heater. Alarm goes off again 7 minutes later. Put on house shoes and enjoy the warmth the 7 minutes of space heater has created. Fast forward through coffee, pony tail, spf, morning email check ritual. Before making my lunch, I choose the socks I will wear for the day. I drape the socks over the front of the space heater (not a fire hazard, I promise) and set my shoes directly in front of the space heater. After the lunch is made, I take off the house slippers and put on my pre-warmed socks and shoes. It makes perfect sense.

This past week I conducted an experiment to see which shoe/sock combo keeps the warmest the longest throughout the day (p.s. I now work as a gardener, meaning I'm outside all day long, exposed to the New England elements). I have three pair of tennis shoes. I always go with the sambas because 1) I like them the most and 2) it's just habit. But my feet have been really cold lately, so I decided to switch it up. Pair one (merrells) failed because they instantly gave me a blister on the back of my left heel. Pair two (old sauconies) performed equally to the sambas, which is not great.

Rewind to August when I was deciding what to bring versus what to leave at home. Besides the few pairs of shoes I gave to the Goodwill, there was only one pair of shoes I decided I could leave at home: steel toed, insulated, weather proof workboots because I thought Surely I won't need these in Boston. Life is so unpredictable. I wish I had them now. Well, sort of. It's these very boots that gave me athlete's foot in July which resulted in me buying "tough-actin tinactin," except I got the special jock itch formula instead of athlete's foot one. I was really hoping I could get rid of the jock itch spray before moving in with the new roommate. She might get ideas.

In other news, my official Tennessee teaching license finally arrived in the mail yesterday. Thank God. My boss at the gardening job has really been hounding me for it.

That was a joke.

Subbing- entry 2

2009-09-21T10:13:00.002-05:00

I think about how much I have hated math since I was in middle school. I think about all my math tests bleeding the same red words over and over: SIMPLE ERROR. I think about how I was so defeated I stopped even bringing my notebook to class on a consistent basis so that I even failed notebook quizzes, which were our teacher's free A's, essentially. They always had five blanks, and I would write

1. I

2. am

3. sorry

4. Mrs.

5. Barrow

I think about how many times in math class I asked, "What is the point of this?" And then I wonder what my response would have been had I been told the truth at that time. It would have sounded like this, "Because Sara, after being out of college for nearly four years, you will find yourself trapped in a seventh grade math classroom spending your miserable days talking about fractions." See, there is a reason crystal balls don't exist. We would all lose the will to live.

The math class was much different than the history class for two reasons: 1) I was working with seventh graders, and 2) I was actually filling in for a teacher who left lesson plans, thank God. The first day the kids took a quiz. I walked around the room, monitoring. A girl raised her hand and pointed to question number five, which she had just finished. It was a long division problem that instructed: Find the quotient. "Did I circle the right number?" she asked.

"I can't tell you that." I responded calmly. "I can't help with quizzes." Then I hurriedly sat down at the teacher desk, opened the math book to the glossary, and looked up the word "quotient" in a panic. Oh, the quotient is just the answer to a long division problem. WTF? Why didn't it just say, "solve the damn problem" if that's what she wanted them to do? I immediately empathized with the girl who raised her hand. I wouldn't have known, either.

The students were just starting to grasp the concept of negative numbers. They were given problems like, "Arrange the following numbers from least to greatest: 5/8, -.76, -2/3, .45, 2." We would do these together as a class. This is how this one went:

"We have a problem that needs to be addressed before we can do anything else. What's that problem?"

I call on someone. They say, "Some are fractions. Some are decimals."

"Exactly. So what do we need to do?"

I call on someone else. "Change all the decimals to fractions."

I realize I don't know how to do that. "Okay, what else could we do?"

I call on someone else. "Change all the fractions to decimals."

"Exactly." I ask a volunteer to come to the front of the room to show us on the board how to turn 5/8 into a decimal. It works out perfectly. We put them all on a number line with 0 in the middle. I have never drawn so many number lines in my life.

Then we take some notes. I copy what the real teacher wrote on the board, one little bullet at a time, making sure everyone understands, and giving them some sample problems before moving on to the next bullet point. The kids copy from the board onto their paper. Someone complains. "This is too much to write." I respond, "This is my fourth time to write all of this out on the board. I think you can write it once." Then someone asks, "Why don't you just write it once and leave it up there for all the classes?" I say, "Because if it's all up there, you'll copy it all down at once without thinking about what you're writing and zone me out for the rest of class feeling satisfied you have the notes in your binder." There is a pause before the kid replies. "Yeah..." he says. "You're a good teacher." *Having a seventh grade student tell me I'm a good teacher in a math room setting is one of my crowning achievements in this lifetime.

The rest of that week is more or less a blur of boys making farting noises and throwing erasers across the room at each other. It should be a comfort to all middle school teachers out there to know that it's not you; it's just how they are. Middle school boys in Tennessee. Middle school boys in Boston. It's like there's some manual they're all given explaining how to do the most inappropriate things in any given situation. But now I'm generalizing. Of course, there were good guys in there as well. You just don't tend to remember the quiet moments at the end of day. Only the fart-noise moments. I was taught in grad school that you're always supposed to give a rationale for assignments and rules. I thought if I explained why I was asking them to stop making fart noises, it might help the situation.

"I know you all have this instinct to make fart noises all the time. And you're doing it to get the attention of girls. In a room of all boys, no fart noises. But add one girl, you get fart noises. Now, some time in the next 2-3 years, it will occur to you that fart noises do not help you get girls. Girls don't like fart noises. I'm trying to help you here. You can arrive at this conclusion for yourself in two years from now, or you can listen to me now." They all chose to wait to arrive at the conclusion for themselves.

Subbing- entry 1

2009-09-21T09:24:00.002-05:00

Within a few days of moving to the Boston area, I decided I would try a new strategy in order to get a teaching job-- randomly showing up and dropping off my info in person after several people suggested I may be a victim of "geographical prejudice," meaning that even though I am very qualified to teach, the job search committees might never get past the word "Tennessee" on my resume, envisioning overalls (which I do still own, actually) and bad teeth. I walked into the first school on my list with clean teeth and no overalls and said I realized it was already the first day of school, but I just wanted to drop off my info in case they had any last minute openings. The secretary mentioned they might need a sub and asked if I could stick around a few minutes to talk to the principal. This felt promising. So I walked into his office and he asked me to talk a little about my education. He scanned my resume as I spoke. I wrapped up after proudly describing my intern experience and Masters degree, to which he responded, "Somerville...that is very close to here. There is a possibility we may need you tomorrow. Could you do that?" Apparently, a five mile proximity is all you need to get a job as a sub. I was in his office for all of four minutes. He said someone would call me to let me know for sure.

I hadn't even made it home when the secretary called me to confirm I could come in the following day (their second day of school). I said sure and asked if she knew what class/grade level I would be filling in for. She said she didn't know. The next morning I was walked to a classroom by the principal. I noticed there were no lesson plans on the teacher's desk. No anything, really. He explained the situation: "So this is tenth grade American history. We actually haven't hired a teacher yet. So if you could just go over chapter one today, that would be great." Now, I haven't actually taken a course in American history since 11th grade (eight or nine years ago). It should also be known that the kids didn't have textbooks. Oh sure, I can scrape something together in the next five minutes before the bell rings from the one textbook available to me. No prob. A God-sent teacher down the hall offered to go run off copies of chapter one. I spent a few minutes introducing myself to the class to kill some time. When the teacher returned with the book and copies, I sent a blank sheet of notebook paper around the room for the kids to sign (I was never given a list of who should be in my classes as long as I was there). This bought me about 4 minutes to speed-read a few paragraphs of chapter one. We started way back. As in Bering Strait, mammoths, beginning of agriculture. The kids took turns reading from their packets, and I felt good as long as I stayed a paragraph ahead of them. I told them to jot down the key vocab words so they were accountable for something but still had no clue what their actual assignment would be. Suddenly it came to me: art contest. Maybe not your typical first day of history assignment, but I think it was a big hit.

I told the students that they would of course get some points for their drawing itself, but creativity and including factual details from the chapter would get them the most points. This caused a bit of a problem because they wanted to be sure they were being as accurate as possible. "What's the difference between a wigwam and a long house?" one asked me. "Well..." I paused. I have no idea, I wanted to say. "What does the paragraph say? I'm not just going to give you the answers here." That was close. I chose the winner because she was the only student who included dialogue during her illustration of a war between two tribes. And I only laughed at one drawing (it showed the first explorers crossing the Bering Strait in a single file line).

I got to teach the class for two fabulous weeks. Within those two weeks the students gave group presentations on the ships the Europeans used for exploration, arranged time lines of early Boston, read articles on Ted Kennedy (who passed away during those two weeks), wrote essays describing the shifts in Native Americans' eating styles (from hunting large mammals to smaller animals to fishing and gathering to agriculture), completed review guides and took a test that I created. Several of them also said they had heard the word "y'all" used in person for the first time in their life during those two weeks. The principal did not stop in once. My temporary job was given away after two weeks to a "real" history teacher, and I was moved in to the seventh grade math room. So it goes.

adventures in cake

2009-09-09T06:42:00.003-05:00

I really like baking cakes. I really like eating cake, and I really like icing. James's favorite cake happens to be red velvet cake-- a cake prior to last year I had no experience baking or even eating. But I made one last year for him from a recipe I found online. The recipe stood out because it was for a three layer cake. Bigger is better when making a cake, in my opinion. So I tried it out. None of the layers really rose, they were lopsided, and I think burned around the edges. The problem is that I don't even know what red velvet cake is supposed to taste like, so I had to go on James's word. He promised it was good, which is nice, but it was lopsided and ugly. It needed tweaking.

The second time I baked it, I decided to double the recipe since the layers were so thin. The new problem was that the middle was entirely sunken in, and only the edges rose. I had to troubleshoot, which resulted in taking the large bread knife and sawing off the higher pieces of cake, but I am not good at this, so I then had a crumbly, leaning, sunken cake. I decided that I hated red velvet cake.

James's birthday was last weekend, and I strongly recommended that he choose a cake, ANY cake, that was not red velvet. But he couldn't be swayed. I briefly considered baking something else anyway, knowing he would get over it, but it was his birthday, so I decided to cooperate. I kept the original icing recipe (what's not to love about 4 cups of powdered sugar, two packs of cream cheese, and two sticks of butter with a dash of vanilla?), but I knew I had to go in search of a new red velvet recipe or I was going to have a meltdown in the kitchen. I went with this recipe from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/dining/141vrex.html?_r=1

It is really simple and turned out a thousand times better than the old recipe. However, it calls for 6 tablespoons of red food coloring, and has a note saying that amount equals 3 ounces. It actually is closer to 2 ounces (meaning two bottles instead of three of red food coloring), and I didn't even want to use that much, so I used about a bottle and a half, and it was still a very deep red. Next time, I'll probably only use one bottle, which still seems like a ton of food coloring to ingest.

PS, yes, my favorite apron is a child's apron with a skeleton from Williams-Sonoma. It looks scary when I'm mixing red food coloring!

cooped up

2009-08-25T20:02:00.003-05:00

I was thinking I could write a blog about my hundreds of failed attempts at getting a teaching job, but it would be too depressing for this outlet. So I will fast forward past all that and get right to my craigslist job searches.

I have been looking for teaching jobs on craigslist for many months now, but until recently, I only looked at the "education" link. Many friends suggested that I look beyond teaching jobs, and I eventually acquiesced. I've decided that if I can't get a job teaching, I can still find virtue in a job that's at least close to my house. You know, I'm not saving the youth or justifying my tens of thousands spent on my Masters degree, but at least I'm living sustainably if I walk to the Wendy's or wherever the hell I find myself working. So for the past week or so, I click on the general job link and type in "Cambridge" and scan all jobs that pop up.

The first non-teaching job that sounded appealing was a job at the Harvard bookstore which is called The Coop-- an abbreviation for "cooperative." But don't be fooled, it's not pronounced "co-op." 80% of life does not make sense in the northeast. Because of that general rule, it is pronounced in one syllable, as in "chicken coop." The idea of working in an independent bookstore is romantic. Hours of silently shelving books in the four floors of the Harvard bookstore...I can do this, I decided.

They were having an open interview one day last week between the hours of five and seven. I wanted to get in and out, so I made sure to arrive on time. Early, even. I walked to the T stop and got off at the Harvard Square stop. After a quick pep talk from James, I entered, ready for my interview. Upon entering, I quickly stopped dead in my tracks and said in a very low voice, "What the f***?" This was no independent bookstore. This was literally a Barnes and Noble. Four floors of Barnes and Noble. I considered turning around at that moment. No part of me wants to work for the man. But you're so poor, a voice within me said, so I walked farther in. On the next floor I found a Starbucks. "Oh my god. It's like there's a man inside the man in this place. It's like a matryoshka of the man in here." POOR, the voice said again. Sighing, I walked into the interview room. I did not meet an interviewer. Instead I met about fifty people in line ahead of me. I was on time! What were all these people doing here?! F'ing overachievers...

I sat on the floor and filled out an official Barnes and Noble application. It felt terrible. I wanted to sabotage my chances right there. The questions were so unbelievably bland, as in: "Address." "Days available to work." "Names of three references." "Education completed." My application was written in black ink and did nothing to set me apart from the hundred other people who had now gathered for the open interview. I looked around. Everyone had the same boring application with the same boring black ink, and we probably all have the same pointless masters degree and degree of desperation.

We were crammed into one room that was unofficially the coop (as in chicken) for unemployed people. We all just stood/sat there. No one smiled. There were people of all ages and ethnicities. It was the perfect cross-section of society. It could have been a great opportunity for a social scientist. Some people were texting, some people were doing absolutely nothing, some people were reading carefully-selected books that would probably be strategically placed on the interviewer's desk as a nice conversation starter. What bullshit. I was one of the texters. Here is what my texts to James read:

"Did you know this is a BARNES AND NOBLES."

"Ps and there's a Starbucks."

"Do I want to work here?"

"This is awful."

"I'm sitting in a big room of corpses."

"No, I don't know how much it pays."

"No, I don't know how far down I am on the list."

"Should I leave?"

"I think I'm going to leave."

"I've decided. I'm leaving."

I walked outside two hours later, at seven o'clock, never having met with an interviewer. When all is said and done, my only regret is that I didn't walk out sooner. I am instead working as a substitute U.S. History teacher at a charter school for the time being, but I am pretty sure that job is quickly coming to an end. Sadly, I'm sure there are hundreds of other blog posts across America that read similarly to this one. It is a really crappy time to look for a job, I am told, and that makes me feel only slightly better.

cold and flu, anyone?

2009-08-24T05:15:00.003-05:00

I have moved cities since I last posted. I now live in the greater Boston area (Somerville, to be exact), and I could write about several things, but it is almost time for me to go to school (currently working as a temp. U.S. History teacher. 10 stories right there). So instead I will post this cry for help.

After moving, I tried to change my weather.com link so it would take me straight to Somerville's weather. I decided to create a "my page" on their website, and I honestly can't remember what questions it asked me, but apparently I must have checked some bubble that asked if I was concerned about the flu (duh). Now, when I click on the permanent link to weather.com, it brings me straight to the cold and flu page. If I click on the ten-day forecast, guess what. The cold and flu page reloads. No matter what I click, it's all cold and flu, gloom and doom. So I went to google.com and typed in "Somerville 10 day forecast." I thought if I clicked on the link from an external website it would work. Nope. All I can get is the latest updates on the stupid cold and flu. This is torturous! Help. Obviously, if anyone has any questions about the cold and flu, just shoot me a line.

Real posts coming soon. I promise.

thank yous

2009-06-06T20:42:00.003-05:00

I am embarrassed of the length of time that has passed since my last entry... In news, I officially have a master's degree in teaching, which seems exciting. I didn't go to graduation and I referred to my diploma as a glorified receipt the other day, but I also feel proud of making it through the year. I only broke down and cried once all year long! (It was when I was trying to teach the Declaration of Independence to the 11th graders. It was, and remains, an impossible task) I think I just want to share a few highlights from the thank you notes the seventh graders wrote me:

"Thanks for teaching me boring verbs and things in a fun way. Have a good feature! Your awesome."

"I love your bubbly personality and how your not boring. One in FIVE BILLION! And that's a lot... I love tacos."

"Your going to be the most favorite teacher in the school. PS Your not old."

"Thanks for all of your dedication to being a teacher. If I didn't hate school so much I might have fun. Live it up and try not to be too much of a capitilist punk."

This was written on several hearts cut out of typing paper: "The small little person with the big heart."

This was the entirety of this card: "Well first of all I want to say thanks for being so nice and teaching us a lot."

"We will miss you hope you can teach next year! And girl you have to call me if you meat a guy."

"You've helped me a lot this year. I hope your new class isn't as good as ours."

"Your the first student teacher that aint mean."

Front Cover: "Bye Miss Little." Inside: "Good Bye Miss Little." Back Cover: "Bye Miss Little."

The realist: "Hope all your dreams finally come true. If not just keep on following your dreams and they might come true."

Every concluding sentence I've come up with sounds really cheesy, but they all have to do with acknowledging that teaching is really rewarding. And tiring. But very worth it. PS I realize I need to spend time with the your/you're lesson in the future..

Farewell, Prom Shoes

2009-04-21T18:58:00.006-05:00

I went through a phase in high school where I hated new clothes, more or less. I really only wanted to wear t-shirts from thrift stores, clothes I had sewn myself (by hand!) and old shoes. My mom decided to stop confronting me about this and started taking matters into her own hands. I would ask myself, "Where did I put those sauconies?" Sauconies are a brand of tennis shoes, and the pair I speak of came from a garage sale when I was in the 8th grade (and I learned later they used to belong to Erin!) and was still being worn my senior year of high school. I would look under my bed, next to couch, all the usual places really, only to find them in the garbage can. This did not only happen one time.

So you can imagine my mom's excitement when I informed her I would be wearing flip flops to the prom. I was wearing a long pink gown! Wasn't that enough? I picked up a pair at Old Navy for about $3, and I was very pleased with my decision (the corsage/boutonniere situation is an entirely different entry).

The flip flops my mom hated in their pristine condition have only gone significantly downhill over the last seven years. Yes, I still have them. However, this morning when Silas wanted to go outside, but I didn't want to get out of bed, he "pulled a mom" and got rid of my flip flops. They are destroyed! Since when did Silas join her team?

Ok, looking at the photo they do look pretty disgusting. I am now accepting new flip flops. And that was the only prom picture I have at my house in Nashville. I am sure there are many more in Memphis.

Strange Dreams

2009-04-14T07:16:00.002-05:00

I had a dream two nights ago that, completely unprompted, I took a spray bottle of industrial cleaner and squirted it into my mouth. Everyone around me was like, "What are you doing?!" and I said, "I...don't...know." Then I tried to rinse my mouth out with water that I had put into the now-empty spray bottle, but someone made me drink a cap-full of anti-septic throat medicine.

Analyzing this on my own, I was thinking that since my throat was hurting in real life, that's how I decided to handle it in my dreamland. But I told my mentor teacher about the dream, and she suggested maybe it was because I accidentally said the "d" word in front of a class last week. Oops. At least I had a heavy conscience?

problem solution

2009-04-07T07:46:00.002-05:00

I love cereal. Sweet, processed, kid cereal like cinnamon toast crunch and cocoa krispies. However, in an effort to be healthier, I've decided to force myself to eat oatmeal. This is not easy for me, but I've been altering the 'recipe' until I got it just right.

Recipe 1: Vanilla Kashi Oatmeal

Recipe 2: Vanilla Kashi Oatmeal + bananas

Recipe 3: Vanilla Kashi Oatmeal + bananas + strawberries

Recipe 4: Vanilla Kashi Oatmeal + bananas + strawberries + cinnamon

Recipe 5: Vanilla Kashi Oatmeal + bananas + cinnamon + chocolate chips

Recipe 6: bananas + cinnamon + chocolate chips. mmmmm.

Finally

2009-04-05T10:24:00.003-05:00

I read a lot as a kid, and I enjoyed most of what we were assigned in middle and high school, but the first book I really really loved as a student was Walden. We read "Civil Disobedience" at the beginning of 11th grade (when my mom was my teacher!), and I loved Thoreau's conviction. After our AP exam, we were given the assignment to choose any pre-approved book and do a report on it. I chose Walden (When in 9th grade, we were given the same assignment, and I somehow got away with reading How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Who allows that? And why did I even want to read that?!) and picked up a cheap Bantam edition at Borders. Of course, I promptly left it outside (the best place to read Thoreau), and it rained, leaving the book sopping wet. I left it out to dry, which it eventually did, and after cutting off the right, mildewed margin of every single page and duct-taping the cover back together that had torn when the water expanded the pages, we were back in business.

I've been given two other copies of Walden as gifts (one annotated and one vintage) and have bought another copy to mark up for a college class, but I still go to my original copy when I feel like flipping through it. Of course, at this point in my life, I don't hold Thoreau on quite the pedestal I once did. He is too much of an escapist for my liking. I believe in community, whereas Thoreau primarily believed in solitude. However, I still love his sarcasm and his reverence of nature that most of the world had/has since abandoned, and the book will always be extremely important to me, being my first love and what not.

So it only makes sense that I have always wanted to go to Walden Pond. I got pretty close (25 miles away) when I visited Boston my senior of college but had to settle for visiting the bookstore Thoreau and Emerson frequented in Boston (very disillusioning experience. The bookstore had been bought out by a liquidation jewelry store). I am happy to announce that I finally made it to Walden Pond a couple weeks ago when I went to visit James in Boston. Besides the inexplicable, excruciating foot pain I was experiencing, it was a perfect, though brief, visit.

We rented a car (let me rephrase. James rented a car. I lost my debit card and contributed zero percent to the weekend's finances...), picked up some coffee, and were at Walden Pond within 30 minutes. We didn't pay for parking like we were supposed to. a) the machine wasn't working, and b) we were paying homage to the man who refused to pay for taxes and most other things. His tiny reconstructed house is right next to the parking lot (I only cringed slightly), and we were able to peer in and see the three chairs ("I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up." "Visitors," Walden). We crossed the street to get to the pond, which is actually very large. It was a warm day (55?), but the pond was still frozen thick. There were a few ice fishermen out there and we stopped to say hello to one of them. I wouldn't say we "wandered around" because there is a path, and you can't do much wandering on a path. It would be more accurate to say that I actually hobbled around.

James: How long do you want to stay here?

Me: Just until I figure my life out.

We ate brunch in Concord which is a really lovely town, but we had to get going in order to make it to Rhode Island with plenty of time. Again, it was a fairly brief visit, but it allowed me to fulfill one of my life-long goals!

"I love my fate to the very core and rind." -Thoreau.

Announcement

2009-04-04T23:02:00.002-05:00

Silas peed with his leg up on a mail box yesterday. He has peed like a girl his whole life, and now he's finally behaved more gender-appropriately. Of course, today in the park he was right back at peeing like a girl (after he made me fall on my butt in front of a family reunion. note: choke collar not working).

Spring Photo Shoot

2009-04-04T22:28:00.004-05:00

I have gotten really terrible at updating my blog. I'm going to try to do a few in a row. There's no lack of post-able stories; there's only a lack of time.

I typically really hate pictures of flowers (love flowers. just hate pictures of them). I stopped wasting my film on flower pictures years ago. They're boring and cliched. However, I made this little bouquet from tulips and the dogwood (and one other plant I don't know the name of) in my front yard today, and I was really proud of it. P.S. I took these pictures with my compact macro lens that I love. Thanks Mom! I haven't broken or lost it in the four and a half years I've had it. Pretty impressive.

all grown up

2009-03-04T07:10:00.002-06:00

I am student teaching seventh grade this semester, which is a challenge every single day. There is one class that I particularly love though. I have them an extra 30 minutes every day (we do independent reading and "physical activity," which, Thank God, I am not responsible for leading), which means I've gotten to know those students significantly better than students from other classes. We can chat and veer slightly off subject, but then pull it back together (in most other classes, getting off-subject-- even if it's just for a couple minutes, means spending 5 minutes reeling them back in). I see them right after lunch. So, Monday we were grading the spelling/vocab books. We got to the bottom of the first page, at which point I said, "4th period...I'm sorry to interrupt spelling, but I just discovered something really disturbing, and I need to get it off my chest." They were all staring at me. I continued, "A few minutes ago at lunch...I found my first gray hair." Immediate amusement on their behalf. "Really? Just one? How old are you? What did you do?"

"Yes, really....Just one....I'm 24....and I ripped it out." One of my students then informed me that you're not supposed to rip them out, and there was general agreement throughout the classroom that 24 is not old. "Okay, okay. Back to spelling. Thank you for letting me confess to you." Later in the class, we were reading a book together, and trying to use context clues to figure out how old one of the characters was. Someone thought she was 40. "No," I said. "See here where it mentions junior high? She's definitely closer to our age. Wait. I meant your age. Not our age. You are youthful and bright with your whole life ahead of you. I am old and graying." So that has been the ongoing joke this week. And I have a hair appointment tomorrow.

Then the Letting Go

2009-02-08T10:23:00.003-06:00

This is one of my very favorite poems. It's by Emily Dickinson.

After pain, a formal feeling comes -

The nerves sit, ceremonious, like Tombs -

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round -

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -

A Wooden way

Regardless round,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone -

This is the Hour of Lead -

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -

First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go

I mentioned somewhere in another blog about my habit of repeating the last thing that people say. I do the same thing with things that I read (but it happens only in my head). So it's really exciting when I actually really like the last line of something. In this case, it's perfect. "First chill, then stupor, then the letting go." I don't know how many times I've said that in my head. (If I've forced any of you to read my favorite short story, "Bullet in the Brain," I do the same thing with that: "They is, they is.") So anyway, I know lots of people who really like Bonnie Prince Billy (he's a musician, for those of you who aren't familiar). I am familiar with lots of his stuff, but I would only classify myself as a marginal fan. I don't own any of his albums, and I go through phases where when I hear him, I want to break the cd in half and scream, "Snap out of it! Everyone!" See, he plays sad music, and if you weren't already sad to begin with, you probably will be after listening to his stuff. But he has this song I really like (ok, I admit, several songs I really like) called "Only Someone Running," and I decided that I would buy it off of itunes. So I type in his name, and all his albums come up. I notice that one is entitled "The Letting Go," and I freaked out, assuming he was paying homage to Emily Dickinson. So I clicked on the album, and the title song goes so far as to be called "Then the Letting Go" which confirms that he is, indeed, a fan of Emily Dickinson. I have newfound respect for Bonnie Prince Billy. That's my announcement. But I didn't buy the album or even the song. I stuck with the album I originally wanted, which I highly recommend (it's called Superwolf).

juxtaposition

2009-02-02T17:29:00.002-06:00

speculation

2009-02-02T17:11:00.002-06:00

Last night, Margaret and I were standing in the dog room, and I decided to feed Silas (he deserved to eat yesterday). I unlatched and lifted the lid of the giant rubbermaid bin we store the dog food in and reached in for the measuring cup that I use as a scoop when I noticed something on the wall of the bin. "What is that?" I asked, half to myself, half to Margaret. "It looks like...a slug," I decided, answering my own question.

"Eww!" Margaret replied.

"Eww," I agreed.

I started looking around the room. "Oh my God. There's one on the wall over there, too!"

"Eww!"

"Eww." My attention was brought back to the dog food slug. "How did he even get in there?" I asked, again half to myself, half to Margaret. Again, I answered my own question. "He must have...been...born in there."

"Eww!"

"What if there are more?" I now asked, looking now at the floor, dreading the inevitable moment I step on one. I continued, "What if tomorrow he's on the handle of the measuring cup when I pick it up?!"

"Eww!"

I love that we never actually did anything about the two slug sightings. We just stood there, grossed out, hoping for the best.

a small thing to some

2009-01-29T20:34:00.003-06:00

The phrase "being chased after" kind of sounds like a high-speed car chase to me, but for lack of a better phrase at the moment (help, please, if you think of a substitute), it'll have to do. I feel like every girl should have that experience. Mine has already happened.

This was in the Spring of '06. I had gone with a few friends to Asheville to see My Morning Jacket, and the opening band came to Boone the following night, so I saw them again. They played at Black Cat, which was across the street from my apartment. Knowing everyone in a little town is pretty wonderful. It allows you to do what you really want to do (without having to worry about having a 'wing man') because a friend is bound to be at whichever of the 3 bars you decide to go to. So I, as usual, walked over there alone. I talked to one of the guys in the band for a minute to tell him that I had seen them the night before and how great I thought they were, and he asked me a little about myself, and there was a little chatting, and that was the end of that.

At the end of the show, folks were lingering outside. I wound up in the same circle as the guy (his name was Mike), and they were all talking about a party they were now going to. "You should come," he said to me. Thanks to my stellar self-esteem, I often assume that people don't genuinely mean what nice things they say to me, and so I nodded and smiled, knowing that he didn't really care, one way or the other. It was cold, and I was sleepy, so after a few more minutes of standing around, I just started to walk towards my apartment. I had gotten across the street when I heard, "Sara!" I didn't even turn around because I have a very common name, and I always feel like an idiot when I turn around, only to find out it was another Sara being called. Then there were running footsteps, and I turned to see Mike. "Hey. Sara. Aren't you coming?" I immediately recognized the moment as a phenomenon. Someone literally chased after me. So I went.

He was just a genuinely kind person. He never tried to 'make a move' or be creepy. He asked me if I would go with them to lunch the next day. I explained I had to work at the video store. "Well I am calling the store to see what I can bring you." And he did. He brought me a quesadilla the next day and said it was nice to meet me.

It's a little treasure of a memory.

Probably the craziest I have...

2009-01-27T16:36:00.002-06:00

(I posted this this morning, and it for some reason was put in the August of '08 section...so I just copied and pasted it here because it's new!)

I hate writing so many negative blogs in a row. This one details a different sort of first/last encounter. Mom, I hope you're sitting down.

When I worked at Lakeshore, I spent 5 hours on I-40 weekly. It was consistently uneventful, except twice. The first time was when an entire tire tread from an 18-wheeler slammed into the hood of my car, bashing in my grill and denting/ruining my hood before flying on to the car behind me. I was pissed, as those of you who have ever ridden in the car with me can imagine (road rage central over here). But this blog is about the second eventful thing happened.

I was driving home around 6 or 7 pm and this car started riding my tail. I got over into the right lane, and he passed. I had my cruise control set, as always, and now I was about to pass him on the right because he had slowed down. I hate passing people on the right, but cruise control dictates that sort of thing. I eventually got in front of him in the left lane, and he got over into the right. He then pulls up right beside me and I notice that his whole body is turned towards me and he is trying to communicate with me. At first I thought he was yelling at me for passing him so many times, but I soon realized he was holding his hand as though he was holding a cup and tilting his head back in a gesture that was saying, "Get a drink with me?" I am immediately laughing because this is completely ludicrous. Who gets asked out on the interstate? So I am saying "NO. NO!" driving 75 mph next to this guy.

"Why not?" he asks, in response. (I am lip-reading, ps).

"I DO NOT KNOW YOU," I mouth back, still laughing. He really didn't look creepy...

"Please?"

"Where?"

He points at the next exit, which ok, that's creepy.

"NO!"

He is now holding his hand up to his face in the "Call me" gesture. I am still just laughing away. Everyone behind us probably wants to kill us. He holds up a legal pad to the window with his phone number written in giant letters.

I think for a second. I called him.

He has an accent I can't immediately place. "Why won't you get a drink with me?"

"Because you could be a homicidal psychopath! I can't get a drink with you at a truck stop!"

"Come on. How often does this happen?"

"Believe it or not, you're the first person to ask me out on the interstate."

"Okay then!"

"No. Where are you from?"

"Israel."

"Does this happen a lot in Israel?"

"Well, no."

"Okay... Where are you going?"

"Memphis."

"Okay...Listen. Follow me off the interstate, and we can go to Starbucks."

I really don't know what I was thinking. I just felt tired of being afraid and skeptical in every possible situation in my whole life. Not everyone wants to kill me, rob me, or rape me. I led him to the busiest possible location I could think of (Starbucks on Poplar). We got out of our cars.

"I love what you're wearing!" he said. I looked down. I was wearing a green thermal shirt and overalls, typical camp wear.

"Um, really?"

"It's what I wore as a boy in Israel!"

"Oh. Perfect."

He bought me a drink, and I honestly don't remember very much about our conversation. I asked him how Ariel Sharon was doing...it was only a few months after his stroke.

"You know Ariel Sharon?!"

"Well, I listen to the news..."

"You are not like any other American girl." I was kind of proud at that moment. I dress like an Israeli boy and am familiar with important Israeli figures...

I told him I had to go after about 20 minutes. He said he wanted to hang out later, but that was the end of my interstate adventure, and I declined.

In retrospect, I feel a little guilty for "using" him to prove something to myself. He really was a nice guy...

yet another

2009-01-27T07:06:00.003-06:00

I was once randomly asked out in Boone by a person I knew nothing about (in Boone, this is a rarity). I agreed anyway. Maybe the lesson I'm realizing as I post these is that perhaps I should be more discriminating, but I am the type of person who would never turn down a dance (it's three minutes of your life, people. You can do it) and can rarely turn down a date offer. So anyway, all I knew about this guy was that his last name was Bush. This is already a hurdle for two reasons: a) this was the last name of our president I was never a huge fan of, and b) if we got married, my name would be Sara Little Bush. Girls think about these things, and that one would be a total nightmare. Any sort of noun last name is going to make me sound like I belong on the set of Dances with Wolves: Sara Little Wolf...Sara Little Hill...Sara Little Woods..

Here are the two conversational gems worth mentioning: He picked me up in a pickup truck. He asked me how my day was. I said, "Pretty good, thanks. How was yours?" He groaned and shook his head. "I was on the phone all day with lawyers." Is he a lawyer? I am wondering. Remember, I know nothing about him and am taking any context clue I can get.

"What for?" I ask.

"Custody battle." We weren't even to the restaurant yet.

I have no idea what I responded with, but we were at the restaurant very quickly (you get everywhere fast in Boone, thank God). Small talk while we're waiting for the waitress. He orders whatever. My turn. I ordered a spinach and artichoke quesadilla (still a vegetarian), to which he remarks, "Hey, that's why ex-wife always orders!"

Check, please.

Rick, the Pilot

2009-01-26T06:59:00.003-06:00

I lived in Memphis the spring/summer after I graduated college, and my romantic prospects were rather grim. However, I noticed a really attractive guy at the bar one night and was surprised when he started talking to me. His name was Rick, he was 26 (I was 21), and he had just moved to Memphis to fly for Delta. He was Dominican, but had been raised in Boston which provided for an interesting accent.

He got my number and called me the standard 2 days later to ask me to go dinner that Friday then downtown to celebrate (his training program was ending). I agreed and he started telling me about some restaurant that he had found, which I had never heard of. This is exciting, I thought. New boy, new restaurant... All his friends from the training program were going to be downtown as well, so he asked if I knew some girls I could bring. Sure, I can make that happen. Fast forward to Friday. All my girlfriends were going to eat elsewhere and then meet us downtown. I hadn't heard back from Rick. 4 oclock passed...5 o clock passed...Finally he called at 6. "Hey...so are you and your friends still in for tonight?"

"Yep..."

"Cool, cool...Well, hey about dinner...I forgot it was Good Friday...so I can't eat meat...and I just really don't think I can find anything to eat at the restaurant."

I didn't respond for a second. See, I was a vegetarian at the time and I found it quite simple to find menu options that didn't include meat. "Ooookaaay..." is probably what I said.

"So, why don't you just call me when you and the girls get downtown?"

I hate him already.

Luckily, it wasn't too late to meet the girls where they were eating. We then drove downtown and started at The Flying Saucer. I called him, and he said he and one of the guys would meet us there. His friend, bless his heart, looked like he had fallen asleep accidentally in the tanning bed. Nice guy, but not doing anything for my friends.

Rick asked me if I wanted a beer. Of course I did. We walked up to the bar where he refused to make eye contact with the bartender. "Man, if I can just get a waitress's attention..." We are standing at the bar. Waitresses don't take your order. After about five minutes of him successfully managing to avoid buying me a drink, I flagged down the bartender, ordered and paid for my own beer and walked back to the girls. Rick followed. "So where are all your friends?" My girls were getting annoyed.

"Oh, they're down here somewhere. I'll call them later."

"Well, you told me to bring my friends so they could meet your friends. And my friends are here."

"I'll call them later."

He wanted to go to Alfred's to dance, but it was barely 10 o'clock, and I tried explaining that people don't really go there til 12. Well, maybe people go before 12, but I don't. "I need a couple more beers before dancing at Alfred's."

This seriously was his response: "You won't need em if you're dancing with me." Hmm. Well, maybe he was right. He was Dominican after all (this was post-Mexico where I learned that guys in other countries really can dance). So we go to Alfred's. He promptly disappeared. The girls and I are dancing. Tori asks me, "Is that Rick over there?" I turn around. Rick is looking like the creepiest person ever, standing in the back corner with his arms folded just...looking. Ew. "Do you want to go get him?" she asks. No, I did not. An hour probably went by with no sign of Rick. I am ready to leave. So I walk around for a few minutes and finally spot him....eating chicken fingers.

I walk up to him and point at his plate. "Hey. What the hell are those?"

"I just can't dance on an empty stomach."

I wanted to throw his chicken fingers on the ground and stomp on them and slap him in the face. But I didn't.

"Well, we are leaving."

"But we haven't danced yet."

"Yeah, well the rest of have. For about an hour."

"Just come dance with me."

Perhaps you have seen Dirty Dancing. Perhaps those dance movies were alright in the mid-80s. He was attempting some sort of Patrick Swayze hip thing. It was the longest dance of my whole life.

"Okay, well it was good to see you. Bye."

He called me a couple days later. I did not answer. The message said, "Hey, it's Rick. I had a really good time the other night and just wanted to see what your plans are for the rest of the week." That was your idea of a good time? What in the world could a bad time be for this guy? I didn't return his call. By the third time he called without me answering, the message started like this: "I don't know if you remember me or not..." Oh yeah, right. You wish I didn't remember you.

The Substitute

2009-01-24T10:50:00.005-06:00

Now that I've been single for a long time, I get to write about dating stories (that's against the rules when in a relationship). I have a treasure trove of horrible date stories. None are recent, because I don't really go on dates in Nashville. So this is actually about the only offer I received last semester in Nashville.

I student-taught 11th grade, and I had four classes in a row before lunch, so by the time lunch came around I typically wanted to sit in absolute silence. The teacher's lounge was always empty during my lunch, and there's a really nice view from the window making it my location of choice. I had grown accustomed to my solitary lunch, so I was disappointed when upon entering the teacher's lounge one day, there was a substitute sitting on the couch. I might have barely smiled because I did not want to be inviting what-so-ever. His reply grin was giant, and he promptly walked towards me.

No, no, no, I am thinking.

"Ms. Little!"

Oh God. We've met before. I have no idea who this person is.

"Oh, hi," I replied.

He talked and talked and talked. I gave some "Mmhmm"s. It turns out he used to live in Raleigh. He started talking about how hard it was to find work there. I could identify with that statement and agreed but pointed out that at least when I lived there (Pittsboro anyway), I was earning some form of income, no matter how meager it was, while student teaching in Nashville I earned nothing, and in fact was paying money to be working.

"Well at least you don't have a family to support," was his idea of comfort.

"Yeah. Good point. At least I am all alone. That makes everything feel better," I replied coldly.

"Oh, I didn't mean..." he is laughing at this point. The very next words out of his mouth were: "I could take care of you..."

You are a substitute teacher, was the only thing I could think, but I couldn't say that. I continued to sit in silence. He continued, "We should go out sometime..."

"I just got out of something," I lied.

"Okay, okay." He is still smiling, not defeated at all. My phone was sitting on the table, and he insisted that I put his number in there for when, I don't know, I realized that I was missing out on the great opportunity of my life. He continued talking through the lunch and by the time it was over, he had offered me a room in his house. I am not kidding. And that was the last time I ate in the teacher's lounge and remains the only time someone romantically interested in me has wanted me to move in.

Dilemma!

2009-01-20T08:03:00.003-06:00

I love the Nature's Valley "Sweet and Salty" Peanut Bars, but I never buy them because they are never on sale. However, they went on sale about a week and a half ago, and I was pretty pumped about it. I've eaten one, and I've been saving the rest. So I see a huge article a few days back announcing that you should throw out all peanut butter products. I thought to myself, "No...please don't ask me to do that!" Another article came out this morning about General Mills pulling all peanut butter products off the shelves. I checked the box, and of course, Nature Valley is a division of General Mills. I ate one, and I didn't contract salmonella (to a noticeable degree anyway). But who knows what the tipping point could be? So on the one hand, I have my sweet and salty bars, and on the other hand I have the potential threat of hospitalization. I must say that typed out, the decision seems to be pretty obvious. But it will be sad to see my bars go...

A Favorite

2009-01-15T07:33:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was my dad's birthday. In his honor, I will tell one of my favorite stories about my dad.

So, my mom's parents rent a house in Colorado for the month of July every summer. Each of the four daughters is expected to bring their family for a week. My mom and Aunt Jan always go together with my brother, Drew, and I've been able to go on about 60% of the trips. Daniel can never go because of either work or school, or maybe because he needs something to complain about the rest of the year. My dad never goes because he never takes vacations, and he probably looks forward to having the house to himself for a week.

A few years ago, my mom instructed me to call my dad the day we were driving back to Memphis to let him know we were on the road. I asked him what he was doing, and he said that one of his mom's friends had passed away in Mississippi (We'll call her "Linda"), and that he planned on going to the funeral. This is the type of man my dad is. The rest of the family is on vacation, and he goes to a funeral of a woman he hasn't seen in 35 years.

Later that afternoon, I called again to say that we were doing fine and to see how the funeral went. Here is the story that followed from my dad:

"Well, I drove down there and walked into the funeral parlor and didn't recognize anybody. Of course, I hadn't seen Linda or her family in years and years, so I figured everyone had just grown up. I made it to the front to greet the family and tell them how much Mom enjoyed when Linda and Charles (Linda's husband) came over to the house, and they kind of looked at me funny but smiled anyway. So I was kind of standing around for a while, and I eventually walked up to the casket which is when I realized... This is not Linda."

In my dad's defense, the woman had the exact name of his mother's friend, and Horn Lake is a very small town, so the possibility of two women sharing a name is small, but apparently not impossible. I probably replied with something like, "Oh, Daddy..." trying not to laugh. He continued:

"So it hit me that they were probably wondering, 'Who the heck is Charles, and why was Mom going with Charles to this guy's house?'"

"Please tell me you left at this point, Daddy."

"Well, no. I felt bad leaving before the funeral started."

"But you didn't even know her! And you got the family thinking their mom was having an affair with some man named Charles!"

"It just... didn't seem right to leave."

Of course I am crying/laughing at this point trying to retell the story to the car. The carload of us periodically would uncontrollably laugh the rest of the 20 hour drive home. So thanks, Dad...It is the best story ever.

Brrrr.

2009-01-12T08:08:00.004-06:00

I can handle cold weather to a certain point. The month of December is fine with me. I like December, in fact. Everything's Christmasy, and the cold is novel. By mid January I reach my breaking point. Every time I get in my car, I whine, "Brrrrrr!" involuntarily. I have always done that. By mid-February, in Boone, I would start yelling, "I hate it here!"

I don't recall Nashville ever being unbearably cold last winter, but looking at this week's forecast gave me a certain sense of dread (There's a low of 7 sometime this week). I still visit booneweather.com to make myself feel better about not living in Boone. I'll get nostalgic, then look at their forecast, and think, "Nah..Here is good." This Thursday in Boone, the low is 3. The caption says, "Shockingly cold." The next day's description says, "Arctic Tundra." See, doesn't that make you feel better?

Just in Case

2008-12-12T08:25:00.002-06:00

Margaret and I decided to take some "family portraits." If you were wondering how big Silas is these days, here's your answer: gigantic.

lame, lame, lame

2008-12-09T17:53:00.002-06:00

The title of the following article is: "Americans Are Working More and Playing Less, Study Finds."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081209/lf_afp/lifestyleusleisure

That is terrible news. Absolutely devastating. I feel the first response is, "Well, the economy is crap. Of course people are working more." But people are only working one hour more. Yet they are playing 20% less. The literary love of my life, Henry David Thoreau, has this to say: "There is no more fatal blunderer than he who spends the majority of life getting his living." This has been a difficult semester. Yeah, I've been broke, but I feel like I'm always pretty broke, so this is really nothing new. I'm in grad school, but the content really isn't very difficult. What's really difficult is the time I've had to sacrifice in order to feel like I'm doing a good job in the classroom. I feel more sad than stressed.

Nothing is more against my nature than working from sunrise to sunset. Actually, 4 am is far earlier than sunrise, and 10:30 is far later than sundown. I just don't believe in sacrificing all things leisurely for work's sake. Granted, teaching goes far beyond "work's sake" and obviously has nothing to do with money's sake.

I guess this is my thesis: It really pisses me off when people tout constant, diligent work as a virtue and criticize taking the weekend to do fun things and be with friends as lazy. If that's what it takes to make straight A's, then I don't want them, and if that's what it takes to be "successful," then I'm not interested.

2008-11-15T21:25:00.002-06:00

I just came across a title that made me laugh really hard:

Meals on Wheels: A Novel on the Donner Party

So clever! The author works for the times. Figures.

The Worst Library in the Whole Wide World

2008-11-08T19:14:00.004-06:00

I only talk to myself/imaginary people when I'm angry. These are the three places this happens: 1) my car. I talk to...ok..more like yell at...total strangers most times I drive my car because I feel confident in saying that I am the only person who ever knows how to drive; 2) the shower. This is where I get into fake arguments with people I do know. I am so down-to-earth at all other times that while showering I like to engage in melodramatic, one-sided arguments where I always win. I caught myself saying, "No! Because I am the only trying here!" the other day and then decided that I was also probably the only one talking out loud about it, alone, in the shower, and was able to drop that argument; and 3) Belmont's God-forsaken excuse of a library.

This is difficult because I honestly do not even know where to begin. I'm just going to visualize walking through that place and stop at all major points of interest. The first place we come to is the "computer lab." The computer lab, ironically, does not grant my laptop wireless access. It costs ten cents to print one piece of paper, and you cannot print double-sided.

As of this semester, the computer lab is closed. Are all the computers still there? Yes. Am I allowed to use them? No. This leaves only the handful of computers in the main portion of the library. You have to type in your student ID and password, and then the hourglass begins. You have ONE HOUR PER DAY on the computers in the library.

Let's walk upstairs to the third floor: home of the "media center." I've got lots of problems with this place. This is where you go to check out movies. And I don't use the phrase "check out" loosely because actually, if you are an undergrad, you can only watch movies in that very room. "I know you're all adults, and that you're paying us 30 grand a year, but we just can't let you take this movie to your dorm." As a grad student, this doesn't apply to me, but it angers me on principle.

Problem number 2: To check out a movie, you walk up to a window, and you must request a specific movie to the "keeper of the movies." Then he walks away and returns with your movie. There is no browsing allowed! You have to know exactly what you want, and I usually come with the call number on hand. Who knows what all there is to check out? Not me.

Problem number 3: Late fees. Late fees are $1.50 per day, per movie. I can't remember if you get movies for 3 or 5 days (hence why I'm familiar with the late fees), but time sure does fly when you're paying 1.50 a day. I had two movies two days late and paid $6 to the keeper of the movies. Last time I had to pay, I asked him how far I was from getting my name on a plaque. I'm sure I've afforded them several new movies, though, without being able to browse, I will never actually see what I provided.

Here's one reason my movies are late: the f'ing hours. I took 15 hours of summer school as well as worked all summer, so I needed the library quite often on the weekends. On Saturday, the library was open from 12-4:30pm, and on Sundays the library was open from 5-9pm. You can't just throw movies in the drop box. You have to take them to the keeper of the movies, and if the library is closed, you have to go back home with your already-late movies.

The lower level. Actually, I kind of am obsessed with the lower level. The library has two main staircases, but neither take you to the lower level. You have to seek out the special, hidden staircase that takes you into the most narrow, isolated corridor leading into the lower level. It freaked me out the first time I went down there. "Jesus, how many serial killers fight over this spot?" I asked myself. I went down there to find a book on liberal humanism. I wondered why books got put on the lower level. Then I turned around and noticed a section on witchcraft. Belmont was a Baptist school for a long time, and I've concluded that they put anything they consider evil in the lower level. Anything left of center goes down there. Oh, and anything about the history of black people.

The other day I needed to get some serious work done. I was in a terrible, depressed mood and decided I should study in the lower level in the hopes that someone might stab me while walking through the corridor, allowing me to be exempt from schoolwork for a few weeks. Believe it or not, there weren't any stabbers waiting that day. So I situated myself in the most remote corner (adjacent to the black history section) and opened my laptop....No wireless signal. One might say I "lost it" at this point. "ARE YOU F'ING KIDDING ME?" I screamed. "I HATE THIS PLACE." Then I started looking up and around, hoping to make eye contact with a hidden camera (which I doubt they deem necessary in the lower level). "DID YOU HEAR ME? THIS IS THE WORST LIBRARY EVER."

One more thing needs to be mentioned. Cormac McCarthy is easily one of the most important living American authors. He won the Pulitzer Prize last year. The New York Times voted him 2nd of the best fiction writers of the last 25 years. He is obviously an author that any university library would want to carry volumes of. However, Belmont has grand total of TWO books of his (two that I already own, no doubt).

Ok, enough ranting for a Saturday night.

PediPaws

2008-11-02T10:32:00.004-06:00

I use yahoo for my email account. They give you a regular inbox as well as a spam inbox, which fills up with about 150 emails a day. So the idea is that you actually read the messages in your inbox, but you can just "delete all" from your spam box without having to scroll through and weed out any real emails. That is how I operated my email until two different people informed me that they had emailed me days earlier, yet I never received their e-mails. They were sent to the spam folder.

So now I have to scroll through all my spam (which defeats the entire purpose of even having a spam folder) on the off-chance that a real e-mail was sent to the wrong place. I salvage one real e-mail about once a month, but I have three main spammers: 1) Cash4Gold; 2) DishHDFree; 3) PediPaws.

I don't know if I've written a blog about the time I convinced myself in my ed psych class that I might be autistic, but one of the reasons is because a major symptom of autism is "echolalia," which means repeating things that someone said right back to them instead of actually responding to their statement/question. I do that ALL the time. If I think something is funny, I whisper it back in a trailing-off kind of way.

That's kind of besides the point, but every time I scroll past an email from PediPaws in my spam folder, I whisper "PediPaws" out loud and shake my head back and forth in disgust. I have never opened one of their e-mails but have deduced that it has something to do with the maintenance of your pet's nails/paws.

The reason this disgusts me is because I am ethically opposed to pedicures for human beings (They, to me, are the epitome of frivolous spending. Which is not to say that I don't frivolously spend...I just for some reason have singled out pedicures as the worst thing to waste money on), therefore the thought of giving a damn DOG a pedicure is the most nauseating notion ever. I cut my nails with the scissors attached to my pocketknife. Ps, the only thing that makes a pedicure worse than it already is would be by referring to it as a "pedi." I hate that word more than I hate when old people pronounce "mature" with a hard t sound.

So last week I went to Target for the first time in about 3 months, and it was quite the experience. I love to see the new and improved versions of everything. I started laughing out loud when I came across a box of tampons that now apparently come with baby wipes, but have been marketed as "feminine" wipes. That is just weird.

Everyone knows the ends of the aisles at Target are reserved for the crap. The hair dye that has been gathering dust for about seven years, last years Christmas cards that say '2007', and hodgepodges of ugly vases, stained lampshades, and useless electric cheese slicers (or whatever). I like to scan these ends for the diamond in the rough, but instead what I found last week was a medium-sized display filled with boxes of PEDIPAWS.

I yanked one of the shelf and in an outside voice kind of yelled, "PediPaws!" The mystery has been solved. It's this electric nail file that is circular and spins fast. It honestly looks like something Sweeney Todd would use. I now see why they're desperate to have these sold off. The creator of this obviously has no pets. Silas won't let me get near him with normal nail clippers, much less some electric gadget that probably causes sparks upon contact.

change

2008-10-26T17:16:00.002-05:00

i was behind a diesel on 440 today, and it smelled like two summers ago. two summers ago, i thought it seemed like a good idea (or an interesting one anyway) to defer grad school and instead move to the middle of nowhere where my then-boyfriend lived with no job prospects or friends.

elizabeth asked me what it was like one time. this is what i said: well, i lived in a modular home and worked as a groundskeeper and my boyfriend hated me and i got bit by fire ants so many times that i started to swell up every time it happened.

it's strange to think now that at one point i really thought i would live there for a long time. i would be driving home and roll up all my windows when i drove past the chicken rendering plant and say to my sweat and filth-covered self, "Well, this is it. I can do this." And I think I probably could have. Pittsboro is far from perfect (where isn't?), but it really has a fantastic community with wonderful visions and commitments, but i chose to no longer be a part of that. I think the only thing my boyfriend liked about me was that I could play his favorite Bob Dylan song on the guitar. That carried our relationship for about 2 months. Then we just didn't break up for another two months even though I am genuinely convinced that he hated me. But when I found myself with no boyfriend, still no friends, and one job prospect (packaging coffee on an assembly line in Raleigh), I decided that maybe grad school didn't sound so bad after all.

So here I am in Nashville in grad school saying to myself, "This is it. I can do this."

I really love that Patty Griffin line that says, "I don't know nothin except change will come. Year after year what we do is undone."

The Office

2008-10-11T08:00:00.003-05:00

Until yesterday, we had been stealing our neighbor's wireless internet. Margaret's computer easily picked up the signal from her bedroom, the kitchen table, and pretty much all other comfortable locations from within our home. My computer, on the other hand, picked up their internet in only one place: the backyard, as close to the neighbor's fence as possible. I wheeled our recycling bin up to the fence, grabbed a stool, and designated this area as "the office."

I therefore rarely used the internet at home because a) it was typically very cold in the office at 4:30 am, the only time I really had available for checking email, and b) I thought it might seem weird to our neighbors if they were to come outside and see me propped up on the recycling bin very obviously stealing their internet.

Though the computer was stationary in its little corner of our backyard, the rest of the office was a very spacious area. I used the patio table for lesson planning (you'll notice I'm not very far on the one that I'm working on in the picture. typical.) and tea drinking, and we have some office pets. That is my giant puppy, Silas, and his new-ish sister/girlfriend, Penny. You'll also notice a floor mat in between them. That is Silas's current favorite toy. No champagne taste for him. Give him floor mats, socks, and any form of cardboard, and he is set for hours.

The comcast man came to give us the internet yesterday! (He was kind of mean at first because he had just lost his cell phone in the hood, and I didn't understand any of the questions he was asking me about our house, but then we became friends once he saw the Obama book on our coffee table.) So my quirky little computer area of the office will no longer be in use. This makes me a little sad because I had grown rather fond of my recycling bin desk and how little I was using the internet. But, it's probably for the best. I will hopefully start writing blogs again and actually do some of my Belmont homework that requires the internet. Plus, I think it's supposed to rain in the office today anyway.

the fairy ring

2008-09-14T17:04:00.004-05:00

It is no secret that I often have plain old bad luck. But, I like to laugh about it and write entertaining blogs so all my friends can laugh, too. This is a Stanley Kunitz quote I found in a literary journal my mom gave to me that I have been completely obsessed with over the last month: "To say that one is aware of the comedy of life is not to deprive it of its dignity. The comic vision requires a certain distancing from the object. It enables us not to fall into the grotesqurie of self-pity or to become sentimental about our losses."

The other night, Margaret and I were enjoying a cup of peppermint tea when she showed me the forest of four-leaf clovers she found in our yard. She seriously had about 5 floating around in a little cup of water. "Aww yay! You are going to have the best luck ever now."

"No," she reassured me. "These are for both of us. They were in the front yard of our house."

"I mean, I guess. But you found them. They're yours."

So the next morning I am driving to school. Every morning, I pass the same abandoned house. The windows are boarded up, the yard is more like meadow, and it's kind of creepy. But this particular morning I noticed a fairy ring in the front yard (a ring of mushrooms growing in a perfect circle. It was probably four feet in diameter). My knowledge of fairy rings comes from my favorite childhood book, Summer of the Monkeys, in which the main character finds a fairy ring and stands inside it to make a wish, because they're lucky. "Oh my God!" I scream in my car. "I got my good omen!" And all I can think of at school is how I'm going to come home and take pictures of Margaret's good omen as well as mine and write this really sweet blog about how, despite a not-so-great week, things are looking up.

Margaret comes home, and I tell her about my fairy ring, and we walk down there together to take pictures. Let me just say that in the month and a half of living in this neighborhood, I have never once seen signs of life at this abandoned house. Of course though, on this day, someone has shown up. Someone has shown up and mowed down my fairy ring. "It's...it's...gone," I say sadly. Margaret and I stand in the middle of the street in a half-hug looking like orphans.

"Well, you saw it this morning. It can still be yours."

"Shit."

We go home, and I'm trying to tell myself that this is not symbolic, that my fairy ring still 'counts.' I look up fairy rings on wikipedia. As it turns out, in practically every medieval culture, fairy rings actually represent an area to be avoided...because...those circles are where SATAN comes to dance.

"Shit," I say again.

misunderstandings

2008-09-02T21:31:00.002-05:00

I am currently fixated on the idea of misunderstandings. It's the perfect way to jump start a plot. It makes me think of Bottlerocket when Dignan goes, "That Rocky was kinda weird...He said he loved you."
So I've been writing down homonyms, like "ingest" and "in jest." Or "meatier" and "meteor."

But this is my favorite recent misunderstanding. So, my mom was in town a couple weekends ago. We're out shopping and she picks up this little packet at the counter of Posh that are these little flower-showed sticky things called "Tip Tops." This is really weird, I think to myself, but I don't even want to know. She and the clerk even have a discussion about what I presume are those nipple band-aid things: "I just love these," my mom says.
"Everyone always says that those are the best!" the clerk replies.
"Oh they are, and you can't find them anywhere!" my mom says back.
I am standing there silent. I know nothing about flower-shaped nipple stickers. We leave, and I am able to push this incident out of my mind as we drive to Franklin. I stop to get gas, and as I'm waiting for the tank to fill up, my mom starts rifling through the Posh bag. Of course she pulls out her little goodies.
"Ok. Mom. I can't take it anymore. Will you please put your...nipple guards away til you get home?"
"What?!"
"Your little 'tip tops' or whatever. They are grossing me out!"
"Sara, these are called 'tip TOES.' They go on the inside of your shoe to keep the balls of your feet comfortable!"
"Oh....Well, THANK GOD."

why i will never cheat on jj's again

2008-08-31T16:58:00.005-05:00

So I have gone to JJ's for coffee since I moved to Nashville. However, when I moved last month, I decided that I need a new coffee shop. Or at least an alternative option. I like the idea of community and being a patron of one's neighborhood coffee shop, so I had my sights set on the Frothy Monkey on 12th. It took me three weeks to build the courage to go. There was a lot to consider in those three weeks...where do I park? will they serve me the coffee from behind the counter, or will it be somewhere that I serve myself? Where are the outlets I can plug my computer into? These things stress me out A LOT, which is why I sometimes think I have autism. People with autism don't like changes in their schedules.

So I finally went last week! For an hour I uploaded photos and played on the internet and talked on the phone. Their iced coffee was great (Drew's brews), even if it cost 2.35. So I tried to go back Friday afternoon. They were closed (offense 1). I don't remember what time it was, but the sun was still out. WTF? Irritated, I drove to JJ's.

Today I went back. I asked their hours. They are supposedly open til 7 all week long (which, to me, seems really early, but whatever. I'm not counting that as an offense). Waiting to order my coffee, I noticed they had two cds playing at the same time (offense 2) which could be the most obnoxious thing in the whole world. And this did not stop the whole time I was there. I sit down at a booth and spread my stuff out. Camera, laptop, two binders... I am all set up. I lean over to plug into the outlet. It doesn't fit. My plug collapses back into the big plastic part. I try again. Same thing happens. I turn it the other direction. I try the adjacent outlet. I am suddenly feeling like a neanderthal (offense 3). Or a toddler who is trying to put the square block into the circle whole. Except I'm not an idiot. I am a modern adult with a plug, and I'm attempting to put it into an outlet. I ask the girl at the counter. "No. There's no trick. Sometimes it just...doesn't work..for people."

At this point I am cursing in my head. I am now in a bad mood. I open up the internet, except it's not working. The internet is broken (offense 4). I upload the pictures onto my computer, which is the only thing I can do with no internet. While I'm waiting for this to finish, I notice a little card sitting on my table. I pull it over to me and read it: "Minimum of TWO people at this booth. NO exceptions." (offense 5). Now I am really cursing in my head, and I look around for a table that doesn't have a little sign on it. "No," I think to myself. "F that. F Frothy F'ing Monkey. I hate everything about this place! And Frothy Monkey is a stupid name!"

For the record, I am writing this at JJ's, my one and only. I have come crawling back.

Watching Movies with My Mom

2008-08-29T17:07:00.003-05:00

As I typed the title to this, I realized that I still don't really know the rules concerning the capitalization of words in a title. I just decided.

My mom and I like to go to the movies together. I guess I like to go to the movies with a lot of people, but my mom and I have probably seen more together than anyone else in my life. So I decided to share memorable movies moments I've shared with my mother.

1. Seabiscuit. There are two things in the animal kingdom my mom loves: pigs and horses. I was working for Malco when Seabiscuit came out, so you better believe that we were there opening weekend. I feel like my mom was crying in the opening credits. Every time I looked over, she was crying. This was the conversation afterwards:

"Well..what did you think?"

"I...loved...it."

"Mom, you cried the whole time! That was like a two hour menopausal meltdown!"

For the next two weeks she called not one, but both of our dogs, "Seabiscuit."

(It's okay, Mom. I cried from beginning to end when we saw Cold Mountain.)

2. The Little Mermaid. This is the first movie I remember seeing with my mom. I think I was in kindergarten, and I was so proud that she was chaperoning our field trip. My anxiety had already developed. I remember Ursula growing really large. Then she starts looking extra mean, and I started to panic, and I leaned over and said, "Mom, is everything going to be alright?"

3. Little Women. My mom took me to see this at the Ridgeway Four whenever it came out ('94 maybe?), and I distinctly remember blushing and being so embarrassed when Christian Bale kisses Wynona Ryder. There is this really gross string of spit you can see when they stop kissing, and I still notice it to this day. However, this was nothing compared to the next movie on the list.

4. Knocked Up and Sideways can tie because both are TERRIBLE ideas to watch with your mother. I think I'll just leave it at that.

5. Napoleon Dynamite. My mother hates stupid "dude" movies so I was nervous about showing her this one. I think working in a high school allowed her to appreciate this one for some reason. I have never seen her laugh as hard as when 1) Napoleon is part of the sign language performance and 2) when he's working with the chickens and asks, "Do the chickens have large talons?"

I don't want to leave my dad out. I've been to the movies once ever with my dad. We saw The Bear in 1988 when I was four years old. If you're unfamiliar, there is virtually no dialogue as hunters track a bear and its cub through the forest for an hour and a half. Yeah, that put an end real quick to asking my dad to take me to the movies.

probably the craziest i have...

2008-08-20T15:16:00.003-05:00

I hate writing so many negative blogs in a row. This one details a different sort of first/last encounter. Mom, I hope you're sitting down.

I was driving home around 6 or 7 pm and this car started riding my tail. I got over into the right lane, and he passed. I have my cruise control set, as always, and now I am about to pass him on the right because he has slowed down. I hate passing people on the right, but cruise control dictates that sort of thing. I eventually got in front of him in the left lane, and he got over into the right. He then pulls up right beside me and I notice that his whole body is turned towards me and he is trying to communicate with me. At first I thought he was yelling at me for passing him so many times, but I soon realized he was holding his hand as though he was holding a cup and tilting his head back in a gesture that was saying, "Get a drink with me?" I am immediately laughing because this is completely ludicrous. Who gets asked out on the interstate? So I am saying "NO. NO!" driving 75 mph next to this guy.

"Why not?" he asks, in response. (I am lip-reading, ps).

"I DO NOT KNOW YOU," I mouth back, still laughing. He really didn't look creepy...

"Please?"

"Where?"

He points at the next exit, which ok, that's creepy.

"NO!"

I think for a second. I called him.

He has an accent I can't immediately place. "Why won't you get a drink with me?"

"Because you could be a homicidal psychopath! I can't get a drink with you at a truck stop!"

"Come on. How often does this happen?"

"Believe it or not, you're the first person to ask me out on the interstate."

"Okay then!"

"No. Where are you from?"

"Israel."

"Does this happen a lot in Israel?"

"Well, no."

"Okay... Where are you going?"

"Memphis."

"Okay...Listen. Follow me off the interstate, and we can go to Starbucks."

"I love what you're wearing!" he said. I looked down. I was wearing a green thermal shirt and overalls, typical camp wear.

"Um, really?"

"It's what I wore as a boy in Israel!"

"Oh. Perfect."

He bought me a drink, and I honestly don't remember very much about our conversation. I asked him how Ariel Sharon was doing...it was only a few months after his stroke.

"You know Ariel Sharon?!"

"Well, I listen to the news..."

"You are not like any other American girl." I was kind of proud at that moment. I dress like an Israeli boy and am familiar with important Israeli figures...

I told him I had to go after about 20 minutes. He said he wanted to hang out later, but that was the end of my interstate adventure, and I declined.

Erin's favorite story.

2008-08-13T15:48:00.003-05:00

My new house doesn't have the internet, which makes it hard to post blogs. My class is about to start, so I don't have time to compose a new blog, so I've decided to share a phone conversation I had last year with my now ex-boyfriend that I had previously typed up: (I'm the second speaker)

“So, what’d you get at the grocery store today?”

“Nothing, really. Milk, cereal, some string cheese.”

"What?!"

“String cheese..?”

“Oh my God. My cell must have broken up. For a second, I thought you said easy cheese, and I was about to flip out.”

“Oh, ha ha, no. Of course not. String cheese. It’s organic,” I said, confidently. At this point, I hurriedly walked to the pantry to scan the shelves for that half-eaten can of easy cheese. It was hiding under a film of cocoa powder I had spilled everywhere, at least two weeks earlier. I grabbed it, opened the trash can, and buried it deep, hididng all evidence of my disgusting eating habits. Without skipping a beat, I continued the small talk, “How was work?"

Now I know that's deceitful, but lying about easy cheese is small potatoes in my opinion.

i got a real letter!

2008-07-29T19:53:00.004-05:00

Typewriters are so... romantic. I think every girl dreams of receiving a letter typed on an old typewriter (well..maybe that's just me). So you can imagine my delight upon finding a typewritten letter (even the envelope!) in my mailbox today. Granted, it was addressed to "Resident" which is a little disappointing, but whatever.

It was from my next door neighbor. He told me the city would charge me $50 next time Silas poops near his house. Better luck next time, I guess.

Honestly, I kind of love everything about this experience. I love that my neighbor would call the police before just asking me to take my dog somewhere else. And that he would write me a letter before verbally explaining the situation to me. And that he would type the thing up and even pay for the postage.

Firsts

2008-07-27T07:56:00.005-05:00

So here are some of my favorite pictures from my very first photo shoot! I think they turned out really well, but I am just a tad biased... Erin is one of my very best friends and is the best listener I know. If anyone needs someone to be completely understanding and nonjudgmental in your life, I can get you her phone number. I cried at Erin and Corey's wedding (actually, at the reception. Is that weird?), and I cried when I saw the first pictures of baby Grayben. They really do feel like my own family, and I love seeing everything fall into place in their lives.

Here is my thing with babies: I like them. I think they are cute, and I want to hold them. But I never hold them, because I fear either a) the worst. I will forget to support their wobbly head and they will die. Or b) the lesser fear. I know that they will be all smiley and cute, and I will say, "Sure I'd love to hold him!" at which point he will start crying hysterically, and everyone will think, "Gee, what has she done to that baby?"

Grayben and Addie (Erin and Corey's golden retriever) were both in the car, and Corey asked me if I wanted to get Grayben out. I told him I'd rather get the dog, but he insisted Grayben would be fine. I liberated him from the car seat, and he didn't cry! I also held him, and still no tears. I love Grayben. He is a merciful baby. Granted, he kind of writhed around and had a very concerned look on his face, but the bottom line is that he didn't cry.

Professional Goals

2008-07-26T10:43:00.002-05:00

Belmont requires all its education students to have a working professional portfolio of lesson plans and research papers. The first part of the portfolio is basic info, an autobiography, and personal professional goals. Each section is graded. On a 4-point scale, I received a 2 on my professional goals because they were all very short-term, such as, "I want to be teaching in Fall of 2009."(I thought that sounded pretty good..) Here's the thing: My long-term goals don't necessarily have to do with teaching. Do you think that's a problem? For instance, in ten years, I'd like to be published. I wouldn't mind owning a bakery. And within the next 20 years, my goal is to own a bed and breakfast on a farm.

On Thursday, I had the distinct pleasure of a) going to Leiper's Fork, where I b) spent time with my family, c) met Erin and Corey's new baby, Grayben, and d) conducted my very first photo shoot! Thursday, from beginning to end, was seriously the best day ever. While we were there, I noticed that the Country Boy Diner is for sale. This is sad. It's a great diner. Last time I went, I had lemon icebox pie and french fries for less than $5. And the cashier yelled at Goodloe and Matt Parks for allowing me to pay for the three of us.

So my thought is that maybe I could buy the diner. It's got a kitchen already, so I could have a small bakery. Then, instead of keeping it as a diner, I would convert it to be a little healthy market, like The Turnip Truck in East Nashville. Currently, in Leiper's Fork all they have is a bi-rite that has nothing. The community has to get to Franklin for groceries, which is completely impractical. If someone would front the money, I would seriously do it. And this is the problem with my professional goals. Of course I want to teach. But I want to have a market, and a bed and breakfast, and take pictures, and write books. Oh, and start a charter school with my other teacher friends.