Category Archives: School

Cookies! Chicago. And writing.

Posted on 4 February 2009 | 3 comments

Oh, Beautiful Blog, how I’ve neglected thee! I traded you in for empty days and nights of Facebook. I whored myself out to fine printed texts, and I left you lonely, abandoned so I could experience companionship with real, tangible people. Now I am filling you with my thoughts while watching Maury Povich tell women which man of many is their baby daddy. I am still slumming, pouring my affections elsewhere and hoping you’ll turn your head.

And, I am drinking a Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale and thinking of a peanut butter and jelly kind of life.

Enough soft-core internet porn.

I am in the middle of baking cookies for our CElla’s Round Trip Bake Sale tomorrow. I just made some really tasty oatmeal, raisin, white chocolate chip cookies. I packed them in little bags of three. Would you buy three little cookies for a dollar? I would if they tasted wicked-delicious like these do. I would spend a dollar for my cookies, but maybe not yours.

We (the Fat Cats and two correctly spelled Rachels) are raising money to go to Chicago. I didn’t realize until yesterday that we leave next week. On Wednesday. We leave in less than a week and we still don’t have our chapbook finished, which does make me a little nervous. Now, I need to learn how to use a bookmaking program in the next two days, so I can produce our book over the weekend. This may be a complete disaster.

I think God is teaching me patience. If not, it’s a cruel trick.

I haven’t been writing or reading like I should be. I have been in somewhat of a funk for a variety of reasons and I am finding it difficult to make myself do the things I need to do. Sometimes I feel like a rapid cycling bi-polar because I can be elated one day and in the gutter depressed the next. I should harness that for my writing.

Good writers have Crazy Brain. I haven’t met one who doesn’t. Next weekend, I will be around a whole bunch of Crazy Brain.

And then, I get to have lunch or something with my friend Corey. I hope I get to have lunch with him ’cause it would be really sweet.

I will just be happy to be in Chicago: I will touch the buildings and run my fingers lovingly along their skin as I walk past them. I will breathe the thick, close air of too many people. I will kiss the lake, love each street my feet touch, relish the stink of the city bus, and retain the press of the bag lady’s hand as she takes the coins from my palm. I will let my mind be transported to a different life, one I could have had but let go of in order to have the life I have.

We can’t go back in time. There is no rewind. We can only go forward. Fast forward.

I need to enjoy things as they come and present themselves to me. I need to work on loving the moment, not thinking about the future or the past. Why can’t I do this anymore? I used to be so good about living in every moment, but they just keep comng faster and faster. Time is relative.

3 Comments

Posted in Beer, PBJ, Reading, School, Writing

Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me

Posted on 29 January 2009 | 2 comments

What do “The Second Choice” by Theodor Dreiser, “Hands” by Sherwood Anderson, and “The Wagner Matinee” by Willa Cather all have in common? The fact is that I have to teach them all for my ENG 605 Literature Pedagogy class. Also, they are all written during the early part of the 20th century. They are dirty and gritty and explore all of those ideas that make us cringe: industry, relationships, sexuality, public and private domains, music, and modernization in all of its forms.

I think I could spend the entire class period talking about Dreiser. Well, now that I think a little more about it, I could spend a whole class period talking about each story. Each story is thick and voluminous, not easily explored in one pass. Short stories remind me of the Grand Canyon: on first glance you think you’ve seen it all (yeah, it’s a big hole), but then you realize that there are layers of color, trenches and rises, shrubbery, animals, and a river way down there at the bottom that you can barely see from the rim.

Teaching is about gleaning. It’s about looking around for the scraps that no one will notice and that no one cares about until you point them out, or until your students point them out to you. I think teaching resembles standing next to a dumpster of knowledge, poking around in it with a stick. You find something new and suddenly everyone wants it. In teaching that is good.

If everyone is interested enough to talk, then you know you’ve hit some sort of truth or importance in text. Your resonance strikes with someone else’s resonance and before you know it you’ve blown a speaker!

2 Comments

Posted in Gleaning, Literature, Modernism, Pedagogy, Reading, School, Teaching, Writing

First Day and No Class

Posted on 12 January 2009 | 3 comments

When I was undergrad I always tried to get my schedule to work out so that I would only have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I remember why I loved it. Today is the first day of the new semester and I get to stay in my pajamas at home. I don’t have class until tomorrow, so I am taking advantage of my last day of vacation by walking the dogs, running, reading, writing, and basically sitting around.

This semester is even better because I only have one actual classroom class on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 330-445. The rest of my classes are independent studies or just sitting in on other classes. The bulk of my work this semester is in the form of studying for comps. I need to have my book list finished as soon as possible so I can spend the rest of the semester and the summer studying.

And, I am spending the day today waiting. Tomorrow I am going to see one of my best friends from seminary. He has lived in Texas since we graduated, pastoring a Church of God. I am pretty excited about seeing him because we were such good friends and I have missed him more than I thought I had.

The last time I saw Feirtag was at graduation and then it was all awkward and we just wanted to get the hell out of there. I won’t ever forget how we helped each other through so much during those three years. He wasn’t the only one. But if I had to pick three people who helped me the most during those times he would be one of the three.

You know how sometimes you see someone every day and you take them for granted. Then when you don’t see them, you really don’t miss them because you took them for granted. This is how I feel about most of my friends from seminary. It is not how I feel about the actual experience of seminary. For the most part, that experience was strange, alienating, and spiritually trying. But I think if I called any one of them up today, we could take up like old times.

I guess I will see tomorrow. Today I will wait.

On another note, yesterday’s sermon was good. I mean really good. I told Bec on the way home that I could stand to trade Sundays—Matt then David—which is a huge compliment to both men.

I think I am a pretty hard parishioner to please when it comes to the sermon. I don’t deal well with gimmicky three point sermons, and I don’t want to be entertained. I want to hear the word, and to hear it wrestled with and rolled around until its meaning is fully extracted.

Preachers get extra points if they include a point that I hadn’t already considered when I read the text. Not that I think I am so smart, but if I thought of every point made in the sermon in the five minutes I had before church to consider the text, then someone (read this to be the preacher) is getting paid for doing what I could do in five minutes.

Yes, I am a little hard on ministers. After all, they are the voice of the Church and that voice should be new every morning like God’s compassion. The voice of the Church shouldn’t bring the same stale message—the voice should cry out in the wilderness bringing a new revolutionary message. As Matt said, it is then our job to go out and meet the revolution and to be transformed by its mystery and grace.

On yet another note, last Sunday Dave spoke about our goal for our church for the year: peace and grace. I think those two words are worthy of body art. Our entire mission as Christians should always be peace and grace, should it not?

This is for you David: canada_flag_peace_symbol_l

3 Comments

Posted in Grace, Relationships, Religion, School

Adventageous: Waiting for Whom

Posted on 21 December 2008 | 2 comments

Sometimes I hate church. I hate going there and being challenged by God or some human to think a little deeper about life. I hate leaving the pole-barn looking building after sermons like today’s with this nagging doubt that I am not doing what I have been called to do. I hate this feeling. I struggle with it often, as anyone who has read my writing more than once knows. Sometimes I just want to shovel through all my crap and baggage so that I can see in me what God sees in me.

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There is nothing with studying literature, but I wonder if there isn’t something more meaningful that I should be doing. I know my students appreciate having me in class because I always get comments about helping them to learn to like English. Frequently, they tell me that I helped them learn about themselves and to see how they fit in with the bigger picture that is the world. Occasionally, I believe them.

I often find myself wondering what type of people generally teach English because I don’t feel like I do anything special. I am excited about my students learning how to express themselves in writing. Are most English teachers lethargic?

This semester my students said they appreciated using blogging and technology in the classroom. I was surprised when many of them put their fingers— without my prodding—on my most immediate pedagogical goal. Several of them wrote in their reflective letters that they foudn it both enjoyable and helpful to write consistently. A couple of them even said they have never had a writing class where they got to write every day. They were able to see how writing every day helped them to carry over from writing project to writing project.

I was appreciative of the level of feedback and serious reflection because I needed to hear that what I am doing is valuable. I needed some positive feedback. I am not usually a person who needs so much positive feedback, but a long, hard semester combined with my continual urge to quit and go farm combined with the intermittent feeling that I am going into the wrong profession, vocation, career made me crave some direction. The positive feedback helps remind me why I do what I do, but sometimes I still have doubts.

I guess that doubt has something to do with the actual words profession and vocation. I don’t perceive what I do to be a calling or something where I profess things I really believe in. I should. I don’t. Yet. Maybe I will one day. Until then I will just hang on to knowing that my students are impacted by me and my passion for literature, writing, and most importantly for them.

Of course, my passion for them comes from God’s passion for me. I can’t understand how deep or how wide that passion is, but I can profess how passion has changed me. I remember who I was, and I know who I am now. So, I love times like advent in which God lets us wait for [Their] miracles. I am moved from looking from the wood of the manger to the wood of the cross. I am overtaken by the fact that God sent his son to the earth just so he could die thirty-three years later to give us grace.

What does that mean for me? It means I wait. I wait for my savior to be born. I wait to sing the news of his birth. I wait to mourn his death. I wait to see how he will work in my life and through my life for another year. I wait with a sense of expectation, joyful expectation to experience moment that I can only make it through by God’s grace.

2 Comments

Posted in Grace, Literature, Pedagogy, Personal, Religion, School, Teaching

Clue, Lounging, and Grades

Posted on 20 December 2008 | 1 comment

I am watching the movie Clue for about the gajillionth time. Yes, gajillionth is a word because I say it is. You could try looking in the OED, but they are a little behind on words like gajillion and fucktard and sextastic. Incidentally, if you click on the spell-checker suggestions for those three words, you find gazillion, fuckhead, and sarcastic as replacements for them. However, when you run spell check again, the words are again highlighted, but no alternatives are suggested. Weird. Conspiratorial.

I got the urge to watch this movie again when I looked at a friend’s Facebook page. She posted a game in which she had to post quotes from movies, and we, her friends, had to guess where the quotes came from. One was from Clue. Specifically, it was from the ending where Miss Scarlet argues with Wadsworth over the number of bullets in the gun.

I have three or four movies that I watch whenever I can’t sleep because I have seen them so many times, I usually fall asleep after the first fifteen minutes or so. The movies in no particular order are Heathers, Clue, 9 to 5, and Adam’s Family. These are also four of my favorite movies, so don’t make any hateful comments about how they put me to sleep because they are poorly made or low quality films. I will just have to ignore you if you do.

Today was the first day after the end of the worst semester of my life. As I have said before I should have listened to Debbie when she told me to only take three classes. I think I could have done it when I was younger, but I just didn’t have the energy to get things done the way I wanted to get them done.

Which brings me to my grades. I already know I have one B+ and that will likely be two. I think I got As in my creative writing classes, but Bs in both of my literature classes. Is there something wrong with this picture?

If I remember correctly, I am a literature major! I just couldn’t focus the way I needed to in order to write two twenty-page seminar papers, one ten-page academic paper, and one ten-to-twelve-page memoir essay. It happens, and I know that the paper I gave Debbie was horrible. I agree with her—there were some salvageable ideas in the paper—but I just couldn’t work on it any longer. It’s over now.

It’s over and I get to take some time for myself. I am reading two books right now: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Echoing Silence. I spent the entire day re-recreating my on-line existence in this blog, going grocery shopping, and hanging out with David and Tim while they played Mario Kart at high volume.

Revamping the blog took a few hours because I had to go back through my old blogs and figure out how to categorize them. I think the only thing I don’t like about Word Press is that I can’t not put a category for my posts because it says “Uncategorized” under it, which is incredibly tacky. I went through the first seven or so and categorized them because they show on my home page, but the rest I left.

Going grocery shopping was an exercise in insanity. Today, the Saturday before Christmas, is not when you want to be at Walmart. I can safely say that no day is a good day to be at Walmart, but the Saturday before Christmas if the worst I have seen in a while. We parked by the garage in the back and went in through that door. It was the closest parking space and the inside proved that the shoppers were carpooling. Each aisle was jammed full of angry little elves. Chris Kringle’s joy was nowhere to be found.

Hanging out with Tim and David is always fun, and watching them play video games is an interesting pastime. Today, though, history was altered. The time space continuum was skewed: David beat Tim at Mario Kart. Once. The problem with the video gaming—really, it isn’t simply the video gaming, it’s anything on television—is that David thinks every game, movie, TV show, or CD needs to be listened to at maximum volume. He thinks it enhances the listening experience, never paying attention to the plaster cracking off the walls or the paint peeling in the dining room. What do I care? I am simply trying to enjoy my break.

I am hoping to get in some good time with my pajamas and good books. Maybe I will lounge so much someone will notice my excellent form and offer to pay me to lounge. I could lounge like it’s my job. Is ice cream involved in my salary package? Because I would need to know before accepting the job and signing the contract.

Also, this is perfect: