Reason Breeds Insanity

Today, I spent the day meditating, going to our local co-op, White Feather Farms, having coffee with a good friend, and wishing that I could somehow make my grandma better or petition God to let her die. Tomorrow is her 85 birthday and she will spend it lying somewhere in the already but not yet. She doesn’t remember any of us. She just lays there moaning. I had to pour grape juice into her mouth and coax her into swallowing it, wipe her mouth, and then coat her lips with waxy chapstick so she wouldn’t pick her lips right off her face. She can’t suck from a straw. She can’t understand why we want her to eat. She asked me, yesterday, if my grandpa, who has been dead for 30 years, told me when she gets to go home. I hate it that other people have to make decisions for her, and it might sound mean that I want her to just go ahead and die, but I want her to be able to be with my grandpa. I don’t want for people to have to pour things in to her mouth and make her swallow. I want her to be feisty and bowling and baking and cooking her really bad over-cooked green beans or her amazing Christmas cookies. I want her to bitch and fuss over the way my mom and I make baklava. I want her to keep buying jogging suits even though she has a closet full of them already: Goolagong. I am not heartless, I just can’t stand to watch this crabby old lady laying there like a two-year old grunting out her answers from between her gums because she doesn’t remember what her teeth are for.

EDIT:
Stuff from my other, old, defunct blog. I love chocolate chip cookies. I grew up watching cookie monster, and I find absolutely nothing wrong with his insistence that cookies are amazing! I could eat pizza, spaghetti, chocolate chip cookies, or ice cream for every meal. I would and do argue that these four foods are possibly modern-day manna given to us by God for our sustenance. Perhaps, I don’t wake up to find chocolate chip cookies covering the ground in the morning, but I do try to pretend sometimes that I have my own spaghetti tree. Have you ever read the kids book More Spaghetti I Say? While it does err on the side of the carnivorous, I have to say it is how I feel about spaghetti. Really, it’s the way I feel about most food.

Since becoming a vegan a mere 19 days ago, I have had this intense craving for chocolate chip cookies precisely everyday, but more intensely this week since, as I have indicated, I have been feeling a little frumpy and PMSish. PMS always incites the chocolate fervor that lies dormant in me the rest of the time. I may have said before that I like caramel or vanilla flavor ten times more than chocolate. But there is something about putting it in a cookie that really turns me on a bit. I was inspired by some mix that my brother had in the car. It was bananas, chocolate chips, nut, etc, so I decided to go out on a limb and make my cookies with bananas, too. They are fabulous! And, since I used carob chips, they are absolutely animal free!

I also get the bonus of Becky’s homemade spaghetti sauce, which is the best sauce I have ever had and different every time. I have to say that I am excited about dinner tonight. And since More Spaghetti I Say is about monkeys and monkeys eat bananas (or in the case of the book, spaghetti), I should have myself a little after dinner reading time too.

Again, my grandma fell and broke her hip, but it was the other hip this time, and the fracture wasn’t as bad. She had surgery yesterday and it went well. I was even able to make it to my class on time.

Right now I am trying to figure out how to write a quiz for my students that isn’t too hard, but that they can’t pass unless they read book. I hate grading quizzes, but I know some of my students weren’t reading and some of them hadn’t even bought the book. I figure this is the best way to make sure they have the materials they need for the rest of the course.

On Saturday at 11, I am going to start learning how to meditate. For the cost of 3-6 fresh flowers, $35, and four hours of my time, I am going to learn a technique involving East Indian music. I am hoping that meditation will work for me, because I think sometimes that meditation can allow us to enter into a new prayer life that we previously couldn’t access. At the very least, it produces clarity of thought. Meditation sort of reminds me of the early Jesus prayer that is said repetitively along the knots of a prayer rope: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The point is that you say it until it becomes a part of your thought life, so that you are thinking it almost as surely as if you are breathing. My point in all of this, is that I am hoping that I can meditate in order to calm my thoughts and my biorhythms to the point where I can actually concentrate on one thing for longer than 30 seconds.

At any rate, I need to make that quiz, so I can go see my grandma before class.

Much like Becky, when her mom tells her to email, she does, when my mom sends me email asking if I am still alive, I figure I should post something to make sure everyone knows that I am. A bit of healthy mother guilting never hurt anyone. It could actually be the impetus for much of what gets done in the world.

Yesterday we got all of our technical issues worked out with blackboard and the blog, and wonder of wonders, I look at the class blogs today and they have been locked because Blogger thinks they are SPAM blogs. I am guessing they are concerned because we all posted at the same time, so I hope they turn it back on by Friday, so my students can make their posts.

On another subject, I got to work with small children at church on Sunday. They made a card for an older couple that are moving to Tennessee. Each kid had to put one hand in a huge ink pad and then stamp it onto the card. The red ink was a mess. It was like it just kept growing. One of the kids thought that was hysterical, and he ended up using six or seven wipes to get it off of his hand. The more he wiped it off, the more it smeared around and eventually got on his arm, and I think some got on his face as well. It was fun, and incredibly funny. I love the little kids!

So I am off now to work at the mission and when I get home, I have to read my stuff for Renaissance class tonight. I feel like I am barely a step ahead this semester, but I think that will be okay.

It turns out that my students didn’t understand how to read the schedule I had posted online. They were confused about whether I was going to assign that reading that day or if it was due that day. I’ll give them that. Starting a semester is confusing. Me getting used to them, them getting used to me. Me getting used to teaching again, them getting used to learning again. It is a dance and one that will hopefully go more smoothly from here on out. I just have to keep remind myself that I am leading, so I set the tone. They are watching me, and I need to give grace. I also need to give instruction. I think it will be just fine.

So the first thing I assigned my students to read was called Shitty First Drafts. Sounds fun, edgy, and is very easy to read. About half of them bothered. Today they had a huge reading assignment, and by huge I mean twenty pages, so we;ll see if they read it. I may do my first pop quiz! Anyway, I hope that they look at the syllabus and realize that I am packing a bunch in at the beginning so that the end will be easier. They finish their research paper and for the last two weeks they will work on a comic, manifesto, or political poster. How much easier can it be? I guess what I am saying is that I tried to design a course that I would have wanted to take as an undergraduate. Maybe I am strange. We’ll see how their photo essays turn out. I have faith that they will turn out well. I can tell these kids are really talented. Maybe reading just isn’t their thing? I did make a powerpoint to go through everything, so maybe the pop quiz will wait until later.

Think happy thoughts for my mom.