part of the writing-in-different-modes assignment involved narrating a (very short) story (to distinguish narration from other modes). my 2pm class was assigned to write about a chair instead, because in that room we didn't have a spare table to be the object of the lesson. here are 2 sample stories to brighten your afternoons. i wonder if the fact that it's the end of the semester and they are almost free to go back to roaming the snowy fields like wild creatures contributes to the common element of feral and/or primitive culture fantasy going on here...

1) from L (not the L of the comma-hat incident): For the first half of its life, this chair was raised by wolves. Then, seeking an education, it came to SUNYIT to learn about the ways of our people.

2) from S: One time, I spun around in this chair so fast that I created a rift in time and ended up in the Stone Age. The indigenous people there saw my strange red chair and mistook me for a god. They brought me back to their cave and gave me berries. They were blue. Then I decided to try dividing by zero and I ended up back here.

there's a student in my morning class with a rock star name. i can't tell you what it is, because that would be a breach of his privacy, so i'll just initial him like i do the others, and call him D. i think D knows, and feels obligated to live up to, his rock star name, however. he's been a pain in my ass all semester--a nice, fun-loving, kindhearted kid who is also in large parts calvin-meets-dennis-the-menace, who never shuts up, who always wants to talk back to whatever i've said, talk if i'm not talking, and talk about his rationales for talking when i ask him to stop talking. i know D has some issues with the medications he's on and trying to get the balance right. i also know D is struggling with transitioning to college, and i'm trying to get my own balance right of keeping him from wholly dominating the classroom so that everyone else's learning is unfairly impinged upon while giving him enough rope to learn something from, letting him try things and screw them up, letting him talk too much and miss instructions, letting him learn from experience rather than just shutting him down harshly so that he learns to fear his asshole English teacher rather than learning to manage himself appropriately in classrooms. and i think it's working, slowly; i've only had a few painful outbursts of him being angry because he isn't getting his way, and there have been more polite interactions. the other students have, for the most part, gotten good at ignoring him, or managing him like i do: playing along for a line or two and then dropping it, so that he's getting some of the attention he seems to so desperately need and also getting models of how to get and stay on task.

in their portfolios, though, is always where the truth comes out. E's narration sentences for a short activity (they had to write in 6 different modes about a table) say "One time during class D was sitting at the table doing work while Tyra was gone and got into a pen cap throwing fight with other people. Not sure who. They both got a few good hits on each other, though." one of B's grammar sentences says "Tyra is going to murder D, and I hope I'm not there when it happens." one of his other sentences, to rather than about me, says "You have almost totally lost control of this class. I still smile every day, though."

B is the same kid who wrote me a sentence in his last portfolio that said "Right now, the sub is playing video games instead of teaching us anything." (the sub--I'm talking about you, Drew--caught a ribbing for that one.)

and E's portfolio contains this note (heart and all, from one young, straight, guitar-and-superhero-loving man to another) at the bottom of a paper his peers were supposed to be workshopping:

Dear E, your handwriting is terrible. I'm going to trust that you did everything correctly, because I can't tell. -- ♥ M

owing to the simple, abbreviated weirdness of the schedule at the nursing college, today is already the last day of the semester for my section of ENG 101 here in town up at the hospital complex, and owing to the vagaries of inter-school politics, the course is going to be farmed out to some other institution than mine next year, so it'll be my last day of teaching there ever. it's been a bit of a blur for me, really; i think i've seen the students with perfect attendance only 12 times total, and most of them didn't have perfect attendance!

i've learned a few things, although like with any writing class, no matter which side of the teacher-desk you're on (a highly out-dated metaphor, since a) college classrooms don't have those anyway, and b) pedagogy in the modern era disapproves; when i taught 6th grade, my teacher-desk was in the back of the room facing the window and was only used during classes as a shelf with a handy drawer for storing confiscated tamagachi), the "learning" part takes longer than the length of the semester, so it's all planting trees for other folks to see.

i've learned about scaling it back, and what does and doesn't work in trying to be a tech-savvy communicator with students who aren't. i've learned about the disconnect between saying something repeatedly and having people nod at you with glazed eyes and the work they turn in which shows you that they didn't actually hear what you said, at all, glazing or not. i've learned that i need more worksheets, because the ones with less school- (or good school) experience don't know that they don't know what you're talking about until they go to apply it and you look over their shoulder and say "wait, no." i've learned that kindness and patience and generosity are sometimes still not enough to fix it, whatever it is (i lost 2 from this batch that only started out at 11; one's personal issues caught up with her, kidnapped her, and carried her away, and one turned in an entirely bogus stolen internet paper, with some very clever faux-citations, but then dropped out before my report about it made it to the dean's desk).

and next week, when their final papers come in (electronically saturday night), i'm going to learn about fudging grades, and find out where my lines are. because the nursing college also has this policy that says a C is the bottom limit and anything below that (even a C-) is a failing grade, and some of these dears are not going to make that line of their own accord. not because they haven't done the work--they've busted their butts--but because it's a lot, and it's all unfamiliar, and the once-a-week-for-so-few-weeks schedule might work for content and quizzes but is a shitty model for a studio course where learning happens through practice and repetition. they simply haven't had the chance to learn as much as they should have learned, as much as the rubrics and the grading scale expect. but they have learned, and they've tried and they've practiced and they've gotten better, and it's going to have to be enough. because in the bigger picture, we need nurses, folks. with or without mastery of the semicolon and/or flawless execution of APA citations.

i woke up this morning to snow on the cars. it's mostly water-drops silvering the bare branches now instead, but the symbolism was clear enough: the weather knows our last real "fall" occasion has come to a close and it's time to start icing everything for the christmas aesthetic. i'm thinking, even though it's a day or two early, the dishes might have to be done to george winston's december. then, on the rest of today's docket, i foresee a little quiet stolen-tv-watching accompanied with leftover-sandwiches, a nice, warm bath, & perhaps a modicum of paper-grading. this weekend i have to bake christmas cookies for my fifty students, because the week will go too fast and then they'll be gone already, and (again, and every year) i'll miss them.

most of them. :)

yestereve was a great success of food and friends and beer and port and conversation, only some of it revolving repeatedly around the kitten. we spent a remarkable amount of time discussing twilight, actually, which i found ridiculous at the time, a room full of graduate students and teachers with no tweens in our families and few tweenish proclivities of our own. Erica, alone among us, had actually seen it (or had any interest thereof)--she teaches high school freshmen, and likes to be in touch with the pulse, or so she says (that explains having gone, but it does not explain the midnight showing!). the men in the room, however, were all very into films in general and vampire lore in particular, so there developed a great many medical/logical/physics-based conversations on the pragmatics of meyer's vampires, and speculation about the sense the premise made or didn't make. "if you're a 90-year-old vampire and you could go anywhere you wanted, why in the world would you go back to high school?" "to get high school chicks?" "dude, you're immortal and immensely powerful. you don't court sixteen year old girls. you just go take them."

i also got to chat on the phone with my mom (while stirring creamed corn during the prep phase) and my dad (lying on a bed overstuffed afterwards), and exchanged texts with my almost-sis-in-law & my brother, prince of the suburban resistance movement (who says "save the turkeys; kill the pilgrims," and in answer to Donovan's "tell him high five," "the revolution begins today!") after i surrendered i got late(ish) night texts from walkinthewilds and l_stboy, so my extended chosen-family was at least ♥-ingly represented too; i sent one to ranagar that went unanswered, which makes another assertion about family & continuity i think it's probably time i actually listen to. they change. some come, and some go. and some swear for years and years and years that they're always staying, and then they go, and that part sucks. a lot. but some of them swear for years and years that they'll never stay, too, and they're still around, pinging the satellites to send wee digital hellos.

isn't going to make itself, and neither are the vegetables possessing of any likelihood of self-chopping, so i need to pull this butt from this bed and get on task. there is garlic to press and sage to crumple, taking it from dry leaves into soft, downy fluff, which is almost enough fun to motivate me even without the coffee!

i'll be sharing my impending creations, + the 3 pies made last night (pumpkin, apple, pecan... of course) with chef-man Shawn & 5 more of our local, currently-Syracusian friends--invited mom up too, but she's only just gotten home from her french sojourn, and more traveling did not appeal. i probably won't be listening to "alice's restaurant" loudly in the kitchen while stirring something, which will be a clear indicator that this is not thanksgiving with my dad, and there's no morning production involving champagne & hollendaise sauce in the works, so it's clearly not like mom's version either, and i can't see any cactuses out these windows (or video games in the living room), so it's not thanksgiving in AZ (plus, i'm not forbidden from the kitchen!)... but the turkey WAS in a bucket of water over night, which is kinda like a dorm bathtub. Katie would know.

happy turkey-day, y'all. whether you're with your birth families, your newly-minted grown-up families, or some version of love-not-blood family you've cooked up for yourselves, enjoy each other. ♥ ♥ ♥

Imagine that one of my students was named Mark Darby. None of them are, or every have been, but just pretend.

In class Thursday, among other things, my students worked on a apostrophes worksheet that featured, intermingled with other exercises, questions about when to use "its" vs. "it's." The student we're pretending was named Mark Darby observed, while he and his classmates were working with their books open to try to learn the rule once and for all, that Strongbad had once done a sketch about the issue, and sung a little song about it.

To be helpful, and because I have internet ADD just like the rest of you, I looked the sketch up after class, and (after a bit of sleuthing, since it's actually just part of a sketch about something else) sent them an email with the link, to amuse them and drive the point home. I titled the email "This is Mark Darby's fault" (using, of course, the actual student's real name). "Mark Darby" has a best friend who's usually in class with him but who stayed home sick Thursday, so "Mark" took the worksheets to him after class. This morning, I got an email from the best friend with the (adjusted) subject

"Also Mark Darby's fault,"

the text of which simply read:

Cause after I showed him the email he insisted I watch this, and now it's stuck in my head.

http://homestarrunner.com/fluffypuff2.html

Thanks.

There was no signature after that "thanks," just the period, which, if you knew the best friend as I did, would convey the tone of the email perfectly. Also, he got the "it's" in his email correct, so I got to laugh and feel successful. It's all in a day's work, folks.

so far today, i have:
ridden 10 miles on the exercise bike (with practically no resistance, but the idea was to get over inactivity by way of being active, not by causing pain)
made breakfast and washed my dang dishes (hoping to lead by example)
baked the butternut squash that has been on the counter for weeks
"adapted" the recipe i found with the ingredients i had around so that it's totally not the squash the internet thought it was going to be
corresponded with a few students about their in-process work
solidified plans for tonight and tomorrow
registered for spring "classes" so that my enrollment status will continue to add pointless length to my transcript while my dissertation languishes in folks' overstuffed inboxes
helped a friend think through some problem-solving steps
congratulated another friend on a job well done
started my christmas shopping
&
graded one paper

that last item is a bit of a problem; it was supposed to be "graded 9 papers" by 6pm, which, since "taken a shower" isn't on there yet either, is highly unlikely to transpire. still, any progress is still progress, right? so, yo, grindstone, get over here! i've got a smooth, yet-un-chafed nose here for ya!

in class today, workshopping the penultimate paper of the semester, this one source-based and so the subject of a great many conversations about how to cite which things, in which formats, including how much information, where on the page, etc., etc., etc., S asks me, across the rows so that everyone gets to listen to the exchange, the following leading question:

"I don't have to cite this, right, because I heard it on the news."

"What news?" I asked her, as a preface to asking "when" and then showing her where in her guide to find how to cite a particular news broadcast.

"I don't know. What do you mean? It was on the news. So it's common knowledge, right? They talk about it all the time on the news."

"Okay, S., but what station where you watching? When did this 'news' happen?"

"I don't know," she says, getting frustrated with my stupid question, which she clearly does not know how to compute. "Why does it matter? It's not like it was a person--I mean, it's just the news."

I raised my eyebrows at her, trying not to look particularly sarcastic or superior, because I'm paid to teach them, not to be a jerk (which, I'll have you know, is the hardest part of the job some days), and try to explain. "It's still a person speaking, saying something written by another person or group of people, sponsored by a particular network. Yes, you have to cite it. There is no such thing as "the news." There's no one "news." Some of "the news" thinks Obama is unpatriotic and should be fired, but not all of "the news" thinks that." "That's true," H editorializes, looking at me as if I'm very wise, then looking over her shoulder at S., to make sure she's following, because they're sweet in this class and look out for each other (all the more reason to try not to be a jerk) "Figure out where you heard that," I tell her, "or listen until you hear it again, and cite wherever you hear it." D. leans in to suggest she can look at online news sources too, to find one that's even easier to cite, and we're back on track.

For now.

These are the same kids, though--and in this story I feel really, really warranted using that word to describe them, despite PH's injunctions against doing so--who had a sentence structure worksheet 2 weeks ago that had the arrival of Europeans to the Americas as the common topic of the sample sentences (presented as a simplistic look at how the process of historical study has kept revealing earlier and earlier "first" arrivals). This worksheet mentioned Leif Erikson and Bjarni Herjuolfssen by their full names but Columbus and Vespucci by last name only, and one of the sentences said something about some scribe writing down the name of the "new" land in honor of the latter. In each of my three classes, one brave young person raised his or her hand and asked me what in the world that was supposed to mean, since our country is clearly not named "Vespucci." I chuckled the first time, and teased the young person about not remembering his/her third? grade history class, and fished hopefully in the others, but the rest of each class verified the question-asker's confusion:

They'd never heard of Amerigo Vespucci. Not one of them knew. Apparently--and they were collectively outraged, when they realized from my tone of astonishment that I expected--and they reasoned, given the "basic" nature of the factoid, that that nugget of information really ought to be common knowledge among the citizenry--no one had ever told them where the name "America" came from.

"Why didn't they teach us that?" they demanded, as if I should have an answer. I passed the buck; I'm not from here. Somebody else makes and carries out those decisions.

"God," one of them--I forget now who--said explosively, "it's no wonder people bitch about the state of education in this country."

He got a couple of "amen"s.

(because i let him friend me last year when he wasn't being like this): i hope when he gets busier & less bored, the crushing ex-student thing will blow over of its own accord & thus fail to become a problem.

(et tu? what can't you say today on facebook?)

i've developed a bad habit of thinking of weekends, especially those during which my roommates vacate and leave me the WHOLE HOUSE TO MYSELF, as magical catch-all time in which anything and everything can get done, kind of like those magical video-game pockets that could carry whole suits of armour and fifteen different choices of staves and swords. this weekend, for example, i've been telling myself i can finish all of the grading i've got piled up from my students' most recent assignment, plus the old presentation evaluations i have lying around that i've been putting off for weeks, plus creating a new calendar to replace the one i gave out last week before i got an announcement about a department-wide curriculum change, plus actually planning what i'm going to teach next week.

those things i might be able to accomplish, if they existed in isolation. but when put into the same block of time as a 2-year-old's birthday party tomorrow (for which i still need to buy a present), dry-cleaning i need to drop off, the many loads of laundry i need to do in order to get the new flannel sheets onto the bed and clean underwear into my drawer, the package i need to get prepped and to the post office, the birthday movie-watching with another friend that's been proposed (by me), the long overdue cleaning-of-my-room i keep promising myself, and the 2 house project of putting up window-plastic on all the windows in my and Shawn's apartments (we said we'd help each other) in honor of how our first good bout of lake effect snow is happening RIGHT NOW and my roommates are all leaving town for a conference and will not be around to assist (somehow this becomes my job, and only my job, every year...)... the likelihood of successfully meeting any of these commitments, let alone all of them, starts to slide away. rapidly. i've gotten 2 papers done this morning over tea, and now i'm off to meet with a tutoring client, to the merry sound of holly's laptop blaring the carpenters singing christmas music (which, disturbingly whitebread-retro-cheerful as that is, fits the visual of the snow skirling past the windows quite aptly...)

i just need a week to play catch up. just one. anybody got any spares?

Somebody w/more time on their hands than I have should tally up the number of times people's answers involve John Cusak w/that boombox. Of course, given the dated nature of the reference, that somebody would probably come up with a woefully low number, and then we'd get derailed from romance into disparagement of the youth...

there have been a few thousand things i've wanted to set aside time and creative energy to post about, all of them lately, all, related to the weather (skies, clouds, leaves, colors, temperatures, reflections), but when there's finally breathing space at the end of a day, in the dark of the living room (and that dark now starts descending at 4'o'clock), i find my fingers-as-the-metaphorical-extension-of-my-tongue are crowded with student email questions and planning quandaries for tomorrow's classes, with pragmatic concerns like "is the rent late" and "where will i take this borrowed dress to get it dry cleaned," and the stunning panoramas of my morning drives across the state (because the after-school ones now are tunnels of headlight and taillight and reflective paint and darkness) are hard to evoke or even remember clearly. i've been taking pictures, probably risking my death and other people's, trying to capture the way the vapors feather and storm across the ceiling (i'm stuck for another good sky word right now--it doesn't feel right to call it "celestial" by daylight, even though the stars are back there somewhere, because they're not in the visible frame, and "heavenly" just seems hokey... even when the piercing columns of godlight warrant the term, it wants to call up what my friend Jason would have called my tendency toward rainbow-farts and unicorns)--one of these days i'll get them into an album together and brag about what hasn't killed me and the art it's made (i've mostly stopped this, at least for now; the deep and subtle greys of autumn don't stand up well to digital flattening, and the epic sweeps of migrating geese across those huge skies look, in tiny pictures, like nothing more than pencil-lines or cat-hairs on the lens). it'll have to be a day without 45 new papers, though, and preferably one from which i already know what i'll be doing in class tomorrow, a characterization that does not describe today.

one crumb for the archives: i noticed, again yesterday, like i always notice, and this time with good seasonal timing, the line in "gold dust," which is a reflecting-back song about the activities & little friend intersections of being in high school in northern VA/southern MD anyway, which means it's already in big-picture form about a lot of our lives, where tori sings the question "what color hair?" and whispers as an answer "autumn crimson." in the autumn of my senior year, Kristmas & Jesi & Sebastian & i & a whole host of other people, most of whom we didn't care much about or pay any attention to whatsoever went on an extended biology field trip to Wallops Island, where our small numbers meant that smaller sub-sets of friends evolved. in one of those subsets, K & Seb & i kept finding ourselves on playgrounds and wandering the gravel roads at night with Theo, who i'd been in classes with on-and-off (mostly off) since elementary school, & who took up a habit on that trip of teasing me about naming the color of my hair. he kept voting for "autumn mist," which annoyed me at the time; "mist is grey!" i would insist (i hadn't yet been introduced to irish mist liquor, which is about the same color too, and might have explained the overlap, but if that was his rationale, he didn't share it). every time the song plays through that line i think of Theo, who will always be remembered gold in my head anyway, for being the kid to introduce me to Elfquest in the 6th grade, and every year or so i search him online and fail to find him. last night, i found & friend-requested him on facebook. this morning, he friended me back.

if anybody's looking for them, they're here, after some other fall-themed events--the fire-spinning is at the end of the set, right before my supplementary, donated-by-Nell batteries also died.

more actual posting later when i'm not cramming lunch in my face before dashing off to the lab to print out plagiarism reports before clients show up to be tutored at 1...

From SyrFall09

summative report: folks got gooey, and much fun was had by all. long-distance bartending advice got our apple-cider spiked with vodka and cinnamon, which turned out to be a lovely combination, especially alongside homemade pizzas from Paul, homemade mung-bean and curry soup from Eglute, and homemade blueberry cobbler from Nisha. there are more pictures at the album link, but not quite of everyone, as some people seemed to be better camera-dodgers than others. tonight (when we will still have pumpkins, because we brought them back in again after leaving them to glow for a couple of hours), all such oversights will be remedied. in the meantime... have a little science. can you tell what you're looking at in the less traditional of these displays?

From SyrFall09

today my students had on their calendars a workshop for their 3rd short formal paper this semester. short = 4 pages, nothing like the 12-page monsters my SU students were cranking out by the end of the term or even the 6-8-ers common for mid-semester work at VT, so even if they are, still, despite all of my instructing, assigned reading, begging, pleading, teasing, and other forms of encouragement to the contrary, last-minute paper-writers, they should have been able to cobble something together last night to make it to page 4 of a draft using sources most of them showed me they had acquired and read before Tuesday. "should," as we all know, however, is about as bold a marker of fantasy as sporting wings. in my first class, 12 of the 21 were there with drafts in hand, and one of those left early to attend to some vaguely-explained appointment. i was disappointed, but the morning class likes to rationalize morning as their excuse, and sometimes the stragglers show up in my 2pm section instead. at 2, though, no stragglers. instead, at 2, i had 9 of that batch of 21 (a tenth was there for a presentation but then left, since he had no paper and knew there was no point in staying to workshop something he hadn't written).

now, the raw fact of their low attendance is in a large part my "fault," because i've set a precedent of sending away students who show up to workshops without papers to workshop. they distract folks who do have work to share, and they would be better off using their time to write their delinquent papers. and ALL of my students have been informed (they had to sign the syllabus that explains the policy) that not being in class counts against their grades (we can leave off the bigger picture debate about college attendance here--this is not a lecture class, it's a writing class, and if they aren't here to practice writing tasks, they will not improve their skills, whether they read the book or not), so they know that acting like not having their work done earns them a holiday is a consequence-laden practice. i know why they're not here: they haven't written papers. what i don't know is what i'm not doing that would better encourage? motivate? cajole? intimidate? them into writing the papers. they know workshops are valuable. they write things in reflection like "I didn't do a very good job on this paper because I missed the workshop, so I didn't really have any feedback, and I sort of guessed what I should do instead of having a chance to have you show me where I was getting off track." and yet, when the next paper comes around, they miss the workshop again.

maybe i need to institute more frequent reminders of the consequences, because they really weren't paying attention to what they signed. or maybe i just need to start bringing cookies for all of the students who show up at workshops. after all... who wouldn't want a peanut-butter eyeball?

the woman who runs the snack bar (who's dressed today in an intricate layers-of-wrapping mummy costume with deeply blacked-out eyes) makes a huge tray of hand-decorated halloween cookies to give away every year--and whose day ISN'T better started off by a peanut-butter eyeball!?

one of my current students approached me today to ask if i would be willing to be the official adviser for a club. i've been asked before to sign petitions to try to organize [water]-pong tournaments and promote other just-plain-silliness before, but this was a real request, with a real form to fill out. "maybe," i said. "what's the club?" she turned the page so i could see where her round bubble-letters spelled out "SUNYIT Gay Straight Alliance"; i also noticed the names of a former student or two on the petition. my first response was to look up at her a bit stunned: "we don't have one?" "we used to," she said, "but i think everybody in leadership graduated and nobody stepped up, so..." "so now you need a new one." "exactly." i had her come back to my office so i could read the form just for the purpose of knowing what i was agreeing to, and then you can bet your boots i signed right up. i'm an adjunct, mostly; i didn't see any fine print disallowing that, but i wouldn't be too surprised if somebody says i don't count and they have to find somebody else.

but still. they chose me. i think a little bragging right here is warranted. so: right now, i am totally cool.

call dibs on my own coffeepot
do the dishes and be able to count on them still being done when i get home later
open the refrigerator knowing that whatever was there the last time i closed the door will be there again
take long baths without feeling rude for hogging the bathroom
pee w/the bathroom door open so the cat can wander in & out
roam around half into outfits when deciding what to wear out w/appelachienne
evaluate her fashion-show choices through our facing dining room windows
sleep naked
work in the living room near the plants and front-porch bird noises
listen to my own music if i want to
listen to hours and hours and hours of silence
have friends over who prefer the silence too

this is not a treatise about how i ought to live alone; i probably ought not to. i've done it. i liked it, for a while, and then i got roommates again and liked that better. i enjoy interacting with people. i love--you know, because i gush about it all the damn time--paul's guitar. it's nice having faces, voices, the clinking of plates and forks, the intersecting of lives, the chance to say where i'm going or ask where someone else is when we come and go, the sense that somebody cares whether we come and go. but it's also really, really nice when, unexpectedly one weekend, they all go away.

evangelysta has left her plants in my living room, and it is awesome. it's like a dream come true: my space is full of plant life, those amazing, perfect, sun-through-leaf-greens in my windows, and she comes over every week to check in on and take care of them, which means that i am not responsible for trying to keep them alive, a task i am notoriously ill-suited for. apparently, her bf is allergic to some random houseplant soil-fungus, so they had to move out. my sadness for her having to live without them is eclipsed by my delight in having all these new, frondy roommates who sit quietly, never stomp around the house or blare weird, discordant music, and spend their free time making me oxygen.

in less fun news, Dexter's housemates (i.e. Shawn & cat-Matthew) are at the vet's this morning b/c Matthew has decided to stop eating altogether. we dismissed this as hating-the-kitten for a while, but it's been almost a week, so it's time to investigate more invasively. send the good cat vibes out thataway, if you've got any lying around... that jungle NEEDS its surly, black, puffball of a panther glaring from the high tree-limb of the sofa-back.

the subject line is marc cohn singing about memphis (do i really have to spell that out? there was a time i would have already known that everybody knew, but it does go ever-ever on sometimes), a nod not just to houseplants and panthers but to the bit of a nostalgia trip i've been on lately, first initiated by runemystic popping a bunch of dak-days photos up on Fb (of, among other things, dear kiffer and that surly puffball hair) and carried on by my efforts to wrap up a mix-cd project that will probably culminate a collection: i've counted, & over a 15 year spread, counting the first that was actually a cassette-tape, this will make nine compilations sent to almost as many addresses but the same destination. what's your record for most music-dedications handed off to a single person? (i suppose, technically, aaric would get the trump, since this one time we decided to flesh out his music library by just batch-copying most of my mp3s straight from hard-drive to hard-drive.) i'm toying with titling this last disc "that's okay, pluto, i'm not a planet either."

...i just turned in mid-term grades. at some schools, that comes way early, but i counted. we meet 28 times (15 weeks @ 2x per week - 2 holidays), & we're at 15 down, 13 to go. i'm only just starting to get to know these kids, and they're already one foot out my door...

seriously, folks, stop blinking. you miss something, i miss something--maybe y'all have extra smoke in your eyes and you're speeding it up for the rest of us, something.

it's supposed to snow this weekend. they're wearing scarves and looking beleaguered, the ones up from the city, where it was 65 and sunny this weekend. the culture shock is coming, and they know it. they cringe when they speak of the sky.

but, really... you bleaksburgians know what i mean, & compiling other stories says you're not the only ones... would it really feel like college if it didn't come with brooding weather & that sense, when you bolt back into the dorms, that you & the folks you've chosen to gather around you are all lucky to have each other, little pods of allies against the big, dark sky and all its metaphors about the wide and scary world beyond the safe corners of the clusters of stone shelters and the neat-mown lawns?

from J's descriptive writing exercise, to paint his room in words, from memory, while sitting in class, using as many details as possible:

My room is messy. The walls are baby blue with a section of paint that has been scraped away. There are two Lord of the Rings, one Star Wars, and one Star Trek posters on two of the walls. Furniture covers the perimeter of my room....Along the back wall is my end table, next to my bed, a gaming chair that sits atop the only rug in my room. The next wall has my dresser and desk both of which are covered with old papers, spare change, and various amounts of clutter. The final wall has my entertainment center. It has a 27-inch TV, a playstation2.... On top is my collection of Star Wars Legos that my parents get me at Christmas. Next to this is my overflowing bookcase. It's full of R.A. Salvatore's novels, Dean Koontz's novels and Star Wars books.... Underneath my bed are a variety of plastic swords, daggers, lightsabers and guns. There are also my box of legos that number in the thousands...

i ♥ them because they're still us. they're us frozen in time, making variations on the jokes i still know, with slightly different words and the same intonation.

it also makes me think, more in questions than in statements... J is eighteen years old, and his room looks pretty much identical to the way some of y'all's looked almost 20 years ago (maybe swap out King or Anthony for Salvatore, but i remember us trading Koontz around). what does that say to you about culture, geek culture in particular, maybe man-culture in particular?

♥ ♥ ♥ for my geek squad (you know who you are).

now if only you people would fix my computer... :D

From SyrFall09

yeah, he's doing fine. he and his monstrous round belly and grand, terrific purr are quite content (on my arm), in case you couldn't tell.

my 2pm class is workshopping each others' drafts, everybody busily reading, discussing, and commenting on the papers other students have written. when they finish a round of this, and i tell them to trade off to one last new reader and do it one more time, Ch, in the back of the room, who is unfailingly good-natured and just likes to be an occasional pest for the fun of being an occasional pest, says, loudly enough to be heard, "this is the busiest busywork ever."

now, you can cuss in my room if you want to, but you don't go calling the activities i bust my butt to make valid and worth your every minute "busywork," at least not without pissing me off or breaking my heart one. Ch knows this--and so do the rest of his classmates. as he makes the comment, my back is to him, because i'm writing an instruction on the board. predictably riled, i turn around menacingly and say "what?!?"

J and S shake their heads at me for responding at all, and in harmonic unison, say (slowly and with what is obviously practiced emphasis) "don't feed the troll!"

tie: my (crazy) mom & dad

but on a somewhat related note, happy birthday to ranagar (and wahyagar 2 days ago). the part where at 17 years apiece they're not even really in the running probably takes care of answering the important parts of the rest of that question. 'course, everybody here to read this already knew that anyway.

so friday i'm walking to marshall street to meet up with a couple of students from my crouse class to see, outside of the large group, how the semester's going for them and to talk about their next paper project, and i pass by a stray cat who's cute, and i talk to it, and it runs away, as they're wont to do, and then at the next house over, down near the sidewalk edge of the driveway, i start to pass by a stray kitten, and i talk to it, and it doesn't run away, and i stop walking, because that's bizarre. so i walk up to it, crunching leaves, still talking, and it still doesn't move. it's very, very tiny, a little hand-sized puffball, and it's sitting like a drunk, back legs sort of splayed, head down, neck waving back and forth a bit, responding to nothing. clearly this is not good, but it's a baby and it's in my path, so i have to investigate. i stoop down, hook a finger under its chin, and lift, so i can see what i'm dealing with, and the lack of responsiveness makes sense pretty much instantly: it has no face.

where a cute kitten-face ought to be, there is just a 2-sided triangle of snotty, crusty goo. no eyes, no evidence of a breathe-through-able nose, and the head in my hand is just lolling there. so there's really nothing to do but pick it up and claim responsibility--even if, as seems likely, just for the few hours before a vet shakes his/her head and says "it's too far gone to save." "at least," i think, "it will have been held for an hour or two at the end of the road." but i can't exactly take a gooey, diseased kitten into the food court to meet with students, so i call Shawn for help, and we come up w/a temporary plan whereby i meet him back at my house, hand off the kitten, get a carrier, he drives me to the meeting, i call the vet's on the way there, they turn out to have an appointment free nearly immediately, and i send him vet-wards with the kitten while i go on to work. in the process of the exchange and car ride, the kitten has picked its head up, opened part of one eye, and protested a few times, which gives us reason to believe it might have some fight left after all. the text saying "he's fine, just sick and covered with fleas" comes an hour or so later. by the time i get back from work, the kitten has been (in addition to gender-identified) flea-bathed, flea-shampooed, fed a whole can of cat food, medicated for worms, dosed with eye-ointment for conjunctivitis, and started on antibiotics for a respiratory infection. exhausted from this treatment, and full-bellied for the first time in probably his entire memory, he is lolling again, but this time in a warm towel.

more logistics ensue: the kitten has several infectious germs, so we quarantine him in my apartment for the weekend and move my cat to Shawn's so i--and he, in many cooperative parts of the several day span--can tend to him with the necessary frequency. he has weepy eyes and needs new ointment several times a day. he needs antibiotics twice a day. he can't stand up, so the litter box (a new concept anyway) is difficult. he needs frequent opportunities to scarf as much food as he can fit into his swollen belly. he's a long-haired cat on new, rich food and antibiotics, so "tending" involves a lot of butt-and-tail washing. he needs a heating pad to lie on, because he's so anemic his gums and toes are white and he has no body fat whatsoever. when you pet him, you learn about cat anatomy. and we can't help petting him, bones or not, because he's so freaking pathetic. he's about 7 weeks old, the vet guesses, and he suckles in his sleep. the first evening, he'll only sleep in a face-planted wee-tiny loaf on the heating pad wrapped in a hand-towel, and i'm calling him "faceplant burrito." as evening fades into night, he puts his neck down on the towel. and then tilts sideways. and then eventually relaxes enough to stretch out his tiny front paws like little micro supercat. i put my finger into the mitten of one tiny paw, and he clenches on and stays sleeping, with his hand on mine. and after that, the milestones rush forward.

on day two, for the first time, he opens both eyes at the same time. he stays standing for a few seconds when we stand him up, and then a few seconds more, and takes a wobbly step before lying back down. he purrs for the first time, when pet after his belly is filled, and digs in the litter with his own front feet.

on day three, he stands up of his own volition, keeps both eyes open for half-hour stretches, follows movement with his head as if he can actually see, walks several steps, discovers that he likes yogurt, and purrs constantly, sometimes even with kneading, if he's being touched, which he is pretty constantly, because the purring is highly rewarding.

also, he's slept in my arms for 2 nights by this point, because on night one i brought him to bed at about 3 in the morning b/c he fell asleep in my arms after i put him in the litter box when he stirred restlessly, and on night two i didn't even bother setting him down in his towel, since he spent the first night so contentedly snoozing on top of me and soaking up my body heat.

by day four, which is monday, the day i will eventually trade him off for the older cats with Shawn, because my utica workdays are too long for me to take care of the dosing and feeding, and Shawn's work schedule more conducive, the kitten is walking across entire rooms, meowing underfoot for food when i'd open cans, twining around my feet (although this took a lot of walking, as he's smaller than even my feet), meeping hello with his tail up when i come into rooms, wanting to be held constantly, showing his wanting by purring whenever it even looked like i might hold him, following me around, and push-pulling vigorously into my skin whenever i acquiesce. he has batted once at a shoelace and twice at a cat-toy, his first discovery of what might turn into "play." he has crawled up a chair to sit on it rather than the floor. when i bend down to pet the back of his head, he tiptoes into the stroke so fiercely that his front paws lift off the ground. his favorite place to be is tucked into my collarbone w/his head behind my ear, although he alternates burrowing there with trying to poke his nose into my mouth or eyeballs, as if to say "closer! i want to be closer in you! to you! you!" i woke up in the morning and saw him by my face, his whiskers up my nose, purring. when i opened my eye all the way so that he could see that it was round, he started, then immediately lunged forward to put his nose in it. "that eye! it-loves-and-feeds-me! it's mine!"

it's part his, maybe. sometimes. Shawn and Matthew look like they're going to keep him; Pids has put up with enough kittens in his lifetime and is overdue some just-being-loved-by-his-mamma time in his old age. i've been with Pids and Matthew, and without kitten, for two days, with a status message up about how typing without a small mammal hanging off me is just not the same, and it's lonely without the constant purring under my chin, although it's also nice to get to snuggle my hug-able whole cat in the mornings instead of just that bundle of fuzzy, tiny, enthusiastic twigs. i have wee red scratches all up and down my arms from the instances of butt-bathing. and Shawn and i are heroes. because it got down to freezing friday night, so even by saturday there might not have been a kitten. and now, instead of a non-kitten, there's Dexter:

From SyrFall09

every semester, the new freshmen at SUNYIT (like the freshmen in thousands upon thousands of composition classes all over the country) start off their academic paper-writing spree with a narrative in which they're supposed to write descriptively about a moment during which something important happened to them. "important" is deliberately not emphasized in my classes as much as it might be in others'; i'm not asking them to bare their souls, but i am asking them to pick something to write about that was memorable enough for them to have a lot to say about it, so that they can give me 3-5 pages of good, rich detail describing some concise, finite happening (i tell them to pick something that took not more than about 5 minutes to happen, although they're allowed to lead in with a reasonable amount of framing/backstory). put together, these essays are a revealing portrait of the things that stand out in the lives of these young people about whom my fellow teachers and i have been known to moan, exasperated about their inability to put things into perspective: "how could they? they have no perspective. nothing has ever happened to them." in a sense, of course, that's not true; amazing and terrible things have happened to at least a few of them, and plenty of okay and kinda-sucky things have happened to the rest of them, but it's also underscored by lines like the one in C's paper wherein he wrote, with no irony or sarcasm whatsoever, that he was "the most scared he had ever been in his entire life" when "walking," one afternoon, from the safety of his bedroom desk-chair, into a particularly dangerous situation in a video game.

here's a cross-section. i'm still missing a few papers due to various technological dysfunctions, so this isn't quite all of this (light) term's 53 students, but in overview, here's what has happened to them, or at least what's happened that's memorable enough for them to write about and not too embarrassing to show the teacher: one dog bite, two dogs' deaths, the first jellyfish sting on a perfect vacation, a cop-bicycle chase, 4 biking accidents (one involving an attack by a bat), 2 car accidents, one skiing accident, 2 boating accidents, a playing-tag-in-the-dark accident, a camp prank, 2 video game tournaments, 3 paintball games, a karate match, a football game, a ping-pong game, 2 baseball games and one baseball injury, a superglue-in-the-eye injury, a sibling rescue from a choking-on-a-plastic-toy incident, 2 pride-worthy art/engineering projects, two public speaking obligations, a graduation, a college-acceptance letter, a skydiving trip, a late limo to prom, a roller-coaster ride, a fire-department rescue for a head stuck in a chair (from the perspective of the rescuee), a fire-department rescue for the victims of a car accident (from the perspective of a rescuer), a missed plane, saying goodbye to a friend who's moving away, a lexical misunderstanding during a study abroad, an academic breakthrough, and 3 hospital visits (one on a grandfather's deathbed, one after a sibling's drug overdose, and one to show off a prom dress to an ailing grandmother).

when you were eighteen, if you were asked to do the same assignment, before marriages and babies and many of the deaths adulthood brings us into contact with, before big promotions and layoffs and recessions and home ownership, before fellowships and dissertations and testing gadgets for NASA and joining the circus... what moment would you have picked? (or, if you remember doing this assignment--it tends to be pretty consistent--what did you pick? i remember reading my brother's: he wrote about how our great-uncle charlie took us out firefly-catching in the front yard of his sprawling stone ranch house in east texas when we were little, and tried to fool us into chasing the light from his watch instead)

it started with friday night's wine-and-cheese party at matt and jenn's, which evolved into matt making elaborate dinner for six people and then us stuffing our faces with internationally-origined wines and cheeses, which then evolved into chad bringing over his absinthe & coaching jenn in proper sugar-soaking techniques, which then evolved into matt getting out his guitar and leading us in a delightfully warm, friendly, full-bellied singalong of simon & garfunkle tunes, & the beatles, & counting crows, which then evolved into marillion videos & swapping best-concert-ever and that-time-i-met-that-rock-star stories, and then somehow it was late at night and everybody was heading home happy.

then it was helped along by saturday morning dawning sunny and cool and crisp and cheerful and with me knowing that the papers were due to start coming in on monday, so it was the last weekend... and a sunny, cool, crisp, cheerful one at that. i finished up a little last-minute work and made with the plan-centric texting, and by mid-day had Shawn & appelachienne in the car headed for the hills--literally the hills out where rts. 20 and 80 intersect, because we thought we might brave Beak & Skiff to go pick apples. the place turned out to be overrun to the point of insanity, so we got snacks, gawked at the small children, took a handful of goofy photographs, and drove back up 20 a ways to o'neill's, where there are smaller crowds, shorter lines for fritters, and raspberries galore, and then we picked our combined weight in berries and apples--gingergolds, honeycrisps, macs, and a few purloined empires from yet-roped-off trees--although a lot of that weight failed to make it to the checkout stand because it was already hidden away in bellies.

apples: SyrFall09
saturday afternoon was going to involve baking, but then it turned into requiring naps instead, and after that Shawn & i ordered pizza and watched a little tv, and then Jill called looking for company, and thus there was monster-gaming with John and the final, necessary, group-participation-requiring partaking of gummi foot (which, to abuse the language in my students' favorite way, is so gross, but the precedent had been set and follow-through was required and Shawn did draw the card). so then baking--apple-raspberry pies--happened sunday instead, alongside crepe-making experiments and the wedging of all of the rest of the raspberries into said crepes, so i was stuffed silly again before i finally settled down to get a little bit more last-minute pre-emptive work done before officially abandoning my post and playing hooky with monday's class because there happened to be the little matter of some concert tickets purchased 6 or 8 months ago for a show in a town 5+ hours away to attend to in the morning.

monday--still weekend according to me--i packed the car, road-tripped solo to the outskirts of boston, met Paul at a train station with a name i've already forgotten, and drove us to gillette stadium to see u2 play another completely, utterly, there's-not-enough-language-to-describe-the awesome 360º show. i will spare you the fangirl squee, because i know how much y'all care, but i was able to take a camera this time, and our seats were amazing, and for not having a real zoom on that wee gadget and it being all night-time and dark and things moving around a lot, like they do, i got some really amazing shots. i'm delighted with myself about how well that worked (especially since i took most of them from around chest-height because i didn't want to be behind the lens and miss a microsecond). it was also the last night snow patrol was on the tour, and they also played a really terrific set--i was bummed to mostly-miss them in milan, and psyched to have planned right this time to be there for it, and found my anticipation thoroughly warranted. plus, gary could totally not make it through dedicating "run" to the band and the crew without crying, and i was so charmed that almost hurt. they led with one of my new favorite songs, and u2 didn't, changing their setlist for this show to start with a different track, include a few things from way back in my early-obsession days, and demonstrate that that mess they were making of "crazy tonight" in italy was going somewhere really cool, it just wasn't there yet. the pictures are in the boston set--did i miss writing about spending that random weekend in boston?--start here and flip forward to see all the shiny (unless you're matt and you don't want spoilers for this weekend's new york show... ok just maybe just one...)

From Boston_Gloucester_Salem

and then, because our otherwise plans, which had started out vague anyway, had disintegrated, Paul & i spent 2 hours getting out of the most expensive AND most poorly-designed stadium parking lot in the world (it only takes 10 minutes to play the set-list game and then start to search around for new distractions), and then 5 driving home, pulling in around sun-up to throw our bags on the floor and fall immediately, gratefully, painfully over, muttering around the glee about how we're not 20 anymore. i made it to 2/3 of work tuesday, having already promised coworker Drew cookies if he'd cover my first class, because there was no possible plan on the table that was going to get me an hour back the way we'd come by 10am--as-was, i slept through my alarm and had to race, shitty wipers on blurry glass, to get there by 1 and drag myself through the day caffeinated and vibrating-like-a-hangover from the sleep dep and dehydrated driving and the simple aftermath of all of that euphoria, but the buzz lasted right on through. it's still here. i'm exhausted, grading is in (virtual) piles all around me, i had conferences all day today and i'm teaching all day tomorrow and i start a new tutoring gig on friday and just writing that list makes me so tired it's hard to see straight, but wow. how's that for sucking the marrow, bit-chez?

title this poem for me:

a mundane, daily gravitation, a coin
loosed from a pocket by a busy hand,
spins first, reliably, toward the ground,

then, this time, slides asymptoticly
along the curb, arcs, and falls
the wrong way up, a black speck lost
in seconds in a haze of blue. i would
have been surprised had i not seen you
with David Hume, heads bent together;
“listen,” you said, “this is what we'll do...”

by night, from cold sidewalks, i catch,
snared in the weave of an otherwise-neat
black tapestry, the old-penny gleam
of what these ragged mittens used to hold.
knit for warmth, they're clumsy
by design; it does no good to wonder
how it got away, and less to reach,

balanced high on these small bones,
but the why still trips me up. you also said
that each cent counted, and i counted you.

i picked up my cell last night to call my brother to wish him a happy birthday to reiterate the sentiments in the card i did remember to send last week--it had been his birthday all day, but he's on california time, and i knew he was working this weekend, so it was going on eleven over on my coast. when my phone's charging, it doesn't ring or buzz: this is important to this story. so with plugged-in-phone in hand, i sent a text to a friend first to confirm a plan-detail, read the instantaneous reply, and then noticed that the envelope icon that says there's a new text message wasn't going away after. so i clicked my way through menus and found this, from a number that wasn't even stored in my phone (& thus not the one i had been about to call):

Hello. this is your brother. :-) :-) :-) :-) i love you. :) thanks so much for the birthday joy. i'm working all day and night in la. call you when i can :)

seriously--within the same 2 minutes that i was holding the phone, plugged in so i wouldn't get cut off while talking to him, fingers poised over the keys, somewhere in a 24-hour span. with, of course, impeccable timing, because if i'd gotten so far as to call, i'd have found out i had the wrong number anyway. i texted back to say the words and demand to know how he'd known i'd been just going to call him RIGHT EXACTLY THEN. his reply:

We are still psychic. :) no matter how far apart we are. hugs and kisses. :-) :-) :-) :-)

went to see Alegría last night for jill's birthday, and loved everything about it except for the ridiculous t-shirt prices, which i will stop bitching about in just one minute, right after i say "angel-wing patterns are awesome, but it's a T-SHIRT, people. $40? really? really?!"

a show like that is, as noted by the several reviewers i consulted this morning looking for hints for where to begin, hard to talk about: there's so much going on, and it's so easy to be awed and so hard to pin any of it, let alone all of it, into specific language. besides, i get on my students' cases about how "fun" and "awesome" and "beautiful" are useless adjectives because they're so neutrally suggestive--they mean the same general thing with entirely different specifics for everyone, so they don't tell a reader anything more than just saying "i liked it."

i liked it! a lot. here are some specifics:

the little orange-headed clown: i wanted to take him home and console him with an infinite supply of paper airplanes. i tried to find him on youtube to show you why, but he's not there. i fell in love with his every gesture, and wanted to pop home mid-show to procure milk and cookies to bring back to share.

& the acrobats? all of the acrobats: i want to install them in my head, where they will leap and spin and change their rate-of-spin mid-air and float in unison and land weightlessly like cats through every dream i have forevermore. i want to be one of the little girls with feathers. i want to freeze the contortionists and run my hands along their joints and see how their bodies can still fit together like that. i want to hang out with them all on a playground on a saturday afternoon and see what they're like out of makeup, if they're as full of energy and talent and play as they look onstage or if all they really want is a nap.

i wanted to see the singers better to know who was singing which part. i wanted the stilts-creature to walk around for longer, so that there could be more gazing. i wanted the flying man to pick me up and whisk me around the arena. i wanted to kiss the guy with the hoop just for the sake of his finesse, and that ridiculous little blue hat that he was suave enough to pull off.

it was so very, very cool. as i write this, plans for the next adventure are rising and falling and being re-cast, and i'm thinking about how i spend my money, and being so, so grateful that i'm my parents' daughter and i was raised to consider the pleasure a thing would bring and the lasting value it would have for me, because i don't have much of the stuff, but for such a performance, it seems money well spent. for the performance, which was also around $40. not for the t-shirt.

i picked up 2 vividly crimson leaves off of the sidewalk yesterday, and when i come and go through the main entrance of the building i work in, tiny yellow locust leaves, like painted commas, scatter before my footsteps.

admittedly, the locusts go first every year, except for that one red maple--and i know which red maple, on which street, and i might have gone by deliberately for dramatic effect.

still, dramatic or not, the effect is real: the colors, they are a-changin'. there are blushing curves along the rounded edges of the mostly-still-green trees that line the highway between syracuse and utica, like the sun-burned skins of apples, and i've begun to hear the geese, the first few nervous pairs and trios practicing their migratory journeys along smaller paths from pond to pond.

it's coming.

after teaching monday and before getting up early to drive to utica tuesday, i dragged S to the state fair, where we tromped through many barns and other buildings, ate enough disgusting fried food that i still twitch when i think of it (coconut shrimp, crawdads, jamaican meat-pie, & not-fried jerk-chicken), peered at prize-winning flowers and fuzzy creatures of all sizes (and a few that weren't very fuzzy at all, like the turtle who was wearing a pancake for an upper shell, or the armadillo who kept HOP!ping every time anybody HOP! moved nearby), inspected the butter sculpture that is the traditional draw of the NYSF, learned about fire safety from a house-of-scary-danger mock-up (never, never hump a lawnmower on the garage floor), stalked our friend Ken unsuccessfully from a distance, took lots of pictures of the ferris wheel (okay, that was just me), watched acrobats perform death-defying stunts, gawked unabashedly at the "normal" people who visit and troop through the fair, passed on the "freaks" one has to pay to see (sorry, ima_spoony_bard, i didn't go check up on tiny tina for you), watched some cows eat, sleep, and poo (spectrum covered, thanks), browsed the candy store for nostalgic sweets (S needed root beer barrels; i managed to dodge everything i thought i couldn't live without as a child and come out with only circus peanuts), walked through a house carved out of the inside of a redwood tree, watched the moon come up, missed out on wine slushies because it was just too darn chilly in the shade, settled gladly on a cannoli for the last treat of the day because it was way too cold (for wussy little me, anyway--it didn't stop my compatriot) for ice-cream before listening to a song and a half of the four tops harmonizing their way into eternity on our way out, echoes of old-familiar motown tunes (in particular, at the last, "i'll be there") stretching across the periodic roars of cars below as we walked the bridge over the highway back to the sweet-grass smell of the muddy field where we'd left my car.

in pictures:


there are more pictures at the end of the Summer in Syr 09 album if anybody wants to see the pancake-turtle, the jumpy armadillo (eating cat food) or any of the other available wonders...

but what you should definitely know is that cow? the sleepy-looking one up in that picture right there? i put him to sleep. like: flopzzzzzzzzzzzzz. i took the picture, and then i leaned in to pet that little face, and the face started to lean too, and i kept stroking down the soft, fuzzy forehead, and KER-FLOP the head fell right over, so that poor cow was snoozing with its neck twisted at what looked like a painful angle, although i'd imagine if it hurt, you'd wake back up again, even if you were a cow. and then i left it there, snoozing and drooling in the straw, and walked away with a week's worth of giggles (it still worked last night, saying "i put a cow to sleep!" and being overcome by the snickers...)

work at work in the basement office is sad this season, because i know the outside world is pretty, and i know the end of "pretty" for another season is drawing nigh. okay, not the end-end, but at least the end of the likelihood that i'll see sun at all in a day...

my classrooms contribute to the disguise: the hospital classroom has tinted windows so it looks ominous & grey out even when it isn't, one of my on-campus classes is in the basement just down the hall from my office, and the other one's in an upstairs computer lab with one tiny window... located directly behind the projector screen so it's blocked at least half the time.

my students, fortunately, bring little sunshines of their own into the room, so when i'm with them, i forget seasons, weather, darkness... and also all of my own angst, drama, or dullness in the absence thereof. then i leave them, and radio songs in the car want to poke and jab at my inner peace (do i have one of those?) and by the time i get home i'm a little bit crowded and cranky.

i'm not used to the new roommate yet. there's nothing at all wrong with the man. he's friendly, polite, competent in the kitchen, good about pitching in with cleaning up... he's just there a lot more than Isaac was, and he walks with heavy steps, and somehow the apartment feels like there are twice as many people in it now. somebody always seems to be in the bathroom, at the kitchen sink, or walking heavily past my bedroom door when i'm trying to sleep.

i'm getting restless, and not just in a fall-makes-everybody-restless, "i-wanna-be-eighteen-in-blacksburg" sort of way. i'm considering maybe looking at job postings, which is a far cry from considering applying for them, but it's a start (i love the one i have, but it was a one-year appointment i've already squeezed 2 out of--i would be stupid to count on it lingering for yet another). i'm thinking about the kinds of places i might be willing to move to. i'm also thinking about giving up on the pining and the wondering and the careful-tiptoe-friend-ing and finding somebody to date who actually likes me (that's been a long, long time coming. and it's still coming yet. i'm not doing it. but i'm thinking about it). i'm also thinking about how much i'd miss my next-door-neighbors, and ways i might arrange to stay with them but lose the boys (and then what about the job?). it's juggly, and i can't juggle for shit, so expect to hear some cursing as i drop possibilities on my toes for a while.

my mom's about to head off to france for a couple of months. it's not a mid-life crisis, she swears, but she does confess to watching under the tuscan sun a few times too many. i told her i'd send her boring, domestic postcards so she wouldn't be lonely. anybody wants to get in on that, let me know, and i'll give you her address.

my brother & his gf have a dog who needs surgery they can't afford. anybody who has pennies have any to spare and a bleeding heart where puppies are concerned should comment. i'll send pictures of the furry family member and an addy for where to send helper-coinage. i'll be sending them the few $ i was going to send walkinthewilds to help retroactively finance italy, because he doesn't seem to be hurting for it, and he's kindhearted enough to share like that (right?).

off to teach another section. today's fun: paragraphs, pronouns, the miraculous benefits to be gained from actually writing drafts, and a quiz on each others' names. you're so jealous you're not in my class!

i complain all winter about the rain (or at least all of the parts of the fall-winter-spring sequence when the temperature flutters up above freezing so that it takes that form), and spend all summer hopeful whenever the air thickens, excited for cloud-cover, looking giddily forward to the rush of thunder. sure, the thunder is part of it. i love thunder. but all summer long, i also really, really like the rain, even when nothing booms or clatters. and then all winter it fills me with a seeping, sinking feeling like despair. staring out the window watching it fall and bounce and scatter-drip off leaf after leaf, i suddenly saw the difference. that is the difference: leaves.

rain on leaves sounds beautiful, symphonic and life-bringing. it leaps and bounces, laughs in tiny rivulets, creates this depth of light-and-noise that's a timeless forest/meadow song that's always, always happened. it's an elemental sound and vision; as long as there have been people, people have seen rain fall through trees and into grasses, and heard the songs it sings. rain in the winter, at least where i live, hits no leaves because there aren't any, and instead slams right past where they would have been into concrete, asphalt, and the threadbare sparse-grass surface-mud of corporate, residential, and university lawns, emphasizing lack and cover-overing and the "progress" of created emptiness instead, collecting oil and dirt instead of refracted light and pollen. no wonder it isn't pretty.

they won't last too much longer, these leaves, but they're still here now, making each rain into a concerto, a sonata, a range of other music-words i never learned. whatever you want to call it, this one's gorgeous.

absences: 4 already. ALREADY. ridiculous.
missed homework assignments: a few in section 3 & too many to count in section 4 (section 15 only meets once a week, so they're left out of the stats for now).
most credible excuse: the bookstore was out of the textbook (it's true)
flexibility: in full working order.
student-generated giggles: also in full working order.  ALREADY.

my 2pm section's "what is good writing" brainstorm derailed (although of course i pulled it back to focus and made a lesson out of it anyway, because i'm just good like that) when someone listed as a necessary element "sparkling vampires" and someone else added "anything WITHOUT sparkling vampires." at the end of the derailment, M raised his hand and said "okay, i admit that i live in a very, very small box, but what are you all talking about?" i was proud of him for having the guts to ask, and for being culturally aware enough despite the disclaimer that a one-word answer sufficed (although someone else piped up about how he/she could help by sprinkling glitter into his box). then i gave them a 10-minute scavenger hunt of grammar rules/definitions to find in their Hackers so as to make sure they had some experience using the indexes and finding their way around the books so that when they need them later they'll know how they work. getting started, J said to S "find hyphens." S said "how about interjections. i'm thinking a number of interjections right now." "i'll bet none of them are polite," i observed. "you're right," he said. scavenger-hunt items included questions like "What does MLA stand for" and "what are 2 ways NOT to use commas?" i turned around from the board to explain the rules of the activity, turned back around to add the last 2 questions to the list, and overheard L say "do not use a comma... as a hat."

injunctions not to use a comma as a hat: priceless.

interested in the stats & details of the current health care situation & what the white house knows & thinks about it? read this blog post.

interested in how social networking "toys" are tangibly changing the way governments and their people communicate? read this blog post.

if you're interested in both, one click will do.

in addition to the international trekking, there have been gems closer to home as well. close-er sometimes meaning actually close, and sometimes not. in the past 2 weeks, crammed in to make sure that at least a little bit of summer felt like summer, i spent a day and a half in geneva with sarah, most of 3 in st. louis (getting to sample, in both cases, what it's like to have a phd in hand and a JOB as a result of it, as both ladies in their lovely little houses, sunny leaves in all their windows, have), and 4 here in town with metalmonkey, roaming the streets of my own neighborhood & seeing it through new, less-jaded eyes. these trips, although i didn't really plan them in advance to work out that way, all turned into tours of artistry of some kind or another.

From Summer in Syr 09

sarah and i spent half a day photographing her neighborhood cemetery, guessing stories and tracing family lines as best we could through the cracks, running our fingers over mostly-smoothed stone faces where the words no longer showed (and also took our tour through streets and houses and peeked in on the lake and gorgeous campus buildings and the coolest classroom you've never taught in either). then we devoted 2 hours of our afternoon--and afternoon we'd set aside for "working"--writing fiction instead, holding ourselves to it, sitting in silence in her living room just making words, words, words. (i also got work done in the morning, while she snoozed, in the sun of her porch to the industrious sound of hammers across the street; up here all end-of-summer days start and end with hammers, because the work has to be done before the snows, and there's always a mad flurry when august comes of realizing that the snow will be coming soon.)

From St. Louis

clk and i, not satisfied enough by the rocketships and giant pants and other forms of art right on her street, after stuffing ourselves with mexican food and anime friday, went saturday to a sculpture park and roamed around with cameras, soaking up the possibilities in things half-named and incompletely if at all explained. we spent at least a half hour under trees peering at re-purposed steel floats bigger than we were, nerds through and through: she was looking up the terms in faded paint along their sides on her iphone hoping for a history lesson for us, while i was making music, tapping along their hollow shapes trying to understand the relationship between dent and tone.

From St. Louis

we both struck out, but the answers weren't nearly as interesting as prowling through the science in the first place. then we bought water-based oil-paints (there's more science i don't understand) and after a delicious evening of live music down on the corner stage and culinary arts in her very own kitchen in the form of roast tomatoes and everything under the sun that might accompany them, we spent the next day listening to thunder while hanging up her existing art wherever there were wall-nails and making new paintings, color-studies and miniature wordless poems, on tiny 2-inch canvases. she promises pictures when they dry, but the oil part is ringing true, and today's report says they haven't yet, even though it's been more than a week.

From Summer in Syr 09

i also dragged my house guest up one street and down the other in this neighborhood, around the pond, up to the standpipes past the community garden, to marshall street for various forms of snacking, through bits of campus, down to funk'n'waffles on a couple of consecutive days for a few hours of getting work done, & through the amphitheater in the pouring, storming rain, which, in retrospect, since we succeeded at keeping both computers dry, was awesome. we photographed graffiti (really: what would johnny cash do?), noshed half-price sushi & free thai curries, painted with watercolors on my living room floor, and took in the tempest in thorndon park, which was the best free shakespeare production i've seen since i moved here, even accounting for how much of it i missed when escher & jonas arrived, tossed into my care for a balmy evening that detoured through playground chase and wound to a close with jonas in the stroller telling tales and escher in the crook of my arm, pointing out planes with a dizzy lean that nearly toppled all of us.

the lettuce is brown and gooey, the pita is furry, when i gave up packing lunch altogether and walked over to Shawn's to print my documents on his computer, the email i'd sent myself with copies of said documents had acquired a mysterious error & was document-less, AND (because i'm not stupid, and when i know i'm in the middle of a jinx i plan work-arounds, so i'd brought it on a flash drive too) halfway through printing out my 6 pages i managed to kill the rest of his ink cartridge, so i still only have every other line of the last few pages.

i wonder if they'd fire me if i declared the first day of school "give up and go back to bed" day. BUT of course i'm not going to find out, because i'm resilient, damnit.

...or at least resigned.

why do the things always rebel in gangs? it's never a thing that breaks. it's always a great bevy of things, all at once.

it can't just be that one day my fan started blowing wobbly on "low" and the next the "medium" button broke and the next week the "high" button broke unless you jam it at some weird, slippery angle and the day after that my cd player stuck (with a disc inside) and now won't play cds but will (won't stop, in fact) play an annoying ticking noise ceaselessly whenever the machine is on to play mp3s or perform any other task.

that's not enough. it also has to be that the next time i walked into the same room and tried to work something else it broke too--so now i can only print documents from my printer if i re-start my computer before each one. (which increases the pain-in-the-ass quotient of trying to ready first-day course materials exponentially, so of course it chooses to perform this stunt tonight, because classes start in the morning.)

and i'm down to 1 hubcap and all of my teflon is scratched and trying to kill me but i can't afford new pots and pans and the "7" button on my cell phone only works about a third of the time, so some of you are getting really hard to call.

just tell me there's an inverse relationship between things and people, and if all the things break, that means this semester i'm gonna have great people. that's how it works, right? isn't there a rule or formula?

ETA make that: after an hour-and-a-half-long fight this morning of following error-correction (ha!) instructions, printer has surrendered and is now all the way dead-dead. ::shakes fist at the sky, where the satellites are surely laughing::

school starts monday.

i'm not ready, but nobody every is. i've got a lot of stuff done and more to do. i've met a bunch of people and forgotten a number of their names already, but they'll remind me. i have plans that won't work, and some that will; i also have experience to guide me through the flexibility that the inevitable failures will demand, and that's all i really need.

as for my "own" work, the revisions continue, never rapidly enough or perfectly enough to feel like anything is ever "done," but building cathedrals took longer sometimes than the entire lifetimes of the folks who started the project, and no matter how much they might have wished it to be otherwise, the only way to go was stone by stone. the first weeks of school, for all that there will be lots of flexibility to enact, should also come without heaps (yet) of the time-heavy demands of grading, so i should be able to lay a few more stones here or there and keep it coming. maybe, between the gaps, i'll also be able to get some more work on eglute's book done. so should be busy.

the end of summer, like the weeks before it, has had some bright moments, but it's also been characterized by a lot of disappointment, a number of retractions, cancellations, things i was counting on falling through, people i was enjoying spending time with fading away, conversations i'd liked starting coming to abrupt halts, promised connections failing to materialize, and i'm tired. i'm tired of feeling never smart enough, strong enough, patient enough, useful enough, or wise enough for anybody's mysterious expectations. i'm tired of apologizing with no idea what i'm actually sorry for just because everybody else always seems disappointed, and i've been just optimistic enough to hope to guess right yet another time (when will i learn it never works that way?).

i try harder than anybody i know to be the right combination of kind and caring and still funny, helpful but not obsequious, generous but never overbearing, etc. etc., but i'm also tired of being told i try too hard, so you can skip that step, if you're tempted. people are worth trying hard for, to me. it's a simple equation. it's also, apparently, bad math, which shouldn't be surprising, i suppose. i've never been so good at math. < / whining > what i am good at, at least so far, is classroom teaching. the rest of the population may escape me, but at least my students' needs are something i understand, and for the most part know how to meet or at least how and where to pave the way for them to do the walking.

so i'm glad school starts on monday. it'll be nice to meet the new faces, and to wonder every day what's going to surprise me, make me laugh, and maybe even go right for a change.

i was in St. Louis this past weekend, which was really cool; more on that later. i was there to visit my friend clk, whom some of you know. those of you who know her probably know she used to work with randy pauch of the last lecture fame: "used to work with" like "published with because she's a genius too" and "was still working closely with when he died." so she and i learned a few lessons not too far apart from one another about losing people we adored and admired. the "genius like that" part of that line is important. if you've read randy's book or seen his lecture, you know what i mean already. if you haven't, i recommend at least one if not both of these things. the lecture is here (it's too long for a mid-day break, but maybe a lunch or two...).

so i'm hanging out with clk and her sheltie for the weekend, and i'm leaning back on the couch with my feet out, and the dog walks by, and i pet the dog with my feet, and then she wanders off and comes back and stands over top of my feet, and i rub her belly with my toes. later in the day, i'm standing in the kitchen and i poke her with a foot to try to trip her, and the dog, untripped (they're very agile little creatures--watching her manage to run full-speed at a brick wall over and over all weekend and not slam her head into it was also delightful fun) maneuvers to get so that she's standing over my feet. so i scratch her belly with my toes again. "fast learner," i say, commenting about the dog, who seems to have picked up that standing over feed equals a belly rub she doesn't have to bother to lie down for. "ha," says clk. "she teaches that one to everybody. you're the fast learner. randy had to have it explained to him." whether it's me or the dog who's smarter than randy in this story remains to be seen, but i hold randy somewhat in awe, so this is cool, and it makes me smile.

later, clk is on the couch putting numbers from her old phone into her new one, and she gets up suddenly and makes something like an "oof" noise. i ask what's up, but if i'd had a minute to guess i would have known, because she'd said when i came downstairs from my shower that she was up to M. "i'm about to get to randy's number, and i have to decide whether to transfer it or not to." we talked about that a bit. lynette's number is still in my phone. it's the last of the L's, so i see it every time i enter "M" to call my mother. "it's not exactly cheery to run across it," she decided, "but it would be worse not to." that's pretty much exactly what i've decided every time i run across lynette's and think: should i delete this? it's useless, of course; the account was canceled years ago and some stranger has the number now and those numbers will never call the people they used to call. but in a way they still connect us. it doesn't take up real "space" on the phone to store one extra "useless" number, and when we see the numbers, we think of the people. and we take the phones with us everywhere, and see the numbers.

another friend and i were talking a little while ago about household shrines, and how our cultures and our families don't have them, that we don't set aside spaces in our homes for relics for our eyes to pass over, we don't build in those triggers for memory necessarily--or at least we don't do it obviously, by building something so straightforward as a shrine. but i was thinking, after those conversations, about how we keep people with us. stories are one way; i know randy differently than i did from just reading his book, because i've seen a scene from his life involving her dog that i never would have otherwise seen, and in that way, she's kept him alive and spread his non-public life in ways that keep him real to her, and to me as someone who cares for her and is inspired by him. but i also think of these lists of names in phones, of the people we don't delete, of these little digital shrines we carry with us that assure us we'll be reminded, and that's another.

Tyra is laughing at Paul's witty, musical, writing/revising characterization, sung to the tune of the theme-song of my alma mater:

you put a sentence in,
you take a sentence out,
you put a sentence in,
and you shake it all about...

(and now, to "shake" that earworm back out of our heads, he's singing "Mac the Knife" over the afternoon thunder, finger-snaps, brass parts, and all)