"Until You Walk in Their Shoes"
Stephanie had her name legally changed from Margaret when she got a boyfriend who was a lawyer. Margaret had been her name with her first husband, Jeff, who she’d married when she was 16; it was what her parents had called her. She was named after her grandmother, but she never really liked the name or its abbreviations.
Despite being raised Catholic, and despite having witnessed her mother’s suffering when her father had an ongoing affair, Stephanie took the risk of loving a married man when she was 23. She was a single mother of a 5-year-old, and the effervescent brunette had gone to see a girlfriend working in a law office. The lawyer running the show there, Ron, accidentally directed his gaze first to her chest, rather than her chocolate brown eyes or her slightly bouffanted pixie cut hairstyle. “Do you wear contacts?” he asked, when she caught him looking.
Ron had been married for 20 years and had five teenagers, four boys and a girl, when he turned 40 and suddenly opened his eyes. He was bored in his marriage, and he didn’t want his life to be over. He’d had success. But he hadn’t lived yet the way he wanted to. He tried taking some trips with his wife to cure his restlessness. They went to Asia, to South America. And he came back just as randy as when he’d left.
He met the 23-year-old in his office, and soon she called him and told him she needed a rock. According to the zodiac, they were a good match. Maybe Stephanie knew that. She was a Scorpio, a sexy, fun, yet unstable sign. He was a Capricorn, successful at his career and supportive and adoring of Scorpios. They were a dynamic match, and within three weeks, he left his wife for the first time. He just told her he was leaving and got a hotel room and then an apartment.
Five years after they met, Ron and Stephanie got married, which her father laid out as a prerequisite before he would visit them in their new house. There had been years of back and forth. Ron learned he had heart trouble and went back to his family until he was so deeply depressed he left again, rented an apartment in Stephanie’s building, and re-entered her life. During the month when he didn’t see her, he thought he was going to die.
Despite the fact that Stephanie had been dating men her age while Ron was back home, she took him back. They had too much fun together not to. They bought a house being built in a new development with a golf course running through it. It was tucked into the edges of Fontenelle Forest, in Nebraska’s oldest city of Bellevue, named by the French for the beautiful view from a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. Bellevue was just far enough from Omaha not to run into Ron’s first wife, and within three years of being married, they had a child together. Four years later, my mom committed suicide.
A big believer in being honest and having no boundaries, my dad never hid the truth that my mom had committed suicide. Every year of life added on to being four, I refined my understanding of the meaning that my mom had actually killed herself.
I knew that death meant you didn’t come back because my mom told me that Grandpa went to heaven and would not be coming to our house anymore. Her father died months before she did, and the best explanation anyone could give for why she committed suicide was because she was grieving his death. I remember his body’s narrowing as he shed weight from the cancer, and his ears seemed to stick out further and further from his bald head. The Christmas before he died, my Grandpa Hammond went all over Omaha to find me a rocking horse that whinnied when I rode it. My Grandma added to the mass of presents two Barbie horses, a yellow one named Dallas and a black one named Midnight, a cowgirl outfit worn for my Grandpa’s delight, and a stuffed pig with piglets that velcroed to its nipples.
* * *
In early January, 2001, I was three months away from my 23rd birthday. Mounds of snow piled high against the sliding glass doors of my Dad’s house, the kitchen lit orange by the light from the Mission-style fixture hanging above our table. It was not the house where I grew up but still bordered Fontenelle Forest. I had just moved back to Nebraska after living in Oakland, California, with my girlfriends since graduating in May from Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. I had tried making it beyond the Midwest in California. But after six months working as the Bilingual Crisis Line Coordinator at a law center for abused women, I was burned out. I had asked too times, in Spanish and in English “What weapon did he use? Has he threatened your life before? Do you have an escape plan?”
I had not met a single man to like the whole time I was in California, and the longer I stayed, the more I realized that any guy I met there probably wouldn’t want to move back to Nebraska. Every time I called my dad for some support he would say, “What the hell are you doing? Why don’t you go to law school?” In spite of my annoyance at his unhelpfulness refrain, I gave up and came home. I’d sat and cried in the hammock chair on the little porch of our apartment, overlooking palm trees and downtown Oakland, long enough while my girlfriends got good advice and support from their California-based moms over the phone. I thought at least back in Nebraska I could try to make more peace with the loss of my mom.
I needed some anti-depressants and the fastest way to get them was to explain that my mom had committed suicide. My dad signed the paperwork, and the next thing I knew, I had my mom’s voice before she died, as transcribed by her psychiatrist, in my hands.
“Want to look at this together, Dad?” I asked.
Somewhat stooped at 71, my dad got up the courage to come sit at the table. He had never seen these records before.
The Authorization for Release of Confidential Information states that the purpose of this release as “Other: wife’s records for consideration in daughter’s case.”
My mom listed herself as self-employed, a beauty consultant, for Mary Kay Cosmetics. She was taking Mnocin, an anti-depressant before the series of new ones that are known to have really worked. I can remember row upon row of orange bottles in the cupboard over the toilet in the bathroom that adjoined my room to my parents’. I often looked at the box of tampons in there and wondered if she’d left them for when I would need them.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
liz is back
yoga, she says, is about accepting all of the possibilities within ourselves.
we worked on not responding from the ego today. not saying i.
everything that is going to happen, has already happened, she says. now we just watch it happen.
contrary to positive psychology, she says we're not supposed to have boundaries. we're supposed to be open to experiences and what they have to give to us.
we are constantly learning yoga.
we worked on not responding from the ego today. not saying i.
everything that is going to happen, has already happened, she says. now we just watch it happen.
contrary to positive psychology, she says we're not supposed to have boundaries. we're supposed to be open to experiences and what they have to give to us.
we are constantly learning yoga.
how much does doubt linger?
beneath the beautiful face, the contact, the connection
there is pain and doubt
which way does the doubt see
and does the doubt doubt me?
looking out from my own eyes
i wonder within
which parts are most me.
the confidence, the humor, the wit,
the smiles and laughter?
the one who was wholesome
but still wanting in pure devotion?
she wanted to be devoted to herself
and to be only in union
with what grew her.
the me who drives away crumpled
is deflated by your pain and doubt
realizes again that maybe,
however good anything may be,
there is no sure thing.
but i still want to believe
there can be a space of good,
stimulation, mutual growth,
and truth.
yet no union of two beings
is ultimately up to me.
there is pain and doubt
which way does the doubt see
and does the doubt doubt me?
looking out from my own eyes
i wonder within
which parts are most me.
the confidence, the humor, the wit,
the smiles and laughter?
the one who was wholesome
but still wanting in pure devotion?
she wanted to be devoted to herself
and to be only in union
with what grew her.
the me who drives away crumpled
is deflated by your pain and doubt
realizes again that maybe,
however good anything may be,
there is no sure thing.
but i still want to believe
there can be a space of good,
stimulation, mutual growth,
and truth.
yet no union of two beings
is ultimately up to me.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
seasons change, a free show
sitting in my car on the other side of the street from my apartment building, i looked up through the windshield and saw masses of plain old birds. to my eyes, they were too plain to even have a type. but they were birds. listening to classical music as i idled with hint of lime tostitos and seven-layer dip, i could see that the birds seemed to have a general idea of migration today, and some flew with the big dance number while others chose to idle for awhile, too. high altitude rest spots varied from the old telephone pole to a few trees just in the process of changing their colors.
if there was a plan for today, not everyone was in it. some birds were taking their time, and some were just flying. some were flying away.
if there was a plan for today, not everyone was in it. some birds were taking their time, and some were just flying. some were flying away.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
breaking up
breaking up is what happens when people shouldn't be together anymore. you know even the beatles broke up.
an annotation i wrote in october
Heather Hunter
Annotation
The Use of Metaphor to Ground Consciousness
In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “The Rattle of Wheels”
In Naomi Nye’s short essay “The Rattle of Wheels” in Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places, the narrator uses metaphor to both expand and ground the narrator’s consciousness as she undertakes the most primal and transformative human act: bringing new life into the world. The narrator describes the scene of the hospital delivery room while linking that scene through metaphor from herself to her new child to others in the maternity ward, the human lineage of mothers, and to the cosmos beyond.
This essay serves as a good example, for me, of the way in which metaphor can be used to link individual consciousness through the use of objects to the grander scope of life, to a collective and universal consciousness. By grounding her experience of childbirth in metaphor, Nye is able to universalize, memorialize, and contextualize the experience of adding one new life to the universe.
In the first paragraph, Nye uses imagery from the sea to create a sense of urgency and expansiveness to mirror the outpouring of childbirth and its effects on the changing and expanding consciousness of the mother. Nye likens the maternity ward to almost a Coast Guard emergency when she sounds the “rolling alert” of the rush of nurses down a maternity ward hallway toward the “islands” where expectant mothers lie in hospital beds. In this opening paragraph, Nye uses images harkening submarines and sea monsters for a woman’s body. The high hospital beds have “special buttons for raising, lowering”; the body is an “island on which the tailbone ached and the startled breasts grew and grew.” In a relief effort for the emergency, a rattling comes “as a boat coming to save us, the answer to our unshaped cries” (101). Through the metaphor of the sea, in the opening paragraph, the narrator’s consciousness reaches beyond the island of the hospital bed.
Next Nye moves from the mother’s body to the child and her earthly agreements. The child becomes a “compact swaddled bundle” which she must “negotiate.” It is the mother’s responsibility, a new duty, to negotiate a life-giving transaction. She must connect “rosebud lips” with “raw and blossoming nipple” to “make it hold.” Here Nye grounds the mother’s duty in the earthly metaphor of a negotiation while remaining metaphysical by asking about the relationships between the bodies. What will make this bond hold? She answers: “Something like electricity. Tapping into the source.” Using electricity as the metaphor of connection between mother and child, Nye universalizes and then deconstructs again asking “But who was the source? Was he? Was I?” Grounding the narrative once again, the narrator relates that she has been instructed to hold him “like a football” but does not find the metaphor of that earthly object helpful (101).
After establishing the cosmic nature of the experience, Nye moves on to metaphors of grounded preparation. She attends “a bath demonstration” overhears “anguishing over names.” But again she bursts into metaphor again when the objective label of boy or girl cannot capture what she deems “an Angel, a Miracle.” While embracing metaphor Nye rejects a reduction of life, of consciousness to the labels of “sex and weight” (102).
Nye finds more common terms for her baby inadequate: “petite” and “simply yellowish.” She sees her baby more transcendentally as in the hospital nursery she watches him “soaking in the glow,” and her husband continues the metaphor likening the baby’s “barely flickering an arm or leg” to “some beachcomber.” Nye refuses a reduction once again when she watches him “bask” in the “chamber of incubators” (102).
When a volunteer tries to commercialize the experience of childbirth to a post-rollercoaster picture display, trying to sell her a “portfolio of ugly First Day Photos,” Nye weeps. She needs to see her child and her experience as having a life beyond this first day being under the incubation light. She rejects the idea of taking home only “scrunched-up eyes and closed fists,” of potential of death, of “relics, ancient sad baby stories” poking “their fingers into fitful dreams.” Reconnecting with the outer world to reassure herself, the sky is “booming and blackening repeatedly” creating a metaphor of change and continuation lasting beyond her doubtful moments in a new life. This peculiar June has “endless rain, streets flooded” with not just one baby but “babies pressed to our side.” The weather in June becomes a metaphor for many lives that will change and continue (102).
The next metaphor of the human saga extends to the sad fate of others. When a stricken father collapses against a wall and blurts “My baby didn’t make it and my wife may not either,” the day changes, and so does the role of the nurses. Every woman a potential mother, Nye asks why the nurse did not “take him in her arms too?” (103).
Our potential as endless children, endless grievers, is expressed through the metaphor of the narrator buried in “swaths of clean linen, the stacked towels.” She has buried herself “in a closet, sobbing and sobbing.” This crossroads has propelled her again into larger metaphor, the tears of her eyes now the “abundant wellsprings, like the endless dripping of the stone cave in Syria where I’d prayed for this baby.” Nye creates the metaphor of the abundant potential of life when the craggy nun directs her to “drink, drink from the pool at the bottom, fill my bucket…” No matter the population, “…if a hundred people filled their buckets at once, the level would not go down.” The narrator drinks the water, which she uses as a metaphor to that has nourished her to this sacred moment where babies eyes are “haloed,” their empty hearts “hallowed” (103).
Reaching from the narrator back into the maternity ward she hears the “parade of rattling” far down the halls. The new lives of the babies have become “little bundled worlds on wheels each heading toward a different door.” The wheels rattle to “halts at bedsides” where there is the occasional yelp and cry, and then the baby’s individual consciousness and cry extends and “stitched all our rooms together” (104).
The narrator’s transcendent understanding is halted by her individual panic. She reduces the potential of her transcendent offspring through her sudden worry that he’d gone from “chilly to frozen.” Like a small boat, he could slip away while she was sleeping. Metaphorically back at sea, she pounds her call button “till the drawl flooded my speaker.” In her panic, her baby and the wheels converge. “The wheels are heading back to the nursery already and my baby never arrived!” (104).
The individual mother’s terror is likened to “the gap of centuries,” the “aching pit of longing.” Her terror of loss becomes the “lineage of mothers, bruised and troubled, echoing behind me . . . . rosaried Mexican mothers keeping vigil at Our Sacred Heart, chanting stroking Arab mothers, the mothers of Calcutta stoking dung fires before their tumbled cardboard shacks.” One mother’s pain becomes the ache of human survival everywhere.
Back at sea, the old questions return: “Would faith follow the fear?” The narrator sets us loose into the sea once more as “the intercom bellowed.” The vast turbulence of the sea is replaced by the metaphorically manageable “bottle” and “breast pump” (105). These items serve as containers of nourishment, lifeboats of simplicity and steady continuation.
And yet the metaphor of being adrift does not end with the solution to one day’s worry. The narrator then “tumbled into dreams” where “hugging the fatly anonymous hospital pillow” like a lifeboat, she dreamed of the lips of babies “that sucking pull” which pulls her both into her future, the baby’s future, and into the sea of the unknown. And yet, like a siren, the baby’s “fine-tuned whimper” pulls her back to earth. Despite the panic, her consciousness set adrift, there is the metaphor of the baby as a new lifeboat, a new wave to follow embodied in “unfolding fists around a finger.”
Nye’s final move is to use metaphor to create one last transcendent and yet mundane image. She is “dreaming the earth’s secret rattle as it turned in space on its ancient implacable hinge.” Transforming the commercial properties of a rattle into an item of metaphorically cosmic scope, Nye posits both a secret shape and secret sound for the earth. The earth’s “ancient implacable hinge” is still sounding and shaking in the hand of a baby, in the terror and agonizing longing of a mother, propelling us forward.
Through the use of the sea as a metaphor, Nye has set the reader adrift in the ocean. It is an ocean through which we have all come with no memory and to which some of us return as participants in its universal terror and reward. The lifeboats to the fearful consciousness of mothers and fathers in the maternity ward are nurses and babies. In the world Nye has created, incubators transcend their status as warming machines and become lighthouses, sun-like beacons where babies bask as beachcombers.
From one mothers’ consciousness to the lineage of human history, to its longings and its pitfalls, Nye has connected human beginnings through the rattles of wheels, charging us forward into unknown seas where the cries of babes connect us in our waking hours, where their lips suck, sigh, swallow, and pull us continually back to earth, where their fists continue to unfold around a finger. The sea, the fist, and the cry can all threaten to pull us under. Yet they also contain the promise of keeping us afloat amidst the dream of the earth’s rattle.
Annotation
The Use of Metaphor to Ground Consciousness
In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “The Rattle of Wheels”
In Naomi Nye’s short essay “The Rattle of Wheels” in Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places, the narrator uses metaphor to both expand and ground the narrator’s consciousness as she undertakes the most primal and transformative human act: bringing new life into the world. The narrator describes the scene of the hospital delivery room while linking that scene through metaphor from herself to her new child to others in the maternity ward, the human lineage of mothers, and to the cosmos beyond.
This essay serves as a good example, for me, of the way in which metaphor can be used to link individual consciousness through the use of objects to the grander scope of life, to a collective and universal consciousness. By grounding her experience of childbirth in metaphor, Nye is able to universalize, memorialize, and contextualize the experience of adding one new life to the universe.
In the first paragraph, Nye uses imagery from the sea to create a sense of urgency and expansiveness to mirror the outpouring of childbirth and its effects on the changing and expanding consciousness of the mother. Nye likens the maternity ward to almost a Coast Guard emergency when she sounds the “rolling alert” of the rush of nurses down a maternity ward hallway toward the “islands” where expectant mothers lie in hospital beds. In this opening paragraph, Nye uses images harkening submarines and sea monsters for a woman’s body. The high hospital beds have “special buttons for raising, lowering”; the body is an “island on which the tailbone ached and the startled breasts grew and grew.” In a relief effort for the emergency, a rattling comes “as a boat coming to save us, the answer to our unshaped cries” (101). Through the metaphor of the sea, in the opening paragraph, the narrator’s consciousness reaches beyond the island of the hospital bed.
Next Nye moves from the mother’s body to the child and her earthly agreements. The child becomes a “compact swaddled bundle” which she must “negotiate.” It is the mother’s responsibility, a new duty, to negotiate a life-giving transaction. She must connect “rosebud lips” with “raw and blossoming nipple” to “make it hold.” Here Nye grounds the mother’s duty in the earthly metaphor of a negotiation while remaining metaphysical by asking about the relationships between the bodies. What will make this bond hold? She answers: “Something like electricity. Tapping into the source.” Using electricity as the metaphor of connection between mother and child, Nye universalizes and then deconstructs again asking “But who was the source? Was he? Was I?” Grounding the narrative once again, the narrator relates that she has been instructed to hold him “like a football” but does not find the metaphor of that earthly object helpful (101).
After establishing the cosmic nature of the experience, Nye moves on to metaphors of grounded preparation. She attends “a bath demonstration” overhears “anguishing over names.” But again she bursts into metaphor again when the objective label of boy or girl cannot capture what she deems “an Angel, a Miracle.” While embracing metaphor Nye rejects a reduction of life, of consciousness to the labels of “sex and weight” (102).
Nye finds more common terms for her baby inadequate: “petite” and “simply yellowish.” She sees her baby more transcendentally as in the hospital nursery she watches him “soaking in the glow,” and her husband continues the metaphor likening the baby’s “barely flickering an arm or leg” to “some beachcomber.” Nye refuses a reduction once again when she watches him “bask” in the “chamber of incubators” (102).
When a volunteer tries to commercialize the experience of childbirth to a post-rollercoaster picture display, trying to sell her a “portfolio of ugly First Day Photos,” Nye weeps. She needs to see her child and her experience as having a life beyond this first day being under the incubation light. She rejects the idea of taking home only “scrunched-up eyes and closed fists,” of potential of death, of “relics, ancient sad baby stories” poking “their fingers into fitful dreams.” Reconnecting with the outer world to reassure herself, the sky is “booming and blackening repeatedly” creating a metaphor of change and continuation lasting beyond her doubtful moments in a new life. This peculiar June has “endless rain, streets flooded” with not just one baby but “babies pressed to our side.” The weather in June becomes a metaphor for many lives that will change and continue (102).
The next metaphor of the human saga extends to the sad fate of others. When a stricken father collapses against a wall and blurts “My baby didn’t make it and my wife may not either,” the day changes, and so does the role of the nurses. Every woman a potential mother, Nye asks why the nurse did not “take him in her arms too?” (103).
Our potential as endless children, endless grievers, is expressed through the metaphor of the narrator buried in “swaths of clean linen, the stacked towels.” She has buried herself “in a closet, sobbing and sobbing.” This crossroads has propelled her again into larger metaphor, the tears of her eyes now the “abundant wellsprings, like the endless dripping of the stone cave in Syria where I’d prayed for this baby.” Nye creates the metaphor of the abundant potential of life when the craggy nun directs her to “drink, drink from the pool at the bottom, fill my bucket…” No matter the population, “…if a hundred people filled their buckets at once, the level would not go down.” The narrator drinks the water, which she uses as a metaphor to that has nourished her to this sacred moment where babies eyes are “haloed,” their empty hearts “hallowed” (103).
Reaching from the narrator back into the maternity ward she hears the “parade of rattling” far down the halls. The new lives of the babies have become “little bundled worlds on wheels each heading toward a different door.” The wheels rattle to “halts at bedsides” where there is the occasional yelp and cry, and then the baby’s individual consciousness and cry extends and “stitched all our rooms together” (104).
The narrator’s transcendent understanding is halted by her individual panic. She reduces the potential of her transcendent offspring through her sudden worry that he’d gone from “chilly to frozen.” Like a small boat, he could slip away while she was sleeping. Metaphorically back at sea, she pounds her call button “till the drawl flooded my speaker.” In her panic, her baby and the wheels converge. “The wheels are heading back to the nursery already and my baby never arrived!” (104).
The individual mother’s terror is likened to “the gap of centuries,” the “aching pit of longing.” Her terror of loss becomes the “lineage of mothers, bruised and troubled, echoing behind me . . . . rosaried Mexican mothers keeping vigil at Our Sacred Heart, chanting stroking Arab mothers, the mothers of Calcutta stoking dung fires before their tumbled cardboard shacks.” One mother’s pain becomes the ache of human survival everywhere.
Back at sea, the old questions return: “Would faith follow the fear?” The narrator sets us loose into the sea once more as “the intercom bellowed.” The vast turbulence of the sea is replaced by the metaphorically manageable “bottle” and “breast pump” (105). These items serve as containers of nourishment, lifeboats of simplicity and steady continuation.
And yet the metaphor of being adrift does not end with the solution to one day’s worry. The narrator then “tumbled into dreams” where “hugging the fatly anonymous hospital pillow” like a lifeboat, she dreamed of the lips of babies “that sucking pull” which pulls her both into her future, the baby’s future, and into the sea of the unknown. And yet, like a siren, the baby’s “fine-tuned whimper” pulls her back to earth. Despite the panic, her consciousness set adrift, there is the metaphor of the baby as a new lifeboat, a new wave to follow embodied in “unfolding fists around a finger.”
Nye’s final move is to use metaphor to create one last transcendent and yet mundane image. She is “dreaming the earth’s secret rattle as it turned in space on its ancient implacable hinge.” Transforming the commercial properties of a rattle into an item of metaphorically cosmic scope, Nye posits both a secret shape and secret sound for the earth. The earth’s “ancient implacable hinge” is still sounding and shaking in the hand of a baby, in the terror and agonizing longing of a mother, propelling us forward.
Through the use of the sea as a metaphor, Nye has set the reader adrift in the ocean. It is an ocean through which we have all come with no memory and to which some of us return as participants in its universal terror and reward. The lifeboats to the fearful consciousness of mothers and fathers in the maternity ward are nurses and babies. In the world Nye has created, incubators transcend their status as warming machines and become lighthouses, sun-like beacons where babies bask as beachcombers.
From one mothers’ consciousness to the lineage of human history, to its longings and its pitfalls, Nye has connected human beginnings through the rattles of wheels, charging us forward into unknown seas where the cries of babes connect us in our waking hours, where their lips suck, sigh, swallow, and pull us continually back to earth, where their fists continue to unfold around a finger. The sea, the fist, and the cry can all threaten to pull us under. Yet they also contain the promise of keeping us afloat amidst the dream of the earth’s rattle.
what happened to october?
i will not dare to mention the four-letter word that did away with most of october but saved it in the end.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
yet another week has gone by
but at least i have some ideas...
-for one, i have this concept of marital depression that i want to write an essay about... here i am going to liken two partners to two TV channels... you are one channel, your partner is the other. your compatibility depends upon your ability to be "on the same page" or same channel, so to speak. because what happens in marriage is that in many ways, at least during their time together, people's lives are merged. and when they're apart, ideally they would be doing/thinking things that the other is interested in because often that's what they end up talking about.
so my idea is that with marital depression, you are being pulled in directions you don't want to be pulled in, almost like an internal conflict that could cause "depression," only in this case you have on control over the other person. you try to communicate, hope things can be resolved without screaming and shouting because then you're really in pain.
but there's also the pain of silence, of keeping quiet. imagine, for example, that you have some liberal leanings, but let's say your partner is fox news. when you married fox news, it was the only show it town. maybe you hadn't even developed your liberal leanings yet because you'd only been with your partner, and you'd only watched fox news. but then, for some reason--maybe you read an article, or you talked to some other people, you learned about liberal ideas. maybe you tried to ask your partner to change their format, but they couldn't. you tried to expose them to your influences, but they refused. and then, maybe just briefly you were channel surfing. you weren't intending to land on any other channels, but let's just say that you caught a glimpse of cnn or pbs. before, you didn't know they existed, and now you don't know what you would do without them. you go home, and it's fox, fox, fox praising, praising, praising sarah palin. you wish you could change the situation. you don't want screaming and yelling. you try what you can, and then finally you might just decide to get your own place so you can watch cnn or pbs. makes sense to me. so that's one idea.
the other idea is about how best to run a classroom. when i was teaching spanish, some days i felt really happy, and i thought the only other thing i'd rather do than this is make movies. i mean the great thing about teaching is that it is live. so that's kind of like movies only better (except of course if you were making them, and then you could actually show them to the people, maybe get an award because people watched and appreciated your best work, and maybe there would even be financial rewards. that would be some perks you don't necessarily get teaching). but anyways, as i need money and like working with people and the stuff i teach, i stay teaching instead of making movies right now, but i still feel that i deserve the respect of film-maker because while i don't have film-making experience i have other valuable experience, and anyways, you get the idea.
so the idea is that on my syllabus, course intro, course ethos, whatever, i call my classroom a film studio. i am the director (because i have to decide what our purpose is every day, or at least set the scene, and i do have student loans to pay for the experience that got me the position), and the students are the actors... sometimes the crew. they all have to take part. and they all have speaking roles. no one is necessarily the star, though sometimes people do have leading roles here and there. i don't want to have to fire anyone for not doing their job, as we all have to go home with good news at the end of the day, but of course there is no sleeping on the job, and you can't talk on-set with other people while we're in the midst of making a scene. this is live theatre, after all. if they come with the attitudes that they'll be engaged in my plans, we can have an amazing range of experiences. maybe if they're really good, we'll even get them on film. and if the students learn my ways, i'm all for teaching apprentices anything i know how to do, and i also welcome new ideas.
those are my main ideas for the day. to get a phd in creative writing, you can put together a book of essays. i plan to do that. i've been wanting to write a book or essay or something called "notes from a sub" (as a substitute teacher, not sub-human as some kids would love to pronounce)... so there is some gift in subbing... the different experiences i have in different places do become interesting should i choose to start recording them and shaping them in writing somehow... also, it just really expands my teaching/directorial/acting repertoire to be placed at random in so many scenes.
there was one more idea, but it's hiding, so we'll have to wait.
-for one, i have this concept of marital depression that i want to write an essay about... here i am going to liken two partners to two TV channels... you are one channel, your partner is the other. your compatibility depends upon your ability to be "on the same page" or same channel, so to speak. because what happens in marriage is that in many ways, at least during their time together, people's lives are merged. and when they're apart, ideally they would be doing/thinking things that the other is interested in because often that's what they end up talking about.
so my idea is that with marital depression, you are being pulled in directions you don't want to be pulled in, almost like an internal conflict that could cause "depression," only in this case you have on control over the other person. you try to communicate, hope things can be resolved without screaming and shouting because then you're really in pain.
but there's also the pain of silence, of keeping quiet. imagine, for example, that you have some liberal leanings, but let's say your partner is fox news. when you married fox news, it was the only show it town. maybe you hadn't even developed your liberal leanings yet because you'd only been with your partner, and you'd only watched fox news. but then, for some reason--maybe you read an article, or you talked to some other people, you learned about liberal ideas. maybe you tried to ask your partner to change their format, but they couldn't. you tried to expose them to your influences, but they refused. and then, maybe just briefly you were channel surfing. you weren't intending to land on any other channels, but let's just say that you caught a glimpse of cnn or pbs. before, you didn't know they existed, and now you don't know what you would do without them. you go home, and it's fox, fox, fox praising, praising, praising sarah palin. you wish you could change the situation. you don't want screaming and yelling. you try what you can, and then finally you might just decide to get your own place so you can watch cnn or pbs. makes sense to me. so that's one idea.
the other idea is about how best to run a classroom. when i was teaching spanish, some days i felt really happy, and i thought the only other thing i'd rather do than this is make movies. i mean the great thing about teaching is that it is live. so that's kind of like movies only better (except of course if you were making them, and then you could actually show them to the people, maybe get an award because people watched and appreciated your best work, and maybe there would even be financial rewards. that would be some perks you don't necessarily get teaching). but anyways, as i need money and like working with people and the stuff i teach, i stay teaching instead of making movies right now, but i still feel that i deserve the respect of film-maker because while i don't have film-making experience i have other valuable experience, and anyways, you get the idea.
so the idea is that on my syllabus, course intro, course ethos, whatever, i call my classroom a film studio. i am the director (because i have to decide what our purpose is every day, or at least set the scene, and i do have student loans to pay for the experience that got me the position), and the students are the actors... sometimes the crew. they all have to take part. and they all have speaking roles. no one is necessarily the star, though sometimes people do have leading roles here and there. i don't want to have to fire anyone for not doing their job, as we all have to go home with good news at the end of the day, but of course there is no sleeping on the job, and you can't talk on-set with other people while we're in the midst of making a scene. this is live theatre, after all. if they come with the attitudes that they'll be engaged in my plans, we can have an amazing range of experiences. maybe if they're really good, we'll even get them on film. and if the students learn my ways, i'm all for teaching apprentices anything i know how to do, and i also welcome new ideas.
those are my main ideas for the day. to get a phd in creative writing, you can put together a book of essays. i plan to do that. i've been wanting to write a book or essay or something called "notes from a sub" (as a substitute teacher, not sub-human as some kids would love to pronounce)... so there is some gift in subbing... the different experiences i have in different places do become interesting should i choose to start recording them and shaping them in writing somehow... also, it just really expands my teaching/directorial/acting repertoire to be placed at random in so many scenes.
there was one more idea, but it's hiding, so we'll have to wait.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)