and the walls became the world all around.

Tonight the prof of my cake class (i.e. Children's Lit, an undergrad survey course) discussed Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and it brought back memories of reading this book while teaching for the IRD last summer. One of the best moments of pure-joy teaching was when I had 20 first graders holding up their wild thing masks and "rumpusing," roaring their terrible roars and showing their terrible claws. Almost ten years ago, I remember a tiny little blond girl I waitressed with whose petite little back was covered with huge tattoos of the wild things.


280 undergraduates amuse themselves during Children's Lit

I worked on a paper while taking notes, my ears perking up when she mentioned WTWTA. She distinguished it as a prime example of good children's literature, that it met through the story and the illustrations the needs of children in an enjoyable way:

Needs:
- need for security
- need to love and be loved
- need to belong and be accepted
- need to achieve and be confident in what we do
- need to escape
- need for intelligence
- need for beauty and order

Clearly, these needs don't diminish upon exiting childhood.

Go ahead. Get a popsicle and watch:


Curious as to who Sendak was and what context he wrote this book in, I found this:

"With the publication of Where the Wild Things Are in 1963, Sendak felt that he had ended his apprenticeship. His childhood experiences, years of illustrations for other authors' books, and psychoanalysis came together in the fantasies of Max, the boy in the story who is sent to bed without his supper, and the monsters he encounters in the world of the wild things. The story is rooted in the very real fears that children have of being left alone or not cared for by their parents. Many critics and child psychologists, such as Bruno Bettelheim, felt that the book was too scary for sensitive children. Sendak was vindicated when the book won the Caldecott Medal in 1964. In his acceptance speech, he said, "… from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things."

Just as Sendak's life appeared to finally be on track, disaster struck. In 1967, he learned that his mother had developed cancer, he suffered a major coronary attack, and his beloved dog Jenny died. In spite of his troubles, he completed In the Night Kitchen in 1972. This book generated more controversy because he showed a boy in full frontal nudity. Librarians drew diapers over the child. "It's as if my book contains secret information that kids would be better off not knowing. This whole idea, of course, is ridiculous." Sendak moved to Ridgefields, Connecticut, in 1972. There he worked ten-hour days on other authors' books as well as his own. Outside Over There, which he considers one of his more significant books, was written during this period."

Then I was thinking, didn't I hear something about Spike Jonze making a movie out of this? More searching:

My doubts are balanced by the fact that Paul Dano is in it. We'll see.

Seeing with Sylvia

You could say I had a soul sandwich today. I woke up early this morning and half-asleepedly accepted a subbing job at the middle school I used to teach at, pre-graduate school. Then I tried to cancel, realize this would mean I couldn’t sleep and goof off all day, but it was too late. Bah. I need the money anyway, I told myself as I drank my orange juice. Gladys Knight sang Midnight Train to Georgia and Stevie Wonder sang As on Sirius 53--Soultown on the way to school. That seemed to be a good sign.

The morning was uneventful. Benchmark testing. Make kids sit for 4 hours and not talk while they do math. Fucking torture. At lunch I went home, slapped together a sandwich, and sat down to watch Montel. He had Sylvia Brown as a guest today, a gravelly-voiced, psychic toad with bleach blond hair, who looked either bored out of her mind or stoned out of her gourd. I don’t say that in a mean way. Just how she looked. If you don’t know, Sylvia Brown is an internationally known psychic and fraud. I began keeping a tally of her responses to questions from one wavering, wondering, teary guest after another about their recently departed friends and family members.










To add that special Montel spice, there was even a voicemail from beyond the grave and a photograph featuring a translucent figure for old Sylvia to decipher. Other inquiries included “who should I marry?” uttered by a normal-enough-looking young woman. I waited for Sylvia to tell her, “No one, if you go asking questions like that to psychics on lame daytime TV shows,” but instead she paused ever so slightly, then said, “Anthony.” Although it was clear she didn’t know any Anthonys, the lady sat down, satisfied. The frustration of keeping silence for the last four hours slipping away, I marveled at how she lobbed vague, ambiguous answers up to the serious and neurotic questions being asked. Was that my dead husband who left that voicemail? Yes. Are my dead parents disappointed in me? No. What should I do with my life? Medicine. What college should I go do? It doesn’t really matter, you’ll do well wherever. Am I going to have any more children? A boy. Is my dead mother-in-law watching over my child? Yes. Sylvia was on a goddamn roll, nonchalantly discussing the why’s and how’s of the afterlife, the difference between ghosts and spirits, and the difficulty of crossing over. It was like she had, floating somewhere above her head and whispering in her ear, every dead person related to an audience member, like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. There wasn’t even an interested hum when a Mexican lady stood up and said her son had been killed 2 weeks ago and she didn’t know who murdered him. Sylvia said he had been out of his mind when it happened and for Mom to not worry about it. They lapped up each answer, nodding and wiping away tears as if some real answers had been given. Even when Sylvia interrupted a grieving widow to ask abruptly, “Who’s Reba?” (McIntyre? I thought), who stared blankly in response, no one questioned that she was on the up-and-up. Insecurity must be stronger than common sense, I guess—the need to know must be satisfied, even if it’s with trite, pithy pronouncements that could apply to anybody.

The devil you say? See you yourself:


I’m not saying I don’t believe in “that stuff,” I think it’s sort of fascinating—the unanswered questions about life and death, the questions that are unanswerable in the here and now. I read my horoscope on occasion. I don’t know how people know the things they know sometimes. One weekend, I asked David what time we were leaving for the beach, although he hadn’t said anything yet about the plan for some friends to go to the coast. I swear sometimes I feel it when my phone is about to ring, it feels like a little whoosh of energy about two seconds before someone calls. I don’t know what that means.

They call people like Sylvia “seers,” and I don’t mean to disrespect them—seers were common in many cultures and eras and only recently have had to compete with science and the age of reason. I’m sure some of them aren’t even frauds. But here’s what threw me for a loop: returning to school, the benchmark testing was over and I was to read The Lightning Thief with the class (who weren’t exactly calm after hours of testing). See for yourself:

(from Chapter 19)
Imagine the largest concert crowd you’ve ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans.

Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beachball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has just happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.

Annabeth, Grover, and I tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghosts. I couldn’t help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. They will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can’t understand them, they frown and move away.

The dead aren’t scary. They’re just sad.

We crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:

JUDGEMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!

"you can hurt a ho with a belt...they like that shit."

I am hungover. No real mental or aesthetic gems in this post. Just an ode to Austin. I'll most likely be leaving within the year, and these experiences make me wonder why.

Mark decided spur of the moment-like to come visit. He told me (drunk) on Friday night to set my alarm for 5:30am, so I could call him and wake him up and he could get on the road and be here earlyish. I too have made plans like that, and just like mine, they got delayed. Excited, I called at the requested time. No answer. I called later, around 7, and sleepy boy mumbled, "Ijesneedalilmoresleep." The ETA changed from noonish to four thirty.

We ate at Hoover's, his favorite place, feasted on catfish, mashed potatos, jerk chicken, cream spinach, macaroni and cheese...damn. Then we met up with another Marc and a few friends at Lala's, the land of perpetual Christmas on Burnet. There I learned that in addition to never shooting tequila again (the one New Year's resolution I maintain year after year), I may have to swear off whiskey. Stories were shared, jokes were told, Al Green was played on the juke box, and we racked up an impressive tab. After that, we got the idea to rent a movie, so we stumbled into Blockbuster, where I sorta yelled, "YA'LL GOT POOTIE TANG?" Happily, they did.



(I'm leaving out the X-rated part of the evening, but I will say that everything has fallen off my bathroom shelf.)

This morning we suffered through headaches screaming for Excedrin and tried to pretend Mark didn't have to go back to Lubbock so soon. We drove for about a half hour, trying to decide where to eat lunch while I choked back upchuck. Mark didn't help, making fake puke noises, which made me laugh, hit his arm and weakly cry "stop it!" unconvincingly. My dehydrated body was fragile--it wasn't long til I was cry-laughing, a state Mark and I often put each other into. I love that.

He left a few hours ago, and I went back to sleep. My sheets still smell like him. Unfortunately, so does my bathroom.

That is all. For now.

mush

Around deadtime (3am) last night, I had a horrible nightmare in which I was dying, the why and how of which I don't even want to go into. I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do, they are terribly lucid and powerful. The thing is, I was whimpering in my sleep as my horrible death went on and on until Mark woke me up. Even then, I was crying and shaking--tears come to my eyes even now remembering it. Not to be overly mushy, but it was only when he held me tight that I could stop crying and fall asleep again. He was my hero and my comfort, and I'm incredibly glad that he's in my life.

I take a lot of shit for being cynical, especially when it comes to romance, but it's not that I'm stoic or unemotional. Quite the opposite, in fact--I'm all pudding inside my hard candy shell. To prove it, I've put together some of my favorite heart-touching moments. This is by no means an exhaustive list, the order means nothing, and I'm sure there are many more romantic moments captured in film and literature, these are just the ones that came to mind.

1) Little Women--at the end, Professor Baehr comes back to give Jo the book she wrote and he published, and, thinking she had married, leaves in the rain, heartbroken. Jo runs after him and explains that it's her sister that had married and she is single. He says he has nothing to offer her, being poor, that his hands were empty. She clasps his hands in hers and says "they're not empty anymore."

2) Shrek 2--Shrek is afraid Fiona really wants the handsome prince charming, so he takes a love potion to become handsome and not an ogre, although he loves his ogre life. She has the opportunity to become and stay her beautiful human self, along with a human Shrek, but denies it, choosing instead to be herself and love him for the ogre he is.

3) Singles--"I was just nowhere near your neighborhood."

4) Virgin Suicides--High school heartthrob Trip Fontaine falls in love with Lux and sits next to her during a school assembly about hurricanes. Their hands inch closer together as the film drones on about warm and cold air masses colliding. You can feel your high-school heart beating the way it did that first time you held hands with someone when you were 14. Just when they are about to make actual contact, someone in the auditorium rips ass and the moment is shattered by embarrassment. Trip tells Lux he's going to take her out despite her strict parents, and before leaving leans over and whispers in her ear, "you're a stone fox."

5)
Some people hate a Shakespearean remake, especially starring the likes of Ethan Hawke. I think if you truly "get it," you appreciate this version--Hamlet's use of video-tape and pictures nicely reflect the applicability of Hamlet's betrayal, confusion, grief, love, hesitation, etc in the 20th century. If I could play any part of any play ever written, I'd be Ophelia, hands down.

6) Wuthering Heights has an amazing collection of heart-grabbing lines. I truly believe only a woman could capture the real power of love this way, not that men don't love too--it just would've been different if a man had written it.

"If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a whole lifetime, he couldn't love you as much as I do in a single day."

"I want to crawl to her feet, whimper to be forgiven, for loving her, for needing her more than my own life, for belonging to her more than my own soul."

"...he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

"Be with me always. Take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you."

7) Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge. Something about Ewan MacGregor's voice. Plus this incorporates so many fantastic 80's songs, it boggles the mind. Go ahead--sing along.

in absentia

I've never been emo or goth, but I have always had what I consider to be a healthy fascination with death. I'm hooked on Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State. It worries my mom. I won't touch a ouiji board, but the question of what happens to us, really, when we die, and even what dying itself is, is very interesting to me. Religion seems wholely based on living so that you don't go to hell. A great uncle of mine died at age 16 because of a freak and mysterious hunting accident, and said "it's so beautiful," looking around before he breathed his last. As I get older, it becomes clearer that birth and death are the truly uncontrollable things we go through--maybe that's why they are so strange. I read somewhere that the body is 3/4ths of an ounce lighter upon death--soulweight. The only thing that really distinguishes death from life, an element totally immeasurable and inescapable.

This was all weighing heavily on my mind when I took a walk through the cemetery (morbid? maybe), bored out of my skull after being home for nearly a week. The twilight of 4:30 and the monstrous hill where our Fulton dead rest, some stones hundreds of years old, became beautiful to me. I read the inscriptions, the only stories left--the oldest stones didn't even have names, just "mother," "father." The important things, birth date and departure date. My cousin had a baby Christmas day. I think about that girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash. I think about the hundreds and thousands of people killed daily, mere blips in the newspaper, dead because of the soullessness of others. I don't necessarily see death as something to be afraid of--I think reincarnation...yeah, maybe reincarnation makes sense.

Sorry to be so heavy. Still figuring this one out.

Pictures. The one is my uncle's grave, born and dead on the same day.

In School Suspension of disbelief

(the pictures are from Kate Eric's collection, Stories for Bad Children)

As luck would have it, I got me a gig. It seems my willingness to take on the most bizarre and inhumane of jobs (refrigerator factory worker, nuclear power plant janitor, waitress, gas station cashier, middle school teacher) and my networking skills have paid off. Instead of sleeping too late and goofing around for the next two weeks, I'll be an ISS monitor at a middle school down the street, where a friend is an AP. Cush, I thought--read a book and babysit the bad kids. I kinda like the bad kids, as frustrating as they can be. Thank God, cause I have $17 in my checking account.

Yesterday a boy said angrily, "you're a bad teacher" when I wouldn't let him turn in half-done homework. My pulse quickened and I replied quickly, "yeah, well, I hear you're not the greatest student." The other kids laughed, and I felt ashamed. I had shamed him, reinforced the label put on him for years. I don't even know these kids, I'm a sub, there's no established rapport to fall back on in order to excuse sarcasm. These are kids who are here for getting busted with pot, who had been in fights or threatened to kill their teachers. They swear, a lot, and talk about hip-hop, sex, and gangs. I'm no angel, but I worry about them. A lot of them have learning disabilities, and have learned to hide their embarrassment behind a billy badass attitude. I'd be an asshole to assume I knew them, knew what they were all about, what their parents are like, their home, their experiences, their history.

The ISS routine in place was to copy down definitions of 50 words, such as "integrity" and "honor," then do homework. (If you knew why I'm a long-term sub, i.e. where the old guy went, you'd find that very ironic, but mum's the word. Watch the news.) Screw that noise. Determined they would learn something before they continued down the path to the ALC and eventually TYC, I decided to promise them extra credit in Language Arts if they would write about what they wanted to be when they grew up, or about who they look up to. I thought if I could make them think about things for themselves, not for their peers or their pride, wisom would somehow ensue. So far this week no one has taken me up on it. I procured books from the library, thinking a good read would make their day of sitting silently go faster. This was difficult, as the library would only give me the throwaway books, concerned the kids might rip up good books. I offered them the option of drawing or reading the newspaper, in addition to their classwork. No sleeping allowed. As the AP described, they were not supposed to have a good time in ISS--they were not supposed to want to come back again. That means I have to be bad cop all the time.I'm not really a confrontational person by nature--I don't go looking to start shit but I don't take it either. Shit, that is. And when you are the one in charge of making 8-10 juvenile delinquents who have not been taught manners, don't know how to play nice with others, and wouldn't read a book for free food and video games, you are doomed to be unpopular. I can deal, I thought. I've got a good teacher voice. I can be intimidating, stretched out to my full 5'11''. I can verbally demolish these kids, whose best burn is "shut up," or "you're gay." After a day or two though, I realized my approach must change.

I forced a softness into my voice, made myself think of them as just emotionally-confused and immature kids who are trying to find themselves, and offered help upon help when what I really wanted to give them was a sharp kick to the side of the head. Graduate school and ivory tower-type jobs make education seem easily student-centered. In real life, some students don't want your help, don't want to write, don't want to read, don't want to be here. I don't blame them, hearing the way some teachers (including myself at times) talk to them, pulling power plays over things like gum, talking, whatever. They're kids, they will break rules, they will push buttons. The bottom line is, it does matter what you say and how you say it. I'll be damned if I turn out like Principal Vernon:


I realize I'm not a savior or a martyr. I can't turn a kid around in a few days of ISS. I'll be disappointed a lot. It's a tough job that someone's gotta do, someone that isn't going to make things worse. So I focus on small victories. Larissa will be with me until Christmas. I'm not sure exactly what she did, but it must have been pretty bad. She is 14 but could pass for 26, her clothes too revealing for 8th grade, her makeup caked on. She worked hard all day but around 2pm she got very grumpy with me and refused to do anything else. After engaging in a brief and pointless power struggle, I dared her to read a book. It's 3:14, and she's still reading it. Danielle is also a frequent flyer, with the worst mouth I've seen in a while. Despite the fact that she has dropped the F bomb 6 times and hit another kid in the head, she has worked on her assignment all day, talking to herself, writing, reading. Kenny has brought his science worksheets up to me four times, each time returning poutily to his desk after I point out that he has not answered all the questions. This last time, he kicked a chair and threw down his book as I explained how in real life, you can't half-ass things, that you see them through to the end like a man. Only nicer. He told me to shut up, defeated and frustrated. Several zingers bubbled up in my mouth, but I said nothing. A few minutes later when he looked at me, I mimicked his big lower lip, and after a few seconds' standoff, he cracked a smile. The two sixth grade girls, imprisoned for fighting (each other), admitted they didn't know what the fight was really about, just that some other kids had said one was badmouthing the other.

What doesn't bend, breaks. TJ is sleeping at the corner desk, but oh well. I just caught Larissa's eye as she glanced up from her book. She smiled back at me, and kept reading.

This isn't English

Fecho reiterates much of what we've read from Rosenblatt, Freire, Dewey, Delpit, and other educational theorists and researchers in an eloquent way. He uses narratives and metaphors and spends a while describing what his book is not. I appreciate his point that there's too much emphasis on "getting through" the school days instead of wrestling out-of-syncness in the classroom, but it wasn't until the narrative of the guitar lessons that I felt connected to Fecho. His thoughts on inquiry-based teaching, theory and practice, strong collaboration and learning with peers definitely resonated with me, and I made notes and everything, but when he described the futility of his childhood dream of being a guitar hero I saw his direct route to learning land. I took piano lessons for years, dutifully practicing chords and drills and performing in several recitals with perfectly executed concertos and opuses, but not with the intensity and passion I heard coming from the piano when my mom played it. The closest I came to that was when I sat playing a few songs that captured me--Canon in D, Moonlight Sonata, Water Music, Ave Maria, and Prelude No. 4 in E minor Opus 28. Those had meaning.