SWF seeking man of her dreams

One of my colleagues posed a challenge to our department over the weekend: write a personal ad describing what you are looking for in an ideal relationship. She will be giving the same assignment to her creative writing students this week, and wanted to see what we would come up with. Here goes.

Single white female in her 20's seeks single male also in his 20's for long-term relationship. Dealbreakers first: No smoking (of any kind), must want kids (3, ideally, but 2 is negotiable), and must pursue an honest, equal relationship - no playing games. Must be smart, funny, handsome, and kind. Requests: Should push me out of my comfort zone but not mock me when I choose to stay in it. Sometimes Kraft Macaroni and Cheese really is where it's at. Should be an excellent and willing cook, though, or that's all we'll eat. Money is not a requirement, but ambition is, and you'll want to have a strategy in place for calming me down when mine overwhelms me. Should tell me I'm beautiful even when I'm disgustingly sick - and mean it. No playing games, remember? Should be willing to have fun, even at the expense of looking foolish, in any situation. For example, are you down with throwing bacon into a shopping cart ten feet away? Should come from a loving and supportive family, preferably one which fostered a healthy appreciation for the Muppets. Must be able to put up with my screaming at the television during sporting events, but joining in is not required. An appropriate understanding of personal space and alone time is helpful, but so is an understanding of the long, silent, supportive hug. Should be willing and able to squash bugs. Bottom line: must be willing to love, be loved, and show it every day.

Just for the record, no applicants need apply. Position filled. (Love you, A.)

A Change Will Do You Good

Dear New Resident of A10,

Congratulations! You’re probably very excited to start a new phase of your life, or to make a clean break, or perhaps simply to get the process of moving all your junk from one place to another over with. The good news is, you’re very lucky to be getting the apartment they assigned to you. I should know; it was mine for the last two years. There’s not really any bad news, but here are some helpful tips you should know.

-         Invest in accoutrements for your amazing new bathtub. It’s big, deep, and perfectly engineered for aquatic reading. I suggest a waterproof pillow and a good bubble bath mix.

-         You will absolutely need a new showerhead. The one that comes with the place will peel your skin off.

-         I think I got all the hairspray off the bathroom fixtures – all I know about the tenant before me is that she drove a red car, parked it too close to the garage walls, and must have had a bouffant to rival Marge Simpson that was hairsprayed within an inch of its life. If there’s any left, try a mix of shampoo and water on it.

-         The acoustics in there are perfect for making you sound like Adele, by the way. The stairs are good for that, too.

-         Speaking of sound, the bedroom only shares about 1/3 of a wall with any other apartment, so it’s very quiet. Enjoy that.

-         You should also enjoy the bedroom closet – I only hope that one day I can have another closet big enough that it has a window.

-         And speaking of windows, I hope you have budgeted for a big utility bill. The living room walls are almost entirely windows, so the insulation is horrible in there. Keep the blinds pulled as the sun goes down, but you'll still roast.

-         The view more than makes up for it. Especially when it storms.

-         The view is great from the balcony, too, but you’ll have to win it back from the birds. The babies should be gone now, so have the maintenance guy take the nest down and power wash the deck. Put up some wind chimes. They help a bit, but you’ll probably still find yourself cursing at the birds in the spring.

-         You’ll curse at the bugs in the entryway all year long. I recommend the heavy-duty spray that creates a bug barrier, but even that won’t eliminate Jiminy Cricket’s descendants. They rarely come upstairs, though.

-         If you don’t have one, get a man friend (or a manly lady friend - that's cool, too) who can curse at the birds and clean up the bugs for you. I didn’t have one when I signed the lease, but he came along soon and that’s why I moved out. Things might change a lot for you while you live here.

-         The garbage disposal smells a bit garlicky. Sorry, my fiancée does, too. Try running orange peels through it.

-         In the event that you should start a kitchen fire, don’t use the fire extinguisher if you can help it. Look carefully at the back left burner and you’ll understand why. Don’t make meatballs in a shallow pan, for starters.

-         Only turn the icemaker on when you really need ice. The noises it makes will scare the crap out of you when you’re home alone. Just keep enough for a drink by the pool, which is awesome.

-         If you get any of my mail, just bring it out to the pool with you. I’ll be the one with the book and the big drink. See you there.

Silly poem is silly

In American Lit 2 yesterday, we were reading Imagist poems to kick off our Modernism unit. While our textbook can be the bane of my existence at times (I can't wait until I have time and energy again to go out on my own and supplement that sucker!), it does have a fun little selection from Des Imagistes. The kids enjoyed the short and sweet (and accessible!) images of poems like "In a Station of the Metro" and "Heat," and they got a good laugh out of my personal favorite, "This is Just to Say." One class finished a bit earlier than the others (that will happen when there's only ten enrolled and six who show up regularly), so I had them try to write their own "non-apology apology poems." Here is mine, lovingly dedicated to A. :)


This is just to say

The computer froze
While you were out
I'm sorry
I thought I was fixing it
But it deleted all your games

Silly thing

-February 7, 2012

Resolved

As discussed in previous posts (re: Yoga class), I tend to require a bit of external motivation when it comes to establishing habits and meeting goals. This still surprises me, too, as it doesn't fit with the strong-willed, stubborn, goal-oriented persona I generally don (and in many ways, genuinely so), but I suppose you can only ask so much of a person who still only gets out of bed if/when other people expect her to (Although, I blame that entirely on my alter-ego, "Sleep Me," who values sleep over all things, including other vital bodily needs.).

Anyway. If I'm going to consider myself to be serious about this English Teacher thing, and I usually do, then I need to get much more serious about the amount of reading I'm doing (or in my opinion, not doing). Cue: external motivation, however artificial, via blog. As I did over summer break with a fair amount of success, I will list the major works I finish here as I finish them. I am also going to attempt to match my summer pace, so I am setting a goal of 50 books in 2012. To encourage progress, I will count books I read for work, even if I have read them before, and I will count books started but unfinished before the 1st of the year. To add novelty and a bit of anecdotal research for our iPad project at work, I will note which books are read via ebook.

If I am to have any modicum of success in this venture, I have to start setting aside time for it. This is where the true challenge and the true resolution lies. It's far too easy to choose passive forms of entertainment and lay zombie-like on the futon in front of Top Gear marathons or scroll through miles of images every night on Pinterest, but by resolving to read more, I am resolving to be a more active participant in my 2012. At least until the Mayan Zombocalypse starts, when they'll have to pry a book out of my cold, undead hands.

1. My Ántonia - Willa Cather (I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It was also fun and easy to teach, which surprised me, too.)
2. The Soothing Soak - ed. Megan Worman (This book is waterproof! So cool! And yes, read entirely in the bathtub. A few interesting pieces and some classic poems, but also a lot of fluff.)
3. Iliad - Homer, trans. Stanley Lombardo
4. Romeo & Juliet - William Shakespeare
5. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Odyssey - Homer, trans. Stanley Lombardo
7. Sloppy Seconds - Tucker Max (Yes. I know. But I needed something completely inane and mind-numbing and it was free to download to my iPhone, which I read it on.)
8. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
9. La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language - Dianne Hales
10. Aeneid - Virgil, trans. Stanley Lombardo *read as pdf on iBooks
11. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling
12. A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry
13. Inferno - Dante Alighieri, trans. John Ciardi
14. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides (A. Ma. Zing. Don't be surprised if his other works appear here soon.)
15. Fifty Shades of Grey - E. L. James (Don't judge me, monkey.)
16. Running With Scissors - Augusten Burroughs
17. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
18. The Pearl - John Steinbeck
19. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
20. Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
21. Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell
22. Bossypants - Tina Fey *listened to on audiobook - very funny that way
23. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - David Sedaris
24. The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant - Dan Savage
25. Girl From Mars - Tamara Bach
26. The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks
27. The Crucible - Arthur Miller
28. The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides (less awesome than Middlesex, by far)
29. The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
30. How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You - Matthew Ingram, aka The Oatmeal
31. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
32. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
33. The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards
34. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse, trans. Susan Bernofsky
35. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain *read on my iPad for the second time

Already waiting for May

I didn't even know the Poem-a-Day topic today was "waiting," but as the rain came pouring down, this came pouring out and well, turns out it fits. So here it is. It's rough due to lack of time spent and it reveals a weakness for alliteration, and please be careful not to trip over the chunks of rust that were knocked off, but here's to waiting through one last winter alone.

rain crashes on screen windows

audibly foreshadowing the ice to come

while flashes of friction

signal summer’s last desperate gasp

wintry air seeps straight through both

rented walls and pale skin like paper

and I begin to wage war on the cold

swathed in scarf and blanket

worn slippers shuffle and

guard against glinting floor tiles

to make a microwave earn its keep

but no amount of swirling soup and cocoa

no vanilla flickers of candlelight

no artificial source of heat can warm

the space beside me as the wind howls

east down the highway corridor

which separates as easily as it connects

November 7, 2011

Yoga + Poetry = Yogetry?

15 years of dance classes in my (relative) youth may not have provided me with any kind of lasting coordination or grace, but they instilled in me a need for my exercise to be scheduled. Despite the fact that I can see the apartment complex workout room from my couch and there is a TV in there that can show me Modern Family just as easily as mine can, I can never motivate myself to work out unless I know someone is expecting me to show up (even if they're really not).

So, I bought myself a Groupon for Yoga classes (75% off!) at a studio less than three minutes from my apartment and convinced myself I could carve out the time to throw on stretchy pants and attend the 10 classes by the end of the semester. Tonight, I went to the first one.

Tonight's class was a combination of Yoga and creative writing, and although I was skeptical (possibly rightly so) about the quality of both the writing and the Yoga I was about to do, it was a peaceful way to spend an afternoon and I got the teeniest bit of writing out of it.

After working (and wobbling) through Warrior poses, we stopped to read William Stafford's "Being A Person" and write whatever came to mind. Unsurprisingly, even in the barefoot earth mother atmosphere of the Yoga studio, work was still on my mind when I read the line, "suddenly this dream you are having matches Everyone's dream," and the result adds a bit of Emily Dickinson and a lot of my current stress level to Stafford's earthy nature scene. It's completely scattered and unedited, but it entertained my fellow barefoot earth mothers, and that's got to be worth something.

Matching Everyone's dream

Everyone thinks they know
how to teach; Everyone
went to school, so
Everyone is clearly an expert.

Everyone has an expectation
of finding Everyone's dream teacher -
well, good morning, Everyone,
it's time to wake up.

This isn't just Someone's job -
it's everyone's job.
Everyone must also help themselves.
Our dreams can't match if I get no sleep.

October 5, 2011

Requited

I can’t get it through my head that someone loves me. Actually loves me. In a happier-when-you’re-around, reach-for-you-in-my-sleep, sweep-the-nasty-bugs-out-of-your-entryway-for-you-without-complaining kind of way, and he shows me and tells me every day. This blows my mind.

My name literally means “loved one,” or “lovable,” so in theory this should be a frequent pattern, easy to understand, but over a decade of serial unrequited and/or poorly timed loves has me classically conditioned to believe that there is absolutely no way someone could return my feelings for them – especially if those feelings are so intense as to be overwhelming and incomprehensible.

So I’ll try to write about it and hopefully it won’t be overwhelming or incomprehensible. ;)



the mirage of waving white satin
and a diamond sparkling in the sunlight
was always an oasis only accessible for other girls;
those far less thirsty and desperate than this weary traveler

sent down the wrong road too many times
by those who may have meant well
but how can those who are lost give directions?
those too clumsy and careless to realize the damage they’ve done?

little did I know that one particularly bad turn
would divert me down your long, lemniscate road
and now that you’ve caught up
all passersby sink into the sand

September 6, 2011