Dustin and Neesha Save the World

Steam for a Cure

2011-03-08T14:51:00.000-06:00

The three of us huddled into the steaming bathroom, shower running behind the ducky curtain. Ten minutes in a steamy room is supposed to help clear up Avonlie's congestion. She doesn't mind. She loves the bathroom because she thinks it means she's about to have her bath: her favorite part of the day. I peer into the empty tub and look down at the white bottom, which was mostly grey and scummy when we first moved in. The can of Ajax and some "green" cleaning product stand beside the tub on the tiled floor.

"Have you noticed how I've brushed the dirt out of the tub?" I ask Dustin, looking back to him sitting on the toilet seat, baby asleep in his arms.
"Have you noticed how I brushed the dirt off my shoulder?" He responds.

It's conversations like this that make up our days. Thank God for our ridiculous dialogue. If not for it, we'd be waxing scholarship all the time! You know, cus that's what two Ph.D. candidates/ABDs do all the time! ;)

Avonlie has a Cold

2011-03-07T16:04:00.001-06:00

I have a sick baby. I've never had one of these before so it's more than the awful it would, I'm guessing, ordinarily be. It's beyond awful...for me, not so much for Avonlie.

All winter long, we have squirreled this child away, making every effort possible to keep her from the cold, from the sickness that we know is lurking outside of our door throughout this season and we did a pretty good job of doing it. But it's not possible to keep her well forever and as of Friday, the day after her 9 week birthday, Avonlie has been enduring her first ever cold.

It started with a rattling in her throat, a little coughing here and there and everyone telling me that she was fine. While I'll admit, in the very beginning of these last nine weeks I worried a lot..."Why is she sneezing? Is it normal for her to be sleeping all the time? Is she going to get sick now that she has been running errands in the car all day long...etc.," I've definitely chilled out. I no longer stay awake all night long despite her sleeping through it, just to make sure she's breathing. When she lets out a pronounced "Waaah" I pretty much know what it is she wants and can hook her up with whatever it is. But when I heard the rattling of phlegm in her throat on Friday and the coughing that it caused, I knew she was on her way to getting sick.

And I was right. Avonlie has a cold.

By Friday early evening, Dustin conceded he, too, believed she was coming down with something. My parents, on the phone in New York, doubted it, still. My negative answer to the question "Does she have a temp?" seemed to them as if it should prove that, therefore, she was not "sick." But the rattling not only persisted, it grew stronger. Come Saturday, Dustin and I were suctioning out her nose with the automatic, press-button aspirator every hour. By Saturday night, it was more like twice every hour. I put out a subtle cry for help on Facebook saying that I hoped the coughing, sneezing and congestion didn't amount to more than a mild cold and my subtle hints and description of her symptoms brought on the much-welcomed advice from all the mothers that had come before me. The consensus? Vicks on her feet and a cool mist humidifier.

Dustin ran out for the necessities.

While D ran out for supplies, I checked her symptoms on every hit google presented. I searched "Vicks on baby feet," "2-month old baby with cough" and so on. The most helpful site was my own pediatrician's which gave symptoms and actions they called for, including "When to go to the ER," "When to call your doctor" and "When to call your doctor during normal office hours," among other options. This appeased me the most because, according to the website, we were nowhere near needing to go to the ER or call our doctor...ever. I feared the ER most thanks to the google hits that presented reader comments that read: "I took my infant to the ER and they had to give him a needle and there was SO MUCH BLOOD!!! SO MUCH! I never SAW SO MUCH BLOOD!" and "You'd never believe how much blood an infant can lose until your baby has to have a needle." "Oh. My. God." I thought, looking at Avonlie asleep on the bed next to me, surrounded by the mucus-filled aspirator, jumbo bottle of saline and digital ear thermometer. Panic rose inside of me as I imagined our trip to the ER. I grabbed my phone, texted: 'HURRY HOME WITH THE GOODS! NOW!!!' to Dustin, as if we would somehow be able to avoid a trip to the ER where they would inevitably drain our infant of all of her blood if he would just get home with the Vicks and humidifier in the next twenty seconds. Before I hit "send," I heard it. The distinct, unmistakable sound of my daughter laughing in her sleep. There, beside me, Av's little head swayed back and forth, her mouth wide open, exposing her smiling gums. Her cheeks spread wide, making room for the smile on her face. Eyes closed, belly shaking with joy, she slept: temperature free, a little congested, but happy.

Avonlie, sick, but smiling and laughing her way through it.

I deleted the crazed message and Dustin eventually came home. The humidifier was a bust, but the Vicks seemed to help. I was up all night, though Avonlie slept with a bit of restlessness from congestion, but soundly otherwise, straight through, only waking when her paranoid mother woke her up to suction out her nose or force feed her so she'd remain hydrated. It was like the first two weeks of her life all over again. Just when I was starting to calm down and settle into this first-time mother thing like an old pro, she launches me, unwittingly, back into paranoid, nervous wreck mode. I express this sentiment to my mother who is in New York with my doctor father (of course they're away when my baby gets sick and I whine that it's the time when "I need them most!"). I can hear her smile on the other end of the phone as she says, "Aaah, daughter. Welcome to motherhood!"

What's in a Name and The Art of Burping

2011-02-10T14:59:00.001-06:00

What's in a Name?

Honing in on 24 hours after I delivered, Dustin and I finally decided on a name. It's not that we didn't come prepared with a name or even a few of them, it's just that none of them seemed to fit our daughter perfectly. They either seemed too small or too weak to hold up to such a large and strong, yet delicate-featured little baby. We each made lists and poured over names, baby books, favorite characters, authors, words. We threw out possibilities like "Serendipity" and "Osprey" and "Quinn," palindromes like "Hannah" and "Ava," which we'd all but decided upon until we saw our little bundle. The only thing we knew for certain was the middle names, they were decided upon months earlier, but the first name was a whole different story. "Maya" would be her first middle name, named for my sister who passed away in infancy and "Victoria" would be her second middle name, named for her grandmothers--one who is named Victoria and the other whose confirmation name is the same.

Eventually, we made lists separately, then together, then separately again. Then we narrowed our lists and rated one another's lists saying things like: "Natalie reminds me of the girl who disappeared in Aruba. I can't think of anything but her when I hear it and I don't want to brand our daughter with that name" or "That name doesn't have enough syllables to sound aesthetically pleasing with our last name..." until we finally settled on Avonlie. Of course, then there was the issue of spelling her name.

Avonlea

Avonleigh

Avonley

Avonlee

Avonly

Avonlie

We counted letters, considered pronunciations and chose the last. We have since reconsidered, but there's no going back now, so "Avonlie" it is. It was only after her name was decided on that someone wrote on Dustin's Facebook page "Oh, like Anne of Avonlea?" Huh. Right.

I first remember hearing the name "Avonlie" while waiting in line behind a girl at MU for coffee. The barista wanted the girl's name to write on the cup and she said it, spelled it, then said it again (a true spelling bee champion's trait!) "Avonlea" and so it was, forever branded in my memory, only to be born again while seeking the perfect name for our child.

Needless to say, not everyone loved our choice of name, but she's not everyone's child, so we shrugged off the naysayers and complimented ourselves on finding the perfect name for our perfect daughter!

Avonlie Maya Victoria

The Art of Burping

We celebrated the new year from my hospital bed with the baby mostly asleep and the two of us toasting with a bit of champagne my family brought along to toast with earlier in the evening before heading off to their own NYE celebration in Hilton Head. I was properly disturbed by what remains of poor Dick Clark and even more bothered by the performance by NKOTB and some other boy band that we happened across while in search of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. When we finally went to bed, Avonlie arose so my night was shot until morning...I fell asleep just in time to meet the pediatrician for the first time, who appeared beside my bed looking well-rested and ready to go.

While he and my husband went over some logistics and I tried, hazy-minded, to keep up, it occurred to me that Avonlie was asleep and I had a few moments where I could get to the bathroom. Hastily, I left D and the dr. to their discussion and slipped away for just a few moments. What I found when I returned baffled even my exhausted mind. The doctor remained where I left him, by the side of my bed with Avonlie draped over his forearm, head bobbing with each slap to the back he gave her. And there Dustin stood, behind the doctor, slapping his hand onto the doctor's back rhythmically. "Is that too hard? It seems like you're hitting her pretty hard? Is this hard enough?" Dustin was asking. I had stumbled upon my husband burping our pediatrician.

Later he would tell me that the doctor never actually told him whether it was too soft or too hard--the force of the blows he administered to his back while mock burping, but I would think about it and laugh again and again every time. (D definitely got the hang of burping...he could perform various methods, one of which would almost always yield a result, though my rate of success is much lower, despite how many techniques I try.) I had never seen or heard of a man burping another man. Our doctor had continued talking as if it wasn't even happening and no one seemed surprised, including me, as I climbed back into the hospital bed and watched the men complete their discussion. It wasn't until later we laughed about it.

That's what a lot of our hospital stay was like...not getting things until they were over and we were home. Only weeks later would I look back on the strange occurrences and wonder how I missed the humor in them at the time. This would especially hit home when tasked with learning how to deal with the Medela. If you don't know what that is, try google or wait for the next installment.

And then there were three...

2011-01-24T14:57:00.000-06:00

Labor? and Delivery

It happened on a Thursday, Dec. 30, 2010.

After suffering a cold throughout the week (a cold bad enough for me to actually leave my office and work from home one day), I found out from my doctor that I was actually already in labor, as well, for perhaps two days. Inactive, beginning stages up until that Wednesday. Labor that would turn into birth on that Thursday.

Checking into the hospital just after noon.

On Thursday, we were instructed to head to the hospital. I had purchased a Cinnabon the night before with plans to eat it sometime on Thursday, but the move from doctor to hospital admission came with instructions not to eat, so the Cinnabon sat in the car.

We checked in at around half past noon and spent the next 7 hours waiting, breathing through contractions that inevitably led to the decision to have an epidural around 4 and the final instructions on "how to push" around 7:20 pm, followed finally by the birth of our 8 pound 3 ounce, 19 inch-long baby girl at 7:53 pm. When the summary of how many minutes it took to push out our girl was given to me, I wanted to find and tell the nurse who had told me just as I started to push that it'd probably take somewhere between 1-2 or more hours to get our baby out. "First mothers just about always take somewhere between 1-2, usually more, hours to push their babies out." So hunker down, is essentially the tone she gave me as she and a few other cast members shuffled around the room setting things up. Thirty-three minutes later, the doctor wasn't completely in her attire for the delivery, but the baby was mostly out and the nurse advised her to get on with the birthing while she (the nurse) finished tying her (the doctor) into her birthing gear.

And then she was here. Avonlie Michael (though it took us around 17 hours to come up with her name!)

She was a swollen, blue mass of fleshy wrinkles. Silent and observant. We didn't hear her make a peep for the first few minutes after her birth, but her grandparents (my parents and D's mom) cried from the distance beside her as they weighed her and looked her over carefully (ordinarily, they would have given her directly to me, but they found meconium--stool--in the amniotic fluid so they had to have a NICU dr. there to check her out thoroughly when she was delivered to make sure she didn't have any of it in her system and all throughout labor, they ran a saline solution flush into my uterus to clean out the meconium as best they could). So I didn't get to see or hold her until they were sure she was ok. Since I didn't get to see her and my dr. was still stitching me up, I sent D over, who was reluctant to leave me and even more hesitant to see our baby for the first time without me. I insisted he "needed" to go..."They're all saying how beautiful she is, D. They might be lying. Go see if our daughter is really as beautiful as they say. Lots of babies are born ugly. Go find out for real if she's one of them."

Of course I was mostly kidding. It's true that some babies are born super ugly, but I wouldn't have cared if she was one of them or not. I just wanted one of us to get over there to see her and since I couldn't, he had to!

So he went and she was. Beautiful, that is. See for yourself:

A Pledge and Some Observations

My brother, sister-in-law, my niece and nephew came in to see her soon after. Jacob, my nephew/godson, is only two years-old so he and Avonlie are ideally separated age-wise (in my estimation, that is, since my brother and sister and I are separated by two years and all seemed to work out nicely for us!). He was thrilled to be a new "big brother" even though, at first, he cried when they told him Avonlie was a girl, but there were no signs of those tears when he came in to meet her. Nothing but smiles. He was so solemn when he pledged himself to care for her as a big brother. Genevieve was shyer, which I expected, but both were thrilled to have a new cousin/sister.

Baby Girl celebration cake for me and Dustin!

Truth be told, I was totally surprised Avonlie was a girl. The entire pregnancy everyone insisted she'd be a boy and I was the first one to say it in the beginning. But Dustin was tried and true to his feelings: girl. He just knew it and it turns out he was right. The hospital brought us a tiny little cake to celebrate her birth when we made our way to the maternity ward. Avonlie stayed with us both nights in the hospital and all day long, only leaving our sights to be taken to the nursery for a bath, a hepatitis B vaccination and some check-ups. Otherwise, babe had on a security bracelet that would've locked down the whole hospital if someone had tried to take her out of our ward. Each time they took her, they checked her bracelets against ours for an identical identifying number all of our bracelets were branded with.

Identifying tags on her ankles (see the huge security one!?!) and her adorable little baby feet!

The First Night

Our daughter, who throughout that first night and most of the next day remained nameless, ate immediately following her birth until she fell asleep. The nurses swaddled her and put her in a clear, giant tupperware version of a bassinette that then resided directly next to me in the hospital room. They found a "cozy" cot for Dustin to sleep on and we were set for the night. "You might want to set an alarm for 3 a.m. or so," the nurse advised when setting us up for the night. "She should eat every 2-3 hours and will probably be very sleepy tonight and need to be woken. Also, someone will be in every hour to check your vitals."

They weren't kidding. Every hour, they were in to check me and the baby. I didn't need an alarm to wake me at 3 because the nurse did to take my vitals, which she then insisted were too low and had to be taken again. When my blood pressure and heart rate were "still low" (bp: 88/60; hr: 45) she had me get out of the bed to perform a few minor circus tricks ("Stretch your arms and walk around a bit..."). Let me just say that 1-getting out of bed after the epidural-numbness wore off was not fun or painless, nor were the tricks I was asked to perform and 2-even after performing them my blood pressure remained low (which I explained was not actually "low" but "normal" for me) and so did my heart rate (we got it up to 55, but my resting heart rate is ordinarily around 60). I tried to explain that these numbers were not out of the ordinary, but she was concerned and seemed to come back even more often throughout the night. No matter, Avonlie was also awake and no amount of feeding her sufficed. That babe was ANGRY and remained so for the majority of our stay in the hospital and our first night home.

Swaddling

Having not swaddled anything since my sister was an infant when I learned to swaddle the baby doll Mom gave me in lieu of allowing me to "have" my sister, (as had been the promise when they told me I was going to "have a little brother or sister," the baby doll being a disappointing substitution for the sister I was promised--a promise I would try to insist they make good on in the year or two following Sara's birth, to no avail. A promise that would inevitably end in me ripping my baby sister's arm out of her socket in her toddler years in my attempt to pull (aka-drag) her around by the arm since I had been trained to handle her on a doll instead of on the actual infant--a clear injustice to my child-self and, of course, my sister), I was out of practice. The way I thought we should swaddle was not sufficient and the blanket bunched in a mess around our daughter. She wailed more angrily with each failed attempt, as if lamenting the parents she'd been born to--parents who didn't know crap about swaddling an infant. Dustin and I looked at each other knowing she was right on this one.

Note the sleeping baby under the nurse's expert swaddle.

Finally, he asked one of the influx of nurses to teach us how to swaddle. She showed us twice, and magically Avonlie stopped crying immediately after she finished. "Do it again!" We were in awe of her magical swaddling prowess. She'd unwrap the baby, who would then cry, and slowly, step-by-step demonstrate and verbally explain how to swaddle our infant.

We felt confident we, too, could do this. After all, we are smart, educated people. Over-educated, some might say. We are both artists. We work with our hands to paint, draw, photograph, cook, write, sketch, and so on...all skills that require us to use our hands in various ways. We are comfortable with this ability. Generally, we are capable. But swaddling was not our forte and the blanket crumpled around her in anguish that reflected our daughter's feelings on being given up to our care.

Note the hand, making its way out of the swaddle, even as she slept.

It turned out, on some level, this was ok. Avonlie, its safe to say, quickly changed her mind about her feelings on swaddling as she flailed her little arms around when swaddled and found ways of maneuvering them out of the swaddle, liberating us from our swaddling obligations within the first 24-48 hours of taking her home from the hospital. She wanted those arms free to flail about and no amount of swaddling was going to stop her from getting them that way. "She's like a little Houdini," Dustin remarked in awe as we watched our mostly swaddled daughter turn bright red and scream bloody murder while ripping her arms out from the swaddle's vice grip. We eventually gave in and resorted to swaddling her from the chest down.

The Barnes and Noble Incident(s)

2010-10-23T13:46:00.001-05:00

Dustin and I have found ourselves hunkered down at a table full of books and laptops, surrounded by the scent of ground coffee beans for a typical grad-student afternoon of haunting the local coffee shop. The difference is that the local coffee shop we're haunting is a cross between the Barnes and Noble book mogul and their equally megalomaniacal partner Starbucks. Don't misunderstand me, unlike my graduate school colleagues, I actually harbor no real resentment for corporate America. I have definitely seen the self-proclaimed, corporate-hating, hypocritical hipster self-consciously wandering the aisles of Wal-Mart, slipping, eventually, into a state of ease when they have finally convinced themselves they will not run into a colleague that will smirk and mentally call them out on their blasphemy. Then, shiny, Wal-Mart-logo-bearing, stuffed cart will turn a corner only to come face-to-face with me. And I smile, of course, and engage them in slow, steady conversation, watching them wriggle like Prufrock, uncomfortable in the spotlight of their hypocrisy. That's the secret: they subscribe to it whether they want to admit it or not.

However, despite my semi-nefarious satisfaction and indulgence in another's discomfort, I have learned to dislike Barnes and Noble for an entirely different reason than my colleagues, and I actually mean it. A month or so ago, when D and I came in to visit the shiny books and to fan the scent of their nascent pages past our noses, we skipped through the rows and rows of newness, opened and closed literary journals to note the writers we knew, the ones we liked and the ones we hated, turning up our snobbish writer noses at the lack of craft here or the crassness in the voice, a direct attribute of the writer, there, secretly contemplating and scolding myself for my own lack of actually submitting my work anywhere...and then, I came across this:

And stopped in my tracks. Why is James Frey and any of his work in the biography section? This would denote that the accounts in his books were true, an outrage I've managed to cultivate in many students by the mere statistic that 90% or more of A Million Little Pieces was fabricated. Yet, there they were, staring smugly at me as I had done to so many hipsters in Wal-Mart. In disbelief, I backed away from the shelf, trying to convince myself there was no "right" place for A Million Little Pieces, but that certainly, Barnes and Noble was not the high court judge in position to make that ruling. I made my way uncertainly through the aisles, no longer sure of what they held, in search of Dustin. It was time, I thought, to leave this place.

As I wandered past the massive, catch-all "Literature" section, bleary-eyed, I found focus again on the placard that read "Teen Non-Fiction," a welcoming, familiar word: Non-Fiction, and breath found its way back through my lungs. Until, again, I was struck in horror, frozen and mortified to see this:

Look closely. Do you see it? Wicked. The Clique. Love Bites. These are the titles listed under "Teen Non-Fiction." These vampire love sagas and Gossip Girl-mimicking novels have been placed under a section that claims to be full of truth, and all its many definitions and facets.

It was there that Dustin found me, statue-still, mouth agape in disbelief.

We left after that fateful day in late August and haven't returned again until today, almost two full months later. Since then, Dustin has informed me of the bookstore's surprise announcement of putting themselves up for sale. We've discussed the fall of the printed word and I have managed to conjure up a sense of sympathy for the chain store, one that really stems from my love for the heft of a book in my hand, the sheen of its glossy cover and creak of its ream of pages when opened for the first time. It's taken some time and distance for me to begin to forgive and forget Barnes and Noble's indiscretions, though, to move beyond what it has done, to redefine my expectations of the corporate bookstore, and that's ok. I've accepted it for what it is now and have not yet wandered through its aisles or diverted my pregnant path from our table in the Starbucks area to the bathroom a mere fifteen second walk away. The joy I felt in fanning pages of untouched books and scanning the table of contents for familiarity in journals is still feasible, as long as I confine my attention to the books at hand and not the section labels they fall beneath. Barnes and Noble and I have an understanding.

Today I have found a different bone to pick during my experience here. An entirely unexpected qualm with space-invasion that, actually, has more to do with social norms of people and respect for comfort zones than anything boostore or corporate-related. On my first trip to the bathroom, I followed a direct path to the ladies room, opened the door and found four empty stalls to choose from. Despite having learned from a pop-up-video of Jewel's song "Who Will Save Your Soul" that the first stall is the most underused, I chose the second stall. It was early, the stalls still reeked of disinfectant, so I felt secure in my choice. No sooner do I get ready to actually "go" to the bathroom, then the door opens and another occupant enters, choosing the stall directly beside me. Stage fright ensues and, annoyed, I pull my clothes back in order and leave the restroom in a huff thinking back on an essay Dustin once wrote about "liking his space" and choosing the handicap stall as a result...and, of course, the hilarity that occurred after that fateful choice was made in Italy.

"I get your essay now. About wanting your space in the bathroom and choosing the handi-stall," I breathe at him while noting he is still in the exact spot in line to order coffee as he was when I left.
"Why? What do you mean?"
I relay the tale of the six (four) stalls all being open and how the lady chooses the one open stall (two) directly beside me to use instead of any of the five (three) vacant ones that were available. I press him for more thought on why I feel so violated; he shrugs, orders us coffee and we sit.
"I couldn't even go because she was there. Right next to me. It was like we were in the same stall or something. She had her pick and yet she had to be right next to me? What is that? I bet guys don't do that with urinals, right?"
"No," he says. "It's guy code."
I raise my eyes in question.
"Guy code, like..." His eyes search around for something to write on before removing the sleeve from his cup of coffee and pulling a pen from his pocket, then he draws five small rectangles. "These are urinals." He places a stick figure on every-other one, leaving two vacant. "If you come in and there's a guy here, here and here, then you wait, even though these two are empty. So everyone has their space."
"How do you know to do that?"
"Maxim," he says. "But, they just put it in print. We all just know and do that anyway." He traces over the stick figures again with his pen, his face focused in concentration. "But when we're drunk and there's a line, it's like you just do whatever. It's like, Fuck. I gotta go. I'm not gonna look at your dick, man. And you just go."

I beeline to the bathroom again when baby has been using my bladder as a trampoline for so long I just can't hold it anymore, only this time it's not vacant and there's a woman in the handi stall. It's quiet, so I have a good feeling I know what she's doing down there. I choose the very first stall, the polar opposite of the one she's in, leaving two empty stalls between us and pee like I'm being timed for a world record. Halfway through my rush, I hear her pulling at the toilet paper, an attempt I recognize as one to mask sound, so I do the same. I don't want her to feel rushed or self-conscious because I'm in there and she can no longer have her privacy. I make a loud show of flushing the toilet and snapping the metal lock open, turning the water on high so it's loud, and unrolling the handpaper at the same time so I cut down the time she has to "hold back" whatever noises she's trying not to make. I finish up quickly and bolt out the door, knowing that, whether she realizes it or not, my sensitivity to her predicament has left her with a sense of relief from embarrassment. A sense of relief she can now enjoy in the privacy of an empty bathroom for however long it takes.

"How was it?" D asks as I return to the table feeling like I'd performed the act of a samaritan.
"Better," I say. "But I have to admit...between the poor section titles and the bathroom situation, if I were Barnes and Noble, I'd probably put myself up for sale, too."

Evening Conversations

2010-08-31T22:29:00.001-05:00

A brief interaction or two to demonstrate the dynamic between me and the best husband ever.

"Sometimes it feels as though my legs don't know how to work anymore. They don't feel like anything and it freaks me out." Pause. I wait.
"Mhmm." Dustin responds.
"Does that ever happen to you?" I ask, wanting to confirm that this unfamiliar and strange feeling is not, in fact, strange.
"No."

We're hanging out in the new homestead with some Vivaldi playing on our Christmas-present-cable which presents us with a Classical Music-station, among several others, not least of which includes a score of Mexican music stations, some techno and, of course, the ever-necessary indecipherable rap. I realize we've lived in this home for going on a month and a half, but since we only just got rid of the end of the boxed stuff on the bottom two floors of the house, it feels brand new all over again (unboxed, that is). D is reading Plato's "Republic" on his Kindle and occasionally goading me into conjuring up my previous philosophy-major self (who read it twice for school and once more for fun before reading it yet another time for comps a year ago) and would've been glad to expound on it for hours. When he's not goading me, he's reading passages aloud that demonstrate Plato's sexism or other odd argument Dustin finds sort of appalling and humorous, at the least, dogmatic and outdated to our liberal mindsets.

When he finishes a particularly female-bashing passage, I comment:
"It was different back then, though. I mean, he liked men."
"That's obvious," D says reading more examples of Plato's hatred for women from the book.
"No. I mean. He liked men. The Greek philosophers, a lot of them, were gay. They liked men and some of them thought it was unnatural to be with a woman."
Dustin turns this over, trying to decide whether I'm lying or not, then gestures toward the laptop on my lap, "Google "Plato" and "gay."
I do. He reads the support to my claim.
"Ok. Now google "Aristotle" and "gay."..."Socrates..."
Again and again the proof is evident.
"Leonidas."
Google headlines regarding "Leonidas" and "gay" yield the following results:

   A Facebook Fan Page titled: "I'd go gay for King Leonidas" and
   "A gay day in Thermopylae."

"Soulmates came from Plato, but there's a reason he chose the "bellybutton" as where the two parts to a soulmate split rather than, well, the more obvious separation a man and woman would have. He was thinking of two men as soulmates, not two people of the opposite sex."
Silence as he absorbs these new revelations.
"You know...Plato's discussion on soulmates. The "Symposium?"
He explains that, clearly, he's familiar with this concept, but wasn't aware it came from Plato. Understandable since not all people spent their early tween years wandering the local library's stacks in search of the logic to support what I cynically and innocently believed were irrational claims of being "in love" and having a "soulmate." In my search, I found the philosophers, since I couldn't imagine anything going further back to the beginning of those concepts than them. Now, though, I can see Dustin storing up these pieces of information on Plato, the Greek philosophers, "The Republic," rethinking and revisiting movies he's seen or books he's read, all in the flash of a moment. Sheer enlightenment comes over him.
"So ancient Greece was pretty much the gayest place ever." He states, picking his Kindle back up and seeing Plato more clearly now.

We both go back to our individual reading and writing. Vivaldi serenades in sweeping strings and staccato plucks. The soft chirps of our parakeets who have been covered up for the night peek out from behind their transparent sheet. The German shepherd's deep, sleepy sigh escapes at my feet.

"He's describing a pretty Fascist state," Dustin remarks, "And he's going to bang all these guys."

Our Baby: First Glimpse

2010-08-21T17:27:00.000-05:00

Maybe now is also a good time to mention that this blog might see even less postings from Dustin since some of his friends and I have coaxed him into beginning his own blog. It's in the works, and he's not ready to unveil it yet, but it allows him to make whatever changes and calls he wants on it. I think we all need our own blog every once in a while :) Plus, this one doesn't really have a goal or voice yet, and the one he's putting together is going to have both, so once he's ready, I will unveil it to you, silent world.

Since you probably miss Dustin as much as I do when I'm only at work for eight hours or he's at work for five, let me tell you a quick "Dustin Realization" story.

Around week 16 of our pregnancy (we're about to end our 21st week on Monday, so come Tuesday we'll be 21 weeks and a day), we went to the doctor for a regular check-up and ultrasound. The ultrasound tech had me lay down, hike up my dress then SPLAT (think Juno-style) she squirts stuff on my belly and starts running it around. Dustin sits down in a chair to my left, the tech is to my right and a good-sized, elevated television is rigged up on the wall in front of me.

"So we're going to be able to see it this time, right?" he asks.
"You got it." The tech responds, moving the device on my belly around.
"Where will we be able to see it...over there?" He starts to stand up, preparing to go around me to the tech's side where he can see the baby on her monitor.
"No, no. You can see it from there."
Dustin sits back down. "Where?"
"Right up there," she gestures to the wall I'm facing and we both look up to see it:

"Oh, my God," he says, leaping out of the seat and walking closer. "That's our baby? Oh, my God. Neesh, are you seeing this? It looks like a baby now. Oh, my God."

It might've been the greatest reaction I've ever seen. As I lay there, his back to me in a silhouette against the light shining out from the screen showing us our baby, I kept thinking about how moments before we came into the ultrasound room, I'd tried to remind Dustin that the baby no longer looked like a tiny grain of rice, the way it had when we went for our first ultrasound during our very first visit to the doctor. I knew this because I was reading baby books to keep up with how our baby was growing and what parts of it had taken shape. I expected the baby to look something like a baby and knew that D was still envisioning a mass of cells or that early grain of rice, despite my reading aloud to the book about what was happening with the baby during week (fill in the blank with any number up to 16), but I never could've imagined the reaction he displayed. It couldn't have been more perfect. Watching him stand there in amazement, I felt my face widen in a smile.

Finally, he tore his eyes away from the baby, who was now amazing us with its dexterity as it performed flips and turns, stretched its legs up, putting its feet on my uterus and bending its knees before putting its arms up for us as if to let us know it had two and was developing just fine. "That's our baby," D said, stumbling back to me, groping for my hands and nearly grabbing the goo on my belly. "That's our baby."

When we heard the heart beat for the first time that day, as well, the reaction was similar and I felt lucky, all over again, for having married such a wonderful, expressive, genuine man and soon-to-be proud father.

xoxo
N

Back and Better than Ever!

2010-08-21T00:28:00.002-05:00

...When we last left off, Dustin and I were going into the witness protection program. Mainly this was to keep my life a little private while the job market took hold, but in the meantime, I was offered a wonderful job near my family in the south, which Dustin and I decided would be a wonderful new adventure and opportunity. Not too long after that, we found out we were expecting our first baby on January 3rd (we know, at least, three amazing people born on that day!). Then D had his amazing essay published in Rick Magazine. You'd be doing yourself a huge injustice if you failed to read it, so to better your life and health, I'm posting the link here. Honestly, it gives me chills and brings me nearly to tears each time I read the end.

It took some time once we got to Savannah to find an actual place to live...we looked everywhere, literally from places like this:

To places that had Dustin literally picking fleas off his legs when he left. All in all, it took an entire month with, perhaps, a week or so change on top of it, to find a place to live...but, we found one. A 1920's house with wooden floors, three stories, three bedrooms, beautiful french doors from the dining room to the living room and more french doors from the living room to the front hallway. It has a few decorative coal fireplaces (one in our bedroom!) and the third floor totally fits my ginormous kidney bean shaped desk.

You might be wondering why it took so long to find such a place and what the hold up was. Why we couldn't just move into an apartment somewhere and whether Dustin brought the fleas home to our new home. The problem, in part, was due to having dogs (though Savannah is a super-pet friendly city from what we see), and due to my inability to study, do work...etc...in a room that is cramped with books and desks (example: our study in Columbia where we couldn't see the walls because there were so many books). After 26 years of school each, D and I have too many books to live in a normal room. They require a space of library-proportions. Seriously. D used to study in that room and always wanted me to be in there, too, but I just couldn't do it. I felt so overwhelmed by all the books and stuff in that tiny cramped room.

Then there's the matter of the desk. My desk is not your ordinary desk. It's a mammoth desk. A life of its own, really. I can't explain it better than this picture can do it justice:

See what I'm talking about? It's so large in needs a room or a house of its own, practically. It was, honestly, the bane of our existence when it came to finding a temporary home to live in...and finally, lo and behold, after the fleas and the too-small apartments, the narrow stairways I couldn't possibly climb at nine months pregnant and the perfect places in the horrible locations, we found it! Our home for the year, the place our new baby will first live in:

Pretty, huh?

It has its issues, don't misunderstand. Plenty of 'em and I am going to go on record as saying that we might have the WORST rental company in all the land (Judge Realty) or maybe just the worst realtor (Tripp, who never returns phone calls or fixes any issues). The owners of the house clearly did not maintain the house as much as they should have (knobs in doors fall right off in our hands, not all the phone jacks work which hurts our DSL usage, no one has ever dusted that place until the day we moved in and I did it with my mom and sister, all the crispers and drawers are broken in the fridge AND the fridge had dead bugs in it. Really.), but it has a luxurious backyard that the dogs can play in and we can bbq in (on the giant grill the owners left) and a patio we can eat out on and a sunroom off the side of the house, a white picket fence and gardens, a porch we can sit out on in chairs or a swing...a whole third floor where the kidney bean desk and all of our books can live without feeling cramped or overwhelmed. There's so much space up there, D even had the movers put one of our couches up there (the one I studied for comps on for half a year--the same one I wrote my comps answers on and most of my dissertation) for me to read and work on so when he's studying, I can be close by.

D could now get his degree in historic preservation without ever having taken a class, and maybe a bit of freelance repair work if he advertised himself as such. And we're happy. Together and settled with a few boxes that still need unpacking and a few purchases that need to be made (I haven't even started talking about the three 2x2 closets and how that's the only closet space for our clothes in the entire 2000+ square foot house!), but we're doing pretty great so far.

Stick around. We've been documenting our adventures and our baby's adventures (in utero, of course) since arriving, taking suggestions from friends who are afar for places to go, restaurants to eat in and things to do...we've had visitors and taken small trips...as usual, we're having an incredible time of it. Now that we're settled, we're back in action on this blog, sharing it all with you!

Stay tuned for recaps and KEEP IN TOUCH. Out of sight, but not out of mind, and D's been working at the airport so you can be even more exciting tales are ahead.

xoxo
N

Undercover

2010-05-09T19:12:00.002-05:00

Hello, world!

This blog is headed for the witness protection program for a short period (we hope!) of time. If you wish to continue reading it in its privatized mode (even if you've never commented before and are a "secret" reader), leave a comment or "anonymous" comment in our comment space with your email address and we will gladly add you to the VIP list. We're closing 'er down in about 48 hours (aka-heading to the privacy setting) so don't dilly dally!

Thanks for reading and, if you don't leave your email address, don't forget about us! We'll be back!

xoxo

N and D

PS-S and MB, we've already got your emails and your invites are "pending." As soon as we go "off" again, you should receive an email if you haven't already! Thanks for your loyalty!

Roots

2010-05-03T08:32:00.000-05:00

Today when I get home and grade the papers I've been thinking about grading, finish the cleaning I need to do and make the phone calls that always need making, I'm going to take our tomato plants outside and plant them in the ground behind the fence with stakes and cages near the strawberries.

This has been a decision I've put off for weeks because 1-it's been sort of cold and 2-I wasn't sure if we were staying very long or not. I'm still not sure, really, but a week has gone by since my campus-interview with no word from anyone at the campus I interviewed on. It's not that I don't believe I might get a job offer, I made it this far so, at the least, I'm hoping for a very kind rejection, it's just that the plants are growing now. They're getting so big they can barely stand on their own anymore. They're falling over on the window sill and in the chair beside it that I've been keeping them on.

It broke my heart a little to imagine I'd plant them, then we'd up and move with no one to tend to their needs, but I've been thinking a lot about roots--where we grow and how we grow and why. Mom says her vegetables aren't doing so well--it's been cold in the south, colder than the vegetables prefer. If we move, that's where we'll be, but my vegetables seem to like it here. They reach and stretch toward the window, the outside world, where I believe they want to be planted. I can take them in pots out of Missouri to wherever we might go, even though this is where they were bred, just like I've been transplanted from place to place even though my family is where my origins reside. But, like the plants, I sort of like it here, enough to put down roots, even if they're just those of my tomato plants, so some part stays when all the rest goes.

Closing Time

2010-05-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

There's been talk of moving in our home, as the job market becomes more a part of our lives...and interviews and dossiers and the like. I didn't expect it, but I'm saddened by that likelihood. When I first moved to Columbia, people weren't nice to me. Immediately. I mean, strangers were, but people in my department, colleagues and the like, weren't. They made plans to have drinks after class and wouldn't invite me. If I suggested it to them during a break from an evening class, they'd say they had too much work to do after class and just couldn't swing it. As I walked to my car after class in the dark, I'd consider that the Ph.D. required a lot of work and that they were probably right: I should get home and study hard. But then, I'd reach my car and start driving home through the city streets only to see those same classmates who thwarted my efforts at socializing walking into a bar, laughing and joking around together. It was crushing.

Honestly, it took a few years for me to really just accept that my colleagues didn't like me for whatever skew of reasons they might have. It took time for me to realize that some people don't formulate their own opinions, they just adopt the opinions of others. The hardest part for me was understanding that I hadn't actually done anything to these colleagues; they didn't even really know me and had never actually had a conversation with me. It's hard to believe, when a group of people around you don't like you, that in rare instances it really isn't your fault, you really haven't done anything, they're just close-minded and sort of mean.

I took a little time off from school when it all became too much. There were other forces at play, even bigger ones, but they're not blog-ready. When I came back from my semester off, I dove headfirst into my work, my relationships (with Dustin, that is, which was quite new at that time) and my other interests. I didn't allow myself to lament the outcast position I'd been cast into. And my life got so much better.

When Dustin joined our local community's cast of Communicating Doors, I thought it was great for him to be getting out there, doing something outside of our field and having a hobby that removed him from the stifling atmosphere we'd been living in. I remembered loving the theatre my whole life, seeing my first Broadway show at the age of 9, then dozens and dozens of others in following years. I remembered how much I, too, had once loved being on stage until one day, in a production at the age of 17 years old--after having been on stage for the better part of my life, I noticed the audience and got really scared. Let's just say I never got up on a stage to perform again--crippled by sudden stage fright.

But the friends we made during Communicating Doors were incredible. They were supportive and came to our readings. They were always willing to make time if something came up and we needed support--both emotional and otherwise. And our relationships kept growing, our circle of friends expanded and when Rory asked us to be in the IAT's short Women's Play Festival, I responded with: "Do I have any lines?" Remembered how wonderful these friends had been to us and before he could answer the question, revised my response to: "Who am I kidding? If you and Kir (the director) need me, I'm happy to help. Just tell me what you want me to do."

I didn't know then that I didn't have some lines, I had many--all crammed eloquently into a nine minute scene, but I did know that these friends had been here for us when Dustin was attacked back in September, showing up at our door to check in on us, taking time out of their lives to come lighten up his spirits. I knew they had come to our house for various get-togethers and had invited us to theirs. Some of them had been to our wedding! I knew them before, during and after they found "the one!" and got married, the heartbreaks they'd been through and the relationships that thrived, how they sang karaoke and what they liked to drink, their favorite restaurants and football teams...I knew that they were our friends and if they needed something, even for me to overcome the knowledge that an audience would be watching my every move for ten minutes, I was going to do it.

This weekend has reminded me why I liked being in productions so much. It's the coming together of a cast of sordid individuals and characters to create a unified existence that's more than just the self, but a community creation. Together, we have created something bigger than any of us individually; we have made an audience laugh and cry and think. It's the perfect metaphor for what this group of friends we've found has done for our lives: gave us experiences that are fulfilling and thought-provoking and meaningful when I, for one, had started to doubt that such things still existed.

Last night, after our performance, we went to dinner with some castmates we didn't know very well, and the dinner lasted for two hours, each of us talking passionately and excitedly, finding more and more things we had in common or respected, learning and sharing and enjoying each other so profoundly that, even then, we had a hard time walking out and leaving.

So it saddens me to think that, at some point, Dustin and I will be leaving Columbia and this phenomenal group of people we know here. Friendships last, I know, but the distance can be far and sometimes crippling. Time passes and life happens and we miss each other. Many of these friends have planned and considered leaving, are actively looking for jobs or opportunities elsewhere, so we're not alone in our departure from Columbia. But, this push toward departure is like being at a party with all the people you love and care most about while knowing that, eventually, everyone is going to leave, but just not wanting to be the first to go...pushing out those last few hours and minutes, collecting and lingering by the door just a little bit longer, not wanting to walk out into the darkness, into a world that's not always so nurturing, unsure of what you'll find, just knowing you don't really want to go.

Playin Around

2010-04-22T14:44:00.001-05:00

Husband and I have been cast in two awesome plays being showcased in the short Women's Play Festival here in town. The Festival begins a week from today and runs through the weekend. Both plays are, as the title of the festival suggests, short. Maybe fifteen pages a piece which would be roughly 20 minutes, at most. The playwright who is responsible for the short that I'm in is Carey Crim, who it seems is off to a stellar writing career (based on the link you see there and some reviews of productions of her plays). I couldn't find much info on Ms. Crim when I was given the script a few weeks ago, but felt a sincere draw to the complexity of what goes on in the play and have been thoroughly enjoying our rehearsals.

It doesn't hurt that my thespian-guitar-teacher-fence-building good friend Rory is the only other character in the play which is directed by yet another dear friend, Kirsten. Truth be told, I haven't actually been in a play in, oh...well...perhaps we shouldn't go there (12 years) and I fear I'm more than rusty in my portrayal of this, what I see as, very complex character, but working with Rory and Kirsten has just been amazing. They're both so helpful and patient.

What I've been realizing, more than anything else, is just how much energy is devoted to acting. When husband was in plays over the last few years, he came home from rehearsal rather exhausted. While I was sympathetic, I couldn't really relate to what he was going through. Now, though, now I get it. Picture this: you work a full day at your regular-paying job. If you're a teacher, you go home for a few hours and prep for your teaching the next day, maybe grab something to eat, then head off to rehearsal. At rehearsal, you transform into another person. This person has her own job and her own life and worries. In my case, she's a maid at a sort of rundown motel and happens in on a set of tragic circumstances, but she's also sort of young and innocent--a student at the nearby university who works this job just to pay her way through school. Before she knows it, she's launched into a series of emotions: shock, rationality, sadness, surprise, disgust, pride, disbelief, then curiosity...and all that within the first three minutes. She keeps going through these cycles of emotions, no one emotion ever taking over for too long. She works through various scenarios and, eventually, has to accept what actually is the truth: that something has happened and no matter how many scenarios she tries out, she can't change the fact of what really is...but she doesn't get there until she restarts the scene various times, tries out various reactions and emotions, and, eventually, accepts it. All in fifteen minutes. (Do you see what I mean about Carey Crim being an amazing playwright?)

But as the person acting this out, you adapt this new, temporary persona, run through the 15-20 minute play, then start again and again to try and get it right every time, tweak moments that are weaker or unconvincing, find something to do with your dust cloth and innocence. It's challenging. You're going through all these emotions and subjecting yourself to them over and over until 2-2.5 hours has gone by and you're off to resume your own life...to grade the papers and prep the class and make up a quiz and feed your family. How could my husband have not been exhausted when you did that times five (his plays in the past have been full-length, 2 hour shows!)?

I've always really appreciated and loved theatre, but I think I haven't fully understood just how amazing these actors are that get out there and do it all the time--that maintain their own lives and identities while consistently costuming themselves up in other lives and identities. It's not hard to get entangled--I know where I start and she ends or where she starts and I end...I know to leave the papers and the grading and the quiz grades at the door when I enter the "theatre" and, even, that this girl and her tragedy stays in the theatre when I go home--but I can imagine that for some people, it can't be as easy. Especially for actors that really feel like they have to be the character they're playing in order to perform that part. And no matter how much we separate these lives out and understand the difference between an individual life and a character's life, at the end of the day, there's no leaving behind the exhaustion of the emotional toil I've lived through and exerted. That's the part of it all that's very real.

Photo taken from MOVE Magazine, Columbia, MO. Original caption below!
Rory O'Carroll, playing a returned soldier, and Neesha Navare argue during the play "Knives and Spoons Go on the Left," part of the Short Women's Play Festival on Thursday at Ragtag Cinema.

Comps Round Two

2010-04-17T22:35:00.000-05:00

Dustin asked me today how much someone would have to pay me to answer my comps questions all over again. I told him I couldn't estimate how much; it was just too high a price. He said, "Were there moments where you felt like you just wanted to die instead?" I told him, "Every moment. Daily, I asked myself why in the world I was doing this. I couldn't even remember after a while." "Yes," he said. "That's exactly how this feels."

What he doesn't realize is that, he's a swan: kicking like mad beneath the surface while gliding along atop the water: smooth and graceful.

I, for my part, flailed the whole way like a drowning child: panicked and unable to swim.

Observations

2010-04-16T19:56:00.000-05:00

Missouri has these giant gashes in its flesh. Literally, the ground does. Like an earthquake rippled through beneath my grass and cracked the ground in pieces of dry skin.

I have finally found a navy blue cardigan I can love again. I had one once. 3/4 length sleeves from J. Crew and I adored it. Then it grew holes and Mom tossed it out with the trash. It has taken me a year to find a new one. I love it so much I'm afraid to wear it into a state of holes like the last. It still has the tags on.

The strawberries I planted a year ago are alive. They made it through the winter and even through the neglect I offered instead of keeping the ground around it cleared and weeded. As if to spite me, it has blossoms, but I don't know what that means yet. Are white blossoms on a strawberry plant good?

Bogey puts his paws together, as a human might put their fists together, tightly waded, the laces of fingers facing and pressing against one another. I imagine he does this in prayer or meditation.

My writing ability

has been

steadily

failing.

Overheard at School Today

2010-04-07T15:30:00.003-05:00

I was standing in line for some overpriced coffee at the cafe in our library this morning when two button-down-shirt-type gentlemen in khakis (one in pants, the other in khaki shorts) and flip flops got in line behind me. The following conversation ensued.

Khaki Shorts: I stayed home all night trying to get the reading done for his class, but 200 pages is just ridiculous. I couldn't do it. I'm not even sure if I'm ready for mock trial today.
Khaki Pants: Are you defense or prosecution?
Shorts: Prosecution.
Pants: Yeah, I heard he was pissed off about none of us coming to class that Thursday so he assigned a ton of reading.
Shorts: When I was an undergrad here, I took this 17th or 18th century American lit. class and our professor did the weirdest shit. Once he didn't give us our tests back because his Siamese cat took a piss all over them. Another time, he walked into class, looked at all of us and said No, man, I can't do this. I'm too high. Class is canceled. He's that guy over there. (We all look, though I am more subtle in my gaze and find that, despite also being in the English department, I do not know the man he's referring to, strangely enough.)
Pants laughs and says: That's awesome.
Shorts: So when they kick me out of law school, which they will inevitably do, I'm just heading over to the English department.

Aaah, the future of the English department. God help us.

If you're curious, the man he pointed at bore a strange resemblance to this familiar face:

A Good Teacher

2010-02-06T10:23:00.001-06:00

Last week, before class, a student of mine asked me what I thought made a good teacher. I didn't have a lot of time to explain, and he didn't seem to be asking me because he thought I wasn't a good teacher, so I rambled off some half-baked thoughts on teachers having individual expectations, goals and philosophies, but the question stayed with me well after the class ended.

I've been teaching for four full years now and have been evaluated by faculty members, at least, four times. Each time, my evaluations have come back with sparkling reviews, much to my satisfaction. But the reviews always read as though the evaluator is a little surprised, as if they didn't expect the kind of teaching-style I have. Sometimes my students seem surprised, as well.

My best teachers were the ones who challenged me individually. The ones who recognized that each student had a different skill level of ability and who taught to that individual, to that level. "You always want to teach to the smartest kid in the class," I've heard, and I think there's something to that, but there's also something inherently significant about teaching to every student, challenging them and making them think about the more difficult questions and issues in a way that allows them to connect to it and make the information not just relevant, but resonant.

Every time I go into a classroom, I have a set of notes that I want to address to the class. These notes touch on aspects of what was required of them in preparation for the class, but they go a few steps further and ask questions that get the students involved. Student involvement in my classroom is essential. I attempt to provide them with the tools they need (background info, definitions...etc.) in order for them to answer the questions thoughtfully. My lectures begin with the information, often I ask someone to talk a little about what the piece we read for class was about and as they summarize, I either add in moments that are important to what we've read or I ask other students to chime in if they think a detail or piece of the story is relevant, but unmentioned by the summarizer. Once we're done summarizing, I pose questions, point out analyses and points I'm not sure they would have recognized on a first read (and most students do not read a text more than one time before class) and guide them toward interpreting and analyzing the points in the piece. I encourage them to give their opinions, even though there's always one who totally misses the boat, but is incredibly devoted to his/her opinion on it--as uninformed and illogical as it might be--and encourage them to engage one another, respond to different opinions and use examples from the text.

In short, I don't overteach to them. I don't tell them what I think they should believe about the text, I just help them get there on their own and, when they stumble, I offer some guidance. Inevitably, the class becomes a lot about discussion, using the texts to support their opinions and relating relevant personal tales or examples from society to the text in order to gage a fuller understanding. In short, my classes teach and, ultimately, learn from themselves and I, as their teacher, act as a guide. My goal as a teacher is to help teach them how to fish instead of slapping that slippery, hooked sucker down before them while saying, "Here is the fish and this is what you should think and know about how we got to this fish."

It seems to be working so far. A good teacher, in my mind, is one who sharpens thinking skills, provides students with the ability to figure things out for themselves, encourages them to look closer if they only see the surface and to push their thinking beyond what seems obvious to the more complex thoughts and themes that lie beneath the surface. Some students get this early on and excel, often pushing the envelope even farther because they've perfected the pattern of thinking until there's nothing left to think about, but only a greater truth that feels present. Until there's really no other way they can see the text but as a representation of women's lib or historical documentation...etc. I push them to keep thinking until they've concluded something that is completely plausible, but, perhaps not always, the only possibility. My goal is to not only make them think well, but to accept that there are other possible answers to some situations and many ways of reaching those answers. My favorite is when a student says, "This might be really stretching it or reaching for straws, but..." and then they go on to say precisely what it is they were supposed to get out of the text. Their disclaimer is really a demonstration of them having leapt past some of the steps it took to get to the overall understanding while still reaching it. Eventually, they go back and take the time to go through all the steps to get there.

I'm not above relaying to my students a personal anecdote that can contribute to their understanding of a text. At times, when they look most confused, I launch into a tale about my own family or life, an opening that will allow them to understand the point of the text, then I liken that moral or purpose to the actual text. The conclusion and lesson is usually evident in my personal story, which allows them to see the point of the text more clearly. Sometimes it's about connecting the dots in a text, recognizing that all the words are there for a good reason, but they aren't all working toward the same goal all the time. Some points are aimed toward women's lib while others are geared toward justifying one's own life choices (in the text) and in even more cases, those points of reference overlap and do double the work.

Usually students take some time to get that they're expected to talk a lot in my classes, to understand that I'm not just going to give them the right answers, but expect them to figure stuff out on their own or with some help. We are four weeks or so into the semester and my students are growing more confident, asking more questions of the text (questions that are sometimes posed to the class or questions of clarity that only I, most likely, will know the answers to, given my close analysis, research and preparation before the lecture). They are starting to engage with one another, push one another's opinions and conclusions on the work and even choose patterns of logic from the pool amongst their peers that appeals and makes more sense to them than others. This is where it gets fun.

I'm not sure if I'm a good teacher or whether, at the end of the semester, my students feel like they know so much more than they did. But I think my goals in a classroom might be different than that. Sure I want them to remember the texts and the authors and the work we've read. Sure I want them to understand what issues from the texts are significant or why we keep reading the same texts over and over...to understand that there are layers of reading and analysis...etc. The thing is, I don't want to give them everything, especially not mine or other scholars' conclusions about texts. I want to teach them how to wear down a path of logic to get to those conclusions themselves. I want to teach them to think.

I hope I'm a good teacher. I'm trying to emulate what I think a good teacher should be and do, but I guess I'll never really know. I do all the other things: the grading, the office hours, the emails and looking at continuous drafts. I make myself as available, helpful and understanding as I can without compromising my syllabus or expectations, like all my best, most memorable teachers did for me (Mr. Lyons, Mrs. Hickey, Dr. McGuiness, Dr. Leonard...) In the end, I think the best teachers are the ones that teach students how to fish...and that's the kind of teacher I try to be.

I just hope it works.

What traits and teaching styles did your best teachers have?

Neesha

The Living Dead

2010-02-02T13:09:00.003-06:00

This week has been "Doppelganger Week" over on the book of faces and you're supposed to upload a picture of a celebrity you've been told you look like to stand in as your profile pic all week. When I first saw this trend, I didn't think much of it. Like most facebook trends, I sort of just ignore them unless I feel as though the status-changing or something really matters. Around the election, for example, I was for it, even though I usually don't display my political leanings for the world (I grew up in a house where it was talked about constantly, but Mom taught us that it was sort of a private thing--who you were going to vote for--and didn't need to be displayed for the world). It's funny how these status changes are starting to become like forwarded emails. You get one saying "Here's a funny story. Now you have to send this along, too, to prove that you believe in the moral of this story and, if you don't, you'll die or have terrible luck...etc" or something to that extent. Now, it's more like "I love (fill in the blank) and I'm not afraid to say so. If you love (blank), as well, post this as your status for (x) amount of days!"...etc. You get my drift.

Last night, the question of doppelgangers came up at a get together Megan and I were at (pics to come). I hadn't thought too much of it until the conversation shifted in that direction, then I racked my memory for comments that began with "You look like..." For years, I didn't look like anyone and, in my childhood dreaminess, I believed that meant I might be meant for stardom: a unique face to light up the stage...or something like that, but then, around college, the comments started rolling in.

"Ya know. You look like that girl from that thriller, mystery movie. You know who I'm talking about...that girl?" I didn't typically know who they were talking about given that description, but eventually I came to learn it was none other than Ms. Ashley Judd. Not so bad, right? She's pretty beautiful and, while I don't see any resemblance, really, I'm happy to accept that I might have some similarity to her that I don't recognize. Our cheeks are different. Don't get me wrong, I have pretty enormous cheeks, but the bulk in Ashley's cheeks is set much higher than mine. Mine make my whole face round. Plus, her eyes are totally different. Not big and round, but narrower in shape. She has eyebrows and mine are barely noticeable. We've got similar colored hair, I suppose, but, for me, that's where the similarities end.

Most recently, a colleague of mine has been obsessed with calling me "Karen" after a character this actress played...

This would be Rashida Jones and the character would be Karen Filippelli from The Office. I'm not sure I really see that exactly either. We have similar hair/cuts and similar skin tone, but her nose is way better than mine (mine's a bit on the chunky side) and my face is definitely rounder while hers is more oval. I did start watching The Office to see what he was talking about, though, and have since had others make similar comments. I attribute the likeness to our clothes style--Karen Filippelli's and mine, that is. My husband has since agreed that it's not exactly Rashida Jones that I resemble, but Karen Filippelli.

But when the conversation turned to doppelgangers last night, it was inevitable that the person I've been likened to the most would come up. And she did, but in whispers and awkward asides to each other rather than aloud to me. I understood why no one wanted to state the obvious out loud, and at one point Megan cupped her hand over her mouth and said, "They think you look like that Brittany..."

Yes. This Brittany girl, God rest her soul. This, I can believe. We have a similar wideness at the end of our noses, like a triangle (only, in all fairness, mine is much fatter than hers). Our eyes are about the same shape and size, darker in the way hers are in this photo. We both smile...widely. A smile that takes up the better part of the southerly region of our faces. There are definite similarities and people used to say this all the time. Last night, however, no one really wanted to say it. At least not to my face.

When I posted the three above photos on Facebook today, the comments rolled in and the consensus was, in fact, that I looked most like Brittany Murphy. "Oh my gosh. You really do. You have similar eyes or smile or something..." "The healthy looking Brittany, not the coked up Brittany..." "I totally see it!" "It's true!"...and the comments poured in. I know. It's true. I've had students and friends claiming this about me for years, but now that Brittany is no longer alive, no one wants to say it out loud, as if I'm a walking apparition of the deceased and it might bode badly for me if they express our likenesses. Just think what it must be like for women who look even more like her than my vague likeness!?!

When I mentioned this eerie silence and awkward shifting that accompanied the conversation last night to Dustin, explained to him why no one wanted to say it out loud, he thought for a moment and finally said, "But what if someone looks like Marilyn Monroe? Or another long dead celebrity? Like Abe Lincoln or something? They're dead and people seem to be ok with that?"

While this is true, these specific celebrities died a long time ago. Their expiration dates have long since passed, whereas Brittany Murphy's is still so recent that, like two-days-past-the-expiration-day-milk, you can't really tell if it's ok to have or not...or, in this case, whether it's ok to liken a living person to a person that just died.

I say, why not? I looked like Brittany Murphy before she died and now I look like Brittany Murphy, who died. Just because she is no longer with us, it doesn't mean that an impending expiration date has been branded onto me. It's sad that she died, but even though I might share some similar physical traits that make us resemble one another, I'm not dead and I'm not Brittany Murphy. It's ok to say "Hey, you look like that Brittany girl..." but just keep in mind, you can say this out loud, to my face, because even if I do look a little bit like her, I'm not really her and our likeness won't jinx me.

I still think she was a beautiful girl and like to imagine our real likeness lies in the laughter and happiness we both seem to feel or share (though I hear at the end of her life, she wasn't quite as happy, but most people who worked with her claimed she was infectiously happy!). But, hey, I'll take Brittany Murphy as a doppelganger any day.

Rest in peace, Brit!

Putting Out the Alarm

2010-01-29T23:11:00.000-06:00

It's like a cricket chirping every twenty-five seconds. After I've counted, I begin to question how quickly I counted. I recently learned that when administering CPR, the counting should be done at a fairly fast pace: thousandone, thousandtwo, thousandthree, thousandfour...but when I count the seconds between the dying smoke alarm's insistent beep, I find myself fluctuating between the thousand count and the "Mississippi" count. Which is more accurate? By my count, the smoke alarm chirps every twenty-five-Mississippi seconds. My husband has done battle with the smoke alarm three times this week, plugging and unplugging it. Ordinarily, I'd say "Let's just change the batteries," but our smoke alarms don't have batteries. They're wired like the rest of the house is wired.

Our 9-year-old American Eskimo barks, every twenty-five seconds, too, while standing in front of my husband, impatiently asking him to do something about the alarm. Make it stop! He barks, his little pointy ears raised high, his squeaky voice whining. He began his complaints by standing in front of me first, quickly realized I knew nothing about smoke alarms, and altered his attention to Huz.

I have unintentionally tested our smoke alarm once every year since I've lived here. I believe that might be what they say the standard is, though I haven't looked that bit of information up yet and I think the test is supposed to be intentional.

My most recent foray into testing the alarm happened last summer, just as the school year was ending. I was standing in the kitchen, browning some garlic in a small puddle of oil on our electric stove when my dad called. I'd been waiting for his call all day and the stove was on medium, the garlic just added. When he asked me to go seek a piece of information from my desk in the room at the other end of the house, I placed my wooden spoon on the counter and padded down the hall with the dogs in tow. Out the window, the lawnmower rumbled and the scent of fresh cut grass glided in through the open window. After sifting through some folders and papers, I found the article my father wanted and nestled back into the chair to read off the information...slowly, so he could write it down, repeating myself when he asked, tucking the paper back into the files in my desk and shutting the drawer behind it. When I approached the kitchen again, my father was saying his good-byes and billows of smoke rushed toward me in the open living room-dining room-kitchen space I'd departed only minutes earlier. Before my father finished, I hit the "End Call" button, tossed the phone into the folds of the couch and started toward the stove that suddenly emitted a burst of flames from the pot. Electric fire...what's the rule for electric fire? I panicked, stepping back from the stove. Dustin! I decided, was my best solution.

Once out the screen door, I flailed my arms as he pushed the mower in my direction. "Dustin! Hurry! Come quick!" I shouted, moving my arms in fast beckoning motions, as if my sign language might provoke a greater sense of urgency than yelling, "FIRE!" The door slammed behind me when I was certain he was coming. He took his time and smoke alarms all over the house rang out in chorus just as he entered the front door. Dustin's face dropped from expectant amusement to shock as he ran into action, grabbing the cover of the pot, squelching the fire and turning off the heat in two swift motions. The smoke alarm continued and we sent the dogs out into the yard, opened the windows and screen doors before stationing ourselves with fanning materials beneath the two raging alarms. It must've taken five minutes for us to calm the alarms and longer than an hour for the smoke to evacuate the house.

If it hadn't been for my husband, who knows what I would've done. The fire extinguisher, though only two feet away from the stove in the pantry, was a forgotten memory when the flames licked the sides of the pot. It's a wonder nothing...including the walls, cabinets and countertop, was scorched...but at least we knew the smoke alarms worked.

Now, as Dustin stands on a chair and fiddles with the wires under the close supervision of Bogey, I find myself hoping he knows as much about smoke alarms as he does about how to quelch a fire. If not, my next unintentional test may not go off as successfully.

Rest in Peace, JD.

2010-01-28T17:01:00.002-06:00

We all knew Holden Caulfield, that quirky, brilliant kid with the dumb clothes and the incessant lies; the one that came out of nowhere and only said things we never expected. His was a dangerous charm. The kind that could hurt you with its meaningless, and break your heart with its observance. He was the one we all expected to die after we loved him but before we understood.

I read J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye my sophomore year of high school. Something in the jaded, critical, realist view of Holden held me captive, as if he shared insight I might never be able to put into words. The uncertainty, the moving away from innocence, the progression of loneliness, loss, alienation, the complexity of human relationships that Holden moved in and out of felt familiar to me, an adolescent acutely aware of the quickly shifting gears from carefree youth to complicated adulthood. Change was inevitable, but I didn't have to like or approve of it anymore than Holden Caulfield. And when I wanted, in following years, to revisit that stubborn disapproval of phony adulthood, I could always go back to Holden and Salinger and know that somewhere, Salinger was still capturing these words I admired, still needed and still felt incapable of capturing myself. Somewhere, Holden was standing out on the edge of some crazy cliff watching everybody run, not looking where they were going...still coming out and catching them before they went over the cliff...the catcher in the rye.

When I learned J.D. Salinger died today, I thought of the works of his I've read and taught. How desperate and greedy in my youth I had been for more of his work to be published, for him to trust in humanity as an audience again. It is only in his death that I will be able to add to my small collection of Salinger texts and this would have made my younger self happy--the self that didn't realize that the birth of new work meant the death of that person out there, standing at the edge, waiting to catch us before we went over.

I will miss knowing you were out there.

From Caviar to Moon Pies

2010-01-21T17:56:00.000-06:00

I've got to be perfectly honest with you here. I'm not a fan of sweets (I'm the girl you can leave alone in a dessert shop for hours and just know she won't touch a thing while you're gone) and, typically, I have fairly refined and somewhat sophisticated taste in food. You might even call me a food snob, if you were feeling kind of snippy. I like caviar with my pasta, but not just any caviar, Beluga caviar from Russia. My uncle used to get it from a friend when I was a little girl and one day, when I was about five, he put it in my spaghetti. Mom told him I wouldn't like it, but I was the only one of my three siblings who felt okay about having black fish eggs dumped into my meal. Much to Mom's dismay, I didn't like it; I adored it. And so began the corruption of my tastebuds.

At the opening of his and my father's new office down the street from our house, they had lots of gifted Beluga caviar and I stationed myself at the hors d'oevres table, stuffing my face with it. There's a photo floating around somewhere of my sister and I with my dad, celebrating the opening in matching floral dresses. My glasses are bigger than ever, sliding down my nose, but my usual smile does not join my father's and sister's. Instead, my lips are closed, my cheeks are full and I am holding a napkin with caviar-drenched crackers in my hands. It's obvious to me why I'm not smiling. I can still taste the crush of salt in my mouth lapping itself over my tongue, coating the insides of my cheeks. I can still remember how thrilled I was to have a huge, barely touched supply of black fish eggs at my disposal.

Not much changed as I got older, except my uncle somehow lost his caviar connection and over $800 a can is a bit pricey, even for the most refined caviar connoisseur. I've tried the $5 or more kind at the grocery store, but it just doesn't have the same taste. Too salty, really. Sometimes I splurge on a caviar that's pretty tasty, but it's so rare. I've come to accept that my love affair with caviar must be put on hold until I find a reliable, affordable kind.

Aside from my uncle introducing me to foods way beyond my maturity level, my mother cooked. When I say she "cooked" I mean to say that I never tasted much that came from a box, had artificial ingredients or was processed in any way. Not to mention, Mom really encouraged healthy eating choices, or at least the healthiest kinds when we weren't at home. A few years ago, Huz and my bf Megan were talking about foods on sticks when I remarked that I hadn't, in fact, ever had such a thing before. Needless to say, they were quietly, but obviously shocked.

"Haven't you ever been to a fair before?" They asked.
"Sure, but we always had Italian sausage and peppers at the fair. Maybe we'd share some cotton candy," I put in for good measure. "Does cotton candy count?"
"No. That's a cone and it's just not the same."

They threw out every possible stick food they could think of: corndogs, chicken-on-a-stick, pancakes on a stick, fried cheese on a stick, kettle corn on a stick...etc. We ruled out shishkababs, since they typically get pulled off of the stick before being consumed and, plus, those are really skewers, not so much sticks. Never mind the fact that I'd never had deep fried oreos, Snickers or any other candy or cookie or the fact that I hate--and I do mean hate--fried dough (which I tried once as a child and once more to appease Huz this past summer. Still hate it). The mission began and before the last few years fully passed...I can proudly say I've finally tried a corndog (blech), a pancake on a stick (even grosser), chicken on a stick (disappointing) and frozen Snickers, deep fried and on a stick (fascinating-how do they do that!?!).

After we were married, when Huz first said he'd like to have mac and cheese one night for dinner, I went out to the store, bought a block of cheese and some elbow macaronis, and marched back home to make dinner. He came into the kitchen just in time to see me dumping the last of the cheese I'd shredded up into the cooked macaroni with milk, butter, salt and pepper.

"Oh, honey, I didn't mean for you to...I just meant, like, Easy Mac." He looked alarmed, though the process had only taken fifteen minutes up to that point.
"Easy Mac?" I asked not fully understanding.
"Yeah...the kind in a box. You add water and heat?"
I just shook my head at him in baffled disbelief why would anyone would want to eat this Easy Mac he spoke of when what I was making was infinitely better and, probably, better for us, too.

The same happened with mashed potatoes. He meant: dump the contents of the box, add water, heat and I meant, boil the potatoes, add butter/margarine, milk and mash.

When our friend Beth went to dinner at a place called Fazoli's with us one night, I casually mentioned it was my first Fazoli's experience and had been looking forward to it. Beth was shocked, to say the least. "Where did you grow up?" She asked, confused as to how this was possible.
Huz leaned toward her before I could say a word and explained: "Her mother cooked."
"Aaaah," she said. "That does explain it."

While a lot can be said about what this discrepancy between my food-relationship and how it was fostered and my husband's and how it was fostered (about parents, society, how family is or isn't developing, value system, most obviously-this generation's emphasis on a 'faster' paced life with less time and attention and care put into the food-making process) means, it's really all just leading up to a fuller understanding of how I typically eat and why. And while I do think my philosophy, relationship and care with food is a good one, I did miss out on one crucial food that I might never have tried if my brother had not been here in November. And if Huz hadn't suggested we go to Bass Pro Shop. And if I hadn't, somehow, gone through nearly thirty years of life without ever liking sweets enough to eat many of them.

Moon Pies.

I don't know if you've had a Moon Pie before, dear reader, but I do know I am properly obsessed with them. My brother insisted that I have one when we saw them at Bass Pro. They were only fifty-cents a piece, which worried me (if they were good, wouldn't they be more than fifty-cents?). He was appalled that I'd never had this "Great American Classic" and I began to question whether I remembered our healthy-eating childhood accurately or whether I had been the only one who truly ate healthy as a child (I do remember he and my sister eating lots of Chef Boyardee and microwavable snacks after school while I usually gravitated toward cheese and crackers or half a turkey sandwich). He handed the small plastic bag to me as we ran to the jeep in the rain. Once in the back seat, he waited while I unwrapped the Moon Pie and examined it. My other brother started the car.

"Just do it. Eat it."
"What if I don't like it?" I asked, looking over the smooth, chocolate exterior of the rounded pie.
"Then don't eat the rest."
I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth over the exterior of the Moon Pie and.....bit.

My life has never been the same.

Now we buy Moon Pies by the scores (2 for a dollar!) and store them in our bread box. We have learned that heating them in the microwave for 7-10 seconds makes them taste like self-contained s'mores. I have never felt this way about a sweet of any kind in my life and honestly believe that every bad day could be made better with a Moon Pie. I don't eat them constantly, but savor them for a day like today when it's rainy and cold and my phone is breaking, as did my pen in class today, and I'm just so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. Then there's my beloved Moon Pie shared over a paper white plate with my loving, wonderful husband, heated in the microwave for ten seconds, gooey and happy in my mouth...and the whole world seems better.

Messy Tangent in Yellow Stills

2010-01-19T22:27:00.001-06:00

It has been a week since my first guitar lesson and I can proudly say that all the chords Rory taught me are learned and I can play a scale fairly seamlessly. Tomorrow, lesson two commences. Speaking of guitar lessons, let me introduce you to Gertie.

Gertie is ten years old, made of wood and owned by my husband. She's never had a name before a week ago, but owns it like a hooker on a street corner, though she's not one. We rock out together to the G, C and D chord every day and, so far, the relationship is coming along nicely. She's got nice, tight strings and a glossy sheen like a well-groomed mare, but she whinnies like the souls of saints. Tomorrow, we hope to learn more chords and more about each other. Thus far, she's in good shape and my fingers are properly callousing, just as Rory suspected they might.

In other news, we had guests in town this weekend, MB and Blake (not to be confused with Amy I'm-A-Crack-House's/Wine-o-House's "Blake" (aka: Winehouse). While they visited for the evening, we experience something called "Ice Fog" together, though none of us could quite put our finger on what made that particular type of fog worthy of a proper name. It was definitely foggy, but not so much icy. We theorized that the ice collects in the lungs and, later, when the person who owns the lung chamber goes inside to warmth, it melts to water, but have no scientific data to back this up, nor were any of our throats or mouths particularly watery the next day as a result of melted ice.

The above photo is of us bracing the ice fog. Dustin, as you can see, is the only one who fears it. The rest of us have made our peace with it.

Blake also introduced us to something called "memes" which, if pressed, I cannot really explain. He showed us these youtube clips of a girl who looked about 14 years old just sort of being silly and devoting her videos as shout outs of love to internet friends of hers and, apparently, it set the internet world on fire. I can't explain it, really, but people sent this kid death threats for doing, virtually, nothing. It was kind of heartbreaking. She was definitely goofy and all over the place, but not death threat worthy by any standard (but, then again, who really is death threat worthy?). Anyhow, I couldn't sleep for thinking about this poor kid who probably went to sleep every night feeling terrified. Eventually, I did some research and learned she's probably ok and living a normal life and that made me feel a lot better and less worried. My future children are DEFINITELY not going to be allowed to post videos after seeing how something so innocent could become so dangerous.

Lastly, I painted our laundry room (with some guidance, patience and help from the spectacular Huz, of course...without him,I would've tried to paint the whole room with nothing but a can and a brush!) Ralph Lauren's kayak yellow this weekend. I started with a small room, thinking it'd be a good first-time-painting-a-room effort. Husband and I use this room to enter the house more than the front entrance since this entrance leads to the garage, where, of course, we park our cars. The room is going to be yellow, black and white since the washer and dryer are white, the walls are yellow, the trim and ceiling are white and some of the fixtures I want/have in there are black. In keeping with this theme, I looked up switchplates and found some that I thought were great, but couldn't bring myself to spend $5 on so, instead, I made some of my own! Here are some photos of the UNfinished project with the finished switchplates:

The flash is ruining the pretty color, but this is the calendar and key holder that was already in there. I had to remove it all to paint (pain in the butt getting everything taped up after I removed pieces from the walls...etc.) All the way to the right you can see ONE of the switchplates. It's black flower silhouettes.

This is a truer photo of the actual color, though still not THAT yellow. It has a warmer feel to it...as if in this pic it's missing a drop of orange or something, but stll...closer. This silhouette is an owl on a branch with a bird cage and birds hanging from the branch.

I imagine I will turn what's left of this room into a wrapping station (can you ever find the wrapping paper, tissue paper, labels, bags...etc...you know you have somewhere when you need it? Because I can't!) and mudroom, but haven't gotten all the pieces together just yet. I still need some items before I can post full scale photogs of the whole project. It's nice, though, to be glamouring up the place, even if it is just the laundry/mudroom.

Sorry for the sub-par photos. My camera is out of commission until I find the battery charger for it (it's one of those cameras that has a special battery that needs to be charged...blah!)

Today was the first day of school and, so far, so good. We'll see. I only TA-ed for a very cool Architecture class/professor today--an extra gig I picked up since times are usually pretty slow in the summer and January is a CRAPPY month for Grad student instructors who rely on a stipend (that's a hint to anyone with authority that can change how that goes down). I get to reign over 21 students, thus far, one who poked fun at my bum eye (did I mention I have a wandering eye? It's inconsistent in its wanderings and usually only does so when I'm TIRED or stressed...aka-first day of class and up at 7am), to her friend (girls never stop being mean, do they?), but the rest seem pretty invested and mature...so far. Tomorrow, I teach my two classes. Huz and I are going to school early to wake up and make copies and all that fun stuff. Should be a good time ;) More than likely the copier will be broken because that's just how it rolls. I'll be teaching Intermediate Cr. Nonfiction writing (think memoirs, etc. 15 students) and Intro to Brit Lit (30 students). Hopefully, all will go off without a hitch!

Also, I've been running again. Huz has been, too. We're all caught up on House (cus who doesn't love Hugh Laurie???) I made tasty spinach and black bean empanadas tonight for dinner (Huz just told me AGAIN how much he liked them so it sounds like that recipe is a keeper!) I've been working steadily on my memoir revisions and broke it down to chapters for this revision, so it's less daunting. Somehow revising one twenty-page or so chapter at a time rather than all 200 pages of the memoir at once is just less intimidating, ya know? Here's hoping! I love how busy and full my days have become. It's so nice to be so involved in my life :)

And, hey, a shout out to my lil 'ister who will be gown shopping tomorrow. She's tiny, petite, delicate and those dresses will need quite a bit of cinching to get on her little self, so GOOD LUCK, Sar!!! Send pics!

I realize this post is all over the place. I didn't get much sleep last night. Some nights, I just can't get cozy!

Love to you, though, with promises for a better, more fluid post than this one soon.

xoxo

Sacrificing to the Guitar Gods

2010-01-13T12:04:00.000-06:00

After my guitar lesson last night, D and I watched a movie and I unceremoniously cut my left hand's fingernails off, collecting the fragments and swiping them into the garbage. My whole life Mom has oohed and aahed over the superhuman strength of my nails. My nailbeds are wide, the nails themselves are hard as rocks, smooth and strong. Unlike my sister and my mother's nails, mine lack any hint of brittleness or frailty; they rarely break and tend to grow to lengths most women pay to have with fake, acrylics covering up their own nails. In fact, my nails even protest cutting and tend to need a few clamps of the nail-cutter before they comply. Mom attributes my nails to her parents genetics and laments that the trait somehow skipped her. She never fails to comment on their progress, often grabbing my hand, examining the nails with one hand and looking at her free hand's shorn ones. When my parents visited last semester, my nails were short, a byproduct of the stress of comprehensive exams and Mom commented, "It's not like you to bite your nails." "They've all just broken," I replied, examining the jagged edges, so abnormal to my hand. At Christmas, they'd grown back to a squared off, manicured-looking length and, again, she noted the change, sighing and saying, "I wish I'd made an appointment for a manicure for you. You just have such lovely nails. I envy your nails."

Women spend tons of money to get their nails pampered every week. In some ways, it's a sign of femininity, one that took years for us notice in my own nails since I played so many sports growing up and my hands were always calloused and dirty, nails kept short for the cause. Today, when I look around at my students and colleagues, I notice the various shades of red, brown, purple on their fingernails, or whatever color happens to be in season at the time. My aunts get their nails done weekly, selecting nail-jewelry when they have fancier occasions or holidays coming up. Many people consider the length, structure and even paint color of nails to be an essential part of their grooming, like I consider flossing my teeth and showering.

I can't count how many times I've heard or read about how revealing hands can be. Some are rougher and coarse from working with them often; good pianists supposedly have long fingers and well-kept nails. Receptionists and secretaries frequently have longer, painted nails and writers, well, we have soft, dexterous hands from all the typing we do.

When I cut those nails off last night and filed down the stubs that remained, I didn't feel like I was losing a part of my femininity or defying my mother's desire to live vicariously through my nails. Instead, a sense of liberation to the stereotype ensued. I am no longer definable by what my hands say, since my right hand nails are still longer. I'm blending together expectations, confusing the ability to determine a precise characteristic with which I can be defined, sacrificing my nails to the guitar gods in exchange for a skill. Already, I find that typing is a tad stranger with one hand's nails shorter than the other, but guitar playing is so much easier and just like learning the guitar, the strange new way of typing will come, too. The skills and work that defines me will recompartmentalize to allot time for practicing where once there none and some other space of wasted time in my day will be given up to learning to play this guitar.

Today, when I woke up and practiced my chords and scales with D's guidance, I could hear my mother in the back of my mind when she comes next month to visit saying, "What have you done to your nails?" and envisioned myself whipping out D's wooden guitar and plucking out my chords and scales as an answer. After all, I don't want to wait until I'm dying or sick to realize that there were things I wanted to learn, but never made the time. Shaving down my nails is a small price to pay.

While D's Guitar Gently Weeps or Guitar Lesson #1

2010-01-12T22:02:00.001-06:00

When I was five-years-old my mother overheard me picking out a tune on the piano by ear that my brothers' were learning in their weekly lessons and immediately signed me up for lessons with their teacher who thought I might have a knack for it. Unfortunately, my brothers hated practicing and I mimicked everything my brothers did, so the lessons didn't quite go as planned. I learned to read music, but had a hard time matching my fingers to the notes or even deciphering their names without pausing, removing my hand from the keys and spelling out "F-A-C-E" or saying "Every Good Boy Does Fine." Instead, I relied on my ear; sometimes my finger would hover over a key just a millisecond longer than a good pianist would, knowing it was going to be the wrong note and flinching, internally, at the mistake I was about to make. As I got older and Mom gave up on the lessons, I found solace in banging out songs familiar to my fingers after a bad day at school or a frustrating game on the soccer/softball/field hockey field. Over time, I grew to love the piano again, but never quite grasped the translation of note names and their key correspondents. Nowadays, if I sit at the piano for three or four days straight, the sounds re-introduce themselves to my fingers enough for me to temporarily memorize the pattern which they should play to make the song I hear in my head. I read the music s.l.o.w.l.y. those first two days, picking out the tunes and reminding myself what the notes look like and which finger should reach for them; by the third or fourth day, I'm steady until, finally, it comes easily again. I can tell by running my fingers just once across the keys whether it needs to be tuned or not and which notes are off.

In fourth grade, I started the drums and played until I was fourteen. I listened for percussion in songs and was even given the title of "first drummer" in our school band, a role that came with having no sheet music to accompany the rest of the band's song and required me to play by ear, which, of course, I loved. That stopped when I entered high school and singing came to be the popular instrument of choice by my peers. So I took singing lessons for six months, an instrument, it turned out, I was not as naturally talented at.

Now, though, having just turned thirty-years-old, I am surrounded by guitarists. Dustin has two guitars here at our house: one that hangs from a hook in his office and the other that lives in an old black case. I am naturally attracted to the wooden acoustic guitar, with it's sleek glossy body and strong neck. Whenever Dustin or a friend plucks out a tune on the guitar, I immediately think of my mother in her youth who once told me she played the guitar. I knew it was true since the catalyst for me asking if she played the guitar lived in our small, cold computer room tucked, almost forgotten, away on the second floor of our house. The room was built off the staircase to the attic. It was narrow, like the neck of a guitar, and housed an old Mac computer with two games (Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and a WPM typing test). An ancient printer sat to the right of the computer and at least two long-sleeved shirts and a hoodie needed to be worn if one ventured into that part of the house. The only other object in the room was a wooden guitar with a busted string. I want to imagine that I wanted her to teach me, but that may be a fallacy. Somehow, though, the image of my mother with the wooden guitar nestled into her lap stays with me, though I've never seen it, and some part of me wants so badly to learn how to play it, to share this music with my family and my mother.

Sometime after my comprehensive exams last semester, I decided it was time to learn the guitar and I whipped out Dustin's wooden one while he was out of the house, pulled up some online instructions and tried my hardest to understand what all the lines, dots and numbers meant to no avail. This semester, I called upon my guitar-playing friends for advice, help, lessons...anything...and tonight, after a seitan cutlet parmesan dinner with Rory and Dustin at our home, Rory patiently gave me my first guitar lesson.

Dustin retreated to his study to read and kindly tolerated my picking and inquiries and Rory's careful instruction. So far, I've learned that holding the neck of the guitar and pressing down the frets is an abnormal motion for the human hand/wrist to perform. I can't tell the difference between whether a string is out of tune because it's too high or too low and this is going to be a lot harder than skilled guitarists make it look. But now I can tune a guitar and know what the dots and lines mean, learned some scales and chords and will be practicing like crazy until that guitar nestles into my lap and plays for me the way I imagine it did for my mother, until I have callouses on my fingers where the strings have made them stronger. Rory says my ear and my fingers and my wrist will all adjust...I just hope, after I cut my fingernails, that he's right.

Thanks D for letting me use your guitar and for tolerating my picking and prodding while you study. Thanks, Rory, for being a patient, thorough teacher. We're going to have to come up with a better tradeoff than seitan for what you're teaching me.

I'll let the rest of you know how it goes as we progress.

xoxo

Grind, A Confession and Beowulf

2010-01-11T16:42:00.001-06:00

Here we are at "It's a Grind," our favorite local cafe. I'd like to pretend it's a dive, but it's really not and, right now, the only "divey" thing about it is the sea of coffee filtering around at my feet, remnants of what once inhabited this bright, beautiful, huge red mug Dustin was drinking coffee out of. That, too, is smashed. Ladies and gentlemen, let me re-introduce myself as one of the world's biggest klutzes. In all fairness, the catastrophic blow to the mug was not entirely my fault, since Dustin placed it directly behind my laptop, out of my line of sight. How could he know I'd turn my computer and send the mug flying? How could I know the mug was even there? Que sera sera.

We've come to this cafe in an attempt to refocus our attentions on schoolwork. For Dustin's part, he has been diligently reading books as if his brain has an unappeasable, ravenous appetite for them. I have been alternating between reading for my first week of teaching next week and revising my memoir. While we've both been rather dedicated, the semester will, no doubt, be hectic and even us studious, academic-types need a break from the same old setting; our home office filled with so many books it makes me dizzy just thinking about them. In fact, just before we left the house, we were fitting a place for a suspended bookshelf to reside in the office since we need space for, you know, more books!

Yesterday I began reading Beowulf which I am teaching the first and second week of the semester for my Intro to Brit Lit class. It was originally written in Old English and when I read the introduction, I found myself trying to memorize the symbols of Old English and what they sounded like so I could teach myself to read in Old English (my bf Megan can do this and I'm totally envious...literary nerds!). In my mind, it should work like those decoder rings from Cracker Jax boxes or those scrambled coded clues they provide on the Geocaching page that look like this. If I keep the symbols and their meanings beside the text, I should be able to translate no problem, right? But this is crazy talk and more introductory reading proves my theory to be impossible. It's a good thing the text I'm teaching has been translated. The big confession here is this (lean in closely because it's a secret)...I've never read Beowulf.

Has the initial shock worn off? I think everyone and their mother has read this text but me. Somehow, in the advanced lit class I took in high school, we skipped this stuff and worked with modern authors and poetry instead. In college, my creative writing major called for craft, workshop and critical courses rather than literature courses and I think my final lit course tally by the end of four years came in at four (two required, two for my film minor). When I divulged this to my husband, his brother admitted that he, too, had never read it. (It can slide with him, though, since he's not an English Lit. professor.) So D launched into a basic summary using the following words, phrases and definitions:

mead hall: place where men drink honey wine (aka-mead) and where they pass out; created by the king for the people (there was a lot more to this, but I'm going for "short" here)
King Hrothgar
Grendel: some sort of fucked up monster whose arms is ripped off by our hero, leading to his eventual death
tears limbs off drunk people: what Grendel does at night by sneaking into the hall when the people are passed out
Grendel's Mom: even more fucked up than Grendel who resides in a cozy cave and is really pissed off when her son dies (bitch should've headed Beowulf's threats...this is my additional commentary, not the husband's)
Beowulf: an arrogant warrior type who eventually becomes king; when he first busts on the scene he brags about swimming for hella long time, like twenty days, and to put his money where his mouth is, he brings down both Grendel and his mom (almost single-handedly). However, he later becomes king, but is more of a fighter than a thinker, the kingdom's not at its peak, a dragon is threatening the well-being of the land and Beowulf takes some guys, fights the dragon, becomes mortally wounded and dies. Oh, and only one guy stays with him to finish off the dragon, but the kingdom benefits from this dragon's death.
The End

I considered whipping out our mini voice recorder and getting this all on tape to play to my class next week, but thought better of it, not wanting them to think this summary would suffice and they'd no longer have to do the work of reading. Sigh. One thing his summary did accomplish, though, is getting me stoked to read Beowulf. I haven't gotten past the introduction quite yet, but will let you know how it goes. Plus, we have a bottle of mead wine at home that I'm now dying to try out (I've been eyeing it between revisions and home-upkeep).

Have any of you read Beowulf? What'd you think?

Good Fortune and Safety to All Who Enter Here

2010-01-10T17:38:00.000-06:00

My brother-in-law recently visited our home for the first time and christened it as being both "calm and peaceful." He commented on liking the greenish hued paint and said he thought the house suited us well. Coming from Coire (pronounced "Corey"), this is a huge compliment. It's not because Coire doesn't offer compliments often; it's because he is something of an inherent interior designer. As Dustin says, "Coire can come into a room, decide that a red stripe needs to be painted vertically down the wall and when he's done it, it looks really good and you're left wondering how the hell a random red line down a wall could work. Somehow, he just has a knack for it. He just knows what will look good."

This can be proven by merely stepping foot into Coire's own home. There is a fluidity to the setup and furniture, a cool feel to the rocky-faced living room tabletops and tan leather couches that makes one think of an Asian rock garden, carefully crafted. At one point, there was a rock-fountain against the wall that seemed to whisper "serenity" and the home felt like nature domesticated. There is something about the way Coire views the world that allows him to take something otherwise bland and boring and make it pop. I often think if I were to simply name an emotion, Coire could design any room to portray it perfectly.

Coire's also quite observant and one of the few, if not the only, people to have commented on the swastika that can be found on the floor at every entrance of our home (image to the right). Most people don't notice it since the sticker is quite small and blends in with the tile beneath it, not to mention most people aren't looking at the ground when they enter a house. My brothers each wear a gold necklace with a swastika pendant that stays tucked into their shirts, but my eldest brother told me he has nearly gotten into fights with people who don't understand the true meaning behind the symbol. When Coire mentioned it, I feared he might think I was a Nazi-sympathizer or racist so I explained the origin behind the symbol.

The swastika is a Hindu religious symbol (it might also be good to note that Hindus are pacifists), second in strength only to the Om. It comes from the Sanskrit "svasti" meaning "good fortune" and is common in India. Various translations can be "good fortune," "auspiciousness," "harmony" or "welcome," among others. To stereotype, Indians tend to be fairly superstitious and when I moved into my home, my father put an "Om" above two of the three doors and a swastika at the main entrance, telling me that it would keep me safe and protect the house. I, for my own part, am superstitious, as well, but became more superstitious when "friends" would "let themselves in" (translate to: break into) my house, but always through the side entrance, the one without a swastika or Om. After coming back from a trip to India, I stuck an Om and swastika at the remaining entrance, the one people used to let themselves in through, and have since had no break-ins. (Hence, my superstition was gratified.)

Coire's logical next question was, why did Hitler take and use the swastika? The answer: because he thought it was a symbol of racial purity and superiority, perpetuated by the speculation that early Indian inhabitants were white invaders. So Hitler took this Aryan symbol and used it to represent his ideal, as well as playing on the idea of "harmony" (believing the world would be harmonious under his rule and the extinction of Jews...etc.). In doing so, he re-defined a revered religious symbol meaning harmony and good fortune to be recognized, instead, as a symbol of hatred and genocide.

We both agreed this was a sad result for a peaceful symbol.

When Coire left, he took an extra swastika with him to place on the floor at the entrance of his home and I couldn't help but feel as though we'd taken something back somehow, by spreading the symbol and using it for good. I just hope the rest of the world can follow the same pacifist, harmonious suit.

The Good List

2010-01-02T16:42:00.000-06:00

It's so long, 2009, and hello 2010, but not without a nod toward all the blessings the year brought. So without further adieu, the Good List (on a personal level) of 2009.

1. The Michael Family Established 2009: Welcome to our love. June 13, 2009 was the day Dustin and I joined together in marriage with 130 of our friends and family as our witnesses. There was never a more perfect day and each day feels as new and exciting as the last. We were so blessed to have so many people travel from extreme distances to be there to celebrate with and join us in our special day. In fact, we had so much fun, we plan on doing it again every few years in varying locations. I'm so thrilled to have married my best friend and love of my life.

2. The Passing of my Comprehensive Exams/Attaining ABD: What a long, hard trip it's been! For the last four years, I've been preparing for this exam, in some ways. For the last year, I've been reading as many books as I could possibly get into me while taking careful, detailed notes on every aspect of them in preparation. All semester, I wrote a preparatory essay (with one major, overhaul revision), then I sat for two hours for an oral exam with my intelligent and knowledgeable committee. One catch, one of my members was sick, so I had to come back and sit for another hour-long oral exam with he and my committee chair a few days later. The consensus: unanimous passes. Again, my thanks to the committee, my family and husband who, as my mom put it, "was there in the trenches" with me. So much support for one girl is more than I could have imagined.

3. Sara's Engagement: Woah there, little Sara! Who knew my sister would be getting engaged only six months after Dustin and I married!?! Sara had been dating her boyfriend for 2 years and eight months before they got engaged. Her newly minted fiance got her parents and his parents to the same restaurant so after he proposed, the host asked them to move to another table. Sara freaked out a little bit, but agreed to move...and voila! They were moved to a table where their parents were. Anthony's a great guy who loves my sister very much. So congrats to the two of them and thanks for asking me to be your Maid of Honor! :) What an honor it is.

4. Cousin Rachel's Admission to Law School...at MIZZOU: This is pretty exciting news since we go to Mizzou and Rachel will be JUST down the street from us. Rachel is Dustin's first cousin. She has been wanting to go to law school forever and applied early admission to no other schools and now...she's in! A dream come true! Congrats, Rachel! We are so proud of you and excited to have you at Mizzou!

5. Coire Graduates: My brother-in-law, Coire, manages a local gas station, raises his 7 year-old daughter, had an internship and took on full course loads every semester until finishing up his bachelor's degree this December. It hasn't been an easy task, but Coire has completed it nobly and we are incredibly proud of him and all of his hard work.

6. Health: 2009 was a year without death or serious sickness in our family (both Navare and Michael sides). We feel blessed that our family is growing with marriages and births and we are thrilled at the blessings of continued health we have.

As 2010 is at hand, we greet it with joy and hope. Dustin will be taking his comprehensive exams this year; we will both be looking for tenure track and spousal appointments. Sara will be preparing for her wedding. Rachel will be moving away from home for the first time and taking on law school. Coire will be on the job market. We hope for nothing more than continued health, love and success for all of our friends and family and thank you all for coming along for the ride.

Here's to 2010!

3am Rambling

2009-12-14T02:50:00.000-06:00

It's nearing 3am and I just can't find a pathway to sleep this evening. D and I spent most of the day watching season five of The Office and had some wonderful stop-in visitors earlier in the day, as well. Who knew Sunday would be so lively at our house? Mainly, we wanted to stay in and have a lazy Sunday to recuperate from the crazy high we've been on all week long! Let me recap...

Monday: First round of oral comps from 2-4pm straight: passed!!!!!
Tuesday: Last official day of class with my students, Christmas shopping, dissertation reading of our darling friend A. who is hopefully reading this and feeling incredibly wonderful about his fabulous manuscript! Great job, A! Followed by a celebratory drink with the chair of my committee.
Wednesday: Coldest day that ever existed, D's last day of class...I attended and helped out a bit/
Thursday: Non-mandatory meet-up/critique with one class, conferences with students, second round of comps (nope, this is not the norm. One of my committee members was sick on Monday so we--the chair of my committee and the sick committee member--sat down and did an hour long Q&A which I passed, thank God).
Friday: More conferences with students, Christmas party, one of my best friend's here came home from the hospital (woohooo!!!)....and we got the incredible news that my SISTER GOT ENGAGED at dinner that night to her sweet boyfriend of three years, Anthony. Congrats to them!
Saturday: Em's birthday celebration, thank you cards from our wedding (we waited for wallet sized pics and started writing them asap when we got them last week, finally!) and Christmas cards mostly finished up, then even MORE good news that D's cousin Rachel got into Mizzou Law School (early admission) and will be joining us up here in Columbia next school year!

Can you see why we needed a bit of a rest come Sunday? Not to mention, I've been sick all week (longer than a week now) and it sucks. After a full day today, we had one more wonderful surprise: a call from D's best friend Andy who is working in a military base somewhere abroad. He left two months ago and will be back for a brief visit in early 2010, but we miss him and were very happy to get word straight from him that all's well.

Usually I survey a year near the end and think, "Man, I hope next year's better than this shit." But, honestly, this is one year that is going to be nearly impossible to top. Two of my happiest moments ever have occurred this year: marrying D and passing my comps. How can any other year top that???

Except, I can't sleep at the moment, with all the thoughts of having free time again to write and read at my leisure and take more classes for fun (yeah, I said that..."for fun"). I'm just so excited I don't want to waste my time sleeping, I guess. So, instead, I'm wasting it writing a crappy blog that you will now be subject to reading. Sorry. I'm going to try this sleep thing again. I've heard if you lay there long enough it eventually comes...eventually.

xoxo
N

The Outcome

2009-12-09T10:47:00.000-06:00

"There's this memory I have of being twelve-ish and believing that one day soon, I'd be a ballerina. So I stood in the kitchen on the wooden floor and practiced tour jetes while my Mom cooked dinner. More than likely, she had her back to me, tired of watching me attempt to beat the height of my last backward, twirling kick leap. I tour jeted back and forth on the kitchen floor, occasionally saying "Did you see that? How high I got?" Thinking that the higher and I leapt, the better dancer I had become. Mom finally turned to watch me when I kicked and twirled, landing on my right foot, extending my left back and upward just as my eldest brother walked into the kitchen. "You nearly kicked me in the balls, Neesha! Watch it!" he shouted. I don't remember what happened after this, but my brother tells the story differently. Instead of leaping and landing gracefully, he contends that he came into the room and bore the brunt of that last leg extension. He swears my left leg came up steadily and kicked him straight in the balls. For years we told this story differently--he with the injured groin, me with the near-catastrophic kick. For him, it perpetuated the stereotype that I was a klutz, that bad luck followed me and reigned down on anyone who had the misfortune of standing or being too close to me; for me, it was the difference between truth and embellishment. Finally, a year ago, I asked my mother if she remembered the incident. If I did, in fact, kick my brother in the groin. I needed to know what the truth of the matter really was...whether I could've altered my recollection of the experience so greatly that I'd forgotten I endangered my brother's ability to have children. "No. I don't recall you kicking him," she admitted. "I remember him being indignant because you could have. But I don't remember it actually happening," she concluded without hesitation or second-guessing. This is the fault of memory," I explained to my doctoral committee Monday afternoon in an attempt to further support my discussion on the faultiness, yet validity of memory.

Incase you were wondering, I passed my comprehensive oral examination. I am humbled by being able to admit that and as proud as my modesty can permit. I cannot believe I've accomplished this feat. I cannot believe I have somehow been able to have a prosperous life on top of accomplishing this feat. I am in a state of constant awe and gratitude. I don't know how to begin to express how happy and relieved I feel or how grateful I am to all those who have helped me get to this place, who have supported me and believed in me. So, please accept my thanks and appreciation for sticking with our blog in its poor state. It might take a new direction, but will, hopefully, house more actual writing now that this process is ended for me. We do have Dustin in the lineup to consider, though, so all the prayers and thoughts can be redirected his way.

Thanks for your thoughts and keep checking back for more blogs!

N

Brink

2009-12-06T14:09:00.000-06:00

Today I find myself on the cusp of the most important exam of my life. In some ways, it literally feels like I'm standing at the top of a rocky cliff, about to step out. At best, the ground appears beneath me, invisible until I step like in that Indiana Jones movie where he has to have faith that he'll step out and something will be there. I think he tosses some dust, perhaps, to make that faith visible. I don't have that luxury. At worst, I step out and tumble, landing alive, but visibly shaken and dejected at the bottom with nothing but the cliff still there for me to climb just one more time.

Tomorrow is the oral part of my comprehensive exam. While I've passed the written part unanimously, I still have to find the words to articulate my thoughts gracefully to an audience of five, learned, intellectual committee members, each with their own questions and specialities in tact and sharpened, ready for discussion. In my heart, I know they want me to pass. I believe this. But in my mind, I am intensely aware of the fact that any one of them could trip me up unintentionally, causing me to stumble off that cliff instead of find solid grounding.

For weeks, years, really, I have been preparing for this day, this exam. It's the culmination of my academic life. Just mention "comprehensive exams" and typically stern and stubborn forces part ways, make exceptions, extend deadlines, knowingly. I can almost see the sympathy and feel the gentle pats on my hand from faculty members when I tell them, via email, I cannot produce a syllabus for next semester yet because my oral exam is on Monday. "I understand the anxiety that can come from this exam," they say. "Just get it to me when you can," they allot. "Let me know if there's anything we can do to make this easier." They, too, have been here. Their own recollections of the difficulty before me overwhelm them, I imagine, and they wish me luck, tell me not to worry about the syllabus and send no more emails to distract me from the task.

To this, I thank them all. Thank the teachers that have come before them and the ones before that. Thank my husband who has graciously taken on the upkeep of our lives. Who has patiently remained a true partner even when I was lost, before he married me and after. Thank, even, my pets for seeming to know and lying at my feet as warmers or company. Bust, mostly, I thank my parents and siblings who don't quite understand what this means or what it's like. Who have, certainly, felt frustration at the years spent moving from place to place, ever further from home. Who have remained, a constant nucleus of love and regenerative strength. Who have tried to understand the processes and tests, papers and explanations, meaningless to them, of "comprehensive exams" and "dissertation," the weight of the words falling on them, the reality of them still elusive. It is with great patience they have followed me on this path, supporting me without fully knowing what it all means. Joining me in wondering, when my sanity was tested, whether it was really going to be worth it, after all. Whether I'd make it out, in the most literal sense, alive. They have accepted what they could not understand through trusting that I was doing what I needed to do. They believed in this and me with blind faith.

Tomorrow, when it's all over, I will either be walking high above the cliff I've conquered or standing at the bottom, contemplating a new way to reach the top. Either way, I will be a stronger, better version of myself for taking that step with only my good strength and sense to guide me and the support of all those who will stick with me whether I rise or fall. I cannot consider myself anything other than the most blessed person I know.

What I Remember

2009-12-02T01:52:00.000-06:00

In my MFA program back in Pittsburgh we read a lot of books and essays that mentioned or talked about Pittsburgh in a class I took. At the moment, I can't remember the class or what it's real focus was, but I do remember looking for Pittsburgh in the strangest of places. Tonight, while rereading Li-Young Lee's incredibly poetic memoir The Winged Seed, I was reminded of that search in various texts when I turned from page 77 to 78 and saw, in a black marker-like ink I have since abandoned in favor of a fine-pointed black ink, "Finally!" scrawled into the margin with an arrow pointing to the phrase "East Liberty." At the time, I must have been searching for Pittsburgh amidst the symbols of "seed" "R" "winter" "ash" but now, four years removed from my last reading of the text, what I remember most is a scene where the author describes removing excrement from his father's bowels because his body will no longer purge itself of it without aid.

For years, when someone sharing a table with me ordered salad at a restaurant, I have waited for the image of a man lifting limp leaf after limp leaf of lettuce from his plate, depositing it into his mouth while spouting poetic brilliance or dropping socially awkward conversation between leaves without remembering precisely where the notion of such a thing came from. A story someone told me? A memory from my past? Until I stumbled across the description in Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar this afternoon. This was her memory, her reality or fantasy and I felt such relief at having discovered the source of this expectation, the reason for why a plate of greenery triggered this hope.

These are some of the moments from literature that have remained with me like a sticker on an old notebook whose image was once complete but now remains only a probed, scratched, faded fragment of the whole. Part of it remains, unremovable, though much of it is gone and its true form is entirely obliterated.

As a child, I could read countless books and recite in great detail precisely what happened complete with character descriptions, thoughts, authors, and, often, page numbers. My mother likened me to a sponge, constantly absorbing whatever I came into contact with, often unconsciously remembering. If you gave me a title, I could respond with a complete encyclopedic, Cliffs Notes knowledge without thinking. This was a time time of untainted recollection, too soon in years for me to confuse experience with a story I'd read. I filled my mental library, devouring books alongside my dinner at the crowded table each night, and stayed up late to know the ending, guided only by the moonlight streaming in from my bedroom window. I simply had to know what happened to these characters, these lives so different and more fascinating than my own. And I remembered every detail as if it were my life.

In the last year, I have read over 150 books in an attempt to study for my comprehensive exams. The list should have ranged from about 110-125, but in the course of revamping it, many books I'd read were abandoned and new books I hadn't read filled their void. These titles are piled in towers on my desk, precariously shifting with the vaguest hint of breeze. I have sorted and separated them into categories according to subject, resorted them by theme, stacked them according to which of my four questions they applied to and started over in favor of how they related to one another, what theories they exemplified, which ones directly alluded to others and so on. Many have come to feel like limp leaves in my hands, my recollection of them like irretrievable waste from my insides, though I have known them all intimately, but cannot call them to mind the way I once did as a child on a whim or as a game.

When I go to bed at night, the last image I have is of those towers of books across the room, stacked high, waiting to be reorganized and remembered when the time comes for me to call upon them when asked. My fear is that when that time comes, they will only come back to me in flashes of lettuce leaves and stubborn bowels, just a single, blank remnant rather than a complete symbol or whole. Already I have forgotten entire plots, authors, characters. Already, life has filled me with memories competing for space, making themselves comfortable in the minute spaces of the card catalog compartment of my mind.

Stolen Lines, Abandoned Selves

2009-11-12T23:13:00.004-06:00

I dated this poet once that used to steal my lines. Can you imagine that? Sometimes I'd write them or text them or say them and then, suddenly, as if they were his own, they'd make a guest appearance in one of his poems. Not the Hilary Duff-like guest appearance on Gossip Girl, where she's scheduled for a handful of episodes in a season, but Blair's-employee-Dorota-guest appearance on the same show. The kind where she pops in for a minute and just as seamlessly pops back out and we don't see her again for the rest of the season. He inserted them in as if he had written or even just thought them up when he hadn't. Don't get me wrong, he had a masterful command of language, but it felt a little like creative theft to me.

One time, during a reading he gave, someone seated a few feet away actually whispered to the person beside her, "I love that. Did you hear it? I love that." After said poet read: "I am on sabbatical from the world."

Yup. That was mine.

At that moment, I wasn't upset, I was still rationalizing the emotional conflict I felt about being written and read aloud about. I was still hoping that my existence, if it had to be used in someone's poem, might have the ability to spark some sort of genius that I doubted my own life would be suspended long enough to create. On the first count, I'm fairly sure it didn't. On the second, I've now come to the realization I was wrong.

I have since decided I don't mind that I was written about and I've come to this conclusion because that person that was written about all those years ago is like the narrative self in creative nonfiction: chosen to serve a purpose, to tell a specific truth, not to make sense of or define a whole. That person, who was broken and depressed has remained just where he knew her and committed her: to paper..to the past.

Last semester, a student of mine from a class I taught his poetry to years ago emailed and asked me for a copy of his work saying, "I think my class would really enjoy it and I need to bring something in. Do you have it? Can you send it to me?" I didn't, but I directed her to the last email address I had for him, one I found in my old email account that serves as a receptacle for junk mail, forwards and the rare significant note from a long-lost friend, the one he used to write to when we still cared for one another in a way and with weight only letters could carry, around the time when he started to steal my lines and I started to fill my belly with bottles of rum and pills. When I found the address among the graveyard of my old life, those emails were there, too, shoved into a folder called "Ebay and Stuff" along with purchase confirmations and tracking numbers for vintage clothing from the 40's that I no longer wear. Those dresses of pink, black, white and plaid hang somewhere in the closet I share with my husband. I had forgotten I even had them.

When I navigate away from the email account, I leave the contents untouched, unopened, not willing to visit the girl that I was, afraid to hear what destruction she spoke, what lines he stole, how unknowing and desperate we were: he in his love, me in my despair. I think it's better, not feeling bad for what happened between us, not trying to make sense of that self I can't understand or excuse. I abandoned her there out of fear. How frightening it was to be left alone with her! Anywhere with her was like death! Even then, with so much time passed, I decide it's best to leave her there, amid the unwanted emails and unworn clothes, an age that defined an era, a movement of tragedy. Unopened, unread, unstirred. Sometimes its best not to linger on what scares us most.

When I send my student the address, I wish her luck, apologize I can't do more and hope he understands that by sending her instead of me I'm letting him know that I'm sorry and that he can keep the lines.

Two Years

2009-11-11T11:22:00.003-06:00

Today is our two-year dating anniversary. In other words, two years ago today we decided we would stop dating other people and just date each other. Six months after this day two years ago, we were engaged. Now we're married...for exactly 151 days. In 31 more days, we will have been married for exactly six months. I could continue with these numbers, but to calculate them, I keep needing to pull up my desktop calculator and I'm losing track of what I'm calculating (that's what you get from a literary person).

For the last few months, I've been busy writing and revising answers for my comprehensive exam. This has rendered me useless to the rest of the world, for the most part. The oral is schedule for December 7th which is the last week of regular classes for the semester, 11 days before D's 32nd birthday, 20 days before my 30th (ouch) and, has a 50% possibility of being the last important day of my 25 years of education. (I know. I'm doing it again! The number thing!) WOW!

For the last few months, D has been studying for his comps, teaching, and holding down the Michael fort (which is no easy task with a pair of humans, dogs and birds, plus visitors! and a wife that is not allowed to drive in the state of Missouri for another thirty days or more).

I'm not saying we're "back" yet, since catastrophe or tragedy could occur at any moment (keep in mind that orals day)...but we're, at least, thinking about it.

Mainly, I just wanted to let everyone know that two years ago today I began dating the man I would inevitably marry and couldn't let the day pass without mention.

I love you, D. Happy Two-Year-Dating Anniversary! Here's to many more!

xoxo

Yes, Virginia...

2009-11-07T21:08:00.003-06:00

I don't have much time for a real blog, but as I was perusing the news today, I noticed some info about this 1897 editorial, better known as "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." A movie is being made about this editorial in which an 8 year-old girl wrote to the New York Sun to inquire as to whether there was a Santa Claus or not, having been told by classmates that such a thing did not exist. The response has become one of the most reprinted pieces in new history. I felt ashamed that I'd heard this quote "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus..." before, but never knew where it came from or what the significance was. I suppose I thought maybe it was written in a tone where the rolling of eyes would be appropriate, but found myself in a mist of touched tears when I read it through, recognizing such beauty and care in the response the author wrote. So, with Christmas a little over a month away and Black Friday, the season kick-off and cue for sheer insanity and greedy chaos to ensue just around the corner, I thought I'd post this as a reminder of innocence and beauty and faith.

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

The Smell from the Fridge

2009-09-14T10:13:00.003-05:00

We have been catering to this horrid stench coming from the refrigerator region for the last week. It began, as most things do, quite suddenly with just the slightest subtle bit of rancidness. Each day, I'd go through the remnants of leftovers, guessing at what might be causing the odor, throwing things out and flushing them down the garbage disposal. For the most part, I'd notice that the smell was gone until about twenty minutes later when I'd re-open the refrigerator, sniff the air and think, "Man. Seriously? What could it be?"

It got to the point that I was throwing things out that I'm not even sure were bad, but had no other choice. It was like sacrificing to the leftover Gods...and their hunger was insatiable. Something had to be causing it! There must be some way to relieve the scent.

We went home to Cape Girardeau this weekend and D left the "instructions note" on caring for the dogs, birds...etc...with a note that the weekend inhabitants could eat anything in the fridge. I "P.S.-ed" that everything smelled, but nothing was bad.

When we returned, none of the food had been touched and the scent was now lingering OUTSIDE of the refrigerator. So with a vengeance, I tore through the fridge again at 10:30 last night. D and I looked UNDER the fridge thinking maybe something had gone under it and died...nothing.

"Maybe it's time to clean out the whole thing and just wipe it down all over," D suggested.

"I just did that last month," I groaned, removing beer bottles and condiments from the shelves, nosing around freshly purchased veggies and milk. "It's still clean!"

Then it happened: my hand landed on a ziploc bag with three lone brussel sprouts in it. We'd eaten these sprouts a week ago or so and I'd, clearly, forgotten about them since they got shoved off the back of a shelf and were dangling precariously between shelves. No wonder I didn't find them sooner! They'd hidden in the balance between levels of food and beer. Bastards!

It was with dread that I entered the kitchen this morning. D sat up on a stool at the breakfast bar reading his book beside the chirping birds. I faced him on the other side of the bar at the sink and filled up an oversized mug with black coffee. "Does it still smell in there?" I asked sipping at the scalding liquid. "I don't think," he said hesitantly, "But I'm stuffy." He referred to his allergicly reacting stuffy/runny nose.

Slowly, I opened the door to the fridge and took a deep breath. Finally! We have success!

So "Sunday Dinner" tonight will be odor free. More on Sunday dinner another time.

Thank you leftover Gods! It seems we have FINALLY reached their quota!

Whoops.

2009-08-31T20:15:00.003-05:00

Dustin here.

A little follow-up to that last post. I didn't run away from home. I was just playing racquetball with our pal Robert Klick; I'd told Neesh about the plan, but forgot to tell her when, and apparently she didn't notice when I kissed her goodbye and slipped out that morning. That was totally my bad. Next time, I'll leave a note. Sorry for panicking everyone (especially you, Neesh)!

We're at It's a Grind cafe now. Neesh is writing and reading for comps. I'm writing a poem that I hope will make it into tomorrow's update at www.asininepoetry.com. Fun fact: Poetry was like, my specialty while I was in grad school at Southeast; since there was no nonfiction writing program there, it was all poetry and fiction workshops, all the time. So I know my way around a rondeau, but up in these here parts -- especially with only two allotted public readings in five years -- there's really no occasion for one such as me to put that out there. Besides, the poets here got that mess staked out hardcore like the Neil Armstrong's U.S. flag on the moon. They're all, like, yoink.

But that's okay, because Neesh and I got somethin' in the pipe for the creative types in these parts whose voices maybe aren't getting heard so much. More on that as it develops. I'm stoked about it, though. I can tell you that much.

Back to the matter at hand before they close and kick us out of here. Peace out until next time, loyal reader.

--D

Two Strange Occurrences at Piranha Court

2009-08-27T08:36:00.002-05:00

The full first week of school is not yet under our belts (D teaches MWF so he still has tomorrow, and I teach today) and all kinds of strange things are happening. One-a student of mine missed the first day of class (he was the ONLY one to miss it). The class is for students majoring/minoring in English. He then wrote me an email claiming "scheduling conflicts." Out of curiosity, I facebook him (is "facebook" a legal verb yet?) and find out that his status claims he not ONLY missed class, but he missed the WINERY!!!, too. I planned to say nothing about it and just kindly point toward the attendance policy in my syllabus so he had an idea. D thought I should call him out. What can I say? I cave under peer pressure exerted by my husband, so I casually advised him, at the end of the informative email, to alter his facebook page to a more private state so his claims of having "scheduling conflicts" could be more believable. Followed by a "see you in class tomorrow!" I'm still not sure whether I actually WILL see him in class today.

When I woke up this morning, my husband was gone. Seriously. He still is, as a matter of fact. All of his things are here, though, and so are his running shoes so I have crossed "running" and "leaving me" off of the list. However, he's not in the house. I once woke up to find him gone and decided he must've gone out for something, but found he was really closed into another room whose door we usually keep shut. I checked those doors, though. And this time, he's really gone. I have faith he'll be back, even though he's not answer his phone. But where could he have been at 8am? Weird.

More to come on the first week of school sometime after I find my husband.

-N

The Demands of the Kitchen and Other Tales

2009-08-21T12:42:00.002-05:00

When did I get so boring?

I have been toying with the Great Removal, as in, the Great Removal of my Myspace Page as I don't ever use it and it is kind of pointless to have that space on the internet devoted to me when I'm not devoted to it. However, it is home to my previous blogging. A blog that tells the story of a girl who came before me: confused, uncertain, depressed, seeking and falling frequently. It takes place in a mind that roams, is sometimes witty and, mostly, quite odd. I'm no longer that person, of which I'm glad, but I do appreciate some of her writing as it's really kind of quirky, engaging, and, at times, enlightening. So I made this attempt to copy/paste it all into a blog on here, but it's over 1mb (or something like that). Then I tried to save it in a document on my computer, but Word physically and flat-out refused to do it. As a last attempt, I emailed it to myself, but I'm not convinced it will ever see the light of day again if I keep it in my old email account. What to do with a past self? A blog that reveals a journey to the now? I don't know. Do you have any other ideas?

Other than reading books (they're for my exam, Kelly!) by the score, I have been drinking coffee like it keeps my heart pumping. D, God bless him, must find me even more boring than I find myself. Last night he tore out of the house to go see a movie that he KNEW was going to be bad, though I tell myself it was the company of his friends he was really interested in, not in parting ways from the Book-Eater that he's apparently married.

However, this alternate universe I'm living in has its own interesting moments. For example, the other day I looked across the room at Dustin sitting over in the kitchen. He was reading intently and, from where I sat, it looked as though he and his giant brick-colored coffee cup were floating. For a good hour, every time I glanced in his direction, the coffee cup appeared to be hovering near him, waiting for him to grab hold of it's handle and sip.

A spider crawled up to me while I was reading the other day and I would bet money it was the exact same spider I saw earlier in the week. On the first occasion, it was near Dustin who, I think, doesn't love spiders. Mostly the spider was yellow with a distinct black stripe on him. Not huge, but fuzzy-looking. I didn't get a chance to tell D about it before the spider scurried off and then reappeared, days later, beside me on the couch. For a minute, it was like me might saddle up and ask me how Mary Rowlandson's "Captivity" was going, but when I returned his attention, he took off in the other direction. I knew this wouldn't do either of us any good...all this running amok on the couch business, so I scooped him up using an envelop as a shovel. He ended up folded inside of the envelope and I set him free out on the patio, much do the dogs' dismay.

Lastly, all this reading has forced me to confront the issue of the paint on the walls of our home. The color is a greenish, but was supposed to be a yellowish, a mistake I've lamented since the day I moved in. I have never stopped wanting it to be yellow and so for the last four years, I've tried to ignore the proud green walls that stare me down from every direction and room. Once, I though I'd paint the study a deep burnt orangey-red. I haven't given up the idea, just haven't gotten around to it. But the kitchen is beginning to get awfully pushy about me painting it yellow. Do you know what that's like? First, the kitchen demanded a pot-holder that would dangle from the ceiling over the sink and breakfast. It kind of insists that the holder will bring a new artistic feel to the room. It has a point. Then, when I began to look around for such a piece, it began hinting at wanting a new color. Mostly this began last Sunday when Dustin, my most wonderful, thoughtful husband, brought me home a shock of yellow roses. I adore them and put them on the breakfast bar in the kitchen so I can see them from where I study. The kitchen has really become quite taken with them itself and now thinks it's THE color. I got some swatches when we bought a can crusher the other day. We, (Dustin and I) are discussing. The dogs don't like it as their hair will lay claim to the wet paint and we know it, but we're still turning the idea on its head to see if it takes or not. Mostly, we're just waiting to see if the kitchen backs off or stands its ground on the color change. You know how kitchens are.

This is what you get when you put a writer in a house and force her to read for weeks on end. Thankfully school starts next week and I'll finally be able to leave the house for a reason!

Otherwise, more to come.

Getting Back

2009-08-19T00:23:00.005-05:00

What a glorious day today turned out to be! I finished one book, started and finished the next and am now on my third book. D and I got a run in, then we met up with a new nonfiction student and his wife, who we did not get to meet previously. We met them for a late dinner (mostly my fault for running into the dark, but more on that later) at Addison's where Nick and Cecelia ordered the ever-tasty Mediterranean salad and some wraps; I stuck with the scrumptious rare-Ahi tuna with a side of the still undefeated-best-vegetable-ever-created: Broccoli and D had these tasty Nachos Bianco!-------------->

We chatted about their move and D's great, secret idea (which I will reveal in an alternate blog at an undesignated date that will, hopefully, be in the near future) while nibbling on the most tasty foods we could think of (I was starving after our run so I might be a bit biased). The company was splendid and the conversation just as satisfying. We were also pleasantly surprised to learn that Nick and Cecelia live just around the corner from us, basically, which is awesome. Almost no one from school lives near us (and if they do, we don't know it). We're not the kind of people to go knocking on the doors of our friends and just barging in, but it's nice to know that if they need us or just want to swing by our place, we're close enough for it to happen. It's especially nice if there's an emergency. Nick and I might carpool to school since he couldn't get a parking pass (they're tough to come by)...and we have a similar philosophy (all of us) on wanting to be at school, do what we need to do, then peace out and get back home to our lives, dogs, home...etc. When we parted ways at the end of the night, we couldn't help but remark about what "good" people they are and, it's unfortunate, but not often that I find myself saying someone is inherently "good" and "genuine" like these two are. What a nice, needed addition to the program.

Fast forward to before we met up with these two lovelies, though. Today my "half marathon training schedule" said I needed to run 4.5 miles, which I wasn't compelled to run in the state of fatigue I found myself in come "cooling hour" (around 7). However, I am a woman of my word and I pulled on my running gear and, accompanied by the huzbah, went to the Katy Trail. We agreed that I would run about five miles and D would run whatever he felt comfortable with...whoever made it back first would wait for the other. Cool.

It was 7:30 when I took to the trail, my feet crushing rocks and dirt beneath me as I found my pace and began pushing my distance further up: Maybe I'll just run a little over five m

iles, instead. I'll see how I feel...it's not out of the question. A girl with purple shorts and a heavy white t-shirt and her running partner, in purple shoes and purple shorts, pulled ahead of me on my left. A man with no t-shirt and black shorts swooped past us all "Nice work, ladies. Keep on going," he called out to us. "Great job, buddy. Nice stride," he waved to a middle-aged man running toward us...and he continued to call out encouragement to each runner he passed as he went. The girls chatted idly and picked up there pace; I started to follow there lead and then some, gaining on them as we reached the half-mile marker. Woah, woah! You'll never get six miles in if you run at this pace, I chided myself and begrudgingly slowed down. I am competitive by nature and swallowed my pride as the purple-clad girls pulled to a comfortable distance ahead of me. (Photo is of the Katy Trail during daylight.)

I followed them for two miles, passing children on bikes sandwiched between their parents, also on bikes, a man and his dog and granddaughter, two women and their dog, runners, walkers, bikers, roamers...we passed old people, young ones, women pushing strollers, people walking dogs both big ones and tiny ones through shaded portions of the trail and the overcast-sunny ones until the girls broke off at the rest place and walked clear off the trail. I continued forward, glad I didn't keep up with their stride, through a tunnel, under the road, into the forest beyond city limits.

It was still light out when I hit 3.15 miles and turned to make my way back. Still light out as I ran the un-shaded mile with nothing but fields on either side of me and heard "moo-ing," but saw no cows. It turned dark as soon as I hit 4.2 miles and not just dark, but black. The trail went dry and empty without a soul in sight or sound but my feet hitting the ground, the occasional hoot in the dark or flicker of dull light where the trees parted overhead. I thought of Dustin and why I hadn't run into him yet. He told me he thought he'd run five miles. He should be out here somewhere. Unless something happened to him. The band on my arm that keeps base withe the satellites that track my mileage blinked green like a firefly in the dark; I ran through a spiderweb that stuck to my face like hair on my wet skin.

The silence turned on me and something rustled in the forestry surrounding me, the trail turned to wood as I passed over a bridge that I thought I'd already crossed. A man on a bike nearly hit me, though we saw each by the light of the rising moon and had plenty of space between us. I worried he might turn around and come at me on his bike from behind. I couldn't possibly outrun a bike if he attacked. I'd be no match. Still no Dustin, only darkness. In the distance, I spotted a vague white glint ahead, fast approaching that disappeared as I passed through a particularly thick area. I didn't see it again until it was an inch from me: another woman, running alone in the dark. Or was it? Images appeared then disappeared, something flew past my head; I heard a whooping from above. Am I not alone, after all?

At the end of the trail, where I began, the lights glowed yellow a mile away like a beacon guiding me back and the fear rising inside of me boiled so furiously my pace only increased. I forgot I had water to drink or feet that had run nearly six miles. I worried Dustin might be worried or looking for me or, worse yet, hurt...and that light still a mile away. I pressed on, fighting the relentless spiderweb off my face, hearing animals in the wood around me, shifting leaves and crunching gravel.

As the gap between me and the end closed in, a flashlight went on in the distance: fluorescent and bright. Then off. Did I see that at all? Is my mind playing tricks now? Then on again, consistent and stable. I knew it was him searching for me in the distance and ran faster. The last two minutes were easy; the fright subsided and I ran to the light: "Neesh?" I grabbed onto him and hugged. "I knew it was you." My heart beat hard in my chest from being so scared. "How did you know?" he asked, guiding me back to the car. "Because you always come for me. You're always there waiting and making sure I find my way safely back to you."

I will be running earlier from now on. The mind has a way of playing the most frightening tricks on you at the worst possible times...or does it? Whatever the case, I don't want to find out next time.

Thank God for Dustin.

Sweet dreams, all.

xoxo

The Blog I Didn't Write Last Night

2009-08-16T23:37:00.003-05:00

I started a post last night whilst awaiting some Berry Bread I concocted (successful creation, I might add) to finish baking in the "Can't-Screw-Up-The-Yeast-This-Time" bread machine (that's its FULL name). However, it turned into what could be a really crappy essay filled with lots of information that isn't terribly interesting. In short, I wrote about Wolverine from the X-Men. Forgive me! The blog-writing came on the cusp of the final credits of the movie Hulk and my awaiting the final BEEP of the bread machine. So instead of that blog, filled with tangents and stories that take too long, I give you this new one that I will write just for this occasion.

A few weeks ago, D entered an essay contest (and we just found out he came in THIRD! Way to go, huzbah!) and kept urging me to enter, as well. I was reading some book or another on my comps list and told him I just couldn't do it. Plus, I had no inspiration. It's been a while, actually, since I've felt like I could put down a book and write without losing myself to it, causing me to reject completing the book. No bueno, amigos. But he did push topics at me and, eventually, tackled me into a conversation on Wolverine. We had recently seen the Origins of Wolverine movie and Dustin began advocating Cyclops while we sat, computer before him, book in my hands, in Panera Bread on Hilton Head Island.

"Cyclops is pretty great, too. He got the girl," Dustin remarked, mentally likening himself to the character. "He's a good guy: reliable, powerful, important, smart. He could totally kill Wolverine with his power if he wanted to. AND, he got the girl."

"He has no edge. No...spark. Wolverine is just mysterious and rebellious and he only has eyes for Jean Grey. He's sexy and funny and untamable. Cyclops is the right choice. The smart choice, the guy Jean should be with, but women are always attracted to the Wolverine's in the pack."

We continued to discuss the fact that Cyclops felt intimidated by Wolverine. In the first movie, he tells Wolverine to 'stay away from my girl,' moments after saying that IF he had to tell Wolverine that, then Jean was clearly NOT his girl. Obvious unsettlement on the part of Cyclops. Obviously he's threatened, and who wouldn't be? It's Hugh-Sexiest-Man-Alive-2008-Jackman!

I've had my students watch and write papers on this film. Mainly, they've discussed LGBT Rights, Civil Rights, the Holocaust...etc. But one of my students wrote a paper on Jean Grey's plight of having to choose between the "good guy" and the "bad boy." We spent quite some time discussing how girls always go for the ass holes who treat them like shit and always overlook the wonderful, stable men who adore them. In the end, the paper was just ok, but the points we discussed or that I found my thoughts wandering to when faced with the dilemma of Dr. Grey's choice were accurate.

As a normal woman, Jean was clearly drawn to the unequivocal sexual energy radiating off of Wolverine and immensely attracted to his passionate desire for her and her alone. He was smart, funny, strong, independent, devoted, sexy and capable. But he was also temperamental, unpredictable, at times, frightening, prone to fits of rage and disappearance...in short, completely unpredictable and unreliable. Whereas Cyclops is also attractive in a subdued kind of way when compared to Wolverine (the guy wears turtlenecks and, let's face it, not all men should be wearing turtlenecks...especially if they're trying to appear more masculine than the leather-jacket clad, motorcycle-stealing, on the hunt, steel razor-clawed Wolverine), smart, reliable, loyal, adoring, trusting, responsible, kind, caring, thoughtful...etc. Need I go on? So, why the hang-up, Jean? Why the obvious feelings of hesitancy when Wolverine is around?

The answer is simple: something in us wants to rescue that lone Wolverine, pull him in and tame him just enough to keep him "ours." We don't want him to lose his mystery or passion, we just want him to keep it reserved for us.

The problem is, once Wolverine is ours, or, hers, that is...she wouldn't want him anymore because he wouldn't be what she loved after all. He couldn't be rebellious and independent, temperamental and unpredictable yet loyal and stable, cautious and reliable. In the end, what women really want and what it takes some of us 28 years to figure out, is the calm, certain version of Wolverine: Cyclops.

I lowered my book to look at Dustin plugging away at his computer across from me, glasses clutching to the bridge of his nose, hair tousled from his hands running through it in concentration, tanned face and glowing green eyes and said: "In the end, no one really wants Wolverine because no girl would ever be happy with the kind of life that would mean for her. He would never change or become reliable. And if he did, he wouldn't be the person we fell in love with and the whole relationship would be a great big sham. At the end of the day, once we figure out what's good and true in life, we're all going to go for the guy with the glasses who will love us forever and never make us wonder where he is or if he's coming back. It's why I married you, honey."

I think he was excited that I, too, had likened him to Cyclops. He's right, after all, he's a pretty awesome character, too!

On an unrelated side note, Bogey is doing much better today (thanks for all the well-wishes). I ran 6.2 miles yesterday, which brought my week to about 20 miles. I'm still aiming to do the Roots and Blues BBQ Half Marathon on the last weekend of September so I'll have to get my mileage up, but I am proud to say I ran the 5k distance in 23 minutes...a new PR! And the huzbah did 5 miles, too! Welcome back, D! By the time school starts, I want to be up and finished with my run by 7am...just one week left...ugh.

xoxo

The Metaphorical Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow?

2009-08-15T01:37:00.008-05:00

It's been a rough day in these parts! I woke up with a renewed sense of plugging away toward my comprehensive exams this semester, thinking I'd get a whole lot of stuff done before the husband arose (it was, after all, only 6am), but I was slightly irritated that I hadn't slept well. I'd gotten up at 3am for some unknown reason and the next three hours were filled with a sleep so frail, one of the dogs just breathing deeply woke me. Every sound, every change in the atmosphere and I was up all over again. Needless to say, I had very little sleep from 3am onward.

Once 6am hit, I gave up and I did so fairly optimistically thinking the early morning gave me lots of time to read, visit the bright yellow sunflowers in our garden, have some coffee from a giant red mug and relax. Unfortunately, the Fates had other plans.

No sooner did I brush my teeth than Bogey, the small, white, oldest dog, began vomiting with a vengeance. Poor boy threw up all over the rug (of course...he is too good for the tile, which you'll later learn more about). I quickly scooted him out the patio door and proceeded to clean it up. If you're a dog owner, you know that these things occasionally happen. After I made coffee and got the dog's breakfast ready, I let Bogey back in and fed the two pups. Then I take the bigger, younger dog out for her morning walk (short and sweet: this is a potty trip only). When I get back inside, Bogey and I go for his walk (though I knew he'd probably already gone outside, but didn't want him to feel left out). All's well, so I settle onto the couch, open my book "The Accidental Asian" by Eric Liu, and proceed to read for about a page. Byz (the second dog) is laying at my feet in the living room on the rug. Bogey has his belly pressed against the tile floor in the kitchen, ten feet away, and watches me from across the room. Just as I get absorbed in the book and confident that I can and will finish it today...I hear it. That gurgling, gagging in the back of his throat. I look up just in time to see Bogey throw up...again. And not on the tile where he was laying, but he made an extra special effort to get it on the rug. Again.

Out to the yard with Bogey. Back to the coffee table with Eric Liu. On my hands and knees cleaning puke. Again.

Then we all settle back into our routine once more...and Bogey gets sick two more times, in a row and on the rug this time. Everything stops. This continues until Bogey has thrown up a grand total of five times, not to mention the puddle of dry bile I found in the bedroom in a corner...something that probably happened while D and I slept. This brings us to six. At this point, Bogey has been sick for hours. Dustin is awake; we've had breakfast and Byz has decided to join in the fun by PEEING all over the kitchen floor. (I should explain that this is typical of her when she is not getting attention or feels she is not getting the attention she wants because Bogey was getting so much attention. I don't expect her to understand the complexity of WHY he was getting the attention. I'm just perplexed by her ability to be spiteful and act on it in this manner. And trust me, it's purposeful. This is not the first time she's resorted to the pee-tactic.) Time to call the doctor who, in turn, tells us to medicate him with four milligrams of Benadryl, keep him calm and in a quiet place so he won't get anxious or upset. Don't feed him much. Right.

Here is what poor Bogey looks like on Benadryl:

Perhaps the word you are looking for is "stoned?" Poor baby couldn't even focus his eyes for more than a minute. For a brief period of time, calmness ensued. I fell asleep, accidentally, while reading. Dustin read the better part of a book. Three hours passed without incident and we let Bogey out of the laundry room (the emptiest, all tile, confined space in the house). All was right with the world.

I continued with my day as if nothing had happened and, for a while, my day could be summed up like this:

I finished that book (which inspired SO much thought for my dissertation revisions!), updated my comps list, worked on the questions for my comps a little and fed the dogs. We walked them, put Bogey in the "Calm Room" again and headed off to the 9:50 showing of G.I. Joe.

If you have seen this movie, skip this next paragraph as I am about to rant for a few sentences. If you have not, bear with me. (Actually, skip to the very last paragraph as my rant went on for MUCH longer than expected. My apologies. I had no idea I felt so strongly about my dislike for this film!)

A few months ago D and I went to see the movie "The Watchmen" and I wrote a blog on how disappointed I was which, if you're interested, you can read here. I would, however, be hard pressed to find a film worse than the one we saw tonight...(and, by the way, there are some similarities to "The Watchmen" in plot--at least the "why" of why the villain--or in this case, lesser villain--claims to be doing what he's doing). Where to even begin with the horrific experience we just sat through! I once dated a guy who, after a long day of work, expr

essed the desire to go see a movie that was "All action, no plot." The creators of this movie attempted to have both action AND plot, but failed to set a standard for either. Or, if they did, it was extremely low. The acting was average, the dialogue made me sick to my stomach ("Try this on for size, boys"...and "What'd you say your unit was called?...'I didn't."), the

explosions and mindless action gave me a headache. I almost broke into tears of laughter at moments where no one else was laughing...simply because the dialogue and delivery was so ridiculous. Seriously. At first I thought it was the popcorn that was making me physically react with a headache and a sickly stomach, but after much careful consideration while more poor dialogue was spouted off, I knew I was wrong. The last time I felt that way during a movie was when we saw "The Watchmen!" Weird.

I hated what Stephen Sommer (writer and director on this one) did to the romantic ideas I had about the cartoon I watched as a child. The Baroness and Duke were engaged and star-crossed lovers? Covergirl dies via knife in the back less than halfway through the movie? Icy chunks sink when the ice-lair is exploded (doesn't that defy the laws of physics...or, at least, the laws of ice?)? Cobra is really RELATED to the Baroness? What is the world of G.I. Joe coming to? They packed in more cliche and corny lines (both story and spoken) than three or four 80's movies combined. Besides the predictability of every single moment of this movie, the acting sucked (did anyone else notice that "Duke" is, essentially, a Brad Pitt-wannabe? I began wondering whether his real job is as Brad Pitt's stunt double and since they couldn't get Brad for this role they just cast the guy who normally doesn't...and shouldn't...talk, instead). The story mimicked others we've seen very recently.

I'm all for being entertained by a movie, even if it's not Oscar Award worthy or even particularly awesome ("The Hangover," for example, was entertaining, but not a fabulous masterpiece of cinematic genius by any account.) This movie couldn't even do the basic service of entertaining me. But more than anything, I felt taken advantage of when I left the theatre. Like the movie creators capitalized on a dear childhood ritual of mine: racing inside after a long day of school followed by run-down in the local empty lot with a bunch of neighborhood kids, up to my parents' room (the only one with a working t.v. my dad wasn't watching the news on), sitting too-close to the t.v. cross-legged on the wooden floor with my brother and singing the theme song. We sat there fixated until the credits rolled and the Public Service Announcement ended. (Not old enough then to note the irony of the violence throughout the half hour show immediately followed by the warnings to "Not talk to strangers" or "Not use a stove without parents" or, my personal favorite, "Don't fight" all given to us by cartoons that solved problems with violence first, conversation and understanding second or not at all.)

I expected the movie to be crap. I'd read the reviews and, though D was the one who kept suggesting we see it with a boyish twinkle of excitement in his eye, I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't lured in by the call of my childhood self, as well. This is precisely what the movie makers expected: to make millions of dollars off of those of us who loved G.I. Joes enough to not let our siblings play with the plastic men unless carefully supervised (my brothers). This is exactly what they were banking on when they watched the film all the way through after the final edits and went ahead with it, anyway. (Let's face it. There is NO way they watched it at that point and thought: THIS ROCKS!) They thought: This will make us money! Those children of the eighties will come running. And run we did...right out of the theatre and back to the jeep where we breathed easier and recounted our memories of the cartoon show...our favorite moments, characters, weapons. "Every time Covergirl rode in with this big missile tank, like a mobile SAM, I knew shit was going to go down. The only one I liked more was the bridge layer. My favorite. It was awesome," D struggled between his nostalgia for the "old days" and his calm dismay at the atrocity that had been made of it. G.I. Joe the film, much like Covergirl the character, died as fast as it flashed onto the screen.

Needless to say, it was disappointing (at best). When we got back to the house, we were pleased to find that Bogey had not gotten sick in the laundry room and Byz had behaved splendidly...but just as those very thoughts finished forming in our minds, Bogey threw up two more times and Byz peed all over the floor. We cleaned up the mess, cracked a beer and cheers-ed to what we hope will be a better tomorrow.

Hope your day was better than ours!

xoxo

Our Summer in Photos!

2009-08-12T14:36:00.019-05:00

It's like I hit 98 blogs and immediately stopped posting! So sorry, fair readers! However, we've returned from an INSANE summer filled with weddings, deaths, births, jobs, love and breakdowns. All the makings of a reality t.v. show (or if you were born BEFORE reality, a soap opera). Just to give you a quick idea of what our summer was like...I give you a photo montage! In chronological order...

Stacy and Todd's Wedding

Dustin, Me and our new friend Jill

The BEAUTIFUL Bride and Groom

Anabella's First Trip to the Beach

Bella and Coire

Us in the Pool

Pre-Wedding Events

College Roommates Meighan and Ali Two Days Before Nups

Girish, Danielle, Jimmy and Kier: After Rehearsal Dinner Welcome Party!
Soon-to-be-marrieds! Summer and Keith.

Wedding: Bride Cam-Style

Some of My Ladies: Lindsay, Erin, Sar and Seale
Most of the boys: Kelpe, Trickey, Kurt, Brian, Matt, Becky (wife of...)Carl, D and Andy
One of our Flower Girls, G, and Dustin

Two of our most favorite people AFTER the wedding with D. Meghan and Tim!

The Honeymoon!
Hot Springs in Santorini!
Farmer's Market in Dubrovnik, Croatia

Castle at Monaco
Il Duomo: Firenze, Italia
Trevi Fountain
Poseidon's Temple: Greece
On the Boat at Sundown!
At the TOP of Mt. Vesuvius
Our Dinner-Mates!
In Barcelona with HS Buddy James
Park in Barcelona: Can You Spot the Husband?
Barcelona at Night

The Aftermath: Working & Living in Charlotte
Baby Sister's 27th! Oh, my!
Sleeping in Charlotte
Fourth of July: Risk
Karaoke at our place of Employment
Baltimore Stop on our Way to a Wedding in Philly
Staying with College Roommates the night before the wedding
Wedding Reception
The Newlyweds: Jill and Liam-(who I've been friends with since 1st grade!)
Cape Friends in Philly!?!
Visiting the Carolina Raptor Center near Charlotte
Our Job with Wings! (Wild Wing Cafe, University Park, Charlotte, NC)

That's not ALL we did this summer, of course, but it gives you an idea of what a whirlwind our summer has been. There are other photos and events not included just yet: the reception my mother-in-law threw us back in Cape Girardeau, the Jour de Fete 5k with the killer hill we ran last weekend followed by a super BBQ with two of our groomsmen (D's friends), their families and D's best friend Andy, the week we spent in Cape with D's brother...all the running around we've been doing since we got back...etc. If we make any reference to an event we haven't talked about this summer, we promise to give whatever back story is necessary.

Now that we're back in Columbia and have unpacked and put away all of our gifts and clothes...etc...we have been in "fix it" mode. Our AC unit leaked a pond into our garage so we were stuck with the task of fixing it. I did a check online for some advice, we followed the advice, and much to the huzba's surprise...IT WORKED! Flawlessly! The battery to the subaru legacy we've got died and today we're going to attempt to fix it. The car literally started to breakdown WHILE I was driving it the last four miles from the highway to our home a week ago. It made it right to our door then turned off and hasn't run since. We're hoping to get more time out of it and are considering "Cash for Clunkers." Does anyone know anything about that program? Or have reviews of it?

I'm in training mode for a half marathon at the end of September (the Roots and Blues Fest here in CoMo), but in the meantime...we are doing the Heart Walk on August 29th with our dear friend Lexie and are volunteering for the Heart of America Marathon over Labor Day weekend. Speaking of "training," I had the privilege of running with the Columbia Track Club yesterday during their "speed workout" and let me tell you...it was like running with the US Olympic Track Team. These guys were awesome...and I was a SORRY sight for all runners. It was a bit embarrassing just how far behind them all I was (I mean they lapped me and could've done so about fifteen times), but they were so gracious and encouraging that I actually finished the whole workout. The mileage was nothing I don't ordinarily run, it was the tempo-ing and the stopping and starting and quickness that I'm not used to. This means I need to work harder and get better so that NEXT time I join them for a workout I've improved. So, even though I'm pretty sure they don't read this, a giant shout out of thanks! to the Columbia Track Club...especially Ted and Tony and Beth for getting me out there to begin with!

What's up next, you ask?

Well, the semester starts in a little over a week. The fair in Cape and my mother-in-law's birthday is next month. D has a wedding in Mexico in October and I have a wedding in September near Philly. Unfortunately, we can't both attend both weddings as finances won't allow it (does anyone else have the problem of being a grad student and NOT getting paid for the majority of the summer months??? It SUCKS!) I am taking my comps this semester (I know, I know...finally!) and, we're playing in a Whiffleball Tournament in October, as well! But, from now on, there will be consistent updates since there is consistency to our lives again so check back, sign up, stick with us...the best is yet to come!

Hope you're all enjoying your summers and can't wait to catch up on all the adventures you've blogged about!

xoxo

N and D

Is This Thing On?

2009-06-05T01:17:00.003-05:00

Well, hello, hello, lovelies! This is Neesha coming to you live from my newly renovated room at my parents house in SC. If you're wondering where the ever-dashing Mr. Michael is, he's a short leap of stairs above me in a much cooler room than my own (read "cooler" as in temperature, not as in a judgement of what's awesome and what isn't), most likely sound asleep. I think that's wonderful since I, myself, haven't been doing much sleeping. It's not that I'm worried or upset or emotional on some level...I'm just not the precise trait one needs to acquire sleep: tired.

So, instead, I'm gazing around my "warm" colored room and thinking about Barcelona (read: Barth-elona...if you've ever taken Spanish with Senior Presberg of MU, you know what I'm talking about here). A few weeks back, a day or two after arriving here in Dixieland, a man rang the doorbell at 8am, setting off a chorus of barking (my parents' two dogs as mine were keeping D-bones company in Mizzourah). My tiny mother made her way across the wooden floor to the front door where she pushed the dogs aside, grabbed the biggest dog-the one at least half her weight-by the leash, and opened the door.

Ladies and gentlemen, this was the moment Ray entered my life. That's right: Ray. And not just my life, but my bedroom where I was still mostly asleep. For the next few days, Ray came like clockwork to my bedroom door, but, alas, I had moved to a room that would not be disturbed at 8am by Ray so he could paint the walls a a dark yolk color with just a touch of the finest gold you've ever seen. Because my room will be in "candid" photographs, it will be staged (now that it's been painted and revamped in deep scarlet and gold hues with black accents framing each piece of furniture) for our photographer, for the bridesmaids, for the wedding day.

My mother is an aesthetic genius when it comes to rooms. She looks around and sees an entire scheme, complete with furniture and the tassels that will hang from the lampshades on the two nightstands that don't match in anything but color (this description goes for both the stands and the lamps and their shades). It's ridiculous the things she can do to a room. For example: nothing matches specifically to each other. The fabric that climbs from the floor to the ceiling, well beyond the reach of sun from the windows they cover, is decorated in carefully stitched golden leaves that grow, without pattern, over the red-set curtain backdrop...and these splendid, curtains fit for a God do not exactly match the red bedspread that feels like silk schantung, but simply cannot be! Lest we forget, I'm a mere mortal and we do not sleep on beds of silk schantung. But, though the color is similar to the heavy fabric that keeps the room dark when the sun comes up, the material on the spread is too delicate to imagine. It's the sort of material that "shhushes" beneath your fingers like cascading water from a fountain. It, too, has rich tones of muted gold that are, really, orange against the red backdrop its unassuming plaid design is etched over. I mentioned the unmatching nighstands and their unmatching lamps with their unmatching shades, heights, shapes. The furniture has been painted or bought in stark black with moments of wear at the edges, giving the impression it is older than it is, that it's seen more life than we know. And who am I to criticize? Maybe it has...maybe it has.

Amidst my mother's stunning canvas are signs of her patience: pastel colored Welcome bags huddled together where the floor was once empty, empty boxes I dare not throw out because I might "need" them, countless white-wrapped gifts with strings of gold ribbon whose ends have been tricked into banana curls so they might dangle attractively from the packages. The robust, black armoire has remained flung open, the way I left it weeks ago when I first arrived and began using it to store Wedding goods, separating items by shelf and side. Each time I approach the enormous wooden piece, I imagine the open doors, so far apart from one another, are spread out, awaiting my arrival, as if prepared to embrace me at any moment no matter what I bring to fill the empty drawers with, no matter how full I cram the shelves. The whole room, always waiting, happy to be used, bursting with warmth and celebration.

This is what the last few weeks leading up to the wedding have been like.

Wonderful, busy, rich in warmth and light, oceanic, beautiful and patient. Just a little over a week left!

It's nice to be back. I hope you're still out there reading.

xoxoxo

Lance's Dilemma

2009-04-10T16:23:00.005-05:00

It happens to the best of us, that time in our lives where we simply must make a decision, and for us, we've put it off long enough. We were told we needed this decision 60 days before the actual wedding and we are mere days from that mark. The thing about it is, EVERYONE has a strong opinion about this one: whether they love it or hate it. There is no in-between.

Do we or do we not play the Electric Slide at our wedding?

For my sister, this is a no-brainer. She is the queen of the Electric Slide. She absolutely LOVES it and will, literally, come running from wherever she is, no matter what she's doing, to jump on the line (usually at the very front of it) and dance the Electric Slide. (I can already picture my beautiful, petite sister looking completely sophisticated in her gown bursting out of the dramatically lit ballroom that will be our reception, still chewing whatever she has managed to stuff into her mouth, drink in hand, to lead off the dance--I would take bets on this one.)

The last time we saw our groomsman Lance and his super awesome girlfriend Emily, the discussion of the Electric Slide came up to which Lance stunned and silenced us all by saying, "I don't know how to do that dance." Shock and fallen mouths filled the room. Crickets sounded. "What?" Dustin asked. "What? You guys act like everyone knows it." Lance replied.

"Everyone does know it." Someone said. Everyone, that is, but Lance.

This is shocking to us because Lance is really good at everything and by everything, I mean...well, everything. The boy is a natural athlete and there isn't one sport or physical activity you can throw at him that he won't excel at within moments...and by excel, I mean he'll be better than you even if you ARE an expert. Example given: Lance had never ice skated before we went to Kansas City in February for a day outing. When we got on the ice, Dustin had the most experience having grown up near a pond that froze over every winter while Emily and I had our fair share of experiences that didn't, by any means, add up to experts. In other words, we could all hold our own on the ice with D being able to skate backwards a little--the crowning achievement of the group. By the time we finished on the ice, Lance, who was carefully sliding his feet forward inch by inch at the beginning, was literally, I do not kid you dear readers, literally doing one footed circles by the end. It was outrageous.

So when Lance said he didn't know how to do the Electric Slide and we decided to teach him, we, of course, assumed he'd pick it up just as quickly as he did the ice skating thing. After finding a youtube instruction video and showing him how it was physically done, I hit the record button on the camera and captured this:

I couldn't believe it. The boy who stops suddenly to watch is Lance and he really doesn't know how to do the Electric Slide and hasn't yet picked it up.

Despite Lance's inability (we're going to continue with our dancing lessons on this one), we are going to have the band play the Electric Slide. Fi and I love to dance, though we're not having the Chicken Dance or the Macarena...and even if people there don't like to dance, we figure this is easy enough to pick up before the song ends, right? Even Lance will have it down by then!

Did you guys have any songs you debated being played at your wedding?

xoxo

WE LOVE YOU, LANCE!

The Great Shoe Dilemma and the Cake Taste Test

2009-04-05T16:15:00.004-05:00

Hola readers!

As promised, today we're going to discuss the cake tasting, since it smashingly. But first...a word about the Great Shoe Dilemma.

I bought these fabulous Nina shoes for the wedding and have been wearing them around the house to "break them in." There's carpeting throughout most of the house so I don't have to worry about scuffing or anything like that and when I take them off, I immediately put them back in their bag and back into the box and back into the closet (Lord knows if the dogs would want at them and these are the WRONG shoes for me to experiment with). I was pretty proud of myself for prancing around in them while making pasta, doing dishes, making the bed...etc...and my feet were loving me for how nicely their relationship with the shoes was blossoming. Then disaster struck. Now, don't jump to conclusions! The shoes are ok...each and every stone is still in place...as a matter of fact, let me give you a visual on these three-inch-silver stunners:

(They're called "Urura" by Nina, if anyone is interested!) And they have this super cozy side and nothing about them is uncomfortable, which is a big relief because they day I had my first gown fitting, my left foot was literally growing numb in this shoe! I carried on wearing these babies and feeling so proud of my ingenuity and forethought when a friend of Dustin's commented that while it's great to break in the shoes so I can wear them all night, the "breaking in" definitely doesn't account for the weight of the dress that these little guys will be carrying.

Could you hear my heart drop to the pit of my stomach?

So what's a girl to do with a dress that weighs, like, twenty pounds and shoes that balance on a heel the size of a pushpin's head? I can't gain the twenty pounds of the dress...nor do I want to...just so the shoes will be more accurate...nor do I want to get other shoes since I measured the whole "hollow to hem" with these shoes and the dress is just PERFECT in length. I don't have the ankle weights that were super cool back in the eighties and I'm kind of stumped! Any suggestions would be warmly welcomed.

The Cake Taste Test, however, was a different carefree experience.

(Rewind back to Hilton Head-Spring Break, Friday night)

My brother Kiran joined us in Hilton Head at my parents house for the weekend late Friday night. Dustin and I had kept our two little test cakes in tact from our testing the day before and figured we'd taste them with as much family as we could get! We really wanted their input and were bound and determined to get as much feedback as possible from the fam!

Once Kier arrived, we opened up the cake holders and pulled out a bunch of forks, called the rest of the family over and went to town on the two little cakes. I should backtrack a second and explain that the cake we have chosen is a four-tier cake with a rectangular bottom layer, square second layer, pentagonal third layer and a small circle top tier for us to keep. We decided on four different flavors to keep things interesting. First layer: chocolate cake with white mousse. Second layer: white cake with chocolate mousse. Third layer: white cake with pastry filling and fresh mangos and, our layer, a chocolate ganache. Now because we wanted one of the layers to have a cool white monogram on it, that decision dictated the icing: fondant.

I have heard a great deal of complaints about fondant, but I was determined not to be one of those brides that "hated it." It seemed harmless enough when I saw it on the cake making shows we watched endlessly over Christmas break. I was pretty floored by how fondant could be used to make realistic flower petals and various other designs, how it smoothened out the surface of the cake so it looked flawless...and how it was made out of sugar! I couldn't imagine how something that could do so many wonderful things could possibly be bad! So we went into the cake-tasting feeling pretty confident in the fondant's ability to be functional and tasty. Boy, were we wrong. Sure, it served its function, but we basically needed a hacksaw to cut through the layer of fondant to get to the cake-goodness it kept contained. We literally sawed at it with our forks, (which, of course, was rather startling since we went at it with such glee, only to have our first taste of it postponed due to an unbreakable icing). Once we got through it to the cake portion, it was incredibly tasty. Pop pointed out that the white cake had a slight almond taste to it, which worried us just a tad. Not everyone loves almond and we don't want people leaving their cake, so I think we're going to switch that to a smaller layer. We also tried the ganache, which everyone loved, so we might make two of the layers ganache instead of just one. We didn't taste the mango or the chocolate with white mousse, but we might now that we know better about the almond.

At any rate, I should also mention that while I'm writing about this situation like it was scene-free, it wasn't. Kier insisted we shove cake on each other's faces since we don't want to do that at the wedding...and that boy really can talk a dog into walking on its hind legs if he felt like it. I don't know anyone as persuasive/taunting as my brother :)

Anyway, we had a blast and felt really good about having waited to taste it with my family. Here are some fun photos of us digging (literally) in. Oh...and incase you wondered--I found a solution to the fondant problem. The whole cake will be buttercream iced except the layer with the monogram (third one from the bottom which is less likely to be eaten...we think). The monogram layer: fondant! Whatever we have left over of the cake will be put into some pretty boxes and left on a table for our guests to take with them when they leave. We don't want to waste it!

That's my brother Kiran on the right. Doesn't he look great? He's been running and going to the gym and getting healthy. I'm so proud of him! Note how he has to hold down the paper plate while he cuts through the fondant! Ha!

On a non-wedding related note...we bought the movie Slumdog Millionaire this weekend and LOVE it even more now than before. D had never see it, but is now a fan. We've always been learning the Jai Ho dance at the end. Who wouldn't want to know it? You never know when an occasion to dance to that song will present itself!

xoxo

OH NO!

2009-04-03T11:36:00.002-05:00

Oh no! There has been a massive assault and massacre on my tulips. Just the other day, I was thinking "Wow! My tulips are really coming up out there!" I was so proud. A few weeks ago, I'd gone out and dug holes for all my tulips to reside in just beneath the tree we have in the front yard. Since then, I'd been battling with the deer over the tulip bulbs and lush green leaves coming up from them. Just yesterday, I was pleased to see that they'd survived the assaults the deer had been launching on them and were actually thriving. Today. They are gone. All of them and every remnant of them. There is no evidence, save for the twelve empty holes, of where the tulips had once been.

A moment of silence please.

Now...suggestions on how to keep those deer bastards off my tulips when I go out, buy more and replant?

xoxo

Last Week's Taste Test

2009-04-03T10:05:00.009-05:00

As you're all well aware by now, D and I spent all of last week wedding planning in Hilton Head. When we got back, we honestly felt like we needed a spring break from our spring break. Most mornings, we were up at 8 and at our first wedding vendor meet-up by around 9 or 10 at the latest. Some days we didn't even stop with our meet-ups until around 9pm. Crazy, right?

But I didn't quite share the details of our week just yet (shame on me! I KNOW!) so today, since it's my day off from school, I'm going to try and recap bit by bit what we did last week without summarizing. What better or tastier place to begin than with our taste test?

Back in February my mom and dad came to visit and mom came bearing gifts of Wedding Reception Menu options! What a task that was! Between reading, writing and studying for comps, we whipped out the bulk of menus and began sorting our options. It was important to us to incorporate Indian food into our menu options since many of my dad's relatives are going to be attending the wedding which means many of them really need to have vegetarian options to suit their religious convictions, but the menu lacked things like "saag paneer" and "samosas." Yes, there were plenty of mouth-watering dish descriptions, but we needed Indian! So we interspersed some options we hoped they might recreate, despite the fact that they weren't on the menu, and chose options from their menu that the rest of our guests would be familiar with. We needed to choose about 8 pass-around Cocktail food options, one sit-down appetizer and salad, three or four dinner selection options and cake flavors! Once Mom, D and I had a rough draft of what we wanted to taste, we presented it to the Westin's "Wedding Coordinator" we've been working with (Anissia Shalton) and she rushed off to the chef's to see what they could whip up. Luckily for us, they have a Indian chef intern at this very moment in time who was familiar with our Indian options and was happy to recreate them for our tasting.

Skip to Thursday afternoon, last week:

We entered the hotel and were guided to their restaurant, The Carolina Cafe, where Linda introduced herself and told us she'd be serving us and if there was anything at all that we needed or wanted throughout our testing we should feel free to let her know. Anissia, my mom, Dustin and I sat around a small four-person table (complete with our journals on our laps) and were presented with a menu of the items we would be tasting. We couldn't taste all of our options since-seriously, who needs to try 8 hand-passed hors 'deouvres? -but I was anxious to taste anything since I hadn't eaten and was starting to feel a bit hangry (hungry/angry-I just learned this from a food blog I follow!).

Our first course? Indian samosas!

Samosas are a mixture of potatoes and peas that are then covered in a dough or stuffed into some dough, then fried. The small ones on the left were the hotel's experiment. They added some corn in there, which I thought was really tasty, and the giant ones on the right are what samosas almost always look like. They were more traditional and came from an Indian restaurant in Savannah. We tasted them all and couldn't believe how amazing they were (of course, I could've just been starving), but decided that the small ones were more practical for pass-arounds since the bigger ones needed to be sliced in half and shared.

Verdict: keepers!

Next, they brought out bhajis or pakoras, another Indian dish.
These guys are essentially vegetables dipped in chickpea flour then fried, as well (lots of fried food in India). The potato bhajis are on the left and the onion, pepper and spinach bhajis are on the right. The potatoes were awesome, but the others were a bit off. We forgot to mention that the bhajis with spinach and pepper in them should be mashed into a sort of ball before going into the chickpea flour and being fried.

Verdict: potatoes are a go, others-back to the drawing board.

Next up was our sit-down appetizer. We chose an Americanized slightly Indian dish for this and hoped that the "curry" flavor would either taste authentic or not be so strong that it bothered anyone who would know real curry when they tasted it. Without further adieu, I present the puff pastry stuffed with chicken curry and porcini mushrooms in a red wine reduction sauce:

Now, I should mention that ordinarily this beautiful rich sauce would sit beneath the puff pastry, but because this girl right here is allergic to wine (I know!), they kindly thought to put it on the side so I could indulge in this oh-so-tasty dish, as well. And let me tell you, I could've eaten about ten of these suckers alone. They were a-maz-ing! Really. Of course, trying to be lady-like and all, we each split one with each other so I ended up craving more, but eating half. Sigh...those are the breaks.

Verdict: definite keeper! Possible favorite!

On to the salad!

Bibb Salad with Endives and...other stuff I can't remember the name of right now...
Can you see why we chose this over the spinach or caesar or any other salad? Yes, I suppose this is a bit hazy of a photo, but, I'm not going to lie. I was starving, still, and nearly forgot to snap a picture of this at all. If it weren't for Linda reminding me of my photo-documenting, I would've dug in and not bothered to photograph it at all...so a special shout out thanks to Linda for stopping my fork and reminding me of my camera! We chose this salad because, well, because it had hearts of palm in it. But that's not all! It also had corn, tomatoes, olives, avocados, red onion, peppers and lettuce topped off with a roasted sundried tomato dressing. Oh, wow, right? Unfortunately, my allergy to wine extends to balsamic, as well, and since the original dressing had some balsamic in it, I had to make due with my go-to dressing: lemons and olive oil. As a side note-you have NO IDEA how many dressings have balsamic vinegar in their ingredient list! Ugh! Needless to say, this baby was tast-y! And we all enjoyed it.

Verdict: another keeper, but with the dressing on the side, of course!

Finally, we moved onto the main courses.

Above is our fish course. We couldn't get married on an island and not have a fish course, right? Fi immediately latched onto this one when we looked at the menu. It's a citrus encrusted mahi-mahi resting in a lemon sauce. I had high hopes for this, since I love fish, but when I dug into it, the mahi-mahi was a bit on the tough side and the "encrustment" came right off and only had a hint of citrus to it. The sauce was nearly flavorless. I expressed my concerns to Anissia who jotted everything down and said we'd try it again later down the line with more flavor. I don't know about you, but when I hear "citrus, lemon and fish" I immediately think like, fresh and spritz. I know that last adjective is totally strange in that context...but "spritz" is clean and refreshing and light, right? And that's what I thought this fish dish would be. Hmmm.

Verdict: back to the drawing board.

Next up was the roasted quail.
As you can see, the quail is in tact. I love poultry, friends. I think it's really lovely as a dish usually, but this poultry looked as though it had just been hunted down and plucked for our tasting pleasure. Unfortunately, do you see that pretty plum colored sauce it's resting in? That's wine...none for me! But Connie and Fi weren't fans. The quail wasn't supposed to have bones and it wasn't supposed to be too dry.

Verdict: this quail has seen it's final hours. For real. Time to pick a new poultry dish!

Lastly, the Indian fare!

The top picture is a vegetable biryani: rice with lots of veggies and some almonds! The picture just above is vegetable korma and raita. The korma is a mixture of veggies in a coconut/tomato sauce sprinkled with cilantro. The raita is an Indian salad. In other words: cool and refreshing (spritz!) cucumbers in yogurt with some paprika sprinkled over top. These dishes were IN-effing-CREDILE! I wanted to empty the entire bowl into my plate and eat it all and not share with anyone. Of course, I didn't...but I easily could have.

Verdict: I know what I'm eating the night of the wedding!

We're also having a prime rib dish which we opted not to taste. It didn't seem necessary considering prime rib is sort of standard, right?

By the time we got through all of these courses, I felt like I was a judge on Iron Chef and we were running low on time since we had to dash off to meet the Lutheran pastor who we asked to do a reading at our wedding. Linda brought out the two mini-test cakes, let me take a picture, then promptly packed them for us in to-go containers.

Aren't they cute? We chose a cake design from a magazine, brought it to Anissia earlier in the week and these little guys are knock-offs, but without the intricate detail. They just thought they'd give us an 'idea.' Nonetheless, we loved them and wanted to eat them up at that very moment, but we refrained and let Linda box 'em. More on the taste-testing of the cakes later.

In short, we had an awesome experience. The Indian intern came out and talked to us for a while and was super sweet and accommodating. Everyone was, really. We all felt so warm and cuddly by the end of it (and accomplished) that I had everyone get together for a love-in aka-photo. Below you will see the result...
From left to right: Anissia, chef, Linda, Fi and Mama.

Thanks to all the wonderful help from the Westin and these fabulous members of what we lovingly call our "wedding team," we are now at least ten steps closer to perfecting our wedding menu!

Next post: Cake Taste Test...trust me, you don't want to miss it!

xoxo

Censorship Bust, Dogs and Pre-Canaa

2009-04-01T12:04:00.004-05:00

Pre-Canaa is over, my friends, and we made it out alive.

I should note that it wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it might be, but not quite as helpful, either. Maybe it was all that parochial school training I had that ruined me for what I would 'learn' in pre-canaa. Dustin, however, had never had parochial school training and didn't find it quite so helpful as he found it 'entertaining.' During our six week Tuesday night class he drew numerous pictures, wrote down dozens of quotes and made a stunning amount of faces.

In truth, I can't sum it up well but I think I'll try to get him to post a blog when he's done with his incessant run-around. Poor boy can barely breathe let alone consider writing a blog.

In other news, last night some of Columbia's fine restaurants co-sponsored an event called "Dining out for Dogs" in which a variety of restaurants donated part of the money they made during a certain spell of time to the Central Missouri Humane Society. I went at six-ish, donated what money I could, ordered breadsticks that never showed up and had two beers prior to pre-canaa. Unfortunately, I couldn't stick around to wait on the breadsticks since they took a super long time (I think they're a delicacy, so I remained patient despite my usual harsh judgment of restaurants and servers due to my own ten-year stint in the service industry) and hope that Beth, Matt, Eli, Amanda and co. enjoyed them for me!

Dining out for Dogs did give me the opportunity to discuss with other animal lovers or supporters just how much I'd like to volunteer at the Humane Society, but can't due to space and sanity restrictions. If I volunteered, I'd end up wanting to foster then adopt the adorable dogs they house and care for and this would be no bueno for all of us!

So after our final pre-canaa class, D slipped home immediately and I stopped off to grab us dinner from Bangkok Gardens. For whatever reason, I was exhausted last night and passed out so hardcore I didn't actually get out of bed and become functional until around 11 today. Not normal. Perhaps it's because we were both up at 5am yesterday and ran around all day getting used to being back from break and catching up on all that needed to be done...oh, and I suppose I forgot, for a moment, that I had to head back to teaching classes, too.

And what fun that was.

My students were as blank-faced as I felt while we discussed 'censorship' in the U.S. I am a firm believer that the way my students respond to a subject or topic is, in part, a direct response to how I, as the teacher, am dishing it out. In other words, I was beat yesterday after teaching my first class at 12:30 so it's no surprise that I lacked all eloquent speaking skills by the time I hit my 2 o'clock class. I could hear my voice-barely audible, scratchy, stumbling for basic words. It was sad. They responded just as poorly to the topic of 'censorship' as I approached it. It was disappointing, to say the least. I feel disappointed because I put this topic into my syllabus with the idea of it being pretty fun, controversial and, perhaps, inciting to my class. They should get riled up about being censored, damnit! This is the country of 'freedom of speech and expression.' But without my excitement, they failed, too. It was a sad funeral for the topic.

With that launching ground, I have been debating all day how to resurrect the theme of the last few weeks of class. I want to take black tape and put it over the mouths of a few students...like when nudity is censored in movies and shows. I want to give them a list of words they are no longer allowed to say and topics they are no longer allowed to discuss, but in order for that to work, they must first talk, right? This is where the problem presents itself. How do I get them to a place by tomorrow where censoring them will work? What topic can I use that will excite them enough to feel as though they want their voice heard so they can feel the hardships and rage that being censored would cause?

Hmmm.

If you have any ideas...speak up! I'm open to just about anything at the moment.

xoxo

An Invitation to the President...

2009-03-31T00:27:00.003-05:00

After a long hard day of saving the world, it's time for bed, but not before I mention a few wedding details (for those who are keeping up)! Tonight, I made a mock-up of our Rehearsal Dinner invites. A compromise was necessary when we decided on our wedding invitations last Monday and in the compromise, I promised him we'd do the rehearsal invites as "travel documents" of some kind since we saw sample wedding invitations like that and he fell in love immediately. Dustin has been so good about everything...and by this I mean-he has opinions and input on every decision we make, but this one made his eyes light up! So I got in touch with the stationery store and they sent me jpgs so I could decide on an invite...I thought I'd look for less expensive ones (they're always more expensive in stores, aren't they???) and found a template for them online! When I'm done, I'll share them if you guys are interested! :)

I have to immediately give credit where credit is due. The template was on this super amazing website written by a woman named "Aylee" who is also getting married pretty soon. Thanks for the templates, Aylee, and if any of you want to see a super cool wedding website blog...head her way.

Secondly, I borrowed another template from her for "Passport" invites and am revamping them into Welcome notes and Itineraries for our out of town guests (which means just about everyone)...the ones whose hotels we can locate, that is. Also, more to come on that as we get further along.

But perhaps the most exciting thing I've learned from Aylee's website so far is that we can invite the President to our wedding (which, I guess is a given...anyone can get an invite, right?) and even though there's just about no chance he'll show, he will send a response signed by he and his wife. Pretty cool, eh? I guess that's only cool if you're an Obama supporter or history buff? No?

Either way, if you're getting married or have some other event you want to invite our President and his wife to...here's the address, courtesy of Aylee...

Send your invitation to the Obamas here:
The Honorable Barack Obama and Mrs. Obama
The White House
Greetings Office Room 39
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Swee dreams, kit kats!

xoxo

Home Again

2009-03-30T16:48:00.002-05:00

We are back in Columbia just in time to ring in the new season (hopefully). While we were gone, a group of our friends tag-teamed puppy/bird/house sitting for us and we could not be more indebted to them. If you're a pet-owner you know what it's like leaving your pets at home or, worse yet, kenneling them at the vet's or boarding place alongside various other dogs from who KNOWS what kind of home! It's stressful! Even taking them is a bit stressful, but with two dogs, two birds, two people and one car, we couldn't figure out a safe way to travel home to SC with everyone arriving in tact so we pooled together our friends and they really came through for us in a bind! We are eternally grateful!

Upon our return home, I discovered that everything I'd been growing from seed when I left a week ago was thriving now-one week later. This year, I planted tomatoes, a few leftover seeds of dill from last year, sweet peas, spinach, red leaf lettuce, hot banana peppers and habanero peppers that Dustin brought back from Hungary sometime in the late nineties or early 2000's I think, basil and coriander. They are all lined up on the kitchen windowsill and moved during the day according to much sun they like or don't like. D thinks I sort of garden haphazardly, but what he doesn't realize is that I've read all the directions and have tailored my care for the various seedlings based on them. For example, peppers need heat, according to a bunch of websites and their packages, so I've been keeping them on top of my heat pad (the one intended for my bum knee) to make sure they're warm enough. I turn it on and off through the day and night since the peppers and heat pad reside on my nightstand (so I can monitor the heat). They are also directly in the window so when the sun starts to go westward, they're perfectly positioned and warm. Some of the things I'm growing are heartier and don't need as much time and attention and care...etc. What it comes down to is this: every single pot I've planted something in has green seedlings or small stalks coming out of it. When I say every single pot I really mean it. Imagine my surprise when I began transplanting the large enough seedlings to separate pots that I thought were empty only to find that the basil I was pretty sure wasn't sprouting had, indeed, sprouted three times. Exactly! Pretty awesome.

So now I have spent half the day gardening, transplanting and watering and a small portion of my day reveling over how successful our vermicomposter seems to be so far. When we left, D and I put in a ton of garbage (knowing we probably shouldn't, but also not wanting it to sit around until we got back). If worms have TOO much garbage in there, they try to escape. If they have too much water they try to escape, too. Apparently, there are a lot of things that upset worms and make them want to leave and, somehow (knock on wood), we have managed to avoid doing any of the things they hate. When we left, the compost was pretty high up and we hadn't bought any worms. Instead, while I gardened, I took the worms I found, collected them in a plastic cup, and tossed them into the compost bin every ten minutes or so. We were supposed to buy them, according to the websites we read, but we couldn't find a bait/tackle shop around here and didn't want to spend a whole lot of money so we threw caution to the wind, crossed our fingers and collected the worms from the garden.

Lo and behold, the compost smells only like dirt rather than smelling rotted from the spoiled food we tossed in a week ago, no worms have tried to escape from any of the holes, there are no worms in the bottom basin of the compost and the amount of stuff inside the compost seems to have gone down...literally...like it's not as high up in the bin as it was. We took this to mean success?

Only time will tell...but so far this spring seems to be off to a good start...off to correct the 20 essays I should've corrected over spring break. I need another spring break just to get over the last one! Whew...it never ends.

xoxo

Wedding Dress Introduction

2009-03-28T19:41:00.008-05:00

The Wedding Planning Week has come to an end, just about. D and I leave tomorrow for Columbia and the rest of the semester and are feeling pretty good about what we've done so far. The only real problem is that I'm worried everything isn't as nailed down as I'd like it to be, but is it ever?

Anyhow...here's more of a recap for you! Friday got up bright and early again and wandered over to the Atlanta Bread Company to meet Cathy Evangelista in person. Cathy is our videographer and we'd never met her in person before yesterday morning. I have to say, the videography wasn't my biggest concern. D and Mom did most of the research, interviewing (on the phone/email) and requests while I kept records and info (we've unknowingly fallen into various roles...as you can probably guess. I'm the one who has all the information and does all the follow-up work and keeping everyone straight and updated work-meaning vendors. We all make the decisions, especially based on what's most important to us regarding the wedding). I totally trusted their choice of videographer, but knew there needed to be a formal meet and talk session with me present. When we did finally sit down over some coffee Friday morning, D and I fell into our usual pattern of asking more about the person's life and, in Cathy's case, very musically inclined sons than asking questions about their work. I think this happens because we already chose them based on what they can do, now we want to have a relationship with them and know who they are and what's important to them. If any of our vendors seemed like ass holes or selfish, money-driven jerks, I think we wouldn't have stuck with them. We are all about having a group of vendors and people on our wedding team that feel like friends rather than just some people we hired and Cathy fell right into that category.

Afterwards, we headed over to the Big Bamboo so D could get a tee-shirt. While we were there, we had lunch at the fabulous seafood place, Steamer's, that I used to work at back in 2002. We mainly go for the amazing She-Crab soup, but their tuna bites are pretty incredible and so is just about everything else. While we had lunch out on the patio, we spotted Dustin's old colleague from the Hilton Head Airport, Austin. I don't really know Austin, but we seem to literally run into him every time we're home.

BUT...the MOST exciting part of yesterday, as wonderful as each moment was, was going to Bleu Belle Bridal to look for a veil. Mom and I entered, wandered around when I saw one of my three dress choices hanging in the samples rack and said, "This is one of the ones, Mom..." to which the salesgirl said: "Yeah, we just love her!" I found two veils I liked and they suggested I try on the sample of my dress with it (cus up until now they'd said my dress hadn't come in yet)...so I headed toward the dressing room and they quick covered my eyes, led me in and said: "Neesha, we'd like you to meet your wedding gown!" Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let me just tell you right now...it was AWESOME! I was so excited and my Mom cried a little, one of the salesgirls got "chills" and I couldn't wait to get that sucker on. It was so amazing. Even more amazing in person than I remember it being. Mom helped me into the dress, we tried the veil I liked most on with it and voila! The wedding day attire is complete. I even had the crazy idea to bring my shoes with me for whatever weird reason...and the only gown, shoes, veil...went together so well and I was so happy. What made me even HAPPIER was that the dress was a little too big on me so it needs to be taken in. Back in November when I tried that size on it was a perfect fit. Literally. Almost like they melted me and poured me into the gown, but this time...too big! Not huge, but too big and in need of adjusting. This is nice to know.

I stood in the dress for quite some time while Tammy, the seamstress, tried to figure out the best way to bustle it without losing any of the beautiful details of the gown. She played with it for about thirty minutes and my right foot started to get totally numb from standing in the new shoes with the heavy gown on...but, really, I would've stood their forever if they'd let me. There aren't many days I'm going to get to put on a wedding gown like that...I love it and I can't wait for you guys to see just why when you come to the wedding!

Before we left, I picked out some cute hair jewelry (who ever thought I would one day be thinking about hair jewelry!?!) and thanked the women profusely. I also dreamed about this Bronwin dress by Melissa Sweet and how much I'd love to wear it to the rehearsal dinner. I read somewhere that it's good luck to wear green to the rehearsal and, although I really want to wear white, think I'll make sure I've got some green shoes or something (I'm totally superstitious...I think it runs in the family). I figure I can find something like this Bronwin dress, though, and throw on some green heels. I saw a pair in some wedding magazine that were ridiculously adorable. If only this dress weren't so freaken ridiculously expensive. Damn Melissa Sweet. I will have to find a more reasonable dress that looks similar.

In other news, my bridesmaid Carrie dropped out, which wasn't all together unexpected. A lot has happened in the world and in families since D and I got engaged...for example, two or three of his groomsmen just had a new baby or are about to have a new baby. We're crossing our fingers they'll all be able to attend still! But, if not, we get it...and love them just the same.

Other than that, the week was a total success. I started this entry the other day and am finishing it now-back in Columbia, after our intensely long ride back yesterday. Still working on details from home...but it feels fabulous to have so much taken care of...thanks to Mom and Dustin this process has really been enjoyable.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend/spring break!

xoxo

Wedding Planning Week Recap

2009-03-26T23:22:00.017-05:00

If I could be any event, I think I would like to be an oyster roast taking place right after an 8am 5k run complete with lemon, cocktail sauce and golden frothy beers on the side. Aphrodisiac HEAVEN!

Dustin would like to be an all-you-can eat pancake breakfast on a chilly autumn morning in Missouri with fresh amber-colored syrup straight from Vermont drizzled over pads of quickly-melting butter.

Today, we were a wedding in many parts that will, eventually, add up to one whole wedding event. In other words, we were up at 8:45, to the florist's (A Floral Affair...apparently, they appear in magazines all the time and have won multiple excellence awards...when you meet Dawn, her adorable puppy Rascal and her completely devoted and hardworking team of floral designers, it's easy to understand why! Dawn picture to the right with my mom and I) by 10 so we could pick and choose flowers, linens and everything else under the sun for two hours. We hit up Sister Kat around noon and had a nice little chat about stuff we didn't know or remember (aka-a reminder session of all we need to have ready for the big day and when we need to get it to her by), followed immediately by an hour and forty-minute food tasting at the Westin which consisted of a few passed hors d'eouvres, sit-down appetizer, salad, three possible entrees and cake (we took that to-go 'cus we had another appointment to jet to).

At 2:45 we found ourselves seated in Pastor Dan Quiram's office at Island Lutheran church to discuss the possibility of him doing a reading or saying a prayer at our Catholic church ceremony and by 3, we were both sweating bullets (seriously) from being grilled about our religious convictions and faith, our definitions and motivations to marry and then (a separate question) our motivations in marrying one another...and many other sweat-inducing questions. I thought I'd lose ten pounds before we walked out the door.

If you're wondering...he did, in fact, agree to do a reading, though we were fairly sure he was

going to say "no" at the end of the interrogation. It was intense. More intense than our meetings with the priests at our Catholic church and pre-canaa sessions. Just severely intense.

It was so stressful, Dustin asked if we could please go get ice cream to make him feel better. Of course, we did (despite our attempts at watching what we eat...79 days and counting).

This is Mom's favorite ice cream store on the island (really it's in the Tanger outlets just off island, but who's counting?) and she's right. It's pretty amazing and that's coming from a girl who doesn't really dig ice cream all that much (sensitive teeth). So if you're ever on the island...keep this place in mind and you'll be glad you splurged your diet on this ice cream!

But the day finally came to a perfect climax when we met up with our fabulous friends

Stacey and Todd who are, consequently, getting married six days before us just up the road on the island, as well! We met Stacey and Todd a year ago on the island when D and I discovered the Art Cafe. I should mention that we are also pretty much in love with the Art Cafe and go there just about every time we are in town to create a new piece for our home (also, it's a great excuse to see our two favorite islanders). D has made two coffee mugs already and I have made a chips and dip plate and a serving platter. The concept behind the Art Cafe is awesome. You go in, pick out a piece of pottery you'd like to paint (options range from dishes to tiles, letters to wall hangings, picture frames and vases...etc.), paint it, leave it with the wonderful owners who will then glaze and bake it then VOILA you have a new _______ (insert name of object you want to paint here). We commemorate most of our visits with a new piece from the Art Cafe. It's a relaxing fun time and we love getting our creativity on during a rainstorm or cool island day!

So we met up with T+S for dinner at Murphy's Irish Pub (just a hop, skip and jump away from the Art Cafe), then headed down to check on the Tiki Hut (which wasn't open, but happens to be just outside the site of our rehearsal dinner and isn't being torn down after all-for those of you who are familiar with the Tiki Hut's plight!). From there, we headed over to the Big Bamboo where D and I first met back in 2003 (click there for story on how we met taken from D's old myspace blog) and had a blast sharing stories, talking, laughing and just enjoying some quality time catching up with one another. This was definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. We don't get to Hilton Head nearly enough and when we're here, we're always strapped for time since we're planning the wedding with every moment our eyes are open...so meeting up with these two was a real treat and we can't say enough about how awesome they are and how lucky we are to have met them (and they don't even read our blog, so I'm not scoring us any brownie points here). Hopefully, you who are invited will come to the wedding and get to see exactly what we mean. If you're at their table, consider yourselves lucky and highly awesome in our eyes.

A few other things of note from the week...

-Invites are picked thanks to Gene over at Pretty Papers

-Hair and make-up decisions have been made thanks to another Gene over at the Westin's Heavenly Spa

-All the music for the church ceremony has been worked out thanks to the incredible musical and creative genius of the church's breathtakingly talented organist (and hopefully our new friend) Jonathan Davis

-The menu is just about set and it includes a delish Indian vegetarian option with the help of

Deepak, an Indian intern in the Westin's kitchen, Bill Ryan, the chef who is working specifically to create our dream menu, and Anissia Shalton, the dream of a wedding/even planner the Westin (and we) are lucky enough to have found. Not to mention we were only able to enjoy this tasting thanks to the incredible service of Linda, the wonderful server that took care of us and everything we could possibly need this afternoon.

-Our engagement photos have been taken and are being tweaked. Special thanks to Tim Zielenbach for taking the time to come out here, meet with us, hang out with us and coax us into playing in the water on the beach, despite the chilliness in the air. (I strongly encourage you to visit Tim's site and treat yourself to some spectacular photography that could keep you entranced for hours. Tim has an uncanny ability to capture the beauty in every moment, whether it includes tears or smiles, old or young, weddings or casual photos. Every moment is a blessing when you see it through Tim's shots. And if you're looking for a photographer-and friend-I can't recommend him enough!) Here is a brief sample Tim sent to us the evening of our shoot...

And, of course, we have to remember to give a shout-out to my Connie...aka..MOM...who is all over every detail and tirelessly works with us (as we drag her around for her opinions) to put every detail and piece of this wedding together little by little. She has been absolutely incredible every single minute of every single day and, really, without her there is NO way we would be this together or this prepared for our wedding. If you read this...THANK YOU, MOM!...You are completely kick ass.

We have been incredibly blessed to work with such amazing, talented, accommodating people during this process. If not for them, it wouldn't be nearly as fun, exciting and enjoyable to put our dream event together. We really are so blessed.

And thanks to you guys for reading! More updates to follow!

xoxo

A Word on Peanut Butter

2009-03-26T00:20:00.003-05:00

Certainly, there is lots to say and plenty of stories to fill you, our loyal readers, in on. But, for the time being (and because it's terribly late and we have a very wedding-planning-filled day tomorrow...appointments starting at 9 stretching in 1-2 hour intervals until 7) I want to share with you one piece of advice, beginning with my discovery.

Cut to story:

Enter Neesha in the mid-afternoon light, feet slapping against the stone kitchen floor, fingers ruffling through a plastic bag resting on the kitchen counter to, ultimately, reveal what it contains: apricot/cranberry bread. (Imagine an expression of utter joy on her face as she pulls two slices from the bag.)

An Aside:

Neesha has given up meat, seafood, cheese and any product made of these elements for Lent this year. For those of us who are vegan/vegetarian this isn't so bad and even for Neesha it's do-able, save for the fact that she is on spring break visiting her parents who love meat and hate seitan, tofu, tempeh...etc True, she is not much of a Catholic, but she is a sucker for a challenge and giving something up for 40 days is a challenge. As her fiance would say: she does it to see if she can.

Envision her small mom standing at the ironing board she's positioned in the kitchen, wedged between the sink and the bread counter.

"Hey Mama, do we have any peanut butter?" Neesha asks, mouth salivating as she puts the slices of bread on a paper plate-the first piece of food she has had time to eat all day long.

Picture tiny Connie pulling a jar of Peter Pan Peanut Butter from the cabinet behind her. In Neesha's mind she sings, "Peanut...peanut butter...(jelly!)" although she has no intention of putting jelly on her bread.

Peanut...peanut butter...jelly! She spreads the creamy peanut butter over the yellow and red speckled bread. Peanut...peanut butter...jelly! Peanut...peanut butter...Over the slice...jelly! "Does peanut butter go bad, Mom?" She asks as she screws the cap back on the peanut butter jar.

"I don't know? Why?" Connie asks, a touch of concern and interest in her voice. She eyes the jar.

"No reason. I just wondered. I thought there was mold in there, but realized it was just the empty spot on the bottom of the jar, not a mold spot."

More salivation before, at last, the first indulgent sensational bite...and chew, chew...gag.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the correct answer to the question "Does peanut butter go bad, Mom?" is a resounding "yes." Peanut butter goes rank and vomitesque. (Yes, I created that word just for you.) Ya know when you haven't dusted your abode in a long time, then decide it's past due? So you go ahead and pull out a dust rag but only have one so you have to clean the whole place and all its surfaces with just the one rag? Imagine all the dust that has collected from your entire habitat being mixed in with a jar of Peter Pan Peanut Butter remnants. That equalled what I almost threw up from my first attempt at eating of the day.

The peanut butter coated itself to the walls and surfaces of my mouth like quick-dry cement. My tongue stuck to my teeth, my cheeks, the roof of my mouth and all the saliva secreted out...retreating from the foul peanut butter I attacked it with. I could do nothing but gag. My eyes teared up, ready for whatever was in my stomach to come rocketing back out. The problem was-there was nothing in my stomach. My mouth was a hostage to the bad peanut butter and nothing was coming out. Salvation came in the form of my toothbrush which I used to cut through the layer of stale peanut butter and bread that stuck to my mouth. It was torture. Pure torture. I would've preferred battling salmonella from the peanut butter than the gross, bad peanut butter I unknowingly attempted to have for lunch.

When Neesha returned from gagging up her peanut butter and apricot/cranberry bread, a new, unopened jar of peanut butter greeted her on the counter. Still coughing and sputtering, she shoved it back toward her mother, saying, "I think I'm off peanut butter for, maybe, ever. And perhaps you should be, too."

Moral of the story: don't eat anyone else's peanut butter or you'll be sorry.

Oh, and, also...beware of bad peanut butter. It's not like milk which curdles and smells, but a whole new breed of disgusting.

Hope you're all well. Miss you desperately!

xoxo

(PS-sorry for the confusion of narrator's, too, was feeling experimental)

Italy in an Instant

2009-03-18T16:06:00.003-05:00

As I drove to It's a Grind this afternoon, still smelling the shampoo on my wet hair and feeling the rawness of my callused, cut hands from digging out a few feet of grass for our garden in the back of the house this morning, I started to think of the six months I lived in Italy. I thought of this while driving, not while gardening. While gardening, I thought of the loose leaf lettuce I'm growing, the spinach and sweet peas, the surprising unlikelihood of my successful pepper seeds that have sprouted and are thriving. I fretted over the worms I stole from the soil and expatriated to the composter, though I've read this will not work, and felt vindicated by this action when I checked to see if the worms were attempting an escape and found that, indeed, they were not. But while I drove, serenaded by NPR's classical musical choices, I thought of Italy.

Italy comes to me in gusts, sometimes. Today it was the sweet powdered scent of chocolate filled croissants at 5:30am, before the sun came up as we strolled the cobblestone streets back to our green-shuddered apartment with its white facade always glowing in the night like the moon. Today it was how those croissants melted like sugar in hot water on our tongues as we exchanged lire for them at the backdoor of the unopened bakery, spitting out what little Italian we had mastered in the early morning darkness to a face that never came to us in clarity.

Today I thought of the cobblestones we treaded both at night, in the morning and in the afternoon. How we carved our way through Florence, past the Duomo and Santa Croce, across the Ponte Vecchio and through the San Lorenzo de Medici market cluttered with wares and vegetables, leather and eggs. Always heading somewhere, to see something, following the cobblestones, dodging traffic, gazing into windows filled with rich chocolate sachertorte gazing back at us through a glaze of glossy, smooth frosting.

I can hear Italy, if I think hard enough. I can remember my innocent mistakes as I ordered an expresso when I really wanted a coffee or my surprise when I found a sandwich spot hidden beneath an arch with a woman who spoke every language we threw at her. I felt safe in her company, her voice as confident as an American's and her command of the language even better.

I remember my shock of blonde hair against the black of my clothes as I attempted to hide myself and blend into the atmosphere, always noticing my foreignness in the reflection of the endless windows I passed.

But what struck me most about Italy today was how everything I saw there, everything I did, every day for months it lured me, entranced me like a siren into forgetting to look for the sky. it's easy to forget the sky in Italy when surrounded by so much artistic and architectural beauty, when watching the ground to be sure I didn't step in dog excrement. How easy it was to forget that slice of blue hidden away behind the shining buildings and sidewalk vendors with their renditions of the art hidden away in the buildings as their wares.

It was on a walk to school one afternoon that I suddenly felt lost and empty in the middle of living my dream existence in Italy. The feeling came over me like homesickness and my heart pounded in my chest, begging me to take notice and remember. "Remember!" It seemed to say with each thump. "REMEMBER!" And, believe it or not, I felt frantic, panicked, as if I'd lost something I couldn't name or even seek. I tilted my head back to take a deep breath and spotted blue space high above the buildings and people, high above the sponge of culture and art I'd become. And in the time it took me to inhale, relief swept over me, calm soothed me and I felt like I was home.

Missouri has so much sky I never feel lost, though I sometimes long for Italy in my daydreams. As long as there is space above me, as long as I take notice of its existence, I will always be home.

xoxo

Advice Needed

2009-03-10T19:14:00.004-05:00

Let me give you the lowdown. Let us call the students "Jen" and "Anne." Let us call the class "creative writing." Let us say that this class, in particular, is fairly mature and very attentive.

Picture this: class begins. Students are seated. You are in the front of the room discussing the reading they were to have read for homework. The majority of the students are scribbling down notes. At least one or two hands go up when a question is posed. When asked to read their work aloud, many of the students are willing to divulge what they've written--therefore, putting themselves and their writing out there on the chopping block for the rest of the class. Occasionally, someone will send a text message, but will immediately put the phone away when you, the teacher, give them a "look." The students laugh at jokes posed by their peers or you and are really quite witty and intelligent. They impress you with their desire to learn and their thoughtfulness. In the back of the room, distinctly separate from the rest of the class, are Jen and Anne. Once, in the middle of workshopping three different, carefully written stories by three different students who offered up their work to the critical eyes of the class, you are distracted through the entire hour and fifteen minutes because Jen and Anne are noticeably fooling around on their laptops-side by side, in the back right of the room. You are annoyed because you realize if it were their pieces being workshopped, they would be paying the utmost attention. They were to have read all of these stories and made comments on the manuscripts in order to discuss them this very day. They had the pieces, at least, one week in advance. There is no reason they should be typing away, eyes fixed to the screens before them, while the rest of the class respectfully attempts to critique the short stories in order to help with the revision process for their peers.

Class ends.

Because you do not want to "call them out" in class and embarrass them in front of their fellow students, you sit down and compose two emails that evening, one to each girl, asking that they do not ever come to class and play on their laptops again. You kindly explain to them just how rude and disrespectful that is to not only you, but their peers and, especially, those who's stories are being workshopped.

Neither girl replies and neither girl appears in class with a laptop again.

When workshopping ends and lecturing begins again, Jen and Anne tag-team their attendance to the class. You notice that Anne is clearly the brighter of the two, as well as the more talented writer and more thoughtful student as a whole. She is, overall, a better student and it is evident when she makes comments in class. However, Jen has a poor attitude-incessantly writing notes, laughing, rolling her eyes, assuming an attitude of condescension when given a prompt in class while the other students are thirsty to learn more, try more and do not make the assumption that what you are asking them to do has no point. It is clear that Anne is more involved in these prompts as she takes much longer to write them. Jen, on the other hand, is always the first one finished. She slams her pen down with annoyance and proceeds to distract Anne while she is still doing her work. One particular day, you have had just about enough and find yourself glaring at the two girls in the back of the room, breathing enraged breaths and debating exactly how it is you want to handle this situation. This has been sparked by Jen's overwhelming flow of haughtiness. Today she has become outright vocal about her displeasure in being asked to perform the menial task of writing down five things and acts as though even the simple directions are damn near ridiculous. (Write down five characters. Write down five conflicts. Write down five gestures.-She responds: A gesture? What, like a hand gesture? Like five different hand gestures? To which you reply, there are far more than just hand gestures to be performed in the world.) Everyone else, including Anne, seems to understand the assignment. She, unhappily, goes back to her work.

Not too long ago, a student complained. In fact, it was just after the laptop incident. He conferenced with you and said, "It's so distracting and annoying! I don't know how you can stand it. If I were the teacher I would flip out!" You want to tell him you, too, want to flip out on occasion...but you haven't quite gotten to that point yet and, instead, you are holding out hope that your emails on the laptop incident will solve the problem. You find out, over the course of the next few weeks, that you are, in fact, wrong.

While the students work on their prompts, you consider your options for solving this issue, while maintaining your composure and coolness. You have reacted well with situations that others may not have before. Remember the time half the class showed up without their work done? You calmly told the half that did not do the work that they were dismissed and free to go since they were of no use to the class or the conversation if they did not come prepared with their work. They stared at you in disbelief. One of them asked you to please, at least, yell at them or something. You said you weren't angry-it was their grade, but you simply couldn't use them in the class activity so they should leave in order to clear up space and distraction. They did so and never came unprepared again. It was the saddest you'd ever seen a class and, possibly, one of the most effective ways of disciplining you've ever used. You want to maintain that kind of demeanor. You think of this while you debate the options.

1. Ask them both to stay after class. When they do, tell them that their attitudes and ongoing conversations with one another are not only rude, but distracting. Explain that you've had students literally tell you that they find it disrespectful and annoying. Ask them if there is a problem you are unaware of that, perhaps, you can all solve together? Further, if they react poorly, tell them they are welcome to drop the class or you can do it for them considering Jen has already missed the allotted four absences. If they respond well, tell them if it keeps up, though, you will have to ask them to please sit separately from now on. "I don't like to do this," you hear yourself say, "Just like I don't like to call students out and embarrass them in class, but since you have become a distraction to your fellow students, it's a major problem and I will be forced to ask you to sit apart if you cannot handle sitting beside one another and remaining attentive in my classroom." Part of you imagines this breaking into a fight because Jen is so angry looking all the time. You don't want to have to take her down.

2. Ask Jen to stay after class, knowing full-well Anne will probably wait for her outside the classroom. Speak solely to Jen and explain to her that her attitude is starting to disrupt the class and her fellow students. Tell her that she is acting as a distraction to Anne who, when Jen is not present, is attentive and participatory. Explain to her that you've honestly had just about enough of the high school attitude and that even if she dislikes you or the class, it's up to her to make the decision to either stick it out and perform up to par with the rest of the class or to drop it and you'll be happy to submit a drop form to the Dean. Further, she is not to miss even one more class as she has already missed the limit and, lastly, she is not to sit near Anne any longer if she cannot keep from chatting with her. This is where you imagine she flips out and attacks you. Unfortunately, you are about half her size so you fear this, but, luckily, you have some taekwando training. A very small amount, but it's better than nothing.

3. You try a sneak attack mode and ask Anne to stay after class. This one, you think, is ingenious! When Anne stays after class, and you know Jen is waiting outside the room for her, you explain to her that you think she is a thoughtful, helpful critic. You tell her that you think her participation is useful and that you enjoy having her in the classroom as she brings a unique twist on things other students have not. You go on to say that you think if her first story was any type of hint as to what she could do in a shorter period of time, you are convinced she could do something quite wonderful if she took quite a bit of time. Unfortunately, you tell her, you have had students complain about the activity going on in the back of the room between she and Jen and it would be best for her grade, overall, if she found a new place to sit or a new way to ignore her friend's chatting.

There aren't as many cons on the third, you think. Positive reinforcement, then blast away at the friend. Divide and conquer! Brilliant!

Yet when the class ends, after the students have read their short scenes for the class, you do not ask either of them to stay. You want to make sure you have chosen the correct option, but need to run it by some people instead of just going for it. You are ok with thinking that Jen might not like you as a teacher or think you are not effective. You're fine with her disliking you as a person, even. What you are not ok with is handling the situation incorrectly and setting a standard. You want this to end and you want it to end as peacefully and quickly as possible.

What do you do?

xoxo

The Watchmen: A Review

2009-03-06T12:11:00.007-06:00

Second day of physical therapy: done!

When I told my students I was going to have to start P.T., they got really excited. It seems like nearly every one of my fiction students has had to go through P.T. for one thing or another and they all said the same thing: "They do this cool thing at the end where they put these shock things on you and a cold pad and they just leave you for, like, ten minutes. It's awesome!" Some of them went so far as to say that they lied and said the buzzing of the stimulator pad wasn't up high enough so their therapist would make it stronger.

I trust my fiction class. They are bright, talented, engaged human beings and I thoroughly enjoy each and every one of them. We have bonded over the last few months and so I believed them when they got so excited about the buzzing strips and cold pad...but let me tell you right now: I hate it. I hate how it makes my leg muscles contract unwillingly. I hate how my leg gets numb from the cold pad and I really hate how it feels as though the buzz pad is buzzing its way through my skin and injecting it's buzziness directly into my muscles. I hate it. I didn't have the heart to tell them the other day how much I disliked it. I thought I'd give it another go: maybe it was just first time gone awry, ya know? But, no. I hate it. Still.

Another thing I kind of hate is the movie the Watchmen, only I'm not as certain about the depths of my hatred on this one. There were some, minor elements I liked. D and I saw previews for this film a year ago and, as intense superhero fans, we have been looking forward to it ever since. In recent months, D has been refining his superhero based course and as the movie release came closer, we grew worried when we heard that the rights to the film were not fully sorted out, meaning the film was in jeopardy of not being released! We waited, with baited breath, and were happy to hear the conflict was resolved and the film was coming out! So when I heard that both of our major theaters were having multiple midnight showings the night it came out, Dustin and I knew we needed to be some of the first viewers.

Admittedly, I had not read the graphic novel as I've been a bit on the busy side, but D filled me in on the basic essential background pieces I needed, we met some friends at the theatre a half hour before midnight and, with popcorn in hand, we awaited the opening credits of the film.

First things first...this movie expects that you already know the basic premise. If I had known more about the background of the characters, I would not have been confused about who belonged to the first vs. the second generation. This wasn't the MOST essential missing link, but it would've saved Fi a lot of quick explaining.

Secondly, the acting was comical. Really. I burst out laughing a few times without meaning to and at totally inappropriate times because it was just THAT bad. The chick who played Laurie (Silk Spectre Gen. 2) was the worst, by far, plus she looked just like Xena: Warrior Princess. If you doubt me, look below for a comparison shot and doubt no more!

See what I'm talking about? Totally weird, right? Imagine trying to NOT think of Xena the Warrior Princess while watching the Watchmen!

Thirdly, gender roles! Good fucking GOD (you know it's serious when I drop the f-bomb!). I am not usually one for pouting about whether women have huge roles in movies. I mean, there are times when movies are made that have NO good male roles, so I think it's fair to keep that type of conversation out of a review if it's clearly not intended to be a carefully done character sketch on both genders. I do, however, take serious issue with the distortion of female roles when they were not intended to be presented as they are on screen. For example-removing half of a costume so the actress is more eye-candy than the character from the graphic novel, cheapening the effect of a sex scene when it is meant to reveal much more about both characters than it does on screen...etc. Perhaps one of the best examples of the poor portrayal of women in this film is simply Laurie herself. She literally goes from one man to the next, craving their attention and using them as "saviors" because she has somehow lost her ability to live independently despite the fact that she is a retired superhero. What??? Talk about wrong on so many levels! Other women were casually and meaninglessly beaten, nearly raped and murdered. These moments added nearly nothing to the plot unfolding on screen.

Fourthly, Roorschach's voice is utterly ridiculous. It's impossible to take him seriously when it's clear he's deliberately trying to make his voice raspy, intense and low, not to mention he leaves out essential words that, for those of us who speak proper English, are imperative to the meaning and completion of a sentence. I'm all for altering the English language when I write--last I heard they call that creative license, but c'mon! I have enough trouble with students getting their sentences straight than to promote it in a movie most of them were probably watching alongside me. It, again, only evoked laughter and disbelief from me.

I could go on, but let me leap forward.

Since I couldn't fathom that Laurie could really be such a vapid character, and because I didn't understand everything in the movie or how it could be SO bad, I borrowed Dustin's book version and read more than half of it within a day of watching the film. If you have ever heard someone say that "the book is way better than the movie," they haven't seen anything til they've read and watched this film.

We sat through nearly three hours of that sludge they called the Watchmen which was made by the creator of the incredibly aesthetically pleasing film "300" and yet only a few scenes of the Watchmen came close to grasping that kind of powerful artistic mastery. Perhaps it was there, but just got overlooked in my deeply concentrated attempt to find something likable about the film. I read more than half the book in less time it took me to watch the film. Part of this is because of transitions. In the book, in literature, white space or a clear leap from one visual scene to the next demonstrates time passing, shift in narration...etc. This is not so easily done in film. Sure, it can be done successfully, but imagine how dizzy an audience would feel if every few minutes we were being tossed from one moment and scene to another entirely different one. My confusion based on having not read the book would've been ten times worse if they'd had followed it around like that.

This is not to say the film didn't stay true to the book, because, in most ways, it did. It literally almost went panel for panel with the book...except the movie characters had to walk down the stairs instead of just going from kitchen to basement in the flip of a page. It took more time to set up scenes and to flip between characters in the film than it takes to see them in a book.

It didn't help that the same day we saw the movie, I discussed the difference between "plot" (defined, from our text, as underlying significance/importance to the series of events; the "stake" an audience has in the piece) and "story" (defined as: a chronological series of events) with my fiction students. (It lost much of its strong plot when it moved from paper to film.)

I commend the movie for trying. I do. I am even willing to grant that some of my issues with the film were due to my own ignorance in having not read the book and done my homework previously. I have to say, though, they really should've stuck more closely to the important details, the symbolic meaningful ones from the book because they were lost in translation. The book was trying to tell a story full of various underlying stories, themes and symbols than even a 2.40 hour long movie could possibly cover. It goes to show that literature really is more powerful than film in many ways. It really was no wonder, when we were leaving the theatre and Dustin confessed the creator of the graphic novel wouldn't allow his name to be used in the credits, why Allan Moore (graphic novel writer) made the choice to remain unattached to the film.

Anyhow, we might see it again when I finish the film. Or we might wait for it to go on dvd. If you see it, let me know what your impressions were! I'm interested in other opinions!

xoxo

Family Film Festing

2009-03-04T19:48:00.012-06:00

Sorry for the very absent blogging...my parents were in town all week until today and we've been terribly busy. But! That's no excuse.

Let me recap what's been going on.

Today I had my first physical therapy session with a woman named Morgan. By means of a recap-I hurt my knee months ago during an extreme off-track run and, though it has it's moments of release, for the most part it's been terribly painful, especially when I go up steps or walk on it a lot. The weird thing is, it hurts after I'm done with said activity (except the stairs-it hurts ON the stairs, not after), and they took an MRI to see if it was a tear or bone bruise or torn ligament or anything, to no avail. So the doctor at the health center sent me over to Peak Performance for some P.T. to fix it. If it doesn't get better in four weeks, they will go in there and see what's up. I'm hoping it'll just be fine!

I realized it was hurting a while back, but the day I went to the doctor, it sort of felt ok. Figures, right? When I left I wondered to myself, "Am I a hypochondriac or something? I don't even feel any pain? Weird." Then my parents came to town for the True/False Film Festival and it all went downhill on day two (Saturday!).

The True/False Film Festival is a series of documentaries that comes to town. The True/False org puts it on once a year and it begins on a Thursday night. It's pretty amazing since they also have sponsors and collect enough money to fly some of the actual movie-makers into town. Most of them are pretty independently done and some of them have been recognized at Cannes...etc. After the film ends, the director/producer/subject of the doc will come up on stage for a Q&A. In general, it's one of the more amazing things we do here in Columbia and my parents drove all the way up just to come see it (they'd been here one other time at the same time the festival was going on). So we got a pass for the films and saw one on Friday night followed by four back to back films on Sunday and Saturday. This is awesome. I love docs and I love my parents and I love changing my routine up, plus I was excited to walk around a lot since the theaters are spread out around the city and, by no means, terribly close to one another. We usually had about 10/15-30 minutes to get from one screening to the next (and Good Lord! was it cold!) so we ended up really running a lot, which strained my knee just in time for my follow-up with the dr. yesterday and my first P.T. session today. Whew! It sucked, but the festival was awesome. Somehow we picked mainly depressing movies, but most of them were just fabulous, so it was worth it. Here's a rundown of the films we caught:

Afghan Star

Blood Trail

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Waltz with Bashir (which may be opening in a theatre near you!)

We Live in Public (totally makes you rethink your online presence...freaky)

Rough Aunties

Over the Hills and Far Away

Burma VJ (I feel like an ass saying this, but I fell asleep during the first part)

Loot

Overall, a great experience. The following pic is the Missouri Theatre-redone and looking fab, of course! The T/F logo is cast on the newly gilded ceiling and I thought it looked elegant, so here's that:

Unfortunately, it was freezing out, as usual when my parents come. We'll have unseasonably warm weather, then the parents will visit and it'll drop down to the single digits! Here are the parents and the Fi waiting to get into the first movie we saw (Waltz with Bashir) on the very first night of the festival. Don't they look cold? Awww. Poor lovies!

There were other guest appearances in store for our weekend, but I will hold off on those and let GG have her update afterwards (you know what GG signals, AP fans!). Plus, who doesn't miss new GG episodes? Seriously? I know the cast needs a vacay, but this was just waaay too long!

We were lucky enough to catch up with some of the people we love most, aside from my parents, and to introduce them to my parents, as well. Connie and Kris (my parents) liked everyone they met a whole lot and kept asking when we'd all get to see them again. If only we had more time between films!

At any rate, other fun things my parents did while they were here is as follows:

If you guessed that they had a Nerf Gun fight...or many...you were right. D and I have these Nerf Guns just hangin' round the house so when my dad spotted them, he immediately figured out how it worked and shot the entire round at my mom before she even figured out how to get hers going. Needless to say, it was the start of a week-long barrage of Nerf-bullets soaring through the house.

Had drinks at one of the best "burger" places in the country, Booches. And ran into people we knew at the table behind us.

Had a tasty, but not efficient lunch at Coffee Zone (it was conveniently located next to the theatre where we had two back-to-back films...the one and ONLY time, I might add!)

We took a trip to the rec center where my dad kicked D's butt in racquetball (he's ridiculously good, even though he hadn't prepared by bringing the right clothes for a day at the rec).And, lastly, they took a trip with me to the Student Health Center where we were not allowed to take pictures. Unfortunately, I have always had a bit of a problem with certain rules and the fact that I find them stupid...unfortunate for the Health Center staff...but we did walk AWAY from the Health Center itself for this photo, so I think it was ok. Note the look of concern on our faces. We thought we were about to be busted.

My parents left today (sadness), but we will see them again in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I have been working on wedding party gifts. Top secret business, everyone! And am feeling sore from therapy and tired and kind of sick (weird). Hopefully, now that I've played a bit of catch-up blogging, I can play some catch-up blog-reading!

Hope you're still reading and haven't given up on us. Stay tuned for a GG update any hour or tomorrow now :)

xoxo

For Keeps

2009-02-23T20:43:00.004-06:00

Dustin and I are playing another round of "keep that sweater." This entails D standing at the end of my bed with a pile of sweaters and sweatshirt, holding one up at a time and waiting for my approval or disapproval. We've done this before. There is a "keep" pile and a "Goodwill!" pile. At the moment, he has disappeared into the other room to retrieve another pile and I am watching the "keep" pile grow taller by the second.

This is a sensitive time in our relationship: the sorting of the clothes. When I look at my own clothes whilst sorting through them to make room or get rid of stuff I simply don't wear anymore, I feel as though I am fairly even-keeled about it: 'This doesn't fit anymore, it's time to send it on to a new life,' or 'I adore this shirt, but it's misshapen and doesn't look good on me anymore,' or 'Damn-I never could pull this gorge dress off, as much as I hate to admit it, it was wishful thinking"...etc. Don't get me wrong-I don't always relish the task of going through my enormous walk-in closet (the one I don't share with anyone, but have somehow managed to completely fill from corner to corner and top to bottom!) sorting through piles and hangers upon stacks of clothes and shoes. I especially hate it when I find an old gem-something I love, but forgot about amidst the traffic jam of newer or cleaner clothes that rest atop them. And I really hate it when I see a shirt or skirt I wore a year ago in a picture, but can't locate it now. Any of these reasons is enough to get me irate about the state of my clothes and the need to let some pass on to their next life. I just can't keep it all, no matter how well-loved it is...and, eventually, I have to admit that I probably won't ever fit back into my size 0-2 clothes and just need to stop pretending, check back in with reality, and toss 'em in the Goodwill bag.

For Dustin, though, it's more sentimental. I have seen some of the sweaters he holds up for me in pictures from his college days, some, maybe, from even earlier. He has items of clothing that are favorites, some that he inherited from his brother, some that I've given him and some-no, scratch that-many of which he earned from running in a race or attending a camp or competition or from acting in a play.

It's not just clothing that, at times, is difficult for Fi to part with, it's other things, too. For example, we went home to Cape Girardeau this weekend to visit my future-in-laws/D's wonderful family and while we were there, D's mom did something I recognized my own mother doing years ago when I still stored much of my stuff at her house: she was giving it back, ever so gently and kindly. Each time I'd come home from college or grad school, where I had a place of my own, mom sent me back with boxes of my childhood items or asked me to go through and "get rid" of anything I "didn't need or want anymore," from my old childhood bedroom. The task was long and daunting, but when my parents moved from my childhood home to our Hilton Head home permanently, only three small boxes of mine accompanied them and the rest I had gotten rid of or moved along with me.

When I moved from grad school to Missouri for the Ph.D. program, all my items fit into one, small trailer. Let me rephrase that: Everything I owned in the whole world fit into one, small trailer. Yeah. Telling, isn't it? I felt good about that-sort of like Jimmy Buffet's or (for my lit major readers who will be disappointed in that simile) Thoreau's protege-someone who needed few to no material objects. I wanted to live simply and carry all that I needed in the world on my back. Seriously, though, I did. This might explain the small trailer (my mom insisted I have furniture and stuff-you know how mom's are) that fit my entire life. I didn't need or really want anything else. Few of the furniture items I had were worth anything, most of them were donated by family and friends, none of them came from a store. Here is a brief inventory of what filled (I use that word loosely) my apartment in Pittsburgh:

1 couch-left in the apartment by the previous owner who could not get it out the door when she moved

1 small corner table shaped, specifically, for a corner-donate by a nurse that cared for my grandma who was in a Care Facility at the time

1 old-school, tiny and incredibly top heavy diner table with four wire chairs (the ones with the heart shape wire backs and putrid yellow plastic seats)-donated by my aunt and uncle who owned a few restaurants along the way.

1 twin sized bed-my cousin's old bed from his childhood that had previously been in storage because he'd moved on to a newer, larger, adult-sized bed. Mind you, he's three years younger than me.

1 extremely old, falling apart, broken/missing knobbed dresser in flaking white paint with cracked drawer bottoms-also donated by my aunt and uncle from my uncle's old apartment-just something they had hanging around and couldn't get rid of-it didn't last but a few months in the Pittsburgh apartment! I couldn't even open half the drawers.

an old chair-courtesy of Grandma

a cassock (square table where I placed my tv)

a TV-given to me and my sister in high school, but still in working condition

my clothes and shoes

a few boxes of my stories and essays

mismatched pots, pans, utensils and a new set of glasses, courtesy of my Mom and Dad along with a new set of dishes from them, as well.

This is a complete list of what I came to Pittsburgh with. The items that came to Missouri with me were even less: all of the above minus the bed, dresser and couch. Oh, and I purchased a nightstand over that two-year span of time, two breakfast bar chairs and a replacement dresser from Target that I got rid of (it broke), as well. The TV is gone now, too.

I still have some items, as you can tell: the nightstand, cassock...etc., but much of it had to go. Just like when I leave Columbia, certain items will not be making the next trip (my brother's futon from college that we've been practically gluing back together, for example, possibly my nightstand...etc.) It's like life, of course (you totally knew I was going there, didn't you?). The lifespan of these items in my world has either come to an end or is coming to an end. This isn't to mean they are no longer useful, but it's time we go down separate paths and continue our lives without one another. We're just growing apart. That's just how life goes. Not everyone and everything gets to stay forever.

I think that's how Dustin sees it and why it's so hard for him to get rid of stuff. As I was saying, before I rudely interrupted my own train of thought, D's mom piled him up with some of his stuff while we were there: a box of stuff I couldn't quite make out, a guitar and amp, some papers and books, an extension for the vacuum cleaner he's had for years...etc. Needless to say, the car was definitely fuller on the way back than on the journey there. Eventually, she asked him if he wanted to take the mirror that connects to the dresser he has here in Columbia. He debated this and I asked him, "Are you going to use it?" He answered, "No." "Then why take

it?" "Because it belongs with the dresser."

I was confused. Why take something you don't plan to use? More than that, why take something that goes with an item that's not in great shape anymore that may not make the next move we make? Why keep taking things that we have to, then, find space for?

Dustin explained that the dresser was his mom's. "Your first dresser? When you were growing up, right?" He asked her as we stood in the kitchen, me trying to understand.

"Well. No. My first dresser was the small one with the three drawers on one side and the crawl space for a chair and another drawer on the other side."

Nonetheless, the sentimentality is ingrained: this was his mother's second dresser. The one she used through high school when the first dresser was no longer big enough for her items. The one she gave to Dustin because she didn't need it anymore and he was moving out. The dresser with the missing handles and wonky drawer-tracks, the nicks and scratches and discolored sections, the dresser I could not imagine lugging along with our slowly modernizing furniture collection was still, despite his mother's lack of sentimentality for it, his mother's from when she was a child.

I get this. Not only do I get it, but I totally respect that stance. Though, I have to admit that a small sense of fear crept into my mind when I thought: He might never want to get rid of it. He might want to keep it forever, even if it starts falling apart in our hands or rotting clear through. We might have this until the day we die! And I'm guessing my eyes widened at this realization because Dustin spoke up, "When we sell it or donate it someone else might want that mirror, ya know?" My fear subsided and I watched him, armed with two faded posters of various dinosaurs, march back out to the car to pack up more items.

It was then his mom said it, "There are things I get sometimes or have from-oh, who knows when or why-and they're nice when they're given to you as presents for the thought of it and that...but I wouldn't want them in my house. The office or at school in my classroom would have been fine, but not in my house. Even in my house, not too long back, I started to notice pictures on a wall or items hung up that I just didn't want there anymore so I'd just go ahead and take them down and rearrange."

I knew she understood what I didn't know how to articulate at that moment or many moments following that when Dustin accused me of being unsentimental (then apologized) or when he said he needed to get rid of things on his own terms or even when he told me he asked his mom not to send stuff home with him anymore. No one wants the leftover stuff, the stuff that gets left behind, including the owner who left it, because no one wants to deal with how to send it off into the world when there are only two options for a pair of dinosaur posters that used to hang, beloved, in the room of a little boy or an old, yet functioning, dresser that just doesn't quite fit into the new life that's being made: Goodwill or garbage. And, the core of this problem, the heart of it all is that no one, and I do mean no one, wants to throw away their memories.

Food, Injuries and Pre-Canaa

2009-02-17T21:24:00.005-06:00

Last night, I pulled out my trusty Veganomicon and whipped up some tasty chickpea cutlets. That's right, friends, you read that correctly! This means I FINALLY found some vital wheat gluten. I was about to bite the bullet and order it off a website Danie D. sent my way a little while back. Perhaps you've heard of it? Amazon? ;P Anyhow, I found the elusive substance and followed the directions to a satisfying, chewy meal. D-bones dug it, though as I always say, he's pretty easy to cook for, and I really liked em, too. Verdict: worth the search for vwg.

I vowed to wake up early and make some amazing scones (also from the Post Punk Kitchen trove of recipes, with some additions of my own: vanilla and cinnamon), but woke up at 7am not remembering why I set my alarm for so early. My love ended up eating cereal and not waking me to make good on my promise. He's such a sweetheart! I wish I'd remembered, though! I like to be a woman of my word.

In other news, there may be a doctor visit in my future...as in, perhaps, tomorrow morning. I think I mentioned this a while back, but I'm not certain now. Back in November I ran an extreme off-track race. This went through the woods and huge puddles and ditches, over obstacles both manmade and natural...where, on my return, I tripped while leaping across one such manmade obstacle only to land 100% unnaturally on my right knee. I don't know how I managed this, but I landed smack dead on the outside part of my knee while my entire right leg buckled under me. When my friends Liz and Beth and I neared the finish (which was near where I fell), Dustin was shocked to see me stop and walk up the last hill rather than run. I have a tendency of running way faster on the last leg, especially when I know the finish line is that near. In his words he, "knew something was really wrong" when he saw me drag myself up the hill and, literally, roll back down to the finish line. (This photo is a pic of that race BEFORE I fell and hurt my knee.)

The first few days after the race, I could barely walk. It was incredibly painful. My body was sore in a variety of places, but the right knee was, by far, the worst of it all. I worked through it and, before too long, I was running again. I've done a few 5ks and continued my normal running regime of 3-4 miles. However, lately, sharp pains in my knee have been waking me up in the middle of the night out of nowhere. I find that going up or down stairs sends shooting pain through my knee and, sometimes, it hurts for no reason out of nowhere. It never hurt when I ran, but this week the pain has been so acute, I decided not to run and, instead, to ask my father what to do (he's a doctor). He suggested heat pads and advil. That's all well and good at night when I go to bed, but the knee is still a hinderance when I'm awake and carrying out my daily rituals of stair climbing and long stretches of walking from one building to another. So tomorrow I'm calling the health center bright and early because I haven't been able to go running more than ONE time this week and that was for just over a mile. There are at least two races coming up that I want to run in and, in all honesty, I really want to be able to do things without worrying that my knee won't be able to hack it. For example, my friend Lexi takes a few ballet classes a week and I'm dying to jump in on that, but know my knee won't hack it for that long. Ugh! Frustrating.

In other news, Fi and I had our first pre-canaa class tonight. Muy interesante. Karen and Alex from school are both in the class, too. They gave us nametags and talked about, well, I think their goal was marriage and keeping our religious faith, but the structure of their talks were sort of lacking (do you see the teacher in full effect?). At any rate, we decided not to discuss pre-canaa on the blog until it's all over and we've passed (if it's a pass/fail thing, that is!).

Instead, here is a pic of D after pre-canaa today:

He was pretty excited about his nametag. Note the church in the background: Sacred Heart. Columbia, MO! Pre-Canaa every Tuesday night for the next five weeks. Wooohooooo! Look forward to a follow-up blog when it ends.

Oh, and, also, D brought home this Craft Studio brochure for me today. The Craft Studio at Mizzou offers free "crafternoons" and really reasonably priced classes, which I knew nothing about but will now be taking FULL advantage of. For example: tomorrow-Tin Can Flower day between 12-4. A class on recycling tin cans by making them into flowers! Pretty inventive, eh? Perhaps I'll go and make one for our office to spice it up a little bit.

Will keep you updated on our Craft Studio endeavors and visit to the doctor, if I can get one!

Hope you're all well!

xoxo

Valentine's Day Recap

2009-02-15T16:57:00.010-06:00

Most people know that I am the absolute worst at keeping a secret or not ruining a surprise and, thankfully, this Valentine's Day I kept my surprises under wraps until Dustin came home Friday night with an awesome ice cream cake and some cute V-day clothes gifts. He's such a sweetie and it was the perfect opportunity to give him my gift! Or, at least, part of it. Here's a hint:

Yes. A bald eagle. Dustin loves birds and I thought it would be awesome if I could give him one, sort of, that's endangered. So I adopted a bald eagle at the STL zoo for him. D's a "Zoo Parent" now so he and I will get invited to the Parents' Picnic and he got a bunch of cute stuff, including a picture I framed and wrapped for him. D calls him "Dustin Jr." and says he thinks about the eagle all the time. I chose this particular bird because D's grandpa, who practically raised him, used to take him to see bald eagles when he was little. I thought he'd maybe like it, but his reaction exceeded my expectations. I'm so happy!

Saturday morning we woke up early and had a Valentine's Day couples massage at 9am for an hour. It was awesome! We relaxed and watched House in the afternoon, then went to dinner at Hemingway's which is on the south end of town. It has a super awesome atmosphere, but isn't run all that well. We ended up waiting for about forty minutes for dinner, which was fine, except we never saw our waiter after he took our order. However, Dustin gave me a super awesome camera for Valentine's Day and we experimented with it until dinner came. Here's an example of how we spent our time waiting:

Cool atmosphere, right?

Then came dinner!
D had the salmon, which is ordinarily what I'd get...
But I went for a porkchop, instead. The sweet potato mash was a huge selling point for me :)

After waiting another fifteen minutes for our waiter to finally come back...we got our check and had one of the two hostesses take this picture while we waited for the other hostess to get our coats. Problem with that was, they lost our coats. Literally, they brought two different sets of coats to us before I finally offered to just go back and check their coat closet myself.

When we got out of there, we decided to take our own little pub crawl and headed downtown to a few of our most favorite places! Here's a recap of our night... Us finishing dinner and deciding on where to go afterwards.
Dustin in The Wine Cellar on their plush, cozy red couch. Stop number one!

Heading to the next place...

Forge and Vine for mojitos...when a group of guys dressed like the band Panic at the Disco came, we jetted. Weird scene.

Addison's-our second to last stop of the night on our way to Flatbranch...

Flatbranch, then home...thanks to Stripes. Yeah, it was that kind of night!

Hope you all had a glorious Valentine's day!

xoxo
N

Running in the rain!?!

2009-02-11T15:59:00.003-06:00

I know "thou dost protest too much!" But I can't seem to force myself out in the rain for a run...even though I'm kind of aching to go running. The weather was just so lovely the last few days, I've been spoiled. Seriously. Now all I see is dark, dreariness and just KNOW that when I head out it's going to start pouring on my head. Ugh...the trials and tribulations of the ever-fluctuating Missouri weather.

The problem isn't really that the weather is crappy. The problem literally is that it wasn't crappy the other day when I ran my six miles. Does that make sense? If the weather had just stayed crappy all this time instead of gracing us with unseasonably, teasingly, gorgeous weather, I would've been fine running in the cold until it heated up and stayed spring, then summery. No problem...it's the changing that screws me up and makes me pout.

Last night, when I went to bed, I was (as I already stated) famished, but I also really wanted to run. A lot. Problem was, of course, that it was dark and late and clearly a bad idea. Now I complain about the weather. In the past, before I read this month's "Runner's World" I convinced myself that running in the rain would make me sick so I shouldn't do it. Unfortunately, this month's edition told me-point blank-that running in the rain for a half hour won't affect my health at all.

One less excuse.

I am going to do my best to suck it up and just go for a run...sans dogs. (If I take one and not the other, the one left behind freaks out. Byz tears shit up and Bogey will, most likely, pee on something.) Sans Fi-he's in class...sans warm weather.

I know I'm supposed to hate global warming and I do, in all practical forms of theory and application and future-repercussions of it-but I do love how it makes the winter comfortable, even if just for a few days.

When I return: stuffed peppers for dinner. YUM!