tv free!

so, the picture is of Yuichiro Miura, a 75 year old Japanese man who just set off for the summit of Mt. Everest. he is my favorite person for the day, i think.

in other news: we have been without a TV for several weeks now, and with a few exceptions, i have hardly noticed. the big ugly box with the crooked bug-ears met its demise during one of my cleaning frenzies, and it dropped head first onto the wood floor. it must have perished on impact, because revival was impossible.

the wonderful thing about having no tv (not even dvd access!) is that i can get tons of reading done. right now im in the middle of a brilliant novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. its stunning. chabon tells the tale of a couple of jewish kids in nyc during the 1930s-- one is a trained magician and refugee from prague, and the other is a wannabe comic artist from brooklyn. interwoven in their story is the history of those years preceding WWII, which drives their political and artistic expression. It is a drive that (as the novel tells) strangely manifested itself in the creation of comic book heroes not long after the turn of the century. im already thinking of ways i can bring this novel into my future classroom, if i teach 11th grade or seniors. im uncertain how teachers can introduce works from outside of the standard curriculum. ive already heard that one huge challenge is obtaining the 100+ copies of the book that will be necessary for students to do reading from home. it seems to be the perfect text to teach both history and fantastic writing.

tv has also forced us out more. we saw Much Ado About Nothing in zilker park on sunday, bringing along mini bottles of shiraz and takeout from p. terry's burger stand-- all organic and local burgers, but they are TINY! i must have grown up in the land of the Golden Corral, because im sorry, if i can finish my burger in 3 bites, i need seconds and thirds thankyouverymuch! so in a state of hunger, cold and fear of fearless ants...we left at intermission.

i have a week left of my current job, and since i have no new, big projects to work on, im half dazed all day, anticipating my final departure with dread and excitement, and wondering what my reinvented life will be like.

lately SuperDork and i have been intrigued by the portlands: portland maine and portland oregon. we will be in portland maine in mid-summer, and hoped to visit portland oregon over memorial day weekend, but that looks like it isnt happening.

the final news is i got all As this semester, so anyone who needs a piece of Middle English interpreted or a complicated sentence diagrammed knows who to call.

I recently picked up my dusty copy of Walden, and found some passages that I had underlined. There is so much wisdom in this book, I should refer back to it regularly, or at least start leaving it next to Gideon's Bible in motel rooms:

"This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt."

"The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves...It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages."

"It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow."

"I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breath malaria all the way."

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

-Henry David Thoreau

vino vino!

i read my last post and realized i sound like an alcoholic. truly, i only drink a few glasses of red wine a week. but wine consumption was up this weekend by several notches...as SuperDork and i spent two evenings at two different swanky wine bars in Austin. now we have this sort of distant dream of opening our own coffee shop/ wine bar one day. a very abstract sort of dream. but given that we met at a coffee shop, our first date was at a coffee shop, and that we buy coffee in bulk, its a very fitting dream.

in other news... valentines day was low-key: fonda san miguel for dinner and then mt. bonnell to gaze upon the well-lit mansions of austin's rich... who, by the way dont pay property taxes because their homes sit on lake austin. thats the rumor anyways. the outrage! i need to add that to my list of causes.

we have transitioned from chaucer to shakespeare in my class, and last night i was up past 1 am trying to read "two noble kingsmen." and today i have to figure out how to create charts and graphs to track regional variations in corpus linguistics. YEAH, that will be real helpful knowledge when im a teacher.

watched "the big sleep" for the 3rd or 4th time this weekend. ran around town lake. went to sister in law's for hamburgers. finished a lesson plan on "point of view" using the book "wicked." reconnected with friends in NM and revived longstanding debate at home on whether we should move to the wild desert!

thats all for now.

ciao!

ah, its been awhile.

life is so hectic right now, i hardly have time to write. last week i was so stressed out that i got some weird spasm of my eye. yes, mine eye! i thought i was going to walk around with a twitching eye the rest of my life like someone with tourette syndrome. but then i drank wine, fell asleep, and it stopped.

my semester is a combination of thrill and misery. the thrill of course is being back in an academic setting, reading chaucer in middle english (which i LOVE) and just learning in general. the misery is speed walking from my class to my car, eating a sandwich with my left hand while i drive with my right hand to work (watch out, pedestrians, you fools!). then sprinting to my office door. i dont know why at this point i am so determined to try to do both...i suppose i still get some sort of satisfaction out of my job. i got an article published in an academic journal this year, and i finished a chapter with my colleagues which will be published in a book next year. i suppose these are good things, and its hard to walk away from.

whatever social life i had now seems nonexistent. i spend friday nights learning about Subject Predicatives. i spend saturday nights writing lesson plans. soon spring is coming and im going to be really depressed if im not out biking on beautiful saturday afternoons. alas.

superdork and i went to a gala/ fundraiser this weekend. i had several mishaps involving my dress. i forgot my tolerance was low (due to lack of recent social life) and drank one too many glasses of red wine. there was an auction and we bid on a sushi dinner at a uchi, which i hope we won, because i could use a good dose of sake toro and hotate right now. even if it is at austin's most chichi restaurant where everyone is confused and thinks South Lamar is Hollywood Boulevard.

what else? oh, our summer vacation is set for the coast of maine, including possibly acadia national park. perhaps the most beautiful place on earth.

must get back to reading chaucer. who, by the way, had a sick, sick mind! if right-wing fundamentalists only read more, the canterbury tales would certainly surpass harry potter as the most banned book in texas schools!

define verdigris.

there are a few things on my mind right now:

Ray Carver was a God. (Everyone must read his story "A Small, Good Thing")

Right before Anton Chekhov died, he ordered the doctor to bring him a glass of champagne. Nice call. I think Ill order a box of See's Chocolates and Captain Lawrence porter.

Errands are the bane of my existence.

"Verdigris" means "green" (thanks, SuperDork).

I cannot live without my iPod. Yet my iPod is dying and i do not know how i will get through a day without neil young.

After almost 6 years away, it is thrilling to return to UT campus as a student. (despite the fact that most people on MoPac at 8:45 am seem to have closed their minds and taken their wonted place in the big gerbil ball, i do believe our brains were actually meant to be used. three cheers for depressed adolescents, chain-smoking, with books by foucault and derrida under their arm.)

I am utterly incapable of making life-changing decisions. Therefore I will probably die at age 98, a dimly contented old woman who never changed her position in life, or ever moved from her favorite spot on the couch.

Nobody knew what cold was until like the 1800s. (so for five million years or so, a bunch of folks have been sitting around, millennia after millennia, sewing long underwear and ear muffs, without ever answering the question of WHAT cold is)apparently, the slower atoms move, the colder something is. (thanks, SuperDork)

set alarm for 6:15 AM

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'" - Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

usually i roll out of bed at 8:30, giving me 15 minutes to throw on clothes and get to work by 9.

but now (*drum roll*) i have to get to my middle school by 7:30 AM!!! this is insane. i need to figure out how take my caffeine in the mornings intravaneously. coffee wont be enough! especially since ive been staying up until the wee hours of the morning reading the sportswriter and watching family guy .

but alas there is good news!

the reason i will be at my middle school so early is because the student i want to tutor is willing to get up early himself and take the public bus to school 40 minutes before the bell rings so i can spend time tutoring him. we are talking about a student who at the beginning of the semester didn't even want to show up to class!

this is so very exciting. i have hope!

so under the theme of "hope" im posting a photo taken after brad hawpe's home run during game 4 of the world series. hey that gave me hope too! and hope is all i need with my caffeine.

observations

last week in my 8th grade class i attempted to help a student write a paragraph. it became instantly clear that this student does not know the sounds of letters in the English alphabet. he is 13 years old and an ESL learner. the rest of the class is reading at about a 5th grade level and they are entering 9th grade next year. the class moves on, and many students (though not all) are improving every day with reading and writing. yet this particular student is left so far behind. its a sobering glimpse at the reality of our public education system and the challenges ahead for me, as a future teacher. as if i dont have enough going on, ive spoken to this student and im going to start tutoring him in the early mornings and on the weekends. i have no experience tutoring an ESL learner. my idea is just to start learning the sounds of the letters by using flashcards combined with reading out loud (a combo of phonics and whole language learning).

for my final school project, ive submitted a proposal to my professor to let me write a short book or story designed for students like the one im tutoring. i think im going to base it on the story of julius casear, since SuperDork is a roman history buff and i think this story will have special meaning to the student im tutoring. the books in the class written for students with low reading proficiency are horrendous! such as a "play" based on a king of the hill episode. i love king of the hill...but im not sure of its literary value!

im still humored by my students' quirks such as: "sneaking" a bulk-size bag of cheetos into class via an oversized backpack-- a bag almost the size of the student himself. or wearing house slippers to school and grandma's rosary as a necklace. they are also thoughtful kids. in one class discussion they all agreed the U.S. should help poor countries "even if they can never help us back." they just think other people should not be allowed to suffer. period. my students would make good world leaders.

in my other job, really interesting projects are emerging. like a "chapter" ill be co-authoring with my boss (due at the end of december!) and our design competition. im trying to figure out a way to keep working AND finish up my content-area requirements for my teacher certification.

meanwhile, im slowly recovering from the red sox's defeat of the rockies sunday night. its hard to hate the red sox too much since they have such charasmatic players. like kevin youklis (the girly hitter straight out of "deliverance"), man ram ("i think ill just live here at the ritz"), coco crisp ("i think ill jump backwards 12 feet in the air to catch this"), dustin pedroia ("i am short but awesome") and curt schilling ("i am god.") my obsession with the playoffs and world series was a major time commitment. something like 5 hours a day...watching BASEBALL.