Write it down and remember.

A month or so ago, an email came to my work inbox seeking volunteers to teach an advising/mentoring 101 class. Alone in my office, I looked around as if I was being watched. Maybe this was a prank.  I hadn’t been interviewed yet to come back for the 2013-2014 academic year at the university, but I replied back: “I’m in. I just have to be rehired.”  The one credit class for incoming freshmen designed to help them adjust to college life is the only class I remember from freshmen year, exactly ten years ago. How could I ignore this cyclical offering of the Universe?

Then last week, I got another email, this one confirming that I ‘d been chosen for one of the 101 slots, and also, stating my course abbreviation as “MT”. I considered asking for the abbreviation to be changed to “MPT” but thought twice.  Once the general excitement faded,  I was blindsided by the occurrence that I would have to do some planning. I would have to create a loose model for my theme: College is Not About the Classes. And I was immediately stumped. How does one go about teaching college freshmen about Life? Read more »

 
Walking through the National Gallery’s exhibit on the Ballets Russes, which employed artists such as Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Giorgio de Chirico to design sets and costumes (Coco Chanel also designed some costumes), composers Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Erik Satie for the scores, and choreographers included Mikhail Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and George Balanchine, revolutionizing ballet at the time (making it more Russian while making it more Avant-garde)—walking through these costumes and video clips of performances, I was reminded of the Leningrad Cowboys.

  Read more »

Now I know what at least 3 of those brushes are for

When she asked if I want the professional makeup artist to do my makeup for the wedding, I said something like “no thanks, I’ll do it.”
When she asked if I want the professional hairstylist to do my hair, I said “I think I’ll just do my own hair.”

For the first time ever, I am in a bridal party. Being a bridesmaid. According to Hollywood’s standards, it’s going to be a zany, mad-cap romp of friendship, hilarity, and ultimately a reminder of what true love really means.

My college roommate is getting married in July and I am one of her bridesmaids. But in the months leading up to the wedding I’m continually being reminded: I know nothing about weddings. I don’t know how the rehearsal dinner works. I don’t know if a bridal shower gift is just for the bride or for both the bride and groom. I had no idea couples had websites. And I really, really, don’t know how to do my own makeup and hair.

I get by, day-to-day. I know how to straighten my hair and wear basic makeup, but anything more complicated and I end up looking like Heath Ledger (we still miss ya, Heath) in The Dark Knight. I don’t like to wake up any earlier than I have to, and as a result rarely leave much time for makeup. Most days I choose clothes based on how much they feel like pajamas. And because I can’t afford the professional makeup/hair artists for the wedding, I’ve foolishly told my friend I can do it myself.
But I can’t. Read more »

This is supposedly a cross section of grass. See how smiley it is?

Plants have their own mysteries (see left, but please note that a. snopes hasn’t verified that this image is real and b. they say that the smell of fresh mown grass is actually the lawn communicating intense fear, pain, sorrow, and trauma).

Apparently chewing fresh chamomile flowers can take the edge off of quitting smoking. Garlic has anti-fungal properties, but I have no idea why some people suggest you stick a clove in your ear if you have an infection, which is usually caused by bacteria or a virus. Many of my friends are still really excited about Bach flower remedies, but Edward Bach was a an English homeopath, and New Mexico’s wild flowers just aren’t the same as the UK’s. I started looking for something more local. To that end, I’m devoting some of my summer to learning about Mexican folk medicine and healers—curanderismo and curandero/as, respectively. If you’re looking for something other than running 5ks, home brewing, and decoupaging bird silhouettes on your furniture, here’s a reading list.

Get some lemonade ready and spend an afternoon on the porch reading Cheo Torres’s Curandero. This memoir weaves together Torres’s childhood memories of his mother’s garden and its various herbs, his developing interest in traditional healing, and information about some of the most famous folk saint healers. It’s a wonderful, personal introduction to the topic, history, and some of the Spanish terms you might not be familiar with (such as mal ojo, empacho, or bilis).
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As a celebration for a year’s worth of work, and the arrival of summer, I organized a cookout for my staff of fourteen college students. In our last meeting prior to the shindig, I asked the group to help me make a list of items to buy for the grilling and the snacking.

“Chips! Doritos!”

“Potato salad!”

“Chocolate chip cookies.”

“Hot dogs AND hamburgers.”

“Can we have a watermelon?”

I had been yelling “Yes!” and pointing like an auctioneer at  each bidder, but at the mention of watermelon, I hesitated, just for a second. The student who’d asked for the watermelon was a white southern boy, raised just down the road from our small, private University in North Carolina. He was without a doubt, one of the most polite and respectful students I have ever encountered, and also one who was most proud of his southern roots. I knew that when he asked for a watermelon that he was only asking for a watermelon, and there was no underlying meaning in his question to me, his black supervisor. Still, I didn’t want to buy a watermelon. Read more »

I could nail this theme.

There’s one journal I want so bad. We all have that one. Maybe it’s the first journal we remember falling in love with, or a journal that has an editor we admire, or the cover art is gorgeous….but we all could probably think of The One.

I have five rejections from my journal. And after each rejection I have to wait another 6 months for the next reading period. I tell myself I will use those 6 months to write more. Revise more. Edit. Read.  Learn the journal better.
And I sort of do this.
But mainly I wait. I wait for them to announce the theme of the next issue. The theme is always just one word such as Eccentric, Foreign, Fear. And I wait for that one word.

I have a love/hate relationship with Theme issues and especially with the way I write for a theme. Ideally the theme of the next issue is released and I have pre-existing poetry that fits the theme (or can be easily revised to fit). But more often than not I see the theme and instantly start scrambling to create poems that fit.  Fury? Yeah? I can write about that. Fury. Like, wind? Sure give me a minute.

On the one hand, it’s really helpful to have something motivate me. The one-word-theme always pushes me to generate. It pushes me to think of that one word in different contexts and from different angles. By seeing that single word I immediately feel excited about creating new work that might reflect that one word.
The problem is I end up submitting work that is brand new; I submit work written just for that theme issue. It’s rough and often rushed. It’s no wonder I’m collecting rejections from them.

I think I’ve come up with a solution. I will create themes for myself. For each month. I want to come up with a calendar, where each month has a different one-word theme. I’m not entirely sure I will stay as motivated without the journal (The One) sitting on the other end waiting to see my work, but I hope it will at least get me thinking.

1. France has perhaps the best bread and pastry products in the world. I especially love how fresh it all is. Yes, they sell a little bit of prepackaged bread at the grocery stores, but there are boulangeries every two or three blocks. I get a lot of croissants and baguettes since it’s only a ten minute walk to the closest boulangerie, but people who live more out in the country will buy thicker loaves because they only get to town once or twice per week.

2. The French are not afraid of traffic circles; I think they’re probably more common here than regular old intersections—at least in the area I’m in. However, the rules for the traffic circles make no sense to me. First, you are supposed to use your blinker—right for the first exit, none for the second exit, and left for the third exit. Then, right before you exit the circle, you turn on your right blinker no matter where you started out. Also, most traffic circles are wide enough for two or more lanes of traffic, yet there aren’t guidelines on which lane you should be in based on where you’re exiting. I’ve heard that, for all accidents at the circle surrounding the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, insurance companies split the liability 50/50 because there’s really no way to figure out who is at fault. That traffic circle has about six lanes of traffic. I’m convinced that the people in the inner-most lane have been driving in circles for years and years, unable to exit.

3. Contrary to the stereotype, the French are kind—to each other and to Americans. I rode the bus the other day, and every person who got off, even when they exited through the back door, took the time to say goodbye and thank you to the driver. And except for one girl at Carcassonne, everyone I’ve spoken to has been wonderfully nice, even when I’ve made a fool of myself with various language errors.

4. My Michigan drivers license works in France, but so far I’ve been too afraid to drive. There are too many differences (not to mention the too-narrow roads common in Europe): it is illegal to pass on the right, yet you are expected to pull off to the right side of your lane if there is a motorcycle behind you. Every driver must carry an emergency vest in the car that must be worn if they break down. There will be random checkpoints set up (that not everyone has to stop at, though I’m still unclear on who does) at which they will check your papers and to make sure you have your emergency vest.

5. Fresh is the name of the game. The weekly town markets are always ten times busier than the grocery stores (so far as I’ve seen, anyway). I walk into the market in Tournefeuille, and it just smells different. The dozens of vendors sell everything from fresh produce to skinned and gutted rabbits, from flowers and plants to prepared vats of paella. So far I’ve stuck to buying vegetables, though. I made myself duck confit last night, but I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a rabbit.

6. Strangely, the French also love their pizza. There are nearly as many pizza places as boulangeries, just don’t expect to find pepperoni. If you want eggs and fresh cream, though, you’re probably in luck. Delivery is free, which is nice, and most places also let you order carpaccio, too. Which is less nice, because, let’s be honest, if there’s one way I really won’t try raw meat, it’s after it’s been put in a box, strapped to the back of a motorcycle, and driven halfway across town.

This is a fer-de-lance, which makes an appearance in the interview. It may also make an appearance in my dreams tonight.

I recently came across this absolute gem of an interview with Will and Jaden Smith, which the world seems to join me in finding both entertaining and kind of weird. Seriously, go read it. You’ll learn a lot about Will Smith’s parenting style and how seriously he takes everything from global finance to the alphabetizing of his laser discs (and the fact that he has laser discs). You also learn that Willow Smith is a little girl with magical powers who only shops at Target (who somehow comes across as the sanest one in the family). Personally, I also found it delightful that 14-year-old Jaden manages to use the terms “multidimensional mathematical” and “Mommy” in the same conversation. And, of course, he rather succinctly sums up the whole interview with the answer, “Patterns, boom” (my favorite part of the whole thing).

In fact, I found the experience of reading this interview to be so titillating that I wrote a found poem from it.

The Complexity of Things that We Say All the Time

There’s a high concentration of snakes
on the school board. You go to paint something
and a color’s empty. If you were a student
of the pattern, you’d have to understand
there’s a destructive aspect to a piano
with a microphone. This is how
the camera works. It’s mental illness Read more »

back in the summer of ’09, i made my first attempt at infinite jest as part of infinite summer, which was the first massive online book club that i’d ever heard of, let alone taken part in.  the idea was pretty ingenious, actually:  tackle a tough book collectively, with a set schedule for pages, plenty of resources to help you figure out what the hell was going on, social media accounts plus a commenting function and forums on the main site to encourage conversation, and regular blog posts from a stable of writers & special guests.  3,334 people were part of the facebook group and 2,738 followed on twitter.

i don’t know how many of them dropped off over the course of the summer, but i was one of ‘em.  theoretically, that infinite summer reading schedule was going to be perfect—it ended right as i was supposed to start my first year of grad school.  but i’m a notoriously slow reader.  i got a little over halfway done before classes began and had to set it aside.  but i picked the book up again during my second year in the mfa program, starting over from page 1, and made it one of my thesis books.  also one of my favorite books of all time, ever.  its complexity isn’t limited to just its structure or plot or extraordinary character list.  there’s a real/sincere heart to this book, and i don’t know if there’s any other literary work that i think about having a sort of “relationship” with.  i knew i’d revisit it someday, i just didn’t know when.  turns out, it’ll be sooner than expected.

the infinite summer site remains, and could easily be used as a guide for anyone still wanting some help to get through the book, but there’s something to be said for having fellow readers diving in along with you in real-time.  so, enter summer of jest:  a whole new group of people attempting the collective online reading group this summer, with social media, a blog, and all the rest.  i’m looking forward to getting new opinions on the book from different writers, and seeing what different ideas/approaches surface compared to infinite summer (i’ve already noticed that one suggestion is to literally cut up your copy of the book to make it more portable/less intimidating).  not to mention, “big” books like this are always better on a re-read.  and this time i’ve even talked a couple real-life friends into joining in with this craziness.  and with any luck, a few more will come aboard after seeing this post.  trust me: this is gonna be great.

if you don’t trust me, though, maybe you’ll be convinced after reading dave eggers’ foreward from the 10th anniversary edition of the book.  and once you’ve been convinced, you might also consider some tips on how to read infinite jest from serious dfw fan/professional blogger jason kottke.  oh, and, by the way, the reading schedule for summer of jest starts today, june 1.  so let’s get on this shit already, shall we?

Ericka and I were in the backyard, talking. We’d just decided that we were probably astrological twins, our lives never intersecting until now, she in a camp chair and I idly searching for four-leaf clovers.  Somehow, we landed on the topic of manic pixie dream girls, that flat but quirky character who saves some dullard by teaching him to embrace the whimsy of the world.

Writes Nathan Rabin, who coined the term in reaction to Kirsten Dunst’s 2005 character in Elizabethtown, “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Garden State. New Girl. I think they create an expectation of salvation,” I said. “Some guy sees you hula-hooping once and he thinks you’ll teach him how to suck the marrow out of life.”

“Hula-hooping?” asked Ericka. “Isn’t that stereotypical manic pixie?”

“Only if it makes you late to work, but having fun and being responsible aren’t mutually exclusive personality traits,” I said. “You could juggle fruit while, say, being an argumentative downer. I think we’re in the process of forgetting that.”

Then she said, in a singsong way, “Mr. F.”

Because really, you can’t tell the difference between the manic pixie dream girl in Arrested Development and the “Mentally Retarded Female” she really is, which is the joke. The ability to pair a coonskin cap with a sundress, inside-out jean jacket, and a teddy bear backpack must signal this stunted development. Or is it playing hooky to roll down a hill? Read more »