The Weather Rules: If It Doesn’t Rain, Tlaloc Just Isn’t That Into You

Posted on July 9, 2012 | 2 comments

Say what you will about nature being female—Mother Earth, Earth Mother, Mother Nature, Gaia, what have you—now that this heat-wave-drought-thing is stretching on and on here in the land of dried-out cheese, I’ve realized I recognize this feeling of abandonment and desertion the lack of rain leaves me with.

It’s just like waiting for a guy who said he’d call to call.

That moment of enlightenment reminded me immediately of The Rules, and that got me wondering if we could generate some weather rules.

(Disclaimer here—I did not use the book or website as any part of the mating ritual that led me into my wonderful marriage),

My basic opinion is that rules like The RULES work best for people who play games.

But this whole “20 Percent Chance of Rain” icon that shows up on the weather forecast online AND THEN VANISHES every couple of days, or even, “50 Percent Chance of Thunderstorms” (also vanishes) have left me feeling toyed with.

So I’m looking for a weather god to blame.

For nominees, I would say possibly one of the Thunder Brothers, who were part of the Penobscot tribes (I’m thinking of Major Houlihan’s husband here, actually), or Pamola the Moosehead, or even Tlaloc, who was Aztec, but things feel desertified here lately, so maybe he’s expanded his range. But really, I’m just thinking some kind of generic, Pan-Indian, vaguely Celtic (given my own genetic heritage) pissy guy with supernatural powers related to rain. I call him Mr. Rain God.

I’ve thought seriously about this for almost an hour now, and I really think if we all follow the following rules, Mr. Rain God will stop being so damn WITHHOLDING.

Rule #1 is “be a creature unlike any other.” In this case the creature is a state (actually just the southern part of the state) or a region, not so much a creature at all, so I would say the weather rule translation would have to be “show up on Google Street View in really freaky ways.” A number of us have been trying to fry eggs on pavement—I think if those of us in Wisconsin just add cheese, we’ll be a dry region like no other.

Rule #2 involves leaving your house. I’ll admit—this has been hard for me. We have the summertime equivalent of “cabin fever,” only it’s hotter outside than inside. So—all of us, ESPECIALLY those of us who’ve been camped out in our central-air-hidey-holes, let’s get out more. (Just not tonight probably, in my case.)

Rule #3 says “it’s a fantasy relationship unless a man asks you out.” I think the weather rule equivalent would be “a weather myth is just a myth UNLESS IT RAINS.”

#4 is about office romance. If you work at a weather-related job, this applies to you.

#5 is about long-distance relationships, and says “he must visit you at least three times before you visit him.” So that’s it. I’m not looking at another forecast, or up in the sky, or anything, until it rains. Three times.

#6 is about personal ads, and to be honest, this had not even occurred to me. But THE RULES says that a woman should place the ad and “let men respond to you.” So I’m interpreting this to mean that not only should we stop looking at forecasts online, we should instead, place one of those Craigslist “missed connections” ads—“Mr. Rain God—saw some dark clouds in the sky above my house, but when I looked again, you were gone.” And just see what he does.

#7 is, I think, the most famous of the rules: “If he does not call, he is not that interested. Period.” So yeah, that’s how I’m feeling these days about Mr. Rain God. He is just not that into me.

#8 says “buyer beware,” but really—what are my options for rain? I mean—Mr. Rain God is pissy and fickle and absolutely Mr. Wrong, but I feel like Peggy Lee here: “He’s a tramp, but I love him.”

#9 says “Close the deal. Rules women do not date men for more than two years.” Not a problem. If it doesn’t rain for another two years, I’ll have much more serious things on my mind.

I know, I know—some of you are saying Yahweh is in charge of the weather, what with the whole 40-days, 40-nights story, and this: from Leviticus 26: “If you follow my statutes and keep my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will give you your rains in their season….” But the problem there is that we had massive floods here in Southwest Wisconsin just four years ago, and I can’t imagine we’ve had a serious change in faithful observance in the last four years.

And then some of you will probably talk about climate change.

For the record, I tend to believe God could affect the weather but almost never does, and that we’ve screwed up the planet, pretty much irreparably. (I don’t know how those two thoughts are connected.)

But the hot, dry weather (dry, as in, no rain, but it’s still humid—how is that fair? Here’s my Rule #1: if you’re not going to send rain, you don’t get to make it humid) makes me crabby and when I’m crabby, I find magical thinking MUCH more satisfying than either logic or theology.

The horrible part is that for me, it’s just an inconvenience, just a matter of higher a.c. bills. It didn’t even increase my watering chores in the garden, because I didn’t quite get around to putting in a garden this year. And nath sure hasn’t had to mow. Also—I’ve been noticing the last few years that when it’s a really good year for corn, it’s a really good year for ragweed, so I’m hoping the converse is true.

But that corn is breaking my heart. “Inconvenient” isn’t even on the same planet as the adjectives that describe what a drought means to farmers. Except where the fields are irrigated, corn here in Wisconsin looks spiky, like pineapple fields, or just brown. I worry a lot about the farmers—some of them have crop insurance, but even so, a bumper crop would always be a better outcome. Farming’s hard enough, you know? A drought like this could send someone who’s close to going under financially ALL the way down (and farming is one of those businesses that is almost always a little precarious).

So—instead of simply being sad and worried for the farmers, and worried for people who don’t have air conditioning, and worried for people who have to work outside, and pissy about having a hot summer when this is usually when we get to brag on Facebook about living in Wisconsin—THIS is when we’re supposed to be saying, “Great sleeping weather!” and “Ah….this is why we put up with blizzards….” Instead of all that, I’m working THE WEATHER RULES.

Because, in a direct quote that is directly applicable, Rule #10 is “keep doing the rules even when things are slow.”

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Summer of my Relative Uselessness

Posted on July 5, 2012 | 2 comments

I’m somehow reminded of when the O.J. trial was on—I spent a lot of that summer on the couch, agreeing with whichever lawyer was speaking at the time. “It’s like they didn’t cancel LA Law after all,” I told my friends.

There’s no trial on this summer that I’m watching, and since we barely have broadcast TV, we’re not watching the lead-up to the Olympics and may not watch much of the Olympics. (Which I’m sure we can add to the list of ways I’m a horrible mother.) I’m also not watching soap operas, because the ones I loved the most are gone. I’ll admit it—I did get a little sad yesterday thinking I couldn’t turn on Guiding Light and find out if Jeffrey were going to make a surprise appearance at the Bauer barbecue and thus lead to yet another Josh and Reva breakup.

Regardless of how little TV I’m watching (other than all of Season 3 of Justified on my laptop through iTunes—just giggling a little here about the juxtaposition of Timothy Olyphant and lap)—regardless:

Between when the spring semester ended on May 24 and, well, any time now, I’ve been pretty useless.

I don’t want to say I’ve earned it, but I did have my gallbladder removed on May 29. Yes, they were able to do it laproscopically, and no, there weren’t any complications, but it took me every minute of three weeks to feel anything close to normal. So many people said they just “snapped right back” after gallbladder surgery. Apparently I’m not snappy. It took a solid month before my son pronounced me 99% recovered.

“Or maybe 98%,” he said. He made this observation after I’d apprehended a runaway grocery cart that was hurtling across the grocery store parking lot toward parked cars. The cart-herd had left it unattended while he moved some other carts back inside. My brain went kind of “phbbbbbbsplat” for a second or two, as I was thinking, “oh, that’s going to hit those cars,” and then, shifting into superhero mode, I scanned the parking lot, said to Wendell “let’s go!” and we ran with our cart after the runaway cart.

I grabbed it before it hit anything, and then pulled both carts back up to the store, where the clueless cart-herd was emerging. I started to say, “I just saved your ass,” but I stopped myself (Wendell tonight at dinner told nath and me that Callie, our kitten, was “pissed off because you’re not snuggling her enough.” I told him that’s another one of those words he shouldn’t use until he’s older, like when he gets his drivers license.)

“I just saved you,” I said to the cart-herd, and it seemed to dawn on him (or, as he’ll probably write in my composition class this fall, dong on him) what I’d saved him from. As we walked to our car, Wendell said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen you run since your operation.”

“I must be recovered,” I said.

“99% anyway,” he said. “Or maybe 98%.” He and nath have been watching Star Trek episodes & Spock is a big favorite.

It was a very dramatic moment.

And that’s pretty much it, in terms of what I’ve accomplished so far this summer.

O.k., not entirely true. I’ve read a lot. I found a lot of terrific apps for the iPad. I actually wrote a fair bit.

And just tonight, I finished transferring my TO DO list from paper to “Things,” which is both a web thingy and an app. It’s designed to work smoothly with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” religion (I read that book during my recovery stretch). I’m relatively excited about the possibility that these two things will help me be more productive. I would personally be more excited if he called it “Getting Shit Done,” but probably that would not be as broadly appealing.

Other than my gallbladder surgery, I think my summer of relative uselessness can be attributed to ongoing issues with burnout. I’m hoping that taking it pretty easy for a month let some of that heal up, too.

I am very, very grateful to have a job where I can take a month to recover from what is, by all accounts, relatively minor surgery.

(You don’t need to tell me how many things I could complain about with my particular job in my particular state at this particular point in history—-trust me. I’m not one of those people who say, “Can’t complain,” because I know I always could. About anything. I’m creative AND I’m a worst-case-scenario thinker. I could complain. But I don’t, not always.)

It isn’t true that professors “get summers off.” But it is true (especially if we’re not teaching, which I’m not, this summer) we have a big chunk of time to get a big chunk of things done, with a proportionally big chunk of autonomy to figure out how, precisely, to go about Getting Shit Done.

So we’ll see—will this summer of my relative uselessness morph into an incredibly productive stretch of time? Or will I spend ever more time finding addictive word game apps and and then finding ways to get the iPad away from my husband and son?

Tune in tomorrow, soap fans. Or next week—or whenever it is I get another blog posted.

(Also—if the title of this post rang any bells, you’ll be happy to know that Kristy McNichol is alive and well.)

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Posted in Burnout, Creativity, Family, Procrastination, Teaching, Work Life

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Recuperator

Posted on June 4, 2012 | 1 comment

|riˈkoōpəˌrātər|
noun
a form of heat exchanger in which hot waste gases from a furnace are conducted continuously along a system of flues where they impart heat to incoming air or gaseous fuel.

How weirdly illness changes time and goals–
everything sticky slow and progress ant-sized–
that our bodies heal at all seems miraculous.

Like trying to watch Venus make its crawl
on the sun a day early or while lightning strikes,
how weirdly illness changes time. And goals

become ridiculous. The prayer for normal
bowel movements is such a blow to pride
that our bodies heal. Of all the miracles

I know, I think now of my father’s heart muscle,
its pace currently regulated by an appliance.
How weird. Illness changes time, and goals

conduct themselves along a flue, heating fuel
and air like machines, leaving us febrile,
but our bodies heal sometimes, which seems miraculous

to me now, given how much can go awry
in even this age of advancing medical science.
How weirdly illness changes time and goals
into the age of fucking miracles.

______

Tuesday is my one-week post-gallbladder-removal mark, and Wednesday is my father’s one-week post-tumor-removal mark. My surgery was planned; his was not. We both make slow progress back toward health and normalcy, though I’m closer to home than he is, since my gallbladder wasn’t as big a villain as his tumor, and my surgery nowhere near as violent as his.

I was so pleased with my surgical team–if you read my gallbladder post, you’ll be happy to know I awoke in recovery with four x’s on my right hand. I did question the wisdom of asking for them in permanent marker as they stayed there day after day (but they’re gone now). My parents are pleased with Dad’s surgeon (and I have to say my mother is at a very, very picky place right now when it comes to health care).

What I tried to convey in the villanelle is the weirdness of healing. I told my husband this evening I was officially tired of not feeling well, which I’m sure means I’m just about better.

But progress comes slowly sometimes. This is actually the first villanelle I’ve ever written without having to look up the form–and I’ve written a lot of villanelles. (And then I did look it up just to double-check.)

Looking up recuperation, I found recuperator and I’m really loving the idea of recuperation as a machine–the product of science and reason. But there’s part of me that will always, always, long for and believe in the age of fucking miracles.

(Can you tell I’ve spent time watching the third season of Deadwood as part of my recuperator time?)

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On the Lighting of Farts and the Reduction of Bile

Posted on May 24, 2012 | 4 comments

(NOTE: If you are part of my surgical team, feel free to skim until you get to the part that says THIS IS THE PART I FOR SURE WANT MY SURGICAL TEAM TO READ.)

Maybe having someone take out my gallbladder will also remove some of my perverseness.

For example, I am not in the least bit comforted by everyone’s intended-to-be-comforting stories about how smoothly their gallbladder surgery went. Percentage-wise, nationally anyway, there are complications in a certain number of gallbladder operations, so every time someone tells me how theirs was “a piece of cake,” I think that ratchets up my odds of having complications. (At least two people have actually used that phrase, “piece of cake,” which I find telling somehow, since cake tends to be high fat, which is what puffs up my gallbladder’s sense of itself and causes me the pain and discomfort I described so precisely to my surgeon that he said he felt confident my problems were caused by my low-functioning sac of bile.)

This concern about everyone’s happy endings meaning that I’ll have problems may not be particularly sound statistical or scientific reasoning, but it feels true, so I was comforted when one of my coworkers obliged me this morning by describing how her father had all kinds of complications, including an open, oozing wound.

For the record, I trust the overwhelming scientific evidence on things like evolution and climate change and even vaccinations. But I understand people who are skeptical. Magical thinking is so much fun and so much easier.

You know how you can light a fart on fire? I’ve never tried it, but a friend says she had to take her then-husband to the E.R. when he did it, without pants on, and caught his ass-hair on fire.

Pair that knowledge with the occasional situation in my own home when someone has farted. Happens very rarely, of course, and it’s almost never me. What do we do, on those rare, rare occasions? We light a match.

I thought, for years I thought this, that you lit a match to get rid of the fart smell because the trace amounts of methane then obliterated themselves.

My husband and my friend Joy, who has a Master’s degree in agricultural science, have finally almost pretty much convinced me that no, there’s no tiny methane explosion (so tiny you can’t see it); it’s just a matter of the sulfur covering up the smell.

I can’t tell you how little sense this makes to me. There are so many things that smell better than sulfur, and spritzing a little lavender would never catch your flannel pajamas on fire. (WHOOM! The flame was racing up my leg. I got those pjs off faster than you can say CH4.)

THIS IS THE PART I FOR SURE WANT MY SURGICAL TEAM TO READ:

I’m glad I’m not in charge of removing my own gallbladder. I’m glad it’s a surgeon who seems to have a good reputation (he’s removed the gallbladder of people I know, two of whom have said things like “piece of cake,” if not using that exact phrase). I also had my shit-detector highly tuned when I met with him last week, and it didn’t go off, not even once.

He was explaining to me what the percentages were, in terms of the likelihood that this operation would solve the problems I’m having. My precise description seemed to give him confidence that it was, in fact, my gallbladder, and I also had a scan two years ago during which a technician and I watched radioactive dye go through my digestive system, and also during which my gallbladder was kind of lackadaisical about pumping out the bile it had stored, which gave me the official diagnosis of, get this:

an equivocal gallbladder.

which seems like exactly the kind of gallbladder I’d have.

A friend’s preschooler learned all the words to the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” this week AT PRESCHOOL, and I can sort of picture my gallbladder rocking out to that song. But not quite on the beat, so—the answer to the question is now GO.

I liked how my surgeon talked about the percentages and then clarified that these were national averages, and his own numbers were much better.

This reminded me of Atul Gawande, who, in his article “Personal Best,” describes the frustration he felt when his own numbers kind of stalled out, after years of improving:

“As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.”

This particular article was recommended to me by my friend Kim Barnes, whose new novel, In the Kingdom of Men, is high on my post-surgery reading list. Kim prescribed the Gawande article after a conversation in which I described frustration at not meeting with the kind of success I wanted. “Maybe you need a coach,” she said, in a moment of absolute diagnostic aplomb. I haven’t decided yet if I need a coach, but I desperately needed to read this article.

What I love about Gawande, in addition to having Googled him to find out he’s pretty cute (if you like geeky-handsome, which I do), is his relentlessness: “Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.”

Everything he said I was applying to myself as a writer and a teacher, and only later realized that I wanted all my healthcare professionals to read him.

Particularly, I would want them to read his book The Checklist Manifesto, or at least have read the checklist itself, (also available as a pdf on the same webpage) which includes things the surgical team should check “before the induction of anaesthesia,” “before the skin incision,” and “before patient leaves operating room.” My favorite item on the checklist is “confirm all team members have introduced themselves by name and role,” because Gawande explains in the book how this ramps up the odds of them actually working well as a team.

I asked my surgeon if he would read my blog before he cut me open, and he said he would. I’m emailing the link, but I’ll bring a hard copy on Tuesday, just in case. I would be so happy, upon waking in recovery, to see on my hand or some other obvious place I’ll be able to see in recovery, a big checkmark in permanent marker, or better, the exact words from the last item on the checklist. I’ll know then, not only did my surgical team read my blog, they read Gawande, and I was, as I was trusting, in good hands.

Because in the end–although my magical thinking cap would prefer a surgeon who recently had a gallbladder operation go badly (thus ensuring my odds of mine going well)–my rational mind would prefer a surgeon who saw my cholecystectomy as one more chance to improve his percentage.

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The Merry Month of May

Posted on May 1, 2012 | 2 comments

The hum, the lull between deep snow and mosquitoes,
Before the tourists descend en freaking masse,
Right when goldfinches go from egg yolk yawn
To neon hello, is when I love my little town
The most. The caravan of architects
Is back from Arizona, and license plates
All over town proclaim a different state.
There are faces I don’t recognize
And starting this weekend, there will be faces
I do recognize, and gestures, and gaits—
The very air changes when the actors all come back.
I know I’ll love the shows but I really love the wait,
Love knowing magic’s on its way, love art
Rumbling like thunder for my winter-dried heart.

_____

There are so many things I love about living in Spring Green, and American Players Theatre is high, high on the list. Tech folks are back in town already and since rehearsals begin next week, the actors are arriving.

Several times over the years, I’ve first seen Brian Mani back in town on the very same day, or within a day, of seeing my first bright-yellow goldfinch of the year.

(We’re lucky to have a lot of APT folk who over-winter, but often they’re off doing other jobs, so even the year-round birds aren’t in town consistently until now.)

As a professor, my semester is still in the deepest swamp–lots to grade and no indication that anything I tried this semester actually worked.

But when I glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, a certain way of gesturing, or walking, and there’s some odd sense of recognition, I realize, “Oh. That’s someone I’ve seen on stage.” (It’s odd, but a lot of times it’s the body language that pricks my brain, not always the face.)

That’s when I know that winter is truly over, and my semester will soon be over, and within a month or two, I’ll be sitting & watching and being transported to what I call my “APT happy place,” where I forget, utterly, my regular life.

And the fact that, in my regular life, I can call many of these wonderful folks my friends, that, as a writer, I’ve had the thrill of hearing some of them say my words–I feel so lucky.

Those of us in Spring Green, we are lucky, boy.

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Posted in Poetry, Spring Green, Uncategorized

This Is Just to Say Whatever Comes to Mind

Posted on April 28, 2012 | 10 comments

Small-town newspapers, where they still exist, are a precious treat. In Spring Green, Wisconsin, we get The Home News, “the only newspaper in the whole, wide world that cares about the River Valley area” every Wednesday. Of course, The Voice of the River Valley, a free monthly, also implicitly cares (though that’s not on its masthead). This past month The Voice had poems (in honor of National Poetry Month) and has regularly carried poems in the past. One of the things I enjoyed about the Home News’ former editor, in addition to his progressive politics and weekly editorials featuring his dog, was his willingness to publish poetry on the editorial page. He was following a long tradition. According to Mike Chasar (whose blog I like and whose book I want),

“through most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth…amateur poets hotly debated issues of abolition and women’s suffrage in verse form, writing their poems quickly in response not only to the day’s current events but also to the specific ideas and claims put forth in the previous day’s poems. As recently as the mid-1950s, in fact, the New York Times was in the habit of printing poems alongside letters to the editor on its opinion pages, making little or no distinction between the two.”

The fact that I am able to quote at length from Chasar’s article, entitled “Writing Good Bad Poetry,” which appeared in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers magazine in 2008, is the result of an argument I lost (am losing). “We do NOT need to keep all these,” I’ve insisted repeatedly to my husband over the years about the boxes and boxes of magazines. But my school library doesn’t subscribe to Poets & Writers, and there aren’t very many articles archived online, so when I remembered the article & looked it up in the database at school, I could have ordered a copy of the article on interlibrary loan. Or I could do what I did, come home and find it.

The willingness to wait a few more days
To get what I wanted from interlibrary loan
Would free up so much square footage in my home
That I could house a family of refugees.
But I’m married to a pack rat. I am one, too.
It’s just I used to purge more often. He won’t.
Or rather, he seldom does. We never do
Much of anything until we absolutely must.
In preparing for a visit from the appraiser this spring
We both set to work cleaning and organizing
And yes, purging. The appraiser was the amiable dad
Of a former student of mine. He and my husband had
A rambling talk. Appraised well, we locked in three percent.
We’re not an episode of “Hoarders.” At least not yet.

Chasar recounts writing poetry for Iowa City’s Press-Citizen in response to an editor’s request. The editor was wanting something “akin to what George Orwell called ‘good bad novels,’ which the author defined as fiction that doesn’t aspire to official literary greatness but that is nonetheless skillfully and admirably written for the purposes or entertainment or political effect.” He analyzes some of the poems that got printed there and discusses what they did and didn’t accomplish, what “good bad poetry” in the newspaper can and can’t accomplish in general, and concludes the article by pretty much bragging that if nothing else, publishing poems in the paper got him a free beer.

When I include poems in my blog, my pay scale is even lower than Chasar’s (he wrote them for free), because no one’s bought me a beer as yet.

(Consider this a bald plea for a Furthermore or Lake Louie.)

So why do it?

Some of it’s inexplicable: I don’t really know why I write. I don’t really know why I’m compelled to share what I write (although every other memoirist and confessional poet understands why I feel copacetic about sharing my life with strangers).

I do know why I love sonnets, through which I record the world and process the world fairly often. Bob Wrigley once called sonnets the most anal-retentive form in the English language. In one way, you might think sonnets are the anti-clutter form, since you’re limited to a certain number of beats and lines (Song of Myself or Howl being the ultimate hoarder poems). But I think of a sonnet more as a phenomenally well-designed closet. You can pack an awful lot in there. And given the existence of sonnet series, and crowns of sonnets, and George Meredith’s 15-line sonnets, it’s an ever-expandable closet.

I could say I like posting poems in blogs because they encapsulate and elevate my everyday existence.

And if that’s true, it also explains why I don’t mind that the poems I post there aren’t even trying to be my best poems. Not art, necessarily. To chronicle the everyday, I have to write every day. And post every day. (Or as close to it as I can get—can I substitute everyfewdays as a synonym? My everyfewdays existence?) Other than minor tinkering, there’s not a whole of revision that can happen in that scenario.

Ron Wallace published a terrific book with the best sonnets from his project of writing a sonnet a day for a year–but he revised a lot to get to the book, The Uses of Adversity.

In general, I think art takes revision.

This is not all merely to say that when I look back at “Metaphors: A Semester” I pretty much go “meh,” although that is pretty much what I go. I suppose in that sense the five stanzas were art imitating life because “meh” was how I was feeling about the semester at that point, but we don’t really want art imitating life in those moments, now do we.

This is just to say–wait! Where have I heard that before?

And thus the most compelling question I can think of at the moment (other than the whole “What’s cooler? Mod Squad or Starsky & Hutch?” conversation we had at supper) is this:

If all our favorite poets had blogged, what would they have posted?

For better or worse, I feel certain Robert Lowell would have posted EVERYTHING. With him in mind, let me just say that I hope some of my blog poems, eventually, could end up in my own Life Studies. Until then, you know where to find them.

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Metaphors: A Semester

Posted on April 27, 2012 | 2 comments

1
damp pile of limp balloons

2
multiple balloons, inflated to bursting
in January
let go on schedule until March
then all at once
sputtering
zip zoom
flail
hanging suspended in April
flop

3
you know how the house in Up floated away?
like that
but no passengers

4
some old-school blown-up balloons
along with helium mylar
and one miniature hot-air contraption
elaborately connected
mostly self-propelled
landing gently
grades turned in

5
damp pile of limp balloons

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Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

The Moan Tax

Posted on April 25, 2012 | 10 comments

I pay for every blessing—don’t think I don’t.
Sure I’ve got a good job, but I work too hard,
And I’m lucky in love, but marriage takes work.
Don’t believe me? Listen to me piss and moan
About the house I have to clean, the food
I have to cook, the garden I have to weed,
My beautiful, rural commute ruined this week
with a spread-manure-fresh-dead-skunk reek.

I might be spoiled but at least I’m not content.

God forbid I should relax or take a break
Or cut back somewhere or say no to anything
Or take the risk of being seen as slacking
Or just enjoy the son I thought I couldn’t conceive.
I fight off jinxes with my constant, low-voltage rant,
Lest all my precious miseries be stripped from me.

_____

This is and isn’t me speaking. Happy Hump Day, everyone!

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Playing with Fire, Opdyke-Style

Posted on April 18, 2012 | 9 comments

Two innocent-looking girls take the shade off a bedroom lamp, up-end a coffee can on it, and melt crayons in the shallow tray they’d created. It’s difficult work. The balance is precarious. It’s way too easy for the waxy mess to slop onto the carpet where it will stay, a clump one girl tries to cover with furniture or dirty clothes the rest of her childhood. Neither of them got burned.

But they did catch fire, having their own little moment of alchemy when the gold crayon swirled itself into the other colors.

They will graduate to ruining plastic pitchers with their experiments. What happens when you mix nail polish remover with nail polish? This cleaner with that one?

Both of them owned Easy Bake Ovens. Neither of them owned a chemistry set.

What happens when one of the girls pours just a little nail polish remover in a shower stall and lights it on fire? She had the hand sprayer ready and the water already running, and she watched the wall of blue flame for a count of two, maybe three, before she doused it.

Don’t believe in miracles? How about dumb luck? The fact that I escaped my childhood alive, without massive burn scars, the fact that my childhood home didn’t burn to the ground—-I have to believe in one or the other. Though I will say, in our own pre-adolescent way, my friend and I were methodical in our experiments. The hand sprayer was good to go, after all.

I never set off firecrackers or wired a birdhouse to explode, the way my brother did (birds never moved in, fortunately, smart birds). But my brother and I were both dangerously creative.

We particularly enjoyed burning trash. Out in the country where we grew up, on the edge of a tiny town called Opdyke, there was no trash pickup, so you burned what you could and dumped or buried the rest. Any other chore, we’d fight to weasel out of. Burning trash, we fought to see who got to do it. Our special favorite was finding anything labeled CAUTION, FLAMMABLE, or especially, DO NOT INCINERATE. At least we had the good sense to stand back. Sometimes there was a whoosh of flame or an interesting shade of smoke or if we were really lucky, BAM! An explosion when an aerosol can slammed against the side of the burning barrel.

One of my brother’s friends was badly burned when he used gasoline to burn his family’s trash faster. All we learned from that, apparently, was DON’T USE ACCELERANTS. (Which is actually a really good thing to learn.)

An analysis of this could reveal boredom, misdirected intellectual curiosity, some variety of pathology, or a combination of all three. But we also were being true to our Opdyke heritage and our family heritage, whether we knew it or not.

On our father’s side of the family, we were only one, maybe two generations removed from people who had stills in the hills. My father’s childhood home burned to the ground, twice I think. I have a vague memory that it was my grandfather’s fault, but I’m not sure about that.

On our mother’s side, we had our solidly creative Gran’daddy, who could solve pretty much any intractable problem by sleeping on it. He regularly dreamed the solution. He could also find water by dowsing—I’ve always been afraid to try. I don’t want to know if I have that particular gift.

When it came to fire, Gran’daddy worked as a volunteer firefighter and I remember being part of a crowd watching them set the old one-room schoolhouse on fire so the volunteers had something to practice on. (I also remember one odd little boy flashing his penis to everyone that day. At least we didn’t have that pathology in my family.)

In terms of creativity and fire, I have to think of Gran’daddy’s work with Sparky, a welder and inventor in our little town.

On the main street, which now has a name but didn’t when I lived there, Opdyke had a post office, ½ of a building that also housed an old-fashioned store with a wood-burning stove. We waited for the bus inside on cold days. (At this point my memory blurs with an episode of the Waltons–I can’t believe I was so lucky and that this was the early 70s, not the 30s.) Next building down was a two-story, red-brick garage where Sparky had his shop. That was pretty much all there was, business-wise.

I know Sparky and Gran’daddy worked together to make parts for various farm machines, but I also remember fabulous inventions, like the rotation hot-dog roaster for camp fires.

It never once occurred to me to ask to visit that shop, and no one ever offered.

Had my son’s school existed at that time, in that place, there probably would have been a field trip there, or we’d have had Sparky come to class to demonstrate.

At least I like to think so, and I like to think River Valley Elementary Studio School is in the process of living up to part of its initial purpose, to give kids space to be creative as part of their education.

It’s not just that I want my son to also escape his childhood without burn scars. It’s not just that I want him not to burn our house down.

I want him to be able to play with fire and learn even more from it than I did.

On reflection, I am utterly baffled that I took Chemistry I in high school but not Chemistry II, where the students regularly made explosives behind the teacher’s back. (Well, other than being completely burned out by my senior year and also hitting a very solid three-dimensional brick wall when I tried to imagine molecules in 3-D.)

In my creativity research, I am trying to learn how to encourage and assess students’ creativity. I’m struck by these quotes from Arthur Cropley, in his book, Creativity in Education and Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Educators. He points out that

“Surveys have shown that in theory at least teachers overwhelmingly support creativity as something that should be fostered in the classroom….However, in actual classroom practice they often frown upon traits associated with creativity or even actively dislike characteristics such as boldness, desire for novelty or originality.” I don’t know how much I exhibited those traits in the classroom, but I can definitely see my obsession with fire as a bold “desire for novelty” (something other than another rerun of Gilligan’s Island) and I don’t know of any other children who set their shower stalls on fire, though a lot of people may be like I was until this moment, sensibly keeping things like that a secret. Cropley has a list of things to do to make creativity possible in the classroom, and it’s striking to me how most of those apply to my brother’s and my trash burning processes. Cropley says we should

• “encourage students to learn independently
• have a co-operative, socially integrative style of teaching
• do not neglect mastery of factual knowledge
• tolerate sensible or bold errors
• promote self-evaluation
• take questions seriously
• offer opportunities to work with varied materials under different conditions
• help students learn to cope with frustration and failure
• reward courage as much as being right.”

We did “neglect factual knowledge” for the most part, and I don’t remember much self-evaluation. I don’t remember frustration or failure, but I think the wall of flame in the shower stall scared me enough I went back to burning trash as my main experimental mode, where you could “reward courage” with an occasional but deeply satisfying explosion. We were hell-bent on making our own “opportunities to work with varied materials under different conditions.” My 8th grade demonstration speech involved dripping candle wax into a pie-pan of water. “What’s it for?” the teacher asked when I was done. It hadn’t occurred to me I needed a purpose–it was just really fun to do. But what I said was, “If you use scented candles, these can be put anywhere to make things smell nice.” I don’t remember being punished or rewarded for that project.

I want to officially and publicly and sincerely apologize to my parents who are learning about most of this for the first time along with everyone else reading right now. (I explained and apologized long ago for the mouse bones the repairman found in the dishwasher when it broke down.)

“Sin boldly,” Martin Luther said, which is what I think of when I read “bold errors.” I wonder, as a teacher, if I make any room at all for that in my students.

It scares me to death to imagine what kind of experiments my already creative son will think up. I mostly hope it’s in a classroom with safety goggles and fire extinguishers available, but I think it’s part of my job to let him experiment at home as well.

Because playing with fire? Having a sweet face that will mislead some people into thinking he doesn’t have a dark side? He comes by that naturally. So did I.

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Posted in Creativity, Family, Opdyke, Teaching, Uncategorized

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Getting the Pay Raise You Deserve, Part III

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 17 comments

CREDO: ENOUGH

I don’t work too hard. I work hard

enough, having joined the small but growing worldwide Church of Enough, not to be confused with the service club called Just Enough, whose border blurs with the Club of Just Barely Enough, which is too similar, frankly, to the Club of Not Really Enough, aligned of course with the also growing club of Not Nearly Enough who might as well admit they’re paying members of the Piss Poor In Nearly Every Measurable Way Society. No, we’re the Church of Enough–not to be confused either, please, with those in the mildly amiable but really too puffed up Club of More Than Enough, who won’t admit this publicly but they share office space with the growing Crystal Cathedral of Too Much and a splinter group, the Cult of Much Too Much, who are Calvinistic in believing anyone without the proud banner MUCH TOO MUCH (a hand-tatted silky thing they work extra hours to buy), anyone who sleeps eight hours in a row, anyone who cares to whisper, “balance,” anyone who stares at a cobalt bottle in the afternoon light, anyone who smiles just must by definition belong to what they see as the biggest club of all, Just Not Enough.

Moderation in most things
is our creed. If we met
we’d chant it but we don’t
have meetings. To qualify
for membership you must
come to us having attended

enough meetings already.

A humble enough start
has bloomed like rust
in the machine
of the rest of our lives.
When progress grinds
to an ugly steaming stop
in our backyards
we’ll be there to sing songs
around the dying fire.
We will have progressed far
enough.

______________________________
I wrote this poem a very long time ago, maybe as many as 15 years ago, when I first read Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American. It became a signature piece for me at poetry readings for a while, although it still scares me to read it in public sometimes, since I assume someone is thinking and might say, “You could work a little harder, couldn’t you?”

But it’s an important end-piece for this particular series, and it’s important enough to me that my husband and I are going to be selling broadsides of it, with a gorgeous image he took of one of my cobalt blue bottles. (Contact me if you want one.)

As a friend of mine said, “It’s all about who’s in the lifeboat with us,” and as I added, “who’s down the hall in the nursing home.”

Are you with me? Want to come to my house when progress grinds to an ugly steaming stop? When that fire goes out, we’ll build a fire in our fire pit (which my husband and I made from the recycled drum of our front-loader washing machine) and drink some beers or possibly home-brewed hooch, which would both save us some cash and let me hark back to more of my Bullock heritage.

I’m saying it loud, saying it proud: Enough. Say it with me: Enough.

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Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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