up the down hallway

I have been teaching part-time for about a year, splitting my time between two local schools -- a community college and a small, private liberal arts college. Because the classes are in the evening, my students tend to be a little bit older, they have jobs and sometimes families.

The similarities stop there, though. The students from the private school are preening and self-absorbed. They have excellent educational backgrounds and are therefore fairly sophisticated in their analysis of literature and their level of critical thinking. But their egos are tedious and their certainty that they have all the answers is, well, not much fun. The community college students are more of a challenge for me in terms of their hesitancy to ask questions, but the diversity among my students is such a delight -- I have students from Nigeria, China, Moldova, Russia, Portugal and Brazil and their enthusiastic engagement with the likes of Poe, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hawthorne is indeed humbling.

They want to know who these writers were, what their lives were like and why they chose to write the stories that we now wrestle with in the classroom. In contrast, their classmates, students who were born and raised in the U.S., are checked out, bored and going through the motions in order to cross this mandatory class off their degree plans so that they can move on to their core (bullshit) business course which will of course lead them to business degrees and jobs later on making the big bucks wallowing around in the corporate cesspool. Thank goddess for my fabulous foreign students who are not foreign at all. They are kindred spirits to me and in a way, living breathing links to my past -- I look at them and wonder if my distant relatives who first came to America in the early years of the the 20th century were as filled with awe as the students who grace my classroom each evening. I hope so. I like to think so.

1978

Dear Bruce, Darkness on the Edge of Town made me fall in love with you. That album set me off on a binge of dark-haired boys with serious cases of chronic malcontent and pretty eyes that has yet to abate. Sigh. 

Pretty. Badass.

There's a 1,000 year-old Indian Mound in my neighborhood that historians say the Tocabaga Indians spent a few hundred years building from discarded clam and oyster shells. The mound is 20-feet high and rests on the waterfront. It's shaded by sighing oaks whose arms are draped with showers of Spanish moss festooned with tiny air plants. From a distance the plants look like bows decorating a girl's long hair.

A park has risen around the neighborhood mound and it's protected as sacred land. It's only inhabitants are a gang of peacocks who apparently feel completely entitled to hassle whomever they choose, including some pretty testy tom cats. The peacocks also sometimes strut out into the road and nonchalantly hold traffic in both directions hostage until they grow bored and wander back over to the park. In all the years I have lived here, I have never heard of a peacock being hit by a car. And I have never seen a cat or dog prevail in a stare-down contest. As you can see in this picture, the peas get mighty peeved when one of their homies is affronted by a flea-bitten four-legger and they are quick to assemble their bad selves in an impressive show of force.

Things I did at work today:

Sat through a mind-numbingly tedious meeting with my clueless bumbling boss
Confirmed for the millionth time that my boss is indeed a douche
Requested official transcripts from both my colleges
Printed receipts of those transactions
Ladies room
Balanced both my checkbooks
Logged onto Facebook a few times
Read my work e-mail (boring)
Read my personal e-mail (not so boring)
Read my friend's blog and got caught up on the last few weeks of her saga du jour
Talked to my brother twice
Exchanged texts with my daughter
Went to Evos for lunch with a co-worker
Rearranged my desk
Rearranged my messenger bag
Updated my status on Facebook
Drafted my letter of resignation
:)

I don't have oceans of money in which to roll

But some of my friends do which means they have real estate that they don't occupy full time. So when my friends with money/real estate to spare offer to give me the keys to the shack in the mountains, I'm all hell yeah. Seven days in the mountains, just me and Miss Daisy -- very positive. Just what I needed.

We loaded up a minivan’s worth of nieces this past Saturday and trucked it up to Weekie Wacheee to hang out with the mermaids. Much to my delight, it was “Mermaids of Yesteryear” weekend, so we were treated to an extra special matinee show of mermaids who swam the springs back in the 1940s and up through the decades of the last century(!) – the youngest of the bunch hung up her tail (temporarily) in the late 1970s.

The three coolest parts about the show were these: (1) one of the mermaids reminisced about the day she swam for Elvis back in the 1950s and she still blushed when she talked about how dreamy he was as a soft-spoken 22-year-old. She is 70, by the way. (2) the turtles who live in the spring seemed to be totally into the music because whenever the mermaids “danced,” turtles splashed down into the lagoon and merrily dove and dipped and paddled with the mermaids who were forced to give them gentle nudges and send them back the opposite direction when the little guys interfered with their choreography. (3) The senior citizen mermaids were vivacious and sure of themselves and this made their performances more enjoyable than that of the firm, nubile 20-something cast of “The Little Mermaid” whom we saw earlier in the day.

the cold snap we had for nearly two weeks has finally receded. I enjoyed the change at first but after two days it was getting old and I missed the sun and quickly grew sick to death of all the belly-aching on the local news, in the supermarket, at work, etc. about how COLD it was and everyone kept whining: "But this is Flooooorida...."

I packed away all the extra quilts yesterday and hung the winter coats back in the hall closet, carefully winding the scarfs around the necks of each coat just in case the cold comes back for another quick visit before March when we can repack in earnest, tucking flowery dryer sheets between seldom-worn sweaters and fleece sweatshirts and such. Then I spent most of Sunday wandering around the yard oh-shitting over the melted plants in the butterfly garden. They look like someone took a flamethrower to them -- the pentas are black and incinerated and pitched to one side or the other, the bougainvilleas are falling over in drunken heaps, their fuchsia petals dissolving into puddles of primordial ooze on the brown (dead) grass. The lizards are back lounging on the deck but the rabbits that live underneath have yet to reappear. And I'm afraid to look too hard for the dragonflies and butterflies, which used to hover in cloudy swarms of yellow and pink and violet, dropping kisses on their favorite blossoms, strafing the gardenia tree, then coming back for more. Winter sucks.

happy new year! you're fired!

So we had yet another hideous round of layoffs at my workplace this week. The worst part about being half-assedly in management (I am sometimes in the know but am not invited to the pow-wows or really give a crap about being in on all the executive strategy meetings because they bore me to death and I cannot conceal this. Just tell me what you've decided, and I'll go from there) is knowing about shit like this ahead of time. The last round of lay-offs was in April and went down while I was in Paris. So the folks who lost their jobs then were suspicious that I knew ahead of time and went to Paris anyway, and was lounging around some outdoor cafe overlooking the Seine when the anvil was dropped on their heads. As a matter of fact, I did not know for certain ahead of time. I knew there was a chance but in the current economy there's always the chance right? The second day I was in France I stupidly checked my e-mail and read the series of frantic messages from my boss to call him ASAP. Thinking there was no way in the world there could be any such thing as an actual editorial emergency I called him from a glass cube phone booth overlooking the Seine and Notre Dam. It was a much longer (and more expensive) call than I anticipated. As I stood there absorbing the news that most of my longtime co-workers were about to be fired I felt very detached because it all seemed so far away (it was, and also it was 8 p.m. Paris-time and I had been drinking, which helps with the distance thing). The call cost me $127 because I charged it, not thinking it would be smart to buy an international calling card just in case I needed to return an urgent emergency call from the editorial dept. while I was away.

Anyway, when I returned from the April trip some of my newly unemployed former co-workers asked me specifically if I knew about the lay off before I left on my trip. And why that point was such an issue, I still can't understand. Would I have gone on the trip anyway had I known? Yes. The tickets were nonrefundable and our CEO is intractable. There is no talking him out of anything, everyone who knows him even a little bit knows this to be true.

Flash-forward nine months. It's a week before Christmas. My boss tells me that a layoff is in the offing, probably a week or two after the holidays. I am torn. Do I give one or two of my closer work friends a heads up and ruin the holidays for them or do I sit by silently while they party ($$$) and shop ($$$) as if they have jobs after January 2010? I said nothing. It sucked knowing, I wish I hadn't known, it made a rather dark holiday even darker. In short, it blew. And of course, I threw myself into the exercise in futility of trying to advocate for a few of my colleagues who we really need and who did not deserve to be let go. The boss was willing to discuss saving anyone I suggested as long as I had another employee I would rather see go (I guess he's seen Sophie's Choice). Nice, huh?

The most painful cut was a co-worker who has been out of state for 10 days or so dealing with the impending death of a critically ill family member. The co-worker saw the torrent of e-mails that went 'round following Monday's layoffs and assumed the coast was clear -- no phone calls or e-mails had come in summoning the co-worker to return to the office ASAP so imagine the shock when the co-worker returned to work yesterday just in time for a staff meeting only to be pulled aside and let go. Part of the layoff, yes, but we figured it would be unkind to do it long distance over the phone while you sit in a hospital room. So we're glad you're back and that your relative seems to be hanging in there for now. By the way, your position has been eliminated.

Being in the next room when this went down and watching my devastated co-worker stagger out the door sucked. It was way better to be in a glass phone booth in Paris, looking at Notre Dam and drawing stick figures in the patches of fog that I breathed on the glass as my boss rambled about "restructuring" and "going forward."

I dreaded the first Thanksgiving without my mom so much that I ditched the extended family ritual and ran away to Europe for the second time in 2009. Thanksgiving does not exist in Europe and it was a relief to walk down a street and see no hint whatever of turkeys or pilgrims or doors festooned with raffia-bundled ears of Indian corn.

I spent the 25th eating Thai food and washing it down with icy pints of 1664 with the coolest teenager ever. We spent days walking and pausing to look closer at some things and to take pictures of others. We threw caution to the wind and actually ate the beans and salty slabs of pork that came with our eggs at breakfast and enjoyed the ambiance of the basement breakfast room of the B&B that included the loud arguments of the Bulgarian cooks, which were always broken up (much to our disappointment) by the big Greek man who owns the B&B. We visited with some of my students who are in the study abroad program this semester and I made up my mind once and for all to put my name on the list to start teaching one semester in London each year starting in 2011 when my sweet schmoopie leaves for college.

I carried some of my mom's ashes with me throughout the trip. I had intended to scatter them from the Eiffel Tower the night before we returned home, which is what my dad wanted, but when the moment came I couldn't do it. I can't explain why, I just couldn't. So the ashes came home with me. The day after we got back my dad called me up and said "You brought Mom's ashes back with you, didn't you?" I have no idea how he knew. It wasn't like I had protested scattering her remains in Paris in the first place -- I thought it was a fine thing to do. But I couldn't let them go and he knew it before I did.