With a Name Like Volcano Roll...

Uh-oh.

Something in the kitchen smells funny. The bad kind of funny.

Today was a productive day because I bought three-dollar pottery AND a ball of yarn bigger than my head. Plus a neat screen print that wasn't quite as outrageously priced, but it's cute, and we all know how much I'm willing to pay for things that are cute: almost full price. What I'm trying to say is that Danny and I drove down to Kalamazoo today for the Art Fair Garage Sale that I think should be put on much more often because I like it when I can buy things without feeling like I'm getting ripped off (speaking of which, I haven't been to J.Crew in too long...shopping trip to try on $500 jackets anyone?). Kalamazoo is the craziest city I've ever been to. Every time I go, and no matter who I'm with, we end up getting lost. It's like there's no grid-layout for any of the streets; all of them veer and bend and jog and do other things that sound like they belong in an intermediate step-aerobics class. During our exceptionally long drive, we had time to talk about important things like relationships, the existence of God, in vetro fertilization, and the pros and cons of gas station coffee (I, of course, was pro...for all). Plus we rummaged through her glove box and found a cassette tape of Bill Cosby doing stand-up from 1982.

We made it home safe, purchases and morals in tow (for the most part), and I had time to skip the gym, shower up, and sally forth to East Lansing so Meredith and I could finally have the date we'd scheduled weeks ago. Lots of time spent on our good ol' Michigan highway system today. Good thing that snow storm decided to hold off until tomorrow. The evening really was perfect, mostly because of the awesome sushi (I eat with chop sticks so infrequently that I have to re-teach myself to use them every time. Today it only took me seven minutes!), sake, green tea ice cream, and the waiter who I'm pretty sure thought we were on a real date (as in, he brought the ice cream in a big dish with two spoons...which doesn't really mean anything, I guess, except maybe they were running short on bowls tonight). And I wasn't even wearing my rainbow pin! Before awesomesushi we saw the Reno 911 movie. It was better than I expected it to be, which is always nice. And Meredith is just pretty great in general, so it's not like having a bad time was ever even a possibility. She gave me the new Shins cd just to prove how cool she is, and Aaron called from Bear City to remind me that St. Patrick's day is indeed coming, and there will once again be an epic gathering over in the East, which I may (just may) be attending.

Tomorrow is the last day of break, which is never a fun place to be. There will be some reading (three chapters of Marquez left to go), some dish washing (see earlier observation about funny-smelling kitchen) and lots of groaning and rolling around on the floor, which is how I like to cope with unpleasant things about which I can effectively do nothing. I find the change of perspective refreshing.

The merest mask of gloom

I was going to say something, but, being that I am in kind of a mood tonight, I think it's better that I go find some worn Robert Frost verses (Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.) and soak up some of his legitimate and authentic despondency rather than rant about my own trivial issues. I actually think it's the pie. I ate too much tonight and now my blood sugar is off and it's making me crazy. As soon as I post this, the remains of both pies are going in the trash. As guilty as that will make me feel, it will be better to get rid of them and have it over with, rather than give in to temptation over and over again for the next week as I pick away at them knowing that I shouldn't be. Stupid pastry-induced self-loathing.

And speaking of crazy, I considered buying a Roomba today, for two reasons: First of all, because I really do heart robots, and second but most importantly, I opposite-of-heart vacuuming, and Daisy is a mess making machine. Today I also discovered that they still make chunky applesauce. Who in their right mind would ever buy chunky applesauce, let alone want to eat it?

Teach us to care and not to care

Because I do not hope to turn again
Becase I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope...

I am making two paper chains. One is until Julie and I go visit Kat in Washington D.C., and the other is until Lent is over. Both will end right around the same time in the beginning of April. Does March always feel excessively long to anyone else?

I'm also considering decoupaging my new trash can, just to jazz up the kitchen.

It's Midwinter Break week and though it seems like I've been working steadily, I don't feel ahead or prepared to go back to school yet at all. Good thing it's only Wednesday, I guess (and then the other side of my mind says, "It's already Wednesday!? Damn!). I did grade an eighteen-inch-tall stack of papers yesterday, plus I made (and ate half of...but it was Fat Tuesday so no guilt allowed) pie with Nate. There were actually two pies, but who's interested in apple when there's peanut butter cream sitting there on the shelf calling your name and doing that little "you know you want to eat me" dance? Both somehow ended up residing at my house, and they certainly won't keep long enough for me to consume at a reasonable pace, so either I can freeze one, or you can come over for a visit and I'll feed you some pie.

I am mightily behind on phone calls, as in people have been calling me and I haven't been calling them back because I keep telling myself I need to concentrate on work. Yet here I sit, decidedly not working.

Today the goals are to finish grading, oversee the installation of carpet into the classroom, make copies, finish one of the two (actually three) novels we're reading after break so tomorrow I can start planning in earnest, go to mass, perhaps do some laundry, and go to the Y if there's time. Oh yeah, and make paper chains and decoupage and call everybody back. Eep!

Also, in honor of A) today and B) it being one of my favorite poems, go read this.

(Guess whose "add picture" button finally works again!)

They're Just Words Anyway

Do you ever get so tired sitting at your computer that you don't have enough energy to get up and get ready for bed, so instead you just sit there for half an hour, playing text twist and being tired to the point of immobility? Well, I'm there now, so I'm going to take the next half hour or so to write down a thought I've been having (the act of which will be delightfully ironic in a minute).

I was listening to Talk of the Nation or something on the radio on the way home from work earlier this week, and the show was about weblogs. The guest had just done a study on some aspect of blogging, and he was arguing that rather that being a fad, it was going to settle itself comfortably into the fabric of our culture. He said this was because it fit in with the human need to express ourselves - to externalize our thoughts. People have always kept journals and loved to tell stories and share experiences, and here blogging is another channel through which that need can be satisfied.

Okay, great. That concept intrigued me enough to occupy my mind for the rest of the ride home - the externalization of thought. I was thinking of how I needed to share this idea with my creative writing class, and how we could relate it to the poetry and stories we'd been studying, this idea that here were not just words on a page, but the manifestations of the contents of some one individual person's head, the result of that human urge to connect and communicate.

Maybe a day later, I read an article that complicated that whole idea, but complicated it in a way that infinitely pleased me because nothing really worth thinking about should be simple enough that it can be entirely digested in a twenty-minute car ride (unless it's a to-do list or a grocery list - any kind of list, really - which is perfect for those little slivers of mental down time). So anyway, this article. It was about two philosophers studying the relationship between the brain and the mind, that is, they are interested in how the functioning of the brain organ, the tissue and neurons and blood and guts, is involved in the thoughts that register in the consciousness, the images and sensations that define reality for each of us.

It was a great article that delved into the past, present, and future of this brain/mind puzzle, but one paragraph in particular struck a chord. In it, one of the philosophers (Paul, was his name - the other was Pat, they're married and Canadian and it's all quite idyllic and pretty to think so and all that) emphatically rejected the idea that language and thought are one - that the language we use reflects thought's innate structure. I think this idea jumped out at me because I remember over and over again sensing this same disconnect - between the structures of thought and language - but had never been able to articulate it so well.

Particularly, I remember sitting down to write papers in college, and having an entire concept plotted out in my head - whole webs of interconnected ideas ready to demonstrate my erudite grasp of the material, and always ending up quite disappointed with the way the language inadequately expressed what had been the contents of my head by clumsily forcing the delicate, living, malleable ideas into rigid sentences and paragraphs. It was difficult to prioritize what part of an idea should come first and which should follow, when in their though-form, the two were inextricably woven together, and articulating the dynamic nature of their relationship was the whole point. But to verbalize it, I had to freeze it, in a sense, which killed it, kind of the way they say you have to kill something to dissect it, which is why you shouldn't analyze the poems you really love. Anyway, the thing that frustrated me about writing these papers was that as vivid and precise as language can be, each word is still a discrete point, each sentence must by definition be finite and independent, and sometimes that's just not good enough. Where my thoughts (the worthwhile ones at least) tend to have breadth and depth and generally operate in three-dimensional space, language seems very flat and 2D - like you get forward and backward, but there's no room to expand around that space to fill out the gaps.

So, I wondered, where does Paul's insistence that language does an inadequate job of accurately reflecting our ideas as they exist, whole and perfect, in our consciousness fit in with the apparent necessary externalization of thought that the guy on NPR was promoting? Why are humans apparently addicted to the use of this fundamentally flawed and ultimately impotent machinery? I figure it's probably because this language is the best form of communication we've got at the moment, the best we've ever known. So we make do (due? why do I feel like I've never actually written out that phrase before? Oh yeah, it's late and I'm tired), and expect that other people will humor us, smile and nod even when they don't know what we're really getting at, and hope that at least the general drift will flounders its way across the vast expanse stretching between our consciousness and the next guy's.


Postscript: So, as I reread this before I post it (fishing for those egregious typos and spelling mistakes that only seem to show up in posts written after midnight) I've started thinking about what would happen to literature if language suddenly became obsolete? Without the need to do the whole externalization of thought thing - if we can just do a direct connect instead - would written language die out entirely? No more books or poems produced after, say, the year 2426 when we finally figured it out? How sad. I mean, where would all the English teachers go?)

Post Postscript: I don't usually write long, serious posts like this. And do you know why? It's because I'm usually not confident enough in my ability to articulate the Big Idea I'd want to write about in a way that was at all transparent and communicable to a reader; I recognize and yield to the very phenomenon I just spent this post trying to describe, because I'd rather appreciate the thought as it is - kept whole and perfect in my head - than see it mangled on the page. And maybe that's the way it should stay. Hm?

Good VD

Valentine's Day in high school is so much fun. I got cards and candy from many more students than I expected today, and there were snacks, which is always a bonus. For journal I had my students write love letters to no one in particular, and some of them were brave enough to share. The sense of humor is in such a stage of development at the age of sixteen that students can manage to walk the line between raunchy and school appropriate about eighty percent of the time, so that was hilarious. A sample from a gentleman in second hour: roses are red / violets are blue / you're really pretty/ we should bone. He showed that one to me beforehand to ask if it was okay to read out loud, and I burst out laughing before I had time to remember that I'm supposed to maintain my professional facade at all times. This journal comes on the heels of yesterday's prompt asking students what bug they would become if they had to be one for a day, and what they would do during their transformation. Of course we had to share that one too, which ended up taking up a good half of each class period. I need to start rationing out my really good journal topics though, or the bar is going to be raised so high that I'll never be able to wow them until June.

What's Up Pumpkin

So the new colors are kind of ugly, I know, but I'm still working on it. I had a scheme all worked out (sort of) but then I tried the orange background, and it pleased me tremendously, so now everything else has to be redesigned around it. The New Yorker had a really interesting article on color the other week, about who decides what colors are going to be trendy and popular and such, so as the orange jumped out at me, ruining my previously acceptable color palette, I knew exactly who to curse. And if it bothers you, don't worry - next month I hear eggplant will be the new pumpkin.

I went to the cafe at Schuler's today and graded papers for about three hours. In order to be allowed to stay there that long guilt-free - they have these terrible (yet polite) signs on all of the tables warning "studiers" that cafe staff has the right and responsibility to ask them to leave if it's a busy time and new patrons looking for eating/drinking stations are left standing. Saturday afternoon is rather busy, and I really didn't want to lose my seat - I had to drink coffee the whole time. On the way home, I was feeling very shaky and the way the cat must feel when she's tearing around the apartment sliding on the rug and rebounding off various living room furnitures. I actually said out loud to no one in particular (as I was the only one in the car at the time) "I need to chill out here, I'm tweaking!" And that raised the question that I meditated on for the rest of the drive home - what does it actually mean to be tweaking? What drug does one actually have to be on to tweak, and what kind of behaviors are physically involved in doing so? Is it a cocaine thing, or E? Is tweaking like seizing, or just getting tense, paranoid, and jittery? I've heard people use that phrase often enough to have adopted it into my own parlance, but I know I'm not using it appropriately (which has never stopped me before, but I digress). Anyway, this is something I feel I need to look into. Also, I promise I won't use the phrase "tweaking" often, even after I do find out what it means, because I'm pretty sure I'm the kind of person who would sound ridiculous using it in any context, facetious or not. Further updates as events warrant.

One more thing, exciting to no one but my own self, probably: yesterday I bought a cute little food processor so now I can make Indian food again without having to devote three hours to shredding, chopping, and mincing piles of ingredients for hours beforehand. I will also never ever ever chop another onion by hand. It's just too painful, and the profit is simply not significant enough to compensate for the cost.

Update: Have you been watching the Jeopardy! teen tournament? I mean...wow, these kids are nuts. If you've missed it so far, here is your heads up. For the next week and a half, tune in and enjoy. You can thank me later. (Surprise Valentine's Day candygrams are always welcome, just fyi.)

Some Wallace Stevens in honor of Dia de Nieva Numero Dos:

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

On a more positive note, I really love my car. I just spent twenty minutes digging it out of a snow drift where it had been weathering this blizzard, sitting for days in sub-zero temperatures while the inches piled on and on, and it started up immediately. I then proceeded to drive it around the block a few times just to get all those cold parts up and moving. I think the snow in Ann Arbor was different than the snow here. I hated how my car handled in the snow in college - it slipped and slid and generally made things unpleasant in that hazardous kind of way that no one appreciates. But today it tracked fine, up hills and around corners, and safely back into the spot I shoveled out in front of the house, so just in case school isn't cancelled tomorrow (come on Winter Storm Warning!) I will have a pretty painless departure come 6:50 AM.

Broken Record

An excerpt from and email I just wrote beautifully showcasing the ever-evolving relationship between my landlady and myself. Apologies if this sounds eerily familiar. I know you all know what the situation is and how I feel about her. This is just another in the litany of gripes for which this place is a relatively benign outlet...

...

Oh, Judy came up to see me today (I know I said I was going to save the rest of my updating, but this story just popped into my head and I kind of want to vent.) So, she came up. And I was kind of freaking out, because on Wednesday she'd left a note for me saying she needed to talk to me regarding. That is exactly what the note said - "regarding" and then it stopped. So I wasn't sure if I was in trouble, or if she just had some updates about maintenance or wanted me to watch Baxter for her or what. Of course, since she's insane, I was expecting the worst. (Especially after she took my hooks down from my kitchen wall when she was up here to install the new light fixture...did I tell you about that?!). So this afternoon she shows up with a stack of papers, one of which is the contract I signed when I moved in here, and I'm thinking, "Oh Jesus, I'm getting evicted". It turns out she just wants me to sign her new "pet rules" form that's a part of the contract now. So I do.

But then she brings up the contract, and starts asking if she was unclear about the parts that prohibit me from putting any holes in the wall, and she points to that wire leaf thing we bought at Pier One back in October and a few other things. I won that round though, because I only used preexisting holes to hang that stuff (which is 80% true...I pounded a few new holes, but I was very careful). The other thing she nails me for is hanging things with adhesive, like the posters and cards I had up in the bathroom. I have no good excuse for those, and frankly she scares the hell out of me, so I complied pretty quickly and told her I'd take them down. Here's where it gets insulting. Apparently my good word isn't enough for her, as she proceeds to march me into the bathroom so she can actually watch me take this stuff down, which is pretty ridiculous. Now, I fully intend on putting it back up again soon (I'm leave a few-day window just in case she sneaks back up here to check), but the fact that she's making me be sneaky like that pisses me off. I would much rather she just let me have my decorations up on the walls and then take money for it out of my security deposit if it leaves any oil marks or anything that need to be touched up. How much does a can of paint cost now, twelve dollars or something?

So that happened, and then she left, but ten minutes later she called. She'd forgotten to mention the bedroom (which has the hideous popcorn walls that are in no way, shape, or form original to the building) where I need to take down all of my posters and my glow in the dark stars puttied to the ceiling. Now, I really like those stars. They've been on every ceiling I've slept under since I was like fifteen, and I'm kind of attached to how they look - in fact, I think they help me sleep. Plus they were a pain in the ass to put up, and they'll be equally annoying to take down. So, now I'm trying to decide if Judy trusts me enough not to sneak up here one day while I'm at school to check and see if I followed her instructions (what was I just saying about being indignant that she doesn't trust my good word? :)). I'm thinking I just won't take them down. I mean, technically she shouldn't be up here without checking with me first, and I don't foresee any reason for her to visit any time soon, so I could at least squeeze out a few more months before my walls have to become barren and depressing again. On the other hand, if she does come up to check on me and sees that I haven't complied, she's going to be terribly upset and she'll really crack the whip. Ugh. It's ridiculous that this is even an issue. I shouldn't be dealing with crap like this. Maybe I'll move this summer. Would that be more hassle than it's worth?

I don't feel like I'm being unreasonable about my treatment of the space. I mean, I get the whole thing about it being historical, and preservation is a priority, but the quality of life should also be considered, and she is seriously cramping my lifestyle right now. It's strange for me to be in this situation where I'm constantly worried about displeasing an authority figure and we're butting heads so often; I think the problem is that I've always followed my own standards for behavior that I believed was appropriate, and never before in my life have my standards not been good enough for whoever else happens to be involved. So now I'm still going ahead and being as careful with the apartment as I think is necessary (and I will continue to do so...something I'm just learning about myself - and this goes for things happening at school too - is that I cannot uphold rules that I don't genuinely believe are appropriate and useful), which is clearly not good enough for Judy. So we'll see where this goes.