Rethinking, Recycling, Revamping

This past Friday, I did a lecture/presentation on Third Wave feminism. I had a pretty big crowd. Part of this was self-promotion & giving my students who attended extra credit. (Not many of them were mine, though. Lazypants.) I made an AWEsome flyer, and a lot of people were intrigued by that.

I thought about not doing the presentation. I signed up for it in the more optimistic, everything-is-possible start of this semester way back in January. As the semester has gone by, I've missed most of the other presentations because this has been such a weird "Spring" for me. So I just wasn't sure. I'm kind of in the "glass half empty" phase of the semester-- tired, frustrated, ready for summer. (Everyone gets there.... students & teachers alike.) Sometimes I am back in the plus, but sometimes it's just hard to do anything because it all seems to be overwhelmingly too much.

But then I thought-- you know, this is what I do. I like to teach, I hardly ever get the chance to justify simply talking about Feminism, and my brand of it, too. Yeah, I work it into some of my regular "comp" and literature lectures, but thus far, I haven't been lucky enough to teach a course that was specifically about this. So it was new ground for me, in a way.

I had a lot of fun, learned a lot. I had one person in the audience who wasn't really "feelin'" it and was not going to be convinced, I think. But I got a lot of "love" from students, including two today who were inspired to go to the bookstore to find some of the books on the handout I had available.

But it's made me think about what I do, and what I wish to keep doing, with my life. I will never quit teaching, no matter what. But it's possible that it may be a while until I'm in front of a classroom as the teacher of record. And I'm good with that. My lectures will just have to be over coffee or margaritas, delivered to one or two interested parties, for a while.

And that, my friends, is a glass more than half full kind of feeling. Sure, maybe it's one of those big margarita glasses. Just no salt please.

Bullies

When I was about 8, my friends and I were bullied. I dreamily remember an event where the bully was chasing me through the wooded, swampy area near my house and the boy I kinda had a crush on was looking for snakes. I stopped to see what he was doing, kinda hoping he'd protect me & bully girl drug me off pretending to be my friend.

My older sister made me & the friend of mine who was also being bullied fight back. I can remember, though, the girl thought she'd still win with two against one, against us two girls with their backs against the walls of sisterly contempt. She smiled cockily, waggled her fingers in that "come and get me" way.

We won. She lost face that day, and was never able to bully other kids again. We knew she could be beaten.

It's a classic story-- the underdog wins, even when at great odds. I like to think bullies always get theirs. And it's probably wrong to be secretly glad when a bully's karma bites them on the ass.

But I can't help but smile, a little, because I know that like when Glinda waved her wand at the Wicked Witch just as Dorothy got her shoes: "You have no power here. Now be gone, before someone drops a house on you." Like when my sister made me take control over my life with the childhood bully, it doesn't really matter now if I actually lose the fight. I tried, and that means the bully doesn't win.

Making the Leap

I've been thinking, lately, a lot about how "real" writers write. What I mean by real is writers who get published because frankly, I doubt many young kids with their noses pressed into books from the library dream about one day having a blog of their own. The aim has always been for the "literary sort" to be published.

I tried. Right after my BA, I sent out a round of poetry to small press journals. Most of them never replied, one nice magazine sent me back my self-addressed stamped manuscript with "sorry, not interested" scrawled across one page. No feedback otherwise. At the time, I took it as a sign that I must not be very good.

Then, I went to grad school. I went to an MA program where there was also an MFA track. I didn't know what MFAs were, at the time. I might have gotten one had I known, but I was already on the MA then PhD track & didn't see the need to switch. The MFA students were generally intense. They wrote, the workshopped. They fought, they had wild parties. I was married & less intense, and I also lived far enough away from where the MFA crowd congregated that they never really made it to my sometimes fairly wild parties. But I took away from that place the feeling that I was more a critic than a poet. I was jealous, but also focused on the teaching gig I was planning to have magically appear in exactly the place I needed it to appear. (Dreams. Ah. Innocence.)

So for years, I really did not write a single poem. Not anything worth calling that, really. A few lame scribbles. While I was pregnant with the kids I wrote the two poems that I'm most proud of in a long time about them, about a sonogram picture. And began thinking about, again, writing the novels which I have ideas about, even an outline for.

Here, in LA, I tentatively have written again. I went to one meeting of the student writer's group, got inspired by a couple of those poets & inspired by the theme to write a couple of good poems. Read a "how to" book called poemcrazy which I still quite like. When the new faculty member who joined us last year, who during her time b/w being hired and starting the Fall semester sat down and wrote her first book, which is now one of three accepted & well on the way to publication arrived, we talked a little bit about our shared interest in genre fiction. It was fun, and I went home one day last fall and wrote ten pages on a book I've actually got all mapped out.

But I haven't really written anything in forever. Class lectures, mostly. I wrote a few drunken poems a few weeks ago, mad at the world, mad at the difficulty in my life (Sean's problems, business, tiredness, life.) It's not that bad, really, but the poems seemed very mad & bitter. (Hey, I said I'd had a couple glasses of wine!) :)

In a few weeks now, I'll be done teaching the last semester I'll teach at the Uni where I work before I'm done for an indefinite period. There are multiple reasons-- the main two being first that my life-- especially the real estate part-- is way too complicated to add even a little bit of time for teaching. The other, less crucial one is that budget cuts are probably going to eliminate my position anyway.

So, I'm leaving the University for the first time in a few years. And I'm not planning to come back right away, either. What I do plan is writing. I want to write, I want to work towards publication. I have to plan to limit my time online, because it can really suck the day away and I don't have that much free time to waste anymore.

I have a business plan, too, and Andrew is very adamant that I work on that stuff. I will, but I will promise myself that I will make the leap to write my own creative work, too. I miss living in that space, that creative life. I will see what I can explore, and work, and write. I am really looking forward to that, and I really hope it pays off.

Got Buddha?

This past week, I had a handyman type dig out my pond & a few other odd jobs in the back yard (no the pool is still not clean. We're having difficulty).

Anyway. This is Shreveport. Or, as hubby & I say, T-I-S.

I have this lovely Buddha meditation statue in my butterfly garden. I need to weed around him but the last time I moved him a tiny silver snake skittered out from beneath. I thought that was cool. Buddha as refuge.

Handyman offered to help me throw the Buddha statue away. He laughed when I said "uh, no thank you" but I could tell he wasn't entirely joking.

Dude, did I ASK you for religious help? No. I did not. My religion is my BIDness (nudge nudge Alex) and nobody axed you for your opinion, thank you.

There's a reason you're not supposed to talk about religion, sex, or politics at a party. People are touchy about their beliefs, and mine are very quirky, and not the point of this post. But overall, in spite of all the quirkiness, I do consider myself a roundabout Christian. It's just not as conventional as SOME folks might like to think it ought to be. Ultimately it comes down to this: God is god, no matter what the name is. So if a Buddha statue meditating in my garden gives me peace, then mind your own Ps and Qs.

So. Buddha stays, handyman goes. Any questions?

1907

In 1907, Dorothy was born, the same day as Gene Autry. During that year, the first vacuum cleaner was built, as well as the color photograph was created. The LRMS Lusitania sailed its maiden voyage. Pike Place market in Seattle opened. The Mud March, the first large procession organized by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), took place in London. Mark Twain received an honorary doctorate of laws degree from Oxford University. Hershey's kisses were created!

There is a lot I do not know about her. We lived very far from her during a good chunk of my life, so I can't really recall ever sitting down and just chatting with her. Also, she was not the sort of person who cottoned to silliness. If you wanted to lollygag about on a day off from work, she would chase you out the door saying "it's a beautiful day; go do something."

My grandmother was a strong woman. Her husband died when she was fairly young, still, and she worked to support herself & her two children when there weren't many women in the regular workforce. She worked until her 80's when she moved to live with my mother in Florida, but she still took care of people, even then.

We had her in our lives for a very long time, and it's going to be strange for her to NOT be there. I know my mom is already missing her. Last winter Grandma became confused and needed to be hospitalized. Basically, I think that Grandma had finally decided she was done and she took off on a walk in the early morning hours, headed somewhere with five dollars and armed with pictures of my children when they were teeny babies.

In the nursing home, she would take the velcro strap they place on older folks so the nurses can move them around in an orderly fashion and swing it at the nurses when she didn't want to do something. I can see it now-- weilding her velcro strap better than Lara Croft's whip, letting those nurses know they'd been OWNED.

There will be more that I will write about this, and I'm in the middle of gathering photos & memories from family members for a digital scrapbook. We will have a family gathering this summer to mark her passing (she's being cremated, and we'll scatter her ashes around then, as well.) But for now, tonight, if you think of how you couldn't even begin to imagine the world without Hershey's kisses, which have just always been there, you can imagine how there is a hole in the universe. However, that hole can be filled with the love and faces and lives of the family, including four generations of kids, that is still here.

We never really die-- we just move to other forms. Right now, I'm certain my grandmother is having a reunion with the man she never got over, holding her son in her arms again, and visiting with all the family she has in that place. And when we see her again, she'll be that feisty old German woman who used to bake cookies and cakes and chase us out into the sunshine. It's a beautiful day. Go do something with it!