I've only seen 2.5 scary movies

I just read Boston.com's list of the 50 scariest movies ever clickity here if you want to read it too and I'm shocked and dismayed to report that I've only seen 2.5 of the movies.

1. The Ring: Honestly, I didn't love it. I was freaked out by it, but it helped me articulate what I believe to be an important distinction: scary versus startling. The Ring made us jump out of our seats, but it was due mostly to the startling factor. The camera zooms into the guy dead on the chair with his face all distorted, but it happens SO FAST that you're literally startled that the lens moved that fast. Yes, the dude himself is scary, but I think the startle far outweighs the scare. However, I'll give it props for having a creepy premise. And I love the actress who plays Samara. She also plays Rhonda, the mormon fundamentalist patriarch's child bride in Big Love. She's f*cking fantastic.

2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Fantastic movie. I watched part of it when I was 8, and when I saw a clip of the remake many years later, even my 8 year-old memories could tell the difference. I've seen it several times since then, and I have been able to draw the following conclusions:
--It is fantastic. Watch it.
--My mother is magical, because this movie did NOT scare her away from gardening in the slightest. In fact, I think it may have inspired her to go outside that very minute and start weeding.
--Botany is a funny word.
--It is AMAZING how Jeff Goldblum has aged so well. In this movie, he is supremely awkward, all lips and squinty eyes and teeth. In Law&Order, he's actually borderline handsome. Fascinating.

2.5. The Shining. I say .5 because I couldn't get through it. It was too slow. I liked the creepiness of it, but there isn't enough Adderall in the world that could make me sit through the rest of it. Kid was fabulous though.

New Goal: Watch as many of these movies as I can. Starting with "The Innocents (1961)."

I FOUND THE CURE FOR ROAD RAGE!

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement. After 8 years of legally carousing the roads of Boston and surrounding areas, I have found the cure for road rage.

Along the way, I've run into a disturbing cast of characters:

CRAZY LADY 
Last summer, Crazy Lady turned left on a red light in Brighton Center, ripped a chunk off my minivan, and when I went to pull over, took both hands off the wheel, swerved all over the road, screamed, and became a scene from the Exorcist. When I got ahold of the police and finally felt safe pulling over, she proceeded to tell me that it was my fault, because her husband was going to beat her.

OLD WHITE CONVERTIBLE GUY
Last spring, I lived on a pretty small street in Brookline. However, despite it being - for all intents and purposes - a small, residential street, it is actually a long street that turns into Kelton, Warren, Sparhawk, and eventually Arlington Street before merging with Faneuil on the Brighton/Watertown border. Translation: If you have any experience driving in this area, you know that Winchester/Kelton/Warren/Sparhawk/Arlington street is one of the BEST cut throughs to avoid any number of LOS (Large, Obnoxious Streets) crawling with O-Bugs (Obnoxious BU Undergrads). Enter Old White Convertible Guy.

This man had impeccable timing, and tended to drive by exactly as I was crossing the street to my apartment.

SIDENOTE: In Brookline, there is no overnight street parking. In a town like Belmont, with an abundance of driveways, this is not a problem. In Brookline, it means that you pay people every month to rent a spot in their driveways/front yards/etc. Thus, I parked across the street.

This is what he would yell:

YOU STUPID C*NT, GO TO THE G*DDAMN CROSSWALK TO CROSS THE STREET! HOW F*CKING STUPID ARE YOU?

I understand people yelling things like that in big intersections. Hell, I switched from the Brookline to the Allston CVS because I was tired of being given the finger by rich mommies jaywalking across Harvard Street with their toddlers. I never yell obscenities out the window, however. I'd like to say it's because I'm a more honorable person, but honestly, it's because I have this irrational fear that one of my students will for some reason be within earshot and will yell, "TO THINK YOU KICKED ME OUT OF CLASS FOR DROPPING F-BOMBS. FOR SHAME MISS!"

In any event, this intersection... is not a big intersections. This intersection is two lanes, and on a residential street. There are no crosswalks. If I wanted to use a crosswalk, I would have to walk back to Beacon. See below:

So you see the absurdity. However, I never got a chance to explain this to him, because he always drove off at 100 mph. 

These are two of many disturbing characters I've encountered along with the subsequent rage that bubbles up inside after our run-ins. But, fair readers, I've found the cure. 

THE CURE FOR ROAD RAGE

Do you remember those old school Nickelodeon game shows from the early 90s? They contained something wonderful: Green slime. I found the history the the green slime on Wikipedia, but I'm entirely too lazy to read it, so I'm going to assume that it started with one show, and caught on due to its awesomeness. If I'm wrong, sue me. 

THIS IS THE CURE. 

Picture the scene: You're driving. You're probably running a little bit late, or worse: you're not quite late, but you're on the borderline, so that one extended red light, LTDTUWDR (Left turning douche taking up whole damn road), or YLNT (Yellow light not taken) could bump you into lateville. I hate that feeling. I'd rather just be late than hovering in the possibility. But anyway, this is the scene. I'm going to use an example of how it might happen for me: Old White Convertible Guy expands his horizons to Storrow Drive. I'm on the Tobin Bridge, and he cuts me off right before the 4th street exit, the one closest to my school. I am forced to continue to the Chelsea HS exit, and backtrack. I will be late. 

Normally, this would be tragic. I would scream, yell things like WHAT THE FUDGE, SHUT THE FRONT DOOR, etc (can't have my students overhearing me). But today is different, because I have figured out the cure to road rage. I've also figured out the longest-winded way to explain this cure to you, but if you're still reading, you love me enough to deal with my rambling. 

Instead of my usual meltdown, I smile. Not a little smile, but a wide smile, ear-to-ear. I giggle first, then burst out into full-fledged laughter. As I pass him, I wave, grin, and blow him a kiss. He looks at me, shocked, because his plan to ruin me has failed, and he has no idea why. 

Why am I smiling? Although he's clean, wearing a white-collared shirt, in a white car, that's not what I see. At the exact moment I was about to burst into road rage, I pictured a huge bucket turning upside-down, dumping gallons and gallons of old school Nickelodeon green slime on him. 

Now it won't work if that's all you picture. You have to use your imagination. What, really, would it look like if green slime was dumped on an angry old man in a white convertible

A convertible has no top. There is no barrier between the sky and the slime, so it pours right in. It slides over the leather seats, slides down the windshield (he turns on his wipers), and seeps into the crack that holds the canvas top, so even if he tries to put the top back up, it will be slimy on both slides. He has glasses, in my vision, so in the midst of all this, he's stopping to wipe slime off the lenses with his fingers. It's in his ears, his nose, and sliding down his white-collared shirt. His feet slip on the pedals because it's in the bottom of the car by now. It covers the seatbelts, the stick shift, the CD player, and his latte. It ruins his issue of Douchebag Weekly in the front seat (Oh no, what will he do for guidance?). He will panic, wondering if it is somehow radioactive, and then panic some more when he realizes he didn't get any kind of service contract on his car because he thought the world revolved around him. He will pull over, covered in slime, and bystanders will take pictures with their phones and post them on the internet. He will try to use his phone, but it will not work, due to slime damage. He will sit in his car, wondering if the brunette in the RAV-4 is some sort of sorceress who can snap her fingers and bring green slime on people. He will remember all the times he cussed me out unnecessarily, and he will. be. sorry. 

I understand that none of that will happen. But here's what WILL happen: As a result of this visualization exercise, I walk into work smiling ear-to-ear. I tell everyone about my breakthrough, and they marvel at my brilliance, while laughing internally at the kooky writing teacher, but still debating trying this strategy themselves. I will prepare for an hour or so, then go to my first class, and even though my 1st period 8th graders are especially negative, they will be drawn into my infectious positive attitude, and when I explain why I'm smiling, they will all tell me of times they've illegally driven automobiles, and we will laugh, and I will try not to worry about that. They will write. Win. 

So try it, I dare you. 

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Living like a writer?

We have writer’s notebooks, lists of writing territories, explorations, drafts, and poems. We brainstorm, share ideas, model ways to vary our syntax and diction, and how to edit. We share, comment, and reflect on our writing. We share storie, do freewrites and more. But as writing teachers, are we really living like writers?

A long time ago, I thought living like a writer meant you got paid to write and your writing got published. Then I got a job reviewing trendy technology. I was paid 20 cents/word to write a review of iPod-wired Levi’s jeans. By the end of it, I wanted to punch someone. Then I applied to teaching graduate school.

A shorter time ago, I thought living like a writer meant you looked at the world differently. On the sidewalk in October, there is a pile of leaves. Some people walk through the leaves without a second thought. Some people pause for a minute to marvel at the way the four o-clock sun slants through the clouds and makes certain colors pop. Some people walk slowly around the pile, squinting, noticing that if they move their heads two inches to the left, the reds cast a light glow over the yellows. A writer picks up a pen.

Both definitions are true, but it took a blog and a roommate for me to realize the element I was missing. I posted an early draft of my memoir, so early that “rough” doesn’t cover the lack of polished prose. In passing, my roommate said that it had a lot of potential, and I wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear. I wasn’t familiar with the fear associated with other people critiquing my writing. It had been three years, after all, since my last writing workshop. Even then, I focused on mainly fiction. This was TRUE. It was my mother, my wonderful mother, who’s in fantastic shape and still somehow needed emergency brain surgery. This was me, sobbing in front of my laptop, setting a timer for ten minutes and letting the fear envelope me as I tried to put it into words. This was less than two months ago, and my roommate thought she could just comment on it in passing, like it was nothing?

In an instant, I knew I would tell this story to all my future students. I ask them to share like it’s easy, like putting your thoughts on display for 27 people is easy, and I’m surprised when making participation 20% of their grade isn’t enough motivation? Sometimes my thoughtlessness alarms me. Sometimes I don’t know how 25 years and God knows how many tears haven’t taught me that it’s hard to put your feelings into words, and even harder to speak them out loud.

That’s what I’m missing. I love my students, but it’s not enough to write for them, and the 6.4 people who read my blog. To truly live like a writer, I need to write in a community of writers. A community of writers where I can swear, where I don’t have to conspicuously leave all the alcohol and sex out. A community of writers that aren’t 10-15-years old.

Most of the writing I’ve done in the past two years has been for my students. When I’m looking for an example of a quickwrite, I do it myself. I have dozens of lists of “My Writing Territories,” geared towards different groups and grade levels. I wrote my own “Relaxing Place” essay. But it’s been three years since took a writing class, three years since I wrote my thesis, graduated, and ended up back in middle school.

The single most meaningful teaching experience I’ve had this year is writing a memoir with my 8^th grade students. I used all the brainstorming and visualization techniques, half the drafting strategies, and found myself saying things like, “Show, don’t’ tell,” while revising my syntax. I found the common theme in a dozen rambly freewrites and stitched it together in a way that made sense. The experience of writing the memoir helped me process the experience I was writing about. I learned something about it along the way. It was too valuable an experience to keep to myself. Even though I assigned a pinch reader to take over when I felt the tears starting, even though I still cried while reading it to them, it changed the way I understand and teach memoir, and way I understand and teach writing.

It really made me question everything I know about writing. It made me wonder if, despite all the observing, writing, collecting, and sharing I do, I somehow was missing the point. Was I really leaving like a writer? Are any of us? Are we looking at the way the sun hits a pile of leaves and picking up a pen? Are we writing while crying and laughing and screaming into our computer screens? Are we hurling our words full-speed at the page like we expect our students to?

I don’t think I was living like a writer until I wrote that memoir.

Three days ago I asked a chronically-disorganized student to show me the Table of Contents in his Writer’s Notebook. He smirked, and said, “Fine, but let me see yours.” When I showed it to him, he said, “But, is it up-to-date Miss Wyner?” It wasn’t. Luckily, I managed to talk my way out of a detention.

The next day, I walked into my seventh grade class and held my notebook opened for them to see. “This is my homework,” I proclaimed. I showed them my two pages of memoir explorations, and explained that my half-page detailed list about Franklin Park wasn’t something I thought I would continue writing about, but I thought I might keep working on my exploration of swimming pools in my life.

A girl who often tells me how annoying she finds me looked up from her detailed schedule of scratching hearts into the table and said, “Wow. That’s really cool that you did that.”

Later, I let her teach me how to jerk. I failed. We all laughed as I tripped over my feet trying to do an alarmingly simple dance move. Life goes on.

HEART OF MY HEART

HEART OF MY HEART
LKW

I was five the first time a boy stomped on my heart.
He divorced me two weeks after our recess wedding on the playground and I thought I’d never get over it. When I told my mother, she didn’t say a word. She just picked up the phonebook and called his mother. I giggled on her lap. Already, the pain was fading.

***

The next time my heart broke I was 14. I don’t remember how it happened; I just remember how awful it felt, the days fading into one long grey streak. Self-doubt consumed me as I tried desperately to figure out what I had done wrong. One afternoon, my mother joined me on the couch. She cradled me like a baby, rocked me back and forth, and stroked my hair. I cried awful, hiccupping sobs. I cried so hard I could barely breathe, so hard it sounded like I was dying, gasping for breath.
As she wiped the streaks of mascara from my cheeks, I was surprised to see sadness in her face. "What's wrong Mama?" I asked.
"Heart of my heart," she said softly, "Don't you understand? When you hurt, I hurt. Your pain is no different from my own."

***

Ten years later, I held her hand carefully, trying not to interfere with any of the IV tubes. Around me things beeped, gurgled and swished, an onomatopoetic paradise. It was 9 a.m. on Valentine's Day, 2010, and I had left the apartment so fast that I had forgotten socks. Her brain had started bleeding, and no one knew why. They were able to fix it, but no one knew the extent of the damage. I couldn't think about it, it was too painful. An hour earlier, when the surgeon had come to talk to my father, I had fainted in the middle of the hallway. No one had noticed.

When she woke up it was worse. Seeing her helpless was nothing that could adequately be described in words. The helplessness I felt was worse. I saw her in there, trapped behind swollen eyelids and a bruised mind. She writhed in the cheap hospital sheets, trying to hurl herself off the bed. My mother, who couldn’t sit through a half-hour sitcom in our den without getting up at least five times to do various things, was confined to a bed. There was a falseness to the situation, a bad aftertaste like cheap soda leaves on your tongue.

She couldn’t talk for days. When she could talk, it was in bits and pieces. My mother, the woman who instilled a love of words in me, could only say about ten of them. It nearly killed me, seeing her like that. “I…” she would trail off. “I just can’t… I don’t… I…” I didn’t know if she wanted me to stay or leave. I didn’t know if I should make flashcards and have her point. I didn’t know how to help. I’ve never felt so powerless in my entire life. I felt like my soul was going to faint, and leave my body standing there, staring, vacant, not knowing what to do.

As time passed, she spoke more fluently, but there was still a halting quality to her sentences, as if she needed an extra second here and there to find the words. Every time she stopped, every idea she couldn't say, tore away at me in little pieces. Every time her eyes sparked with an idea and then welled up with tears when she couldn't express it, pain consumed me somewhere between my chest and shoulders.

A week later, she was doing what the doctors called “waxing and waning.” Some days she could talk almost normally, and some days she could barely get a sentence out. On one of her good days, she told me it was like being imprisoned in her own mind, and we cried. She said, over and over, “There’s no way you could ever know how awful it was,” and she was right: I’d never had brain surgery; technically, I didn’t know what it was like.

What I couldn’t figure out how to tell her was that I did know. The way it felt, watching her, helpless, was a kind of torture I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It felt like being ripped in half. I thought of all the times she told me she felt my pain, all the times she cried when I was the one breaking, and right then I realized what she had meant. Never before had I wanted, so much, to take someone else’s pain. I wanted to lie down in the bed next to her and have her pain transferred to me, injected into me in huge doses, pushed into my body by IV, to get it out of hers. When I was 14 she told me she could feel my pain, and it took me until 24 to realize that link went both ways. Heart of my heart. I finally understood.
I don’t know if I’ll become a parent anytime soon. I don’t think I’m strong enough to take on a lifetime of feeling my child’s pain, a lifetime of wishing that pain was inflicted on me instead. If I can, one day, I will.

***

Wouldn’t it be the greatest gift of all, to truly take on someone else’s pain?
If only we could.

An Open Letter to Naturally Thin People

You know who you are. You casually walk into the employee lunchroom with leftover Burger King tucked under your arm, a dollar in your pocket to buy Sunchips from the vending machine.

When we went to college, the rest of us agonized over our weight. The dining hall became a veritable fat factory, full of cholesterol waiting to seep over the tops of our high school denim. We spent 20 dollars a week on diet coke, celebrated the invention of Propel, and sloshed through puddles on rainy days all in the name of keeping our highschool figures. In the end we all failed, some more tragically than others, but we stood united in our defeat. We moaned and groaned together. We joked about Lindsay Lohan's cocaine diet, but knew we were only half-kidding. We tried crazy fad diets and failed.  We planned group shopping trips as soon as bubble dresses became the style, thrilled they hid our ever-expanding lovehandles.

Throughout all of this, you stood off to the side with your 4,000-calorie brownie Frappuccino from Starbucks. You nodded in all the right places, said, "Damn, I know, right?" and wiped the whipped cream off your chin. You were never mean about it. It was simply a part of life that you didn't understand.

Our older friends, wiser, somewhat worse for wear, told us, "Don't worry, guys don't like girls that skinny." They pointed at you discreetly and said, "She's built like a boy. Men like curves. Men like women that look like women." And it pacified us for the time being, but on some level, we knew it was a lie. Because when given a choice between flat-chested Kate Hudson and gargantuan Kirstie Alley, who do you think men would choose?

Thousands of dollars and dozens of weight loss programs later, we're still struggling. Some of us have bins in our parents' attics, full of jeans we haven't been able to wear in five years. We should just throw them out, but that would mean defeat, so we don't. We let them accumulate dust, dust that we will one day, hopefully, get all over our hands in our haste to open that bin.

This is a message for all the women who can still drink frappuccinos on a regular basis: Your time will come.

It might be ten years after college graduation. You'll wake up one day and realize that you have to suck in your stomach to button your skinny jeans. Maybe it'll be after your first child, and the weight you gained won't slide off you like the freshman 3.2 you gained. Or maybe you'll be like Sienna Miller, and realize one day that, despite being skinny, your skin flops around your tiny bone structure and you look worse than some fat people.

I say this not with anger, but with the quiet realization that what goes around comes around. Maybe it's Karma. Maybe taking it for granted will be the catalyst for your downfall. Maybe it's like diffusion, and the bad luck will gradually spread out.

When it happens, I'll be flying down the esplanade with Muse blasting in my earbuds. When the proverbial fat hits the fan for you, that's where I'll be, in my rosy-cheeked, muscled glory. My ass will be carved from steel, my quads will be almost too strong, and my arms will finally not look like string beans. Maybe I'll still have a miniature spare tire, but I'll be a tan, ripped, golden God so I won't care.

When you stagger into the gym, I will help you. I will politely remind you that Converse sneakers are not workout attire, and I'll even show you how to work your core. I will throw out your Frappuccino.

So enjoy it while it lasts, thin person. Your time will come.

And until then, at least my boobs are nicer than yours.

Things I Hate

This blog is inspired by Dave Anderson. He was two years ahead of me in high school, and his senior year, he took my yearbook and labeled all the people in his class that he hated and why. Thank you, Dave. I hope you're having fun in France, doing... whatever it is people do when they move to France.

THINGS I HATE:

• People from BU (except MK)
• People from BU that howl at the moon while drunk at night during the week. or at all. who howls? who does that?
• injuries
• the smoke monster
• being fat
• having to wait a week between Lost episodes
• Jack Shephard (I'm sorry, he's SO ANNOYING. I know everyone loves him, and I know you're going to judge me, but I am ALL ABOUT SAWYER. I know. Surprise, surprise. Leah likes the bad boy with a heart of gold character. Color us shocked). 
• the fact that I'm losing weight, and as a result, my boobs are shrinking
• winter
• cold
• car payments
• my hands. they are bitten bloody and raw.
• this week
• luck

Fraud

FOR TEN MINUTES, I'm going to let the pressure out. 

I'm so scared. I realize now that I am a complete fraud. Every time I've comforted someone who's lost a loved one, every time I've cried over someone's death, none of that compared to this. Every single word I've said.

My mother is the most incredible woman in the world. I love her so much it physically hurts. It is painful. And this week I had to face the possibility -- I can't type it. Every time I try, I sob so hard my body bucks forward and I have to gasp for breath.

I've been so lucky. No one I know has ever left me in a permanent way. I wondered about it for the first time when I was quite young, and the longer it lasts, the more I worry. When someone leaves me I don't know if I'll make it. Given how I'm handling this now, I'm not too optimistic.

She looked so awful today. Her whole face was waterlogged, puffy to an extreme level I've never seen. She seemed so frail. My mother. Force of nature. The strongest woman I know, the person in the world with the most fire in her. SHe was helpless. Everything I say is wrong. I wanted to say it nearly killed me, but I can't. Oh god. This is too much.

I feel like I can't talk to anyone about it. Everyone I know has gone through real loss in a way I haven't, and I have this fear that, no matter how genuine they are in their care for me, they will resent me for it. And I can hardly blame them.

I felt her eyelid today. It was puffed out twice its size, filled with fluid from the swelling in her brain. It felt like a tissue-thin water balloon.

There's too much. I can't let it all out it's going to choke me and drown me and I can't take it. Ouch. Oww. I am silently screaming, hunched over, abs crashing into each other, back curled over my keyboard, mouth wide open, eyes squeezes shut, silently screaming. That is exhausting.

I don't feel resolved, but I do feel drained. Turns out the advice I gave my dad about setting a timer for ten minutes and letting the fear envelope you for that time isn't half bad advice. I'm still terrified and overwhelmed, don't get me wrong. But I feel drained. And starting now the pressure will start building up, and I'll do what I did today: everything I can to keep moving. I cleaned my room in a more thorough way than I have the entire time living here. I even cleaned my dresser. I just couldn't stop moving. I kept telling myself that I was being absurd, but in my head I knew I had to keep moving, for fear of what would happen when I stopped.

Now my eyes are dry. My face is a work of science. The skin that still has the night cream I use on it is stiff, but the rest of it is covered in streaks of saltwater that wiped it clean.

Times like this make me understand those people who completely shut themselves off from the world and lock out all emotion. You know, the people who DON'T believe it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Right now, I understand the logic. I still don't believe it, but I can see why people would.

And I feel like a hypocrite. They say she'll be fine. She's supposed to be swollen - she had brain surgery. She's supposed to be out of it - she had brain surgery. I believe she will recover. I worry she won't, and I think of our conversation about GD, and I'm going to need to push that down again. Shove. Smush. Push. Close. Lock. I'll explore that with my ten minutes tomorrow.

Monday Night, Midnight, 2/15/10

REMEMBER * book idea * book of letters, book of dear ____s *

testing

...Does it work?

Snow Memoir

I remember cupping my hands against the glass, trying to block out all the light, and squinting through the window. The first floor roof always obscured my view. The trees along Solomon Pierce didn't help much either. Eventually, I would creep downstairs, carefully stepping on the outer edges of the squeaky steps. I'd push back the curtains on our front door windows and strain to see the tiny dots of white against the black backdrop of night.

What were those special curtains called, the ones that were attached at the top and the bottom? We had those curtains on the front door. Mom always yelled at us when we touched those curtains, but it never stopped us. "They'll turn yellow, look, they're already looking worn," she'd insist, but the second she turned around, my brother and I would go back to casually pushing back the sheer fabric to check if our friends were at the door. Eventually, she gave up and stopped telling us how much they were. Years later, they are noticeably yellowed on the inner edges and seriously stretched out of shape, but I doubt my mother cares.

In my head, I imagine the moment she changed her mind about the curtains. One minute, she glances at them and sees the money she's wasted on curtains we inevitably destroyed, and the time she's wasted trying to convince us not to. The next minute, in my vision, she looks at those curtains, yellow and pulled out of shape, and they conjure images of the two of us, young and eager, pulling back the fabric, looking for friends, butterflies, snowflakes, and car headlights. In her mind something shifts, and those curtains become the children that grew up tugging on them, the children that are now grown up and gone with curtains of their own to pull on and snowflakes of their own to chase.

I always loved snowflakes. There's something soft and comforting about the way they fall from the sky. I remember squinting through the window at the street lamp on 1 Solomon Pierce Road, trying to see tiny dots in the light it cast. It was always tough to tell if it was snowing, or if it was just an illusion created by flecks of dust on the window.

PUTA: a poem

You look the same
in your fifth grade
ID picture
but different

I look at you now
as you slump
against the back of the
green, metal chair
and wonder
where did that open-eyed
wild-haired
bright-faced ten-year-old
go?

You didn't have bangs back then
maybe the fringe hiding your right eye
is what makes you evil
maybe the hair gel seeping into your brain
makes you ask,
"are you on your period?
is that why
you gave me detention?"

the little girl without the eyeliner
would never have said the word "pad"
out loud
without trying to
smash chin
into chest
bright red
mortified
wanting to disappear.

so where is that
sweet
little girl?
her frizzy black hair
now flattened and gelled
her wide eyes
now covered in shadow
her mouth now spewing
spanish words i
shouldn't know
the definitions of
but i do
unfortunately

well i might be a
PUTA
but i'm still the
PUTA
who tries to wipe the slate
clean after every nasty comment
you can't resist yelling
i'm still the
PUTA
that wants to read your words
even if yesterday they were
swears screamed at top volume

not every puta can do that

WHEN I WAS FIVE

When I was five

I decided the trees

were all boys or girls

(tall trees were boys)

(short trees were girls)

When I was five

I hated to read

but halfway through

Ramona Forever

I hid under blankets

with a flashlight

(couldn’t put it down)

When I was five

I chopped off dolls’ hair

and cried

when I realized

it wouldn’t grow back.

Impatient,

I cut my own hair

then baby brother’s hair

until Mom hid the scissors

(thank God).

When I was five

David threw sand

stung my eyes

broke my heart

(we got a divorce)

When I was five

I rode horses all day

tiny cowboy boots

dry heat

When I was five

ballet was my love

I danced through gym class

“Leah, pass the ball!”

(can’t hear you,

busy spinning

my hands in the air).

When I was five

I wore a shower cap

to school

My mom couldn’t stop me

so she gave up

(can you blame her?

I was five).

When I was five

Mom went away

and Dad fed us peanut butter and jelly

for all three meals

Mom was not pleased

“It’s pretty healthy food, Leah,

tell your students that,”

he insists

when I call him

to ask for details

about when I was five

Hanukkah 09 Recap

I CLEANED UP this Hanukkah. It was the best Hanukkah ever. The only one I can think of that was better was 5th grade, when I got a boombox and Hootie & the Blowfish's Cracked Rear view. God damn, what a good album that was. You don't get that many albums nowadays that you can just listen to straight through. I blame iTunes. And Bush.

The top gifts:

• a drill. so I can drill things. and drill holes in things. and sometimes, i will even drill different-sized holes in things.
• a label-maker. I already labeled the cactus in the kitchen. "cactus." in case you thought i labeled it with something else.
  
• jew bling for my phone. i now have the five books of moses represented in silver keychain form.
  
• A BULLET BLENDER. oh my god, it's like, imagine a food processor and a blender got together and did a lot of cocaine, a lot of steroids, and then had a baby.
  

You know what really bugs me? Those movie trailers that are 3 minutes long and somehow manage to say almost nothing about the movie. what a waste of time. Boo sex and the city 2.

Just kidding. I didn't mean it. I swear. Promise. Forgive me?

Writing yet again about dieting (how boring, you should fire me)

Let me begin by saying that I know diets. I've been on one, more or less, for the better part of my twenty four years. Growing up in Texas it's just a reality. When we moved to Boston, my mother used to joke with New England natives about how in Dallas, they put the diet drug Phen-Fen in the check-out line next to the bubble gum. The next time we went grocery shopping, I eyed the bubble gum in the check-out line, wishing there was Phen-Fen there like in Dallas, so I could be the same size at the Limited Too as my (slimmer) friends. I was ten.

I won't say that I've been through all the diets in the book, because I haven't, and thank God. Here is a list of weight-loss measures I have tried:

1. running. I started by running a mile a day in 7th grade, and ended up... a runner.
   
2. anorexia. I wouldn't recommend it.
   
3. bulimia. I also wouldn't recommend it.
   
4. Atkins. Not a good idea for a vegetarian.
   
5. South Beach: Works like a charm, but is impossible to sustain for life.
   
6. jenny craig: also works wonderfully, but is ridiculously expensive, and although it teaches you portion control, there's no lifelong method.
   
7. crazy expensive gym with personal trainer 4x a week: also works, but slowly, and I didn't learn anything about the muscle groups. Idiots.
   
8. winging it.
   

Some worked. Some didn't. Some worked really well- South beach, first time around, was amazing. I was so thin. Elyse, do you remember that? I came to visit you at Scotty's? I was CRAZY thin. But again, it just seemed so hard to sustain. I do well with structure, so I do well with most diets at first, and even for a few months. But after that, I'd get fat again.

I had the epiphany that I wasn't looking for a diet sometime around last spring. I realized that the problem with all these diets is that they don't promote lifestyle changes. Or maybe they do, and I just completely missed that. I was so busy trying not to hate myself physically that I changed my lifestyle drastically to fit a diet, and then when the diet fell away, I was left with nothing.

I tried all summer to lose weight. I told myself, I want to change my lifestyle so that these bad eating habits don't come naturally, so that if I fall off the wagon occasionally, it won't be so hard to get back on. And I tried, God love me, I tried. But it wasnt' enough.

It was Elyse that finally inspired me to do Weight Watchers. More about that later. Need to watch Cougar Town.

Thoughts on October 26, 2009

I'm so tired. I love my job, I really do, and I know it will get easier every year, but whoever said that the second year of teaching is significantly easier than the first is lying. A bit, maybe. But not a lot.

I am so frustrated with my students. I want so much to motivate them, but it has to come from them. At a Halloween party last year, an old friend from high school/temple said, "Wow, so you're like Michelle Pheiffer in Dangerous Minds," and I couldn't comprehend the comparison. Movies, books, all narratives essentially, are made with the audience in mind. There are things like narrative arc, climax, rising action, characterization, etc. Real life is a lot less interesting. It tends to wear on you day by day, like a layer of gauze between you and the outside world, until finally your mind is so blurry that you sleep for 14 hours starting at 7 p.m. Friday night.

I will, however, try to use positive motivation whenever possible. I can't keep giving detentions. There's no point. I am happy with my decision to not hold afternoon detentions anymore (Haleluyah), but still, something about the model is broken. I don't know.

I ... am tired.

Loans

Here's the thing about my relationship with loans. I love the idea that borrowing money is so easy, but the interest freaks me out. Most people are okay with it. I am not. I worry, agonizing, calculating how much more I'm actually going to have to pay back beyond my original principal amount because of how slowly I'm going to pay it back.

I know you have to pay to borrow money, and nothing's free, but I still lie awake at night hyperventilating about the 20+thousand dollar graduate education that very well may end up costing me over thirty. And although I'm prone to exaggeration, this, dear friends, is not an exaggeration. I have the loan payoff calculator bookmarked. Apple-D baby, Apple-D.

I can't figure it out. On the one hand, I want to subtract my living expenses from my paycheck and send the rest into Sallie Mae. On the other hand, what if I need more money than I anticipate. And shouldn't I be saving?

Saving is another thing I wonder about. I love the idea of saving money and buying a place. But I wonder... what good is putting away money each month if I'm rapidly incurring interest? Won't I eventually be spending all the money I save on the interest I'm incurring while I'm saving it?

My inability to answer an MCAS prompt

It's funny, actually, that so many writing prompts involve choosing a relaxing place. The irony that I of all people am tasked with teaching 13-year-olds how to best organize their thoughts into an MCAS response is... well, we'll talk about that later.

I always do what I ask my students to do. Maybe not immediately, or in the exact same way, but I would never ask them to try a strategy I haven't tried myself. As a result of this, I've tried to do the MCAS prompt about a special place I go to relax. And... I can't.

I wasn't an overanxious kid, as far as I know. I'm sure I was as demanding and outspoken as I am now, if not more so, but I wasn't so high-strung that I never relaxed. I just can't remember relaxing places from my youth that I went to with any regularity.

I remember moments, not place with broad, overarching feeelings attached to them. My parents' bed was one place I remember going to cool down. They always had silky sheets that were crisp and cool against your cheeks, and this comforter with a nubby design that I loved to pick at (and that my mother, naturally, loved. I remember their pillow shams, the stiff ruffled edges, so full of ... pillow stuffing... that I thought they might pop. I remember the darkness in the air, even in the bright mornings, and I remember a velvety blanket we used only occasionally. I remember that I had to lie a certain way to attain maximum comfort between my mom and dad.

I remember hide and seek. My brother and I spent years trying to craft the perfect position to hide in. We were positive that if we crumpled the covers up JUST SO, then the seeker wouldn't notice the human body rolled up in them. I don't think we ever succeeded.

But I also remember traumatic memories tied to that bed. I remember running in the middle of the night, zig-zagging across the living room, and hurling myself at them, only to be picked up, tossed over a broad shoulder sack-of-laundry-style, and carried back to my bed. I remember how far away the floor looked from where my head rested on my mother's shoulder as she carried me. I remember throwing up all over her, en-route, the puke staining her blue nightgown in streaks of dark navy. I remember how they used to calm me down.

Leah, look at one spot on the wall. Tell me five things you can see, five things you can feel, and five things you can hear. The first time a guy really hurt me, like, treated me like garbage, I dug my fingernails into my palms and pretended you were asking me to do that again.

So, what do you do with that? What if your memory isn't compartmentalized by emotion? I mean, I'm not worried about my life. I think it's a good thing that my memories are so multi-faceted and vivid that no place ever evokes solely one feeling. But still... it makes you think.

And ramble, clearly.

Loveyouall-lw

PS: Being a writer means...
-Sometimes you have to write, even if it's late, because the thoughts bubbling inside your head are too much to sleep.
-Sometimes you can't fully enjoy something in the moment, because you're already thinking of how to express it in words. This, however, lets you enjoy it later.

Day Sixteen

Day 16... -10 pounds and counting...

BIG thoughts

Done.

Maybe that’s why I took so long to finish the 8th grade poetry book. Because on some level I knew that the completion of that would really mean the end. I mean, what do I really have left to do? Buy envelopes. Pack. Organize. Find those damn letters. Dayanara is afraid to go to high school so she’s subconsciously sabotaging herself with negative behavior. Is it all that different? Probably not.

the sheer volume of information I have in my head is overwhelming on a level I never thought possible. If I thought I could write it all down I’d try, but I don’t know how far I’d get before losing it completely. However, one skill I have perfected this year is learning to take my own advice, and practicing what I preach, so more often than not I find myself saying, “What would I tell a student who had this problem?” It works, surprisingly. I think using student strategies helps talk me down from my metacognitive cliff because a) they are good strategies, b) we are not that different and c) it keeps me humble. So, how would I advise myself?

First, a flood of ideas would deluge my mind. Then, I would consider where the student was coming from on every level I could think of, and suggest something I thought they could handle. So, what can I handle now? Right now, I need structure. I need some way to express these ideas, some medium, because or else I’ll burst (or deflate). But I think I need to structure it so I don’t freak myself out.

Marion’s idea of color coding everything is probably going to help in the later stages of this mental inventory and organization, but for now, I think I’ll just broadly compartmentalize. If I had to put all the info, duties, plans, necessities, every part of my life into three buckets, what would they be labeled?

Personal/me, curriculum, remembering as much as I can.

There. There are my buckets. So, here’s the plan which I just came up with forty five seconds ago. I’m going to carry a notebook. Or maybe a little, four-subject notebook. and I’m going to keep a running list. Listing is another thing I tell students to do, because it’s not as scary as paragraphs and sentences, and more often than not, when you take the pressure out of the equation, most of your bullet points end up being sentences or something like them anyway. But regardless, I’m going to list. Two lists for each, one on computer, one on paper. And that way, I’ll remember everything I can.

How did someone with such poor executive functioning skills by nature get a master’s degree in education? I sit, in this room, in this disastrous hellhole covered with clothes, middle school vampire literature, New Yorker magazines and school supplies, and marvel at my ability to teach nine different classes when I can barely locate my right foot. But I’m working on it. Baby steps.

Just start listing. You might miss something, a thought might fly out of your head while you’re using your brainpower to write another thought on paper, but if you never start writing, odds are you’ll lose both of those thoughts.

I wonder what a thought looks like. That would make a cool personification exercise. If you had to give a visual representation of “thought” how would you do it? Food for thought. HAH thought.

So, I’m glad I wrote all that. I’m sure it’s a mess, but the point is, I wrote it, and in doing so, I talked myself down off of my metaphorical, metacognitive cliff. I wrote to move time. Before I started, it was standing still, and I was not happy about that. I hate when time stops. It’s unnatural, illogical, impractical and wasteful, because inevitably when time starts up again, you miss the time you would have had if time hadn’t stopped. Say time stopped at 12:40 a.m. for roughly two minutes. When time starts again, it’s 12:42, and you’ve missed 120 seconds, skipped, gone, adieu.

But anyway, I hate it when time stops, and when I closed the document, it did just that. When time stops, you feel everything. Where your bangs lay on your forehead. Tongue against inside of your front teeth. Ring sliding down finger. Sometimes I swear sound slows down too, but I’m not entirely sure about that.

I don’t do well with big transitions. In fact, let’s call them negative transitions. I don’t mean bad, I mean diffused. When I suddenly have a lot less to do, and a lot more time, I flip out. The sudden loss of that is horrifying. It’s why I got depressed after running the marathon. I looked
up marathons overseas compulsively. I planned training runs. I even bought new sneakers. You need something to fill a void that size.

The real issue is that my 8th graders will be gone. My eyes are crossing with the revelation. I always tell them sometimes you have to write 5 pages of junk to get to that one great line. Well, I had to ramble about all this GodKnowsWhat to get to this place. The place where I’m going to lose a piece of myself when they go. It’s not weird or inappropriate, it’s just reality. They made me the teacher that I am today. Wow.

Need to sleep on that.

Sometimes I think I'll never have the time and energy to revise my own writing. Well, what I'm doing now is more important anyway.