HAPPY NEW YEAR

“I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck anymore what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today!”

--Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (via)

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.

― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What has been the hardest part of your job?

There was really a deep belief that there’s only so much you can do, particularly for high-poverty kids. That poverty is, if not destiny, a significant hindrance to effective education. And changing ideas, changing hearts, changing minds — those things are difficult. And not surprisingly, people are going to push back. It’s a lot easier for the school system to say we graduated 45 percent of our kids because our kids had lots of problems and there’s only so much education you can do. It’s a lot harder to say we graduated 45 percent of our kids because we blew it; we didn’t do the job that we needed to do. That kind of ownership is a major kind of transformation.

--Interview with Joel Klein

New semester starts in a week--new prep, new kiddos. Sometimes (always, day after grueling day) it's hard to remember the bigger picture.

Somebody should have told me, Hey, Mac, your life, Mac, thirty years of it, Mac, is gonna be school, school, school, kids, kids, kids, papers, papers, papers, read and correct, read and correct, read and correct, mountains of papers piling up at school, at home, days, nights reading stories, poems, diaries, suicide notes, diatribes, excuses, plays, essays, even novels, the work of thousands--thousands--of New York teenagers over the years, a few hundred working men and women, and you get no time for reading Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald or good old P. G. Wodehouse, or your main man, Mr. Jonathan Swift. You'll go blind reading Joey and Sandra, Tony and Michelle, little agonies and passions and ecstasies. Mountains of kid stuff, Mac. If they opened your head they'd find a thousand teenagers clambering all over your brain. Every June they graduate, grow up, work and move on. They'll have kids, Mac, who will come to you someday for English, and you're left facing another term of Joeys and Sandras, Tonys and Michelles, and you'll want to know: Is this what it's all about? Is this to be your world for twenty/thirty years? Remember, if this is your world, you're one of them, a teenager. You live in two worlds. You're with them, day in, day out, and you'll never know, Mac, what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. June will come and it's bye-bye teacher, nice knowin' you, my sister's gonna be in your class in September. But there's something else, Mac. In any classroom, something is always happening. They keep you on your toes. They keep you fresh. You'll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That's a real problem, Mac. You get used to talking to those kids on their level. Then when you go to a bar for a beer you forget how to talk to your friends and they look at you. They look at you like you just arrived from another planet and they're right. Day after day in the classroom means you're in another world, Mac.

--Frank McCourt, Teacher Man

A FEW THINGS I THOUGHT WOULD BE THE CASE THAT ARE NOT ACTUALLY THE CASE

1. I thought that teaching would be tiring, that when school let out at 2:15 I would crave nothing more than my bed. I was wrong. Teaching is not very tiring. Yes, waking up at 5:00 to be at school by 6:00 requires some sort of chemical stimulant (sidenote: almond milk in coffee is delicious) and bouncing around a classroom in heels for seven hours is hard on the stems, but the teaching itself isn't so hard. It's the planning that absolutely blows. From the time I get home to the time I collapse into bed, I am frantically trying to teach myself the material and come up with interesting ways to present it. There are times, usually post-dinner, when I realize that I have no idea what I'm going to say in front of 87 students the next day and I am filled with panic. If someone handed me the material, I would gladly teach from sunup until sundown. It's the planning that kills me.

2. I thought that the weekends would feel fabulous. I was wrong. Friday afternoons and evenings feel fabulous. Saturdays feel fabulous. Sundays, however, initially took the name "Sunday No Funday." Now we call them "Sunday I Need a Gunday." Sundays are when you realize that there are five full days of school stretched out before you and you are not in any way prepared for any of them. Sundays are all about impending doom.

3. I thought I would care if my kids liked me or not. I was wrong. I care very much that they respect me, but I don't give a damn if they think I'm cool. In fact, I've gone out of my way to seem as old and dowdy as possible. I tell them I'm 48 and that I'm way too old to have heard of Waka Flocka Flame (the latter being 100% true). A lot of them seem to like me anyway, which I'm constantly surprised by, considering how incredibly boring some of my lessons are.

4. I thought I would really struggle teaching a subject I know nothing about. I was wrong. It would definitely be a lot easier if I didn't have to do a lot of research, but it turns out that 80% of my energy is devoted to policing behavior. The other 20% is actually teaching earth and environmental science. This is probably really problematic and one of the many reasons my school is not as high achieving as Sycamore High School, but. Eh. Rollin' with it.

5. I thought I would have time to eat. I was wrong.

It took an hour to get to the supermarket, or rather it should have taken half an hour, but he made sure it took an hour. During that time he smoked three cigarettes, recalled four sexual experiences, and told himself to try to remember to call his mom on Mother’s Day.

--J. Robert Lennon, The Impossible Man

Who, me? Oh, I'm doing just fine.

Last night I found two gray hairs, one after the other. They are neighbors and, though I've only been aware of their existence for a day, I've grown rather fond of them. Later I was social--I laughed! I chatted! I mingled!--but it was ultimately tiring* and not what I wanted** so that's that.







*because of whispers to Brady to please wait ten to fifteen seconds then rescue me from an uncomfortable conversation, because of mumbled lies about a non-existent super serious boyfriend

**my bed, my down comforter, my space heater, Ys

PECAN WAFFLES AND SCRABBLE

When there is always a book to read or a book to write, a sermon to prepare or a retreat to lead, a letter to write or a call to make, my self imposed pressure leaves little time to simply live, for being human and playful, for delighting in pecan waffles and Scrabble. Is my life slipping by without making time to be a friend with my friends?

--Brennan Manning (via this)

IN THE END

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o' clock, and you will enter the long, dark teatime of the soul.

--Douglas Adams


I came home to find that Kt had exposed the sad truth about Sundays on our kitchen wall.

When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.

--Adam Gopnik, Why We Use Cookbooks

What I meant with that list was that I have finally been making enough time for (in no particular order): friends, classes, work, a mutually-beneficial thing with TMBBITW, preparations for the future, my health, and my parents. Success!

AN EMPTY WHITE ROOM

He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad...Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

--Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

GOOD MORNING

THESE THINGS HAPPEN

Lau never expected to become a fortune-cookie writer. After graduating from Columbia with degrees in engineering and business...

--Jeremy Olshan, Cookie Master

TRITE BUT IMPORTANT EPIPHANIC DREAMS

Everyone who sees our new apartment comments on how much better it is than our old apartments, which is true, it is far far better, but come on now, the old apartment wasn't that gross was it?

I have this huge bedroom now. And not one but two closets. And a roommate who is not just a roommate but a friend. And a spacious kitchen. And friends who are also neighbors out walking their dog. And a neighborhood.

Crazy things are afoot. It will be nice, I think, when classes start so I can devote time to things like grammar and ballet instead of massive important all caps scary life-things like LOVE and RELATIONSHIPS OF ALL KINDS. If it's not one thing it's another.

AURALLY EXCITED VERSION

Today at work I drew pictures of animals smoking cigarettes.

THAT'S ALL, FOLKS

...or maybe he is also too busy and soon the whole world will be one huge beehive where everyone swarms above the ground, too distracted to go anywhere except forward. forward! onward! everyone will cry and with a great bang the sun will become a red giant and we will die.

--KD, circa two days ago

Well I certainly don't understand anything that happened today but I'm glad it's over.

I thought about life, about my life, the embarrassments, the little coincidences, the shadows of alarm clocks on bedside tables.

--Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close