Dear Charlotte's city planners: Seriously?

I got back from the Marriott and TFA stuff by 4:00 today, so I had some time to run to the post office, make dinner, write some emails, and then I thought I'd go for a run. I'm not what you call "in shape" so I figured I'd go for 2 miles, 20+ minutes, easy peasy. This was the route I had in mind when I left the apartment. (I live by the "D".)

Not quite. Charlotte has the most confusing street layout I have ever seen. Roads change names 3 or 4 times within a couple miles, they zig zag, connect in bizarre intersections, and half of them are named 'Queens.' You can stand at what, to all appearances, is the intersection of Queens and Queens. And then Queens turns into Kings, which makes total sense. This is the route I wound up taking:
I have circled for you all the pieces of road that are called Queens. Every time I thought "Oh! This is Queens, I know where I am"...surprise!! It's the wrong piece of Queens and it actually just changed its name to Morehead. 20 minutes of pleasant jogging turned into 20 minutes of pleasant jogging followed by 30 minutes of incredibly confused and sweaty walking. Thank you Charlotte, for making the executive decision that I needed a harder workout.

Our house is a very, very, very fine house

Today's my last day of freedom before it's back to TFA-land and the Marriott. I decided to pull out one of my p90x DVDs (for the first time in over two years) and spent an hour doing Kenpo with Tony Horton. I was pleasantly surprised to not be keeling over by the end - credit I'm going to give to LA Boxing back in Chicago. Made some ham and eggs, and a cup of tea, ate some nutella, and got to work on a painting I've been doing to go over my bed.

It's going to be half of a diptych, because I want the whole piece to be as wide as my mattress. But I figure it'll have the green, blue and brown that I currently have going on in my mismatched bedroom, and it'll give me something to put behind my bed without my having to go buy a headboard. Or a bedframe. The photo I'm working from is from an issue of my favorite magazine Orion and is part of a series of "landscapes" taken underwater in ponds and streams. It's the biggest watercolor I've ever tried, and it's taking me a lot longer than I thought it would, but it's nice, meditative work and I'm happy with how it's looking so far. It's been too long since I made anything pretty.

Otherwise, I've been listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash (thanks to a hefty donation from my Dad's iTunes), chatting with faraway friends of the Biber and Ex types, and enjoying one hell of a thunderstorm from my cozy screen porch. I have no porch furniture at the moment, but since I also have no dining room/kitchen table, I've at least got a spare chair.

Week One = Success

I think I'm going to love Charlotte. I knew I loved my apartment from day one, but I've been spending time this week getting to know this whole new city, and I think I'm liking it. To reiterate what I'm sure I've said before...it is so good to have a home again. Sarah stopped over for dinner on Friday, and even though I don't have any dining room furniture yet (arrives from Delaware in a month), we had a fantastic meal. A meal that wasn't cooked in the cafeteria at Delta State. Pasta with broccoli, and toasted garlic and breadcrumbs, with garlic bread and green salad. Plus strawberries were on sale at Harris Teeter, so that was dessert. Very classy, even if we had to use magazines as place mats on my coffee table.

An additional success this week was spending Friday night in Winston-Salem with some excellent people.

I drove up to hang out with Reed and Discepelo, only to discover Kate M. and Caroline T. were there too! Plus a bunch of other cool folks, some still in college (some younger than students I've taught!) some not. It was a fairly ridiculous evening, but a nice reminder that there's no need to start feeling old at 25 if I can still flip a solo cup and chug Bud Light. A good deal of the night looked like this:
After my brief return to college, I drove back to Charlotte the next morning, went to get lunch at a place called the Thomas Street Tavern. While there, I met a number of interesting people at the bar. I was sitting there with my Red Oak when an old man and his wife sit down one stool over. The man sets an empty pickle jar on the bar. I looked closer, and noticed the jar was not in fact empty. There were 15 or 20 spotted beetles crawling around inside it. The bartender (sexy) came over and apparently knew the guy and his wife (as well as everyone else at the bar) and beetle-man started explaining to hot-bartender that he'd collected the beetles from his garden to bring down to the guys over at the hardware store to see if they could tell him what they were and what to do about them. I asked if I could look at the bugs, and he began telling me how they were all over his yellow squash, just eating it to pieces, but that the guys at the hardware store told him they were spotted cucumber beetles and that he could spray them with [something I forget] to get rid of them. He'd brought them to the bar in case anyone else wanted to see what they looked like so they could identify them on their own plants. After showing the bugs around for a few minutes, he gave them to the bartender to throw away. The bartender asked, "Should I put a little whiskey in there? Give them a glorious end?" but beetle-man thought that would be unnecessary. So the bartender chucks the pickle jar, and then he goes and pulls out a plastic grocery bag of cucumbers from behind the bar! Some other bar patron had grown them and left them at the bar to be given out to anyone who wanted one. In retrospect, I probably should have taken one, but the pickle jar of cucumber beetles was bizarre enough already, and the production of home-grown cucumbers completely caught me off guard.

This is not something that would happen in Chicago. But I absolutely loved it.

Further successes this week include: Yesterday I walked to the library and got a library card, plus four books (on economics, the Revolutionary War and the Constitution), and a Belgian movie (Le Fils) that looked appealing. Then I got dinner in NoDa at Cabo Fish Taco with Taylor K. who came down for the evening and brought me muffins. This morning I went to Uptown Church, which I think I might go back to next week. It's not Covenant Chicago, but we sang a lot of the same songs (albeit sans the violin/mandolin/accordion/recorder/cello that made music at Covenant so great), and the sermon was some good, solid exegesis on John 15 (I am the vine and you are the branches). The building they meet in has some unbelievably beautiful stained glass and I'm a sucker for a beautiful church. Three people introduced themselves and were very friendly and sincere. Plus, it's a mile-and-a-half from my apartment, which means once it's not hideously hot, I could conceivably walk. Or ride the bike that will also be arriving from Delaware. And then, after church I caught up with Lauren R. for lunch at 300 East in Dilworth. So...all that to say...success! Charlotte's looking pretty fantastic!

Dear DMV...

Dear DMV on Idlewild Road off of Independence:

Here are some suggestions for making peoples' experiences at your establishment a) less than four hours long and b) not prone to causing violent thoughts.

1. I understand you have a very small office and a very small hallway. If people have to queue up out along the sidewalk in the heat for an hour or more, you should find some local school children to sell lemonade. It also might be nice to provide some benches. You could also move to a bigger office.

2. Patch up the three fist-sized holes in the hallway walls. By the time people get to the hallway, chances are they've been waiting an hour already, and don't need reminders that they really just want to hit something.

3. Clean the walls in the hallway. Seeing the visible accumulation of people's butt- and head-filth rubbed along the walls in parallel gray smudgy stripes subtly suggests that the DMV as a great place to catch communicable diseases.

4. Rather than have a lady pop out of the door once every two hours to remind people that this office doesn't do tags and registration, have you considered posting that in written form someplace outside so people can find that out before waiting in line for two hours.

5. Since you don't accept credit cards, or out-of-state checks, putting an ATM in your building would be smart. As a side note, the ATM at the Circle K across the street is out of order.

6. You might want to instruct your employees that, while friendly is better than surly, when someone has been at the DMV for three-and-a-half hours already, they would probably prefer not to have a conversation about Keanu Reeves movies if the employee perpetuating the conversation cannot talk and type at the same time.

Sincerely,

Me

Quick! I have internet!

I've been stealing some internet until I get my own (Friday!) and it's working right now! Which means I've got 30 seconds to write a quick blog post and then get some Hulu going. I'm not paying for cable, so I'm going to have to buy an antenna for my TV to get any channels. Toby was giving me all sorts of advice involving tinfoil and stripping coax cable, but I think I'll be conventional on this one. For now. I told him if he wants to deck the place out in tinfoil when he gets here, he can go for it.

I walked to the library this morning, but didn't think to bring some proof that I live here, so I couldn't get my library card. I'd go tomorrow, but the libraries here apparently had some big funding cuts and are only open four days a week. I'll have to wait till Friday before getting my L-card...which is probably more exciting to me than it should be. I've got to start bulking up on economics, government, politics, the Constitution, Founding Fathers, and so forth, so I have something to teach these teenagers in a month!

The place is coming together slowly but surely. I successfully hung a couple pictures in the hallway, and then bent a couple nails trying to hang pictures on the hardest plaster walls I've ever encountered. I like that my apartment feels solidly built, but it doesn't need to be that solid.

And tomorrow...I'm driving up to Salisbury to see my friend Jon Furr in a play! Why? Because he lives in NC too! It's wild to me that I can suddenly just get in my car and drive like, 30 minutes to see friends I haven't seen in ages. I'm liking being back east.

Point B

After starting my move at the end of April, I've finally made it to my new home. So far all I've really seen of Charlotte is the U-Haul storage facility, Wal-Mart, Food Lion and Panera, but psh, I've got time to see the city. What I'm really excited about is my new apartment. After living in dorms in Mississippi for five weeks, anything resembling a real home would be incredibly welcome, but my place here is absolutely fantastic and I love it. I loved my Chicago apartment, and loved the big open kitchen (my kitchen here is smaller and galley-style), but this place feels like a real house. It was built circa 1940, and is made out of real wood, and plasdter, and hardwood, like they don't build apartments out of anymore. No wallboard, no laminate "wood"....also no washer/dryer, but I have located a nearby laundromat and am being optimistic about that little adventure. My friend Sarah came over yesterday and helped me unpack (!!!) but I'm still surrounded by boxes and can't find my shower curtain. When my Dad drives down to move Hannah back into college, he's going to bring me some furniture from home my Mom's trying to clear out of the house. So until then, I'm without a dining room table and some other items, but whatever. I slept better last night than I have in two months...because I have my bed back! I have my tea kettle back! I have my books back! I have my couch and my coffee table back! I have my art supplies back! I've got a lot more unpacking today, and am going to go help Sarah buy a car this afternoon, but people have been asking for photos so here they are. I still have to write about my last week at school, about my amazing summer school students, and about the letter that my one student Faith wrote me which made things suddenly very worth it. But...another day, another entry. For now, enjoy some shots of my apartment! Once it's all decorated and tidied up, I will have to post some "after" photos. Take these as "before":
This first one is taken from where you walk into the apartment. Big double windows facing the street are to the right. Arched doorway goes to the dining room and kitchen, other doorway goes to the bedrooms and the bathroom.
Back hallway with the bathroom and bedrooms (one on either side of the bathroom).
My awesome retro bathroom. That subway tile looks strangely familiar...
My bedroom. Two windows, tiny little closet, and just enough space for me to put my rug down. I love it. Those radiators aren't functional any more, but they left them in the building because they look bad ass. There's a big one in the living room that will make the perfect shelf for plants.
My first dining room! Ha! The door leads out to my screen porch, which is just big enough for a couple chairs and a little table. (Or, for now, a kitchen chair and a cardboard box.) You go into the dining room and the kitchen is on your left.
Little galley kitchen, backdoor to a screened-in mud room/storage area/place where I can put my new worm composting that I want to start soon. I was standing in front of the walk-in pantry when I took the picture. There's a ton of cabinet space, but only one drawer in the entire kitchen. Where did people in the 1940s keep their silverware??

Okay folks, that's all! I'm stealing some internet from a neighbor, but it's spotty. Once I get my own I'll be posting more. I've got no commitments until next Wednesday, when TFA's "Round Zero" professional development/planning for the school year gets started. My plans include seeing Jon Furr in a play, hiking in some mountains, seeing what's to do uptown (in Charlotte, downtown is called "uptown" - it's very confusing), checking out another church Sunday, and spending as little money as possible because we don't get paid until September!

But man, I'm glad to finally be here.

Six Days Till Charlotte!!

I will miss my students here, but there are approximately 283 reasons why I can't wait to get to Charlotte. Here are some of them:

I haven't cooked my own food in five weeks. In Charlotte I will have a whole kitchen with a walk-in pantry.

I haven't had fewer than 10 mosquito bites on my body at any given time since I got to Mississippi.

I will have a bathroom with a bathtub and a window and 1940s subway tile.

I will have my big, wonderful, full-size mattress again. My Delta State mattress is pretty weak. And the bedframe is ugly brown metal.

My car won't get sprayed with clouds of mosquito-killing insecticide every night.

I'll have a fridge to put my beer in.

I can get up and drive my car to work every morning, instead of riding 40 minutes in an un-airconditioned school bus.

I can sit on my couch and watch tv on Hulu and make myself a white russian.

I can paint pictures again and have all my art supplies back.

I can drive to the mountains, and hang out in Asheville, and go hiking and camping and driving through land that isn't fields of soybeans and corn.

I can go to art galleries that are closer than two hours away. And I can get involved in a church again. And I can go to the occasional sacred harp singing. And I can eat barbeque. And buy a grill. And drink beer on my porch. And . . . my brother Toby is going to live with me!!!

New Orleans

I sat down to write about my first black church worship service experience (three hours!! so much yelling!!), then I thought oh, I should write about my trip to Memphis yesterday. But then I realized I still haven't written about LAST weekend, when a bunch of us went to New Orleans. So...backtracking and away we go.

We had a three-day weekend for the Fourth of July, so me and four other girls drove down to New Orleans last weekend. I hadn't been there since Mock Trial Nationals in high school, and recall that experience mostly as working furiously in our hotel rooms and one brief trip to an underground mall to buy beignets. (I was sure to get some beignets on this trip too.)

Can't say I've been anyplace at all like this city before. Parts of it were beautiful. Gorgeous houses with those high balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows, sphagnum moss on trees, beautiful cemeteries, quaint-looking streets, and so forth. There was free live music at just about every bar we walked by the first afternoon, artists selling their work on the street, brass bands wandering through outdoor cafes. It's definitely a southern city, with hot, heavy air that keeps things moving slow.
And then it got dark...and we made our way to Bourbon Street. Wowee. I used to look back on my college days, those crazy nights in Rome or Prague or Vienna, and think man...that was out of control! We knew how to party! Oh no. Those nights were dolly tea parties compared to this. There are no open container laws in New Orleans so everyone can wander around with their drinks. I saw more overflowing liquor, and overflowing breasts, than I have ever seen crammed in one place in my life. The five of us were pretty much the only white people in any bar we went into, and our cute little dresses and flip flops stuck out like burquas in a crowd full of neon hot pants and red mesh tube tops and leopard print corsets and platform stilettos.

We had a great time dancing and drinking silly-colored drinks, but good lord I don't know how anyone does that more than once. As much fun as it was, I left the city feeling a little dirty. First of all, because it WAS dirty. They bring out the mounted police at night, and they don't seem to think it necessary to equip the horses with those handy little tail bags. So it smelled like horse shit and beer and sewage; I stepped over some of the foulest street puddles I have ever seen. But even when you didn't smell something gross, you had to look at it. I've never seen straight up porn plastered in public places quite like they've got it Bourbon Street. Strip clubs advertised "Barely Legal Girls!", their storefronts covered in posters showing the advertised product. Because that's what those girls are made into. It just made me sad, I guess. It's not empowering when your sexuality becomes the only thing anyone values about you.

And it wasn't just Bourbon Street. We walked into a seemingly inordinate number of souvenir shops, and more than one of them was selling mardi gras beads strung with giant plastic penises. Or giant plastic penises being embraced by tiny women. Or giant plastic penises being embraced by tiny women that you could fill with water like a squirt gun. On a necklace. First of all, a freaky dismembered penis made out of plastic and hanging on a string of beads is weird enough. But they were everywhere! I don't know, my feminist side just kept getting riled up I guess. The commodification of sex isn't good for anyone, but I think is especially damaging to women, since we are the ones typically made into the objects for sale.

But....all that aside. We saw the most amazing fireworks show on the 4th. They shot them off two barges on the Mississippi, and they were hands down the coolest fireworks I've ever seen. There was a brass band marching around the whole time, and when the fireworks were done they moved onto a bandstand, followed by a whole crowd of people who danced and danced for the next hour. I don't think I've been part of a more joyous crowd of people. Man, I love America.

"She talks to me and be nice"

Today, TFA had us give our students a survey that asks questions about our classroom environment, what they think of us as a teacher, etc. I've been feeling like I've been letting kids get away with too much talking and not being as immediate or consistent with consequences as I could be. Don't get me wrong, my classroom management is light-years ahead of where it was when I taught before (when I had students running around the room waving paintbrushes). My kids shut up when I need them to and take notes when I tell them to and pay attention (most of the time), but if Teach for America teaches you anything it's to constantly ask "What could I be doing better?"

Anyway, so I wasn't sure what kinds of responses I'd get from kids on the surveys. I told them they could leave their names off if they wanted to be anonymous, and stressed that we just wanted them to be honest. So, I was happy to get responses that were pretty much positive across the board. It's one thing to have someone observe your classroom and leave you an encouraging note. That's nice of course, and having people in and out of my room every day leaving such notes has been a real confidence booster, but ultimately you aren't there for the people observing you. Hearing some of the things my students wrote was just really encouraging and the best reinforcement of why I'm teaching in the first place. I honestly didn't expect to be able to have much of an impact on kids in three weeks, and although obviously I'm not going to pretend I've altered their entire academic trajectory, seeing even just one kid write that they think I've taught them a lot...I mean, yeah. Just humbling and powerful and makes me incredibly excited to meet my kids in Charlotte...who I'll get for a whole semester!

But anyway, I thought I'd share some of the responses that made me the proudest and happiest.

"Mrs. Anderson I like you. You are a good teacher and I learned more than I did when I was in school."

What has your teacher done to help you know how to behave?

"Just told me How to act and I act that way."
"Talk respectfully to us."
"Nothing cause I am respectful anyways" [Got several responses along these lines. My students apparently have very high opinions of their own behavior.]

"This teacher is a good irreplaceable teacher." [Check out this vocab!! Spelled right, too!!]

How do you know how much your teacher cares or doesn't care?
"Because she wouldn't be here helping me pass."

I didn't think I'd get attached to these kids so quickly, but as much as I can't wait to get the heck out of Mississippi and back to North Carolina, I'm gonna miss these kids a lot.

Missiles aren't people.

Today I taught my class about the Cuban missile crisis. I give them a quiz at the end of every class to make sure they all learned what they were supposed to learn during the hour. It's a couple multiple choice and a couple single-sentence answers. Most of my kids got 9s or 10s today. But one student wrote this as an answer to the question 'Why was the U.S. worried about missiles in Cuba?': "Because the missles thought USSR had weapons + USSR thought missle had weapons."

It hadn't even occurred to me that I might have to teach my kids what the word "Missile" means. Most of them knew it, but this one student clearly had no idea what the word meant, and so just wasn't able to make the connection throughout the lesson that "missiles" WERE the nuclear weapons we were talking about, and not some group of people living in Cuba. This next week and the one after I'm going to just take a big step back and go over the vocab in everything we read. No wonder so many of these kids can't get through an article on their own with any idea what it's saying - if you don't know what half the words mean, how can you be expected to have any clue about the content?

On the one hand, I continue to be impressed and amazed by some of the stuff my kids show me they know, but on the other hand, I keep being surprised and kind of horrified at the things they've been allowed to get this far without knowing. One student asked me last week if the people who blew up the twin towers were sent here from another country. He legitimately had no idea why they did what they did. Then he wanted to know if we took any revenge on anyone, and kind of had no clue about how we wound up in the war we've been in for the last 9 years.

We have six more class days of summer school before we give them their end-of-class assessment and leave Mississippi. Part of me keeps thinking how much these kids deserve the world's best teacher to get them up to speed, instead of someone who's pretty much learning as she goes. And then part of me realizes that whatever teachers they've had up till now didn't really do their job to the extent it needed to be done, and then I wish I could have them for a whole year because at least I'd be trying my damnedest. Four weeks of class with pre-determined objectives where we're more or less teaching to a test isn't close to being enough to get these kids on the track they deserve to be on.

A tour of the Delta

I just got back from New Orleans this afternoon, but went to upload those photos and realized there were a couple from earlier in this grand southern adventure that I'd yet to put up. So, I will leave my New Orleans trip for another night and give you a quick snippet of Mississippi.

First week here I signed up for a bus tour being offered by a professor here at Delta State. We drove through corn fields, and cotton fields, and rice fields, and looked at some Blues landmarks, including a crossroads near Dockery Farm where Robert Johnson might have sold his soul to the Devil to learn how to play the guitar.

Since the story itself is obviously apocryphal, the site itself is also apocryphal, and so the actual spot we stopped at looked like this.

A major highlight of the trip was (as is usually the highlight of most things for me) the food. We all got lunch at a soul food place all-you-can-eat buffet. I got fried chicken, chicken with gravy, and some pulled pork that made me suddenly mourn my five vegetarian years. Plus beans, plus greens, plus boiled cabbage. If I didn't value my cardiovascular health, I could eat like this every day.
If I didn't have to get up in less than five hours, I could go on about the other historical sites we drove past, but I'm going to be lazy, give you one more little tidbit and then throw up some photos. The last stop on our tour was a place called Po' Monkey's. Po' Monkey's is one of the last remaining Juke Houses, which were make-shift music halls where people could come and hang out and play the blues. It was built as a sharecropper's shack back in the day, and looks like it was pieced together with tin and plywood from a junk heap.
But this guy named Willie Seaberry lives here, and has lived here for sixty-some-odd years. And every Thursday the place is open for business. Sometimes there is still live music, although usually there is a DJ that works the night. Mr. Seaberry doesn't exactly have a liquor license, but he sells beers out of the fridge in the kitchen of the shack. The inside of the place was decked out in the accumulated memorabilia of sixty years. There was a definite monkey theme, with stuffed monkeys hung all over the walls, but otherwise the ornament itself didn't really seem to matter provided it covered a piece of wall or ceiling and was colorful or interesting. All 80 or so of us mostly middle-class, mostly white kids piled off the bus and within minutes were packed into this tiny little shack that maybe holds 40 comfortably, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the quaintness and oddness of it all. Mr. Seaberry was friendly and seemed happy to have us gawking about, but it felt a little like invading someone's living room and going around commenting on their family photos. I hope this place stays around for a long time.

It was oddly reassuring to me to be reminded that America doesn't all look like the middle-class East Coast suburbs I grew up in, or the upscale metropolitan areas where I've lived. Whole huge chunks of it look like rice fields and cypress-wood shacks, and to the people who live there, that's America. The view that I know I tend to have of what (or who) our country is can get so limited that it's humbling, and sometimes startling, to be reminded what exists outside whatever little concept of America we're comfortable with.