Go away, stuff.

I have a fear of being trapped in stuff. This might have something to do with growing up in my house, where the chair-to-family-member ratio is about 8:1 and the book-to-family-member ratio is probably in the neighborhood of 175:1. It also comes from moving into three (and out of two) apartments in three cities in the last three years. Nothing makes you realize how much crap you have that you don't need more than moving. I love getting rid of things and there's something satisfyingly freeing about throwing bags for the Goodwill in my trunk. Yesterday, I went through my bookshelf and my closet and got two big grocery bags out the door and out of my life.
Books are one thing I have a hard time parting with, but most of the ones I dumped were either freebies or were for college classes or were fluffy, silly books to begin with. I'm pretty ruthless with my clothes, although I have a bad habit of saying "Oh, but I could re-sew this into something else!" about items that have nice fabric or some other vaguely appealing feature. However, I have a lot less storage space in this apartment than in my last one, so it just doesn't make sense to keep a bunch of clothes I don't really wear and don't have a place to store.

So with two big bags of stuff gone, I felt justified buying a flannel shirt and a jumper and a few other fall things from Target. AND...finally spending a $20 Amazon gift card. Cubic-foot for cubic-foot, still a net loss. I got four books. Two novels (Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and Little Bee by Chris Cleave) and two Christian-y books (Crazy Love by Francis Chan and A Praying Life by Paul Miller). I will be sure to let you all know if they're good.

I'd like to marry Wendell Berry

I've been reading a collection of Wendell Berry's essays lately. Usually I don't read things with a pencil in hand unless it's for a class or something specific. But Berry is so full of beautiful beautiful language and precise ideas and ...ah!! I just love him. It's going to be difficult for me to restrain myself from posting daily excerpts accompanied by rapturous, rambling praise. However, there were two brief passages I read today in his essay "A Native Hill" that I thought were just very lovely, and that said similar things in different ways.

"The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever."

I think that just struck me because my life feels so striving, sometimes. Always trying to get the next thing done, the next task accomplished, the next goal met. Which is good, of course, or can be, but leaves a residual frustration that I can't fully devote myself to any one thing because I have such limited time in which to do so much. Surely that can't be the way God intended us to live out our days. Lilies of the field, and don't be anxious about anything, and all that, right? The other passage (on the opposite page from this one) is this:

"Too much that we do is done at the expense of something else, or somebody else. There is some intransigent destructiveness in us. My days, though I think I know better, are filled with a thousand irritations, worries, regrets for what has happened and fears for what may, trivial duties, meaningless torments - as destructive of my life as if I wanted to be dead. Take today for what it is, I counsel myself. Let it be enough...We are in the habit of contention - against the world, against each other, against ourselves.

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are."

I think, for me at least, so much of that constant striving and grasping and anxiety appears when I refuse to allow that I'm small, and not God, and can't do it all by myself. I can't, by sheer force of will and strenuous effort, learn to be better than I am. Yes, of course you can work to "improve" yourself...all those things we resolve to do differently with each new year. But letting things be enough, resting in the knowledge that the answers are external to ourselves, that the ends are bigger than ourselves... oh Wendell. Why are you so old and married?

Dear King George III

We've been going through the Declaration of Independence, and the build-up to the Revolutionary War this past week. Today, our third block had the option of writing letters to King George "breaking up" with him, or writing their own "Declaration of Independence" from something they didn't want to be involved with anymore. Our kids' might have shaky writing skills, but they're funny, and smart as hell, and this assignment made me love them even more:

dear king george,

we gave been together for some time now and i'm sorry to tell you this but I am splitting up from you. With all the ridiculous acts you've been creating is messing up my life. Especially, the Quartering Act why would you let some random soldier come to my house and eat, sleep, and shit. Just about a week ago some White soldier who didn't have any boots came to my house telling me to buy him boots.

Dear King George

I have had enough for your total B.S.! You don't pay any attention to me. I do everything you ask and when i slip you you want to start to tax us and make us pay extra for little things. The quartering law you just passed could have been your saddest attempt yet. You have no idea how many nights I have had to give up my bed for some dirty, stinky soldier who has a bad snoring Problem and tried to clean out my entire kitchen cause of his overly hungry appitite.

Dear King George III

Im breaking up with your government because, the laws you make are so harsh; one of them is the Quartering Act, I don't want no dirty Soilder comming to sleep in my bed. I want to sleep with comfort with my women.

And here are a few "Declarations of Independence":

[written by one of our Vietnamese students]
I want to be Free in my life is Freedom of my country, because in my country they don't let us go to church. And to do whatever we want they control everyting. Like if you want to go to another country, you have to ask permission from them and them why? And they take control Religion they like us to go to church and they want us to do like what they do. And we have to listen to them. And if you go to church and they catch it they take to the police office and ask some question or take you to jail.

Cartoons I grew up up with you. Having you there every morning with my Bowl of cereal. But now I'm getting older an now I juzt think your for littel Babys But Don't Think That it's just you my cartoon Tite whites got to go to ok bye

The last one is my favorite. Took me a second to decode it, but yes, I think that's supposed to be "tighty whiteys."

Suzy Homemaker

Since acquiring a dining room table and four vaguely matching chairs (and since finally getting a paycheck that allows me to buy more than cereal and milk), I've been meaning to have some people over for dinner. So I did! Getting up in the morning and spending the day cooking and baking is something that, just a few years ago, I never in a million years would have imagined I'd find enjoyable. But after a week of getting up at 5, and getting home at 6, it's awfully nice to have something else to do that's engaging and creative and actually produces a tangible, practical result. Not that teaching isn't those things in its own way, but physically making something, especially something that you can then enjoy with friends, really is kind of meditative sometimes.

I made crispy fennel bread sticks first. The recipe is from Chico Hot Springs Resort in Montana, which wisely publishes a cookbook. (They also have an outdoor hot spring pool and some of the biggest freaking sky you've ever seen.) I also made carrot gnocchi, which I had to attempt twice after failing at pureeing carrot, but which were infinitely worth it. Plus ribbony zucchini with basil and lemon, plus a lemon cake with a glaze that I had to improvise because I didn't feel like buying a bottle of limoncello so I could use a tablespoon of it. Yes, I'm a Food&Wine magazine whore. But I'm totally okay with that. One of these days I'll have the sickest cooking skills ever and will be able to whip up recipes out of thin air, but until that day comes...foodandwine.com it is.

Although my plates are mismatched sized, my glasses are mismatched shapes, and we used paper towels for napkins, the table looked pretty sexy:

We stayed up till almost one talking about Israel and creationists and the problems with our public education system, and probably some other things that I should remember but don't.

And so by Sunday morning the table looked sexy in that rumpled, bleary-eyed, morning-after kind of way:


And I've still got leftover cake. Win, and win.

Why yes, thank you...

...I do make the most bad ass birthday cards ever.

My friend Sarah collects owl-themed things. And had a birthday last week.

A spelling lesson

Over the long Labor Day weekend, Toby and I paid a visit to the Home Depot and got some curtain rods. After much effort, plaster dust, paint flaking and dulled drill bits, we got them hung. Apparently you need a masonry bit or, I don't know, a diamond-edged spike, to put holes in my walls. Regardless, the place has gotten a lot homier over this past week, so for the benefit of curious family members, here are a bunch of new photos of 518 Willoughby:

Still needed are two barrel lampshades for my 60s golden pine cone lamps (on the end table). Also, some throw pillows. Also, a GFI outlet in the kitchen that can power the microwave without tripping the whole circuit.
Toby brought his turntable! He also brought a stool from the old Korner Diner in Newark (may it rest in peace). The stool make a nice, shiny side table, and its peely gray vinyl is still a comfy seat. Next up is re-covering the chair cushions. Midnight blue? Gold? Ideas?


A dimly lit photo of the dining room...but...I have a table! And four bentwood chairs. AND I have back the cuckoo clock I got in Germany in 10th grade! Although the damn cuckoo itself is so irritating I finally took the weight off the cuckoo chain.
These curtain rods were a nightmare to hang. This one is hung with a nail on one end, and a half-in screw on the other. There's a 5-inch circle of paint that popped off the wall when I tried to drill a hole, so that's held onto the wall with a giant piece of packing tape. Plaster walls are nice and solid and good for keeping the place well-insulated, but good lord they're a pain in the ass to hang ANYTHING on.

Still some things to pick up, hang up, and tidy up, but the place is looking a lot nicer than a month ago.

Teaching goes well. I think, to be honest, I had braced myself to be miserable and stressed and hate my life at this point. TFA even gave us a whole presentation about the phases of your first year of teaching, and how by October many people reach the "disillusionment" phase, or something to that effect. Apparently last year the Charlotte corps had more corps members quit after their first year than any other region. Yikes, right? I'm happy to report, however, that I actually very much like my job so far, and the people I work with, and our students. I'm also very thankful that it's my second year teaching, and that I'm not doing this straight out of college. Plus, co-teaching with someone who's been at the school for a year already has made a big difference in terms of the amount of work I have to do alone. Being able to divide up grading, or planning, or what have you makes things a lot less overwhelming. It's also nice to be living in a region where I have friends and family within easy driving distance.

As an addendum, one of my favorite kids (although one of the most obnoxious in class) stayed after school recently to get his homework done. He had to write sentences using vocab words from an article we'd read in class. He wrote one sentence with the word "wuz," and so I told him to spell "was" correctly. He erased "w-u-z" but then paused. He couldn't tell me how to spell "was." With some prodding, he figured it out, but it took a minute or two. "Man, I be texting too much!" he said, and then grabbed a dry erase marker and showed us how he and his friends spell things. "Dnt" and "Cmeing" and "Wut"... "Wen ru cmeing ovr?" I pointed out that "Cmeing" has just as many letters as "Coming," but somehow that didn't seem to be the point. Anyhow, it had never occurred to me that kids might actually FORGET how to spell words like WAS!!! because they write everything in text language. Even on facebook I see kids spell stuff like that. Sometimes I think there must be some contest to come up with whose spelling requires the longest amount of time to decipher.

Anyway, I was at the fabric store today, and I saw this:

Really??

My neighbor Genevieve

I'm getting ready to make some grilled cheese for Toby and me for lunch when someone knocks on my back door. An old lady with a red plaid shirt, and gray hair held in dangly coils with bobby pins stood in my back porch and introduced herself as Genevieve. Genevieve lives in one of the other buildings and had noticed that I liked plants (she pointed to my screen porch, where I have a couple two-foot-high rubber trees, and a spider plant on a plant stand). She has a number of plants on her porch and was going to be getting rid of some of them soon, and would I like some? I realized I wasn't sure which unit she lived in, so I offered to walk outside with her so she could show me. We walk across the parking lot and she points out a number of pots of soil she has stashed in the grass next to her porch. "I know when you move into a new place you never have pots, you never have good soil," she explains. "Would you like some of these? Here, this is good soil in this one." So she gives me a pot with soil in it, and a variegated ivy on a plastic hanger that she didn't want anymore. Then she asks if I want a cutting from an orchid she has inside. Obviously the answer is yes, so I follow her into her apartment and through to her screen porch where she just snaps a piece of stem off of a plant and hands it to me. "You don't have to root this at all, you just moisten the soil and put it in and it will flower in...around February."

Score. So I've got a variegated ivy, a cutting from some kind of orchid that looks like a cross between a begonia and a Wandering Jew, and she promised she'd let me know when she was ready to get rid of some more plants. She is 82, apparently, and from Paris. She studied at the Sorbonne. And she's living on her own with a screen porch full of bonsai, begonias and astroturf. And just happened to notice I had some plants on my porch.

I have located my camera charger. It's in Delaware. Once I repossess it, I'll be able to take some pictures of things again. Like my new (old) bike.