fuck. this. shit.

fuck it.

it gets warmer and better; banana pancakes

SPRING IS HERE. (sort of.) there is a daffodil that came up in the garden behind the apartment - yesterday it was standing tall and today the bloom has fallen off, killed by the freezing cold we had last night. but it came out, so that's progress - new york city is WAKING UP AGAIN and i realize again that this is my absolute favorite time here.

AND school is going better, too. i'm beginning to get the hang of getting them hooked on the books themselves and doing a lot of the things that i did when i was student teaching with sean desilva but forgot in the daily crush. (probably because i feel like i have to spend so much time just getting them to acknowledge that they're in a classroom. but i'm beginning to think the best way to do that is just to charge ahead and keep "heeling" them back to the material. and when i do a good job of hooking them from the beginning, it's easier to heel them and some of the behavioral problems kind of take care of themselves. it also helps that we're doing "the outsiders" and "night.") a sample lesson title: "A MORAL QUESTION: Would You Kill Baby Hitler?" wherein we talked about whether we would have killed infant Hitler if given the chance to go back in time, complete with a picture of Baby Hitler. most of the kids actually said that they wouldn't. i'm going to ask them again how they feel when we get to the end of the book, or maybe right after the part when they talk about throwing the babies into the incinerators.

other things are good, too. i had much more of a balance last week between doing school shit and doing my own shit - i'm getting in yoga and have been doing some good cooking and reading. i just read this cool book mom sent me called "the wild within" which is all about stalking the self & the need to be able to see things for what they are outside of our thoughts. it makes me come back to looking at what i really want to teach & the kinds of change i'd like to affect in my own life, i.e., being able to connect with the natural world on a regular basis and helping others connect with it as well. now i'm reading a book that sibylle gave me a long time ago called "nonviolent communication" which intersects with the book mom gave me because it's all about being able to phrase yourself in a way that acknowledges that our thoughts are just reactions. i'll be interested to see if i can make it work in my classroom.

i wanted to share this awesome banana pancake recipe i made this morning. it was kind of a triumph because i made it without eggs - pete's little bro mike, a vegan, is visiting - but it came out better than when i do it with eggs. it's easy as hell, too:

blend 2 bananas with 2 cups of soymilk and 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil. mix 3 cups of flour with some salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, a dash of cinnamon, a 1/2 cup of oatmeal and 1/4 cup of chopped walnuts. add the blended ingredients to the dry ingedients by mixing with as few strokes as possible. COOK 'EM & EAT' EM w/ maply syrup! (serves 3)

an essay is born

wow - just had a cool moment that i wanted to get down before i start asserting the full volume of my bitchery again:

i read a really strange introduction at the beginning of an essay i assigned to them, and totally couldn't piece it together (honestly, it is poetic how cumbersome this kid's syntax is - like you couldn't put words together like that if you wanted to) and then i read it to pete and he kind of parsed it out and suddenly, it totally made sense, and was actually a really thorough attempt at beginning the essay with an anecdote. and the rest of the essay, right down to the last sentence, was not quite right on, but i could tell that he had picked up on the elegance of the essay structure and had started to assert an idea he had truly considered. it was like AN ESSAY WAS BORN TODAY folks, like i actually saw some of this shit COMING TOGETHER.

and what i realized after that was that THAT was why i even started doing this job - because i fell in love with being able to lay my ideas out like a person might build a house.

9 weeks left

crazy weekend - went to boston for rosie's 21st birthday. went up in the bus with good old jon ledoux & we listened to music through his headphones splitters just like we did back in high school - so good as always to be able to be with my best friend.

we got into boston and then got rosie & went to the harpoon brewery for a free tasting of amazingly delicious beer. then rosie and i went home, hung out at little, had some thai, and then ran the kegs over (it was sort of like getting to do the "21st birthday party- COLLEGE STYLE" that i never did for one reason or another). we went back and got ready at rosie's, and then drove over to the party, looking pretty much as hot as a pair of pagerey-greys have ever looked (rosie in this amazing, royal-blue-sequined mini-dress with black tights and those awesome grey booties she has - i had moments of not recognizing her and then realizing that the beautiful woman was actually my sister).

the party itself was fun, too. (i did a keg stand in rosie's honor - which was judged by jacob carter as "well-executed.") a good mix of people was represented, and i had some good conversations with some of rosie's friends who were there to celebrate her turning 21. a lot of them were surprised to find out that i was rosie's sister when we got to the part of the conversation about whom we knew at the party, and that was cool, too - to see how many people she impacts and then see myself as someone who's been able to witness her as a part of her life. she has got such a big goddamn heart, that rosie. she just loves and loves and loves.

the next morning, i succeeded in prying the birthday girl from her bed and we went with jon and colin first to colin's, where we ate some breakfast and danced to M.I.A., and then to the MFA. we spent a couple of hours looking around. then i got on the bus and came back to new york.

so now it's easter morning, and i'm all alone in my apartment. it's bright and shiny outside, and i had dreams about being a camp counselor again. in my dream, i was trying to show my smallest campers some chicks i had gotten for us to raise, but there was a scheduling problem and they never got to see them the way i had planned, but i didn't really mind and knew that i would be able to make things better the following week. i guess that bodes well, right?

what i did this week was come really close to giving up. i can't do that yet - i've still got 9 weeks, and god knows how much can change in 9 weeks - but it might be that i'm out of my league. and then there's a voice in me that says, 9 weeks! you've been doing it for more than twice that, and the fact that you'll even go back every day is a triumph in itself. all you gotta do, p-g, is just keep getting up everyday. and even if you have to tell yourself every moment that the things that you do are enough, that you are capable, and that this WON'T LAST FOREVER, this shit is well-nigh impossible, but you're doing it.

and what will get me through is applying to a score of schools all over the country. i might have to part with new york (and with the man who wants to stay in new york no matter what) but number one, i'm too young to put my roots down, and number two, there's just got to be something better out there. who knows? it might be right here - i'm applying to other schools here - but why torture myself? i fear that i'm on the road to killing the joy that i used to have for this job, a thing that i can't afford to lose.

days like these

oh now i remember. march. march in the northern climes is like trying to drag a sack of quarters up a steep hill on top of which exists a restaurant which serves the most exquisite food you've ever eaten. except that you're not sure exactly where the restaurant is, and you are beginning to doubt that it even exists.

teaching is getting more brutal now that the "honeymoon" is over. there has been a lot of coming home at 4, getting into bed, and only getting up after staring out the window at the dark with feelings of desperation. i can't say that i'm sure of what i'll do after this summer, but i can't say it might not be this job. and i hate to say it but i think that the only thing really keeping me in the game is that i don't want to be a part of that statistic of the 1 in three teachers who quits after their first year. well, that and my good days. there are good days.

(and also of course the man that is there in good days AND bad days, without whom i would be in godknowswhat kind of state.)

god, what am i doing wrong? it's not the question, though. the only way i'm going to get through this is to pay attention to what i'm doing right, because i'm the one that stands in front of them everyday.

anniversary

last year on this day, i was boarding a plane to mexico. this year, i'm not.

god, i really hate my job. i don't hate my job, though. i don't. i can't, yet. but it is really not what i expected and i am having a hard time tonight. i guess i chose it for myself for that reason?

after the feast

coming back from the holiday, trying to get my mind back in track, and naturally, procrastinating - er, blogging.

quite the past four days. first thanksgiving, which was lovely and more low-key this year. and then friday - goodwill hunting w/ rosepag, wonderful nap and 5-year high school reunion. the reunion was a lot more friendly than i thought it would be and i was really glad i went (but perhaps even more glad to have pete to look to and say "wanna get out of here?" whenever i needed to.) i was only slightly blown away that we are all Groan Ups, and it was cool to come back into that milieu with five years of being ourselves. some people seem to have grown up out of that pressure and some seem to have settled or compressed inwards... i'll be optimistically subjective (for what else, really, can i be?) and count myself amongst the former. mostly. honestly, though, it was kind of a triumph to be around them and be at ease, to realize that the demons that i fought back then didn't get the best of me.

saturday was goodbyes and a little correcting, then visiting bill en route to the rosen-baiers. we had pizza & beer and jon told horrible, horrible jokes and i read to benny and told leo about zombies. dropped rosie off w/ her boyfriend in lee and then went to the dreamaway. drama as usual, but it was great to see the old crew (or the new-old crew, i guess.) i begin to wonder how much of the bullshit is essential and sort of the engine of the magic and how much is perhaps the premonitions of the ship going down. and then i stop entertaining those thoughts and am just thankful that such a place exists. it's that kind of alternative reality, even if it's only one weird little restaurant, that makes me wonder if i'll always be coming back to the berkshires - if i'll end up there eventually.

and now here i am, preparing for what is actually my FIFTH week of teaching. it feels like yesterday that i started and at the same time feels like i've been there for a million years. and even though it's the hardest thing i've ever done, and won't stop being difficult ever, really, i found myself telling a lot of my old classmates that i love my life. and i do - seeing all of the options that have become people's lives for the past five years, and seeing mine, it becomes clear that dreams do come true (and then usually grow to astonish us with how mundane they are.) i mean, here i am, planning how to teach a bunch of brooklyn kids about the stories coming from the navel, as it were, of the collective unconscious (persephone myth tomorrow). here i am, guided on every side by men and women and places that are as beautiful as they are crazy, and i get to be the conduit of that beauty and insanity. i guess we all do, though; it's just the amounts we receive and give away that vary.

lists

god. i've had three damn days to get shit in order and to miraculously become the best english teacher i can be and you know what? i'm not. i didn't use my time well. i got some work done but there's a million other things i should have done, too.

i'm beginning to get it now - there is a certain under-controlness that experienced teachers exude that gets the kids in line - i don't have that yet. the under-controlness apparently comes from lots and lots of lists. lists of grades. lists of points earned for good behavior (pretty much the only way i can get them to sit down and start learning - the high school equivalent of a gold star. yes, i have to give them meaningless points to make them do anything... although the way they react it's clear that they are anything but meaningless). lists of things that were supposed to get done veteran's day weekend that actually got done.

i guess this is part of the magical process of figuring it out... but i can't help but wish i was there already, for my students' sakes and, of course, for my own.

light and dark imagery

so, last post was perhaps a bit too much of an overstatement. i made it through the first week, am mostly alive, and have learned a couple things.

• number one: no expectations, just knowing what they're capable of. no miracles are going to happen - or rather, the ones that are, i'll hardly see coming anyway.
• number two: don't take it personally.
• number three: just because they don't give a shit (or seem not to, anyway, at least after lunch) doesn't mean i don't give a shit

and things are really pretty good with my first three sections. my schedule works out so that the earlier in the morning, the better they are, and then we have 6th period lunch, and it's a like a swarm of demons overcomes them. and it happens every day, too. it's pretty sorely compounded by the fact that they haven't had a teacher for three weeks, have a brand-new teacher with very little experience, and are a CTT class (which, by the by, is a code for class comprised mainly of students with behavioral and/or developmental issues) so by eighth period i vacillate between deep breathing and suppressing the urge to duct-tape their asses to the chairs and gag them with the homework assignments they didn't do last night. the most shocking thing is that all the adults are really too busy with their own shit to even care - which is to say that the people i'm most accountable to (my students, right?) apparently want nothing more than for me to disappear completely. and people have told me that it's some "they're-rejecting-you-before-you-can-reject-them" stuff, but as far as i'm concerned, it makes my job a living hell. apparently it gets better. i guess i'll spend however long that takes learning how not to throttle them and hopefully also how to make them understand that studying literature can actually make their lives better.

because it totally fucking can. or at least it makes my life better - being an english teacher, and getting to expose people to patterns of humanity and human thought is a really cool thing to be bound to at the end of the day. we're doing a myth unit with the freshmen (two classes of whom are my last two periods, making it even more painful to be denied the opportunity to teach a fascinating topic ... but aren't i supposed to be asking myself how i can make that fascination accessible? or is that a really naive, second-week-in teacher question to ask?), and so i'm reading joseph campbell's "myths to live by" and a whole bunch of global myths from the big compilation i make copies out of. how striking the patterns are! and so much around me has been speaking lately to the end of days theme... this is either because i'm losing my mind or because it really seems to be happening. at any rate, i leave you with a campbell quote:

And of all these warnings and pronouncements, that of Spengler [in The Decline of the West] was the most disquieting. For it was based on the concept of an organic pattern in the life course of a civilization, a morphology of history; the idea that every culture has its period of youth, its period of culmination, its years then of beginning to totter with age and of trying to hold itself together by means of rational planning, projects and organization, only finally to terminate in decrepitude, petrifaction, what Spengler called 'fellaheenism'. Moreover, in this view of Spengler's, we were at present on the point [in the early twentieth century] of passing from what he called the period of Culture to Civilization, which is to say, from our periods of youthful, spontaneous and wonderful creativity to those of uncertainty and anxiety, contrived programs, and the beginning of the end.

(love that about the "morphology of history" - i get an image of the sinuous, three-dimensional beast of it.) well, it certainly seems that we're passing from a time of creativity to a time of "anxiety, contrived programs, and the beginning of the end" to me. and so what if it is? so what if we are careening from order to chaos, from light to dark, as all the old stories have it? seen in another way, a lot of those students who didn't pass this marking period aren't going to pass this marking period, either. this is not my fault. but my job - and, yes, my joy - takes me back there every day. this is, for now, at least, my own adventure. so the terror and the joy, the shadow and the illumination, are both they as they will always be, and i follow as best i can to where i feel them. because, that, i think, is my greatest duty - to manifest these polarities in my own life, to use them to my benefit.

as the post-act-of-titling coup de grace, i have to briefly also thank all of my previous english teachers - all of my teachers, in fact - for the examples, whether good or bad, they set for me. of particular note is mr. pickard, who with the help of nathaniel hawthorne, drove the nail of light and dark imagery deep in my head, and whom, being a brand-new 23-year-old when i first met him, i think of with renewed sympathy all the time.

a letter to myself two years ago

(ok, i'm going a little jonathan swift on you here... it's not all bad, but once i opened the window and started going, this is what came out.)

Dear Future Ms. P.G.,

While you may think that teaching English to urban youth is your life's calling, please do not take yourself or your ambition too seriously. Once you finally achieve this goal, you will find that it is essentially a joke. Your expectations are so far from reality that you may as well be thinking about an entirely different person's life. Forget everything now. Forget your visions of inculcating your students with The Truth - they will be too busy trying to tear the classroom apart and incite each other to mortal combat (or, alternately, too deeply asleep) to listen. Forget your naive allegiance to the tenets of a student-centered classroom and the laughable, kumbayah ethics of progressive education. And most importantly, forget yourself. Forget all of the moments you spent, yourself a high school student trudging through a thousand dreary assignments, knowing that It Could Be So Much Better than This - your own adolescence was a paragon of opportunity that the students you will come to teach would feign recognize as a high school education, mistaking it rather for a somewhat rigorous engagement at an underfunded country club. Forget all else except the blessed miracle of time's forward movement which will inevitably deliver you to the end of the day - lo, even to the far-off paradise of a Friday afternoon - for this and your own meager wits are all that will sustain you.

But do not be discouraged. Despite the near-total apathy of your students, the complete incompetence of the administration and your own lack of preparation, you will find allies in your coworkers, with whom you will carp endlessly during lunch hours. You will also find succor in the tremendous amounts of coffee you consume daily, and in the glasses of wine that await at a day's end. And, at the very least, at least you aren't selling pussy dye.

Please heed this advice as well as one's previous self, bound by temporal causality, can - your very sanity depends upon it.

Sincerely,
Present Ms. P.G.

good manners & evil queens

i feel something taking shape in myself. i'd like to flatter myself and say it's a good person. by this, i mean someone with good manners. to say "someone with good manners" might be treating everything like a nail a little too much but i realized this summer at camp that the least we should expect from each other, no matter what kind of situation we're in, is good manners. of course, this brings into question from whose culture the manners are referenced, but i suppose the rule of thumb would be first to consider another person's space and how well their needs are being met and to go from there. and so i'm trying to practice this with everyone, including myself. it's a useful sort of compass.

for me, it is good manners to be honest. i have been asking myself a lot lately, "what is your true intention here? what do you really want, and what do you really need?" these questions have helped me already in a couple of situations, but there are blind spots. it seems that the place where honesty breaks down is in the relationships between the sexes. we fall into old, easy patterns out of laziness but more often because of the intoxicating possibility of union with someone else on a number of levels. when i am honest with myself, i see that the sexual is all-pervasive in my thoughts - not because of an desire to experience pleasure as much as the constant lure of a power interplay. but we cannot be honest with each other about sex; we would then be being honest about power.

i just tried to frame a confession in a metaphor, tried to explain how my intentions sometimes aren't pure when i know i have captivated a man's attention. i wanted to talk about how what i really seem to be looking for is a mirror to cast a flattering reflection, and then i realized the parallel between that metaphor and the evil queen in Snow White... and of course being as full of the Jung, RAW and feminist Irish poet as i am, went into the symbolic substance there. the evil queen's most powerful motif is excess vanity - her wish to see herself, regardless of the truth, as the most beautiful woman. her repugnance is her stubborn unwillingness to accept that she not the most beautiful (which can be read, at least by me, as "the most powerful"). so there it is (or perhaps i have digressed too far), that naked clamor for power in the guise of flirtation - ugly, certainly not good manners, but something i recognize in myself. but even as i process this, i realize that without the evil queen and her cruel, insatiable vanity, there would be no story - no Snow White would ever find her Seven Dwarves or, obviously, Prince Charming. and, to recognize that the full cast of characters as possible selves (as i must, Child of Western Archetypes that i am), i may be staring a man in the eyes to see my reflection, but i will always have my eyes open for the possibility of really seeing him for who he is. and if that impulse is not always guided by good manners, it is at the very least governed by honest curiosity.

media & me

double whammy last night of dinner w/ another ESL teacher and watching "the office" w/ alison. dinner was at this great South Indian restaurant on lex and 27th - yummy dosas & Brooklyn IPA and good conversation about students and politics and timespace patterns. so cool to fall into the conversation you knew you were going to have with someone who is essentially a perfect stranger: he said "it's doesn't matter so much whose mouth it came out of but the fact that it came out of someone's mouth." in other words, it's all the same thing - the same thought-impulse coming out of the human organism.

and then watching "the office"- or rather, a kabillion minutes of advertising and "the office." first, i'd like to make the obvious observation that perhaps the popularity of "the office" and "officespace" and related comedies/sitcoms makes a strong case for Western society's dawning recognition that people aren't designed to work in offices. and to take this to its logical conclusion, most of the way we live our lives today is based much more in convenience (mostly economic and social) than it is in any fulfillment of our spiritual or emotional needs. (of course i'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before, and - the worse offense - i'm taking the spiritual fulfillment stance, but this is what i see.) watching television is a difficult undertaking for me. on the first level, i'm expected to interact with a story line and a cast of characters that i don't know, whom i know don't really exist. at the next level, i can't help but to constantly interpret them through the filter of my knowledge that it's someone's job to create these people and situations, that testing has even been done to ascertain what will give me or someone like me the most enjoyable television-watching experience. and thirdly is the "me or someone like me" awareness - all of a sudden i'm part of this gigantic entity of Americans who watch "the office" on thursday night, and of every person who thinks like me and sees it for the media machine it is, there are three people (a generous estimate) who buy it whole hog, who probably aren't able to discern their buying it from enjoying it.

because most people like to watch television. most people come home and "unplug" from their work by plugging into the TV. it has become, for better or worse, our fantasy playground, and i suppose that in a lot of ways we need it. i used to think that the entertainment industry was complete fluff and it boggled my mind that billions of dollars are spent on nothing more than making up some stories, but now, after having digested some good ol' Jung, i see that we desperately need our fantasies. (we must, right? how else could the benefits of making another shitty dane cook movie or "reality" TV series versus, say, feeding or vaccinating a few hundred thousand people be explained?)

but here's the thing: i'm not sure if my fantasies look like those ones. i'm reading this kind of dull book right now called "object lessons" which, as far as i can see, centers around one woman poet's experiences discovering what it means to be a woman and a poet at the same time. her thesis is that women and their lives are the object of a poem but are only now becoming the subject of it, and as such we have only been seen from the outside and romanticized or objectified. while this seemed a little facile to me at first, or even untrue (perhaps because of having come into consciousness in the post-women's lib generations), what she writes has begun to sound a deep chord in me, at least when i'm watching NBC on a thursday night. those stories - most of the stories that can be found in mainstream media - don't do it for me. i want to really be entertained - i want real stories. and perhaps the only way to get them is to make them for myself.

a little piece of paper

so: i am cleared to get hired (i think) and ... AM ACTUALLY CERTIFIED TO TEACH IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. i really never thought this day would come - all of the bureaucratic nonsense, and hundreds of dollars of fees, and tests, and paperwork, and phonecalls, to say nothing of the four years of college, the student teaching, visits to 65 Court Street, gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, all of it culminating into this one glorious moment where the little white lie on my resume ("NYS Certified") is finally true. amazing that a stupid piece of paper can make me feel this elated.

i will start teaching on the 29th (yes, two days before Halloween - how fortuitous!). visited the school yesterday and sat in on a couple of my sections. i will tell you this, O Blogosphere, i am scared. i am scared because they say i look about 15 years old, scared because the Bloods are recruiting, scared that i don't have the organizational skills or patience or moxie to do this. but this is what i've been waiting for. as i told patito last night, i have absolutely no idea what it's really going to be like - my expectations have so little bearing on what the reality is going to be that i may as well try not to indulge them.

and i quit my stupid job. i got paid today - i'm so looking forward to the day that getting paid won't make me feel like i've been punched in the face (or make me want to punch someone else in the face.) that being said, i'm trying to hang in there for my students' sakes - haven't yet told them that i'm leaving although i've dropped a few hints. i'm really going to miss my week class but hopefully i'll be able to stay in touch with some of them, and they did teach me a lot (as they always will, right?)

what else... the weather's turning here. it's chilly in the morning - makes it even harder to get out of bed - but i love it, love how a different season can make me see this city in a new light. it's a sort of reprieve, a reminder that things aren't always going to be the same, although with all this change i don't know why i'm looking for more.

tectonic movement

as of my last post, i've had quite a few changes take place. am finally settling into the new apartment, which i'm pretty thrilled with (as of right now). actually had the "this rug really pulls the room together" conversation with pete, and then had the requisite "did we actually just say that" moment. having my first real place, where i pay for it and have my name on the lease and things, makes me have little reflective bursts all the time, like "gee i guess this is what it's like to be a real person." they come now and i'm almost ashamed of them because i know that the rest of the world has been aware of these kinds of responsibilities this whole time and i'm just arriving onto the scene. it's like the awareness after you get your driver's license or turn 21 that all that anticipation leads up to a whole new set of tasks, and that you'll probably be bitching about what you were just celebrating. but i will always be having those moments, i will always be realizing that i'm a new inductee to one legion or another - perhaps the graceful thing to do is to just let it be that moment of newness (or of whatever.)

aaaaaaaaaand. i got a Real Teaching Job. well, sort of. the things i need to do to get the job for real are 1) get a file number/get certified (still? still. fuck me.) and 2) quit ESL job. and it is ever so easy to whine about how difficult these things are going to be but the plain fact of the matter is that this is my in. this is what i am supposed to be doing. this is the time for me to triumph over the gorgon bureaucracy and get myself where i deserve to be. this is not that say that i'm not a little apprehensive about beginning this job. the school is 70% guys, is only 4 years old, and as the AP told me, not without its structural flaws. on the plus side, i'll be able to bike to work (it's in williamsburg) and will no longer need to go to manhattan as much. so. i'm trying to be pragmatic and action action action on this but let me unburden myself as i cannot elsewhere that i'm blown away by the amount of responsibility i'm about to take on. am i worthy? will i do a good job? of how much am i truly capable?

pato visited this weekend, too. it was a nice time - lovely dinner at hearth (i had the bass with calamari and chickpeas), brunch at roebling, indian food, not nearly as much adventuring as i had planned, but taking a nap and eating a good meal were top priorities on my list (lazy-ass that i am.) but nevertheless - some beautiful moments: walking the tree-lined streets of bushwick, smoking under our umbrellas with the storm overhead, the roses on my bureau reminding me of his visit. i fear he showed me a better time than i did him, but i think that might have a lot to do with my slow comprehension of how to let myself be treated. i think that this trip proved him to be a bulwark for me in this new time.

so now to bed for some much-needed rest. i have a lot to take care of in the next few days.

cleaned the shit out of the new apt w/ jay and pete yesterday. after things were mopped and clean(er)-smelling we went around with a tambourine and pot lids and incense and scared the old bad spirits away (the upstairs kitty looking on from the fire escape in bewilderment), then went back to pete's and had sub-par burritos and beer. i'm looking forward to living with those guys.

and then riding back to alison's on the subway, looking at the outer edges of the map where it wanders off into long island, i remembered myself 5 years ago riding the subway looking at the same map. a lot of it has become so much more familiar - i wonder what i would have thought if i'd known how far from manhattan i'd end up. those outer edges used to make me feel twinges of envy of the people whose childhood homes were just on the other side of brooklyn and now i'm making my first "real" home of my own right there, and the longing has diminished to a little pebble. i guess i'm feeling the happy effects of finally settling down after so many years of having my stuff(myself?) scattered all over the place. (although god only knows how long i'll really be anywhere anyway.)

harvest moon

just saw the harvest moon hanging low over met. ave and it was like a huge swollen pumpkin in the sky (eerie orange, i swear to god) and i wish everyone in brooklyn could see it, too, and we could have a big orgy. or harvest things. or something. i always feel like i should be doing more with myself when i look at a full moon.

last year i saw the harvest moon with huck at the dreamaway. it was chilly out (sweltering today, mid-90's) - there was a scrim of clouds across the sky, and huck told me to remember the moment and write about it some other time, which has now finally happened.

in other strange synchronicities, i ate lunch (soggy but passable chilaquiles) in this mexican diner that matt used to live under. mana's "labios compartidos" came on, creating a sort of triad of longing (matt/old life in ny, nicky/summers on the cape and mexico itself.)

into and out of the wild

last night i watched sean penn's "into the wild," and, being the granolaface i am, was moved by it. (which is not to say that i didn't snigger at the shot of him burning his as he set off across the sweltering Arizona desert.) besides it coming right after what could have been a disastrous phonecall w/ dad (Me: Hi, dad. so you're going to move me in on sunday. Dad: Oh. I am?) but ended sanely, even sweetly (Dad: And we're going to get you moved even though it's a tremendous pain in the ass, because you are the most important thing and I love you. Me: [sort of sobbing]) which brought up all sorts of feelings about what it means to really and truly leave home, to become, as i vowed to myself last december under a sky pulsing with stars, "a child of the universe," it set some interesting thoughts into motion.

on the one hand, a complete return to nature is the easiest thing to do - at least from an existential standpoint. the most definite measure of a person, in my estimation, is who s/he is without the adulterating influences of other people, media & the incipient bullshit they entail. and without question, such a change would open the door to a new series of existential problems, but you'd be so busy trying to satisfy the most basic of needs that you wouldn't have to entertain them. (although, having never been in that situation, i can't really speak authoritatively.) taken in this light, it is more difficult to create a self-sufficient, or at least sustainable, lifestyle within the confines of society.

which is not to say that chris mccandless was "right" or "wrong" in doing what he did. i had the interesting experience of being able to see this film and read critical discussion (from the onion a.v. club, naturally) without the impulse to call him either a hero or an asshole - he was just doing what he felt he absolutely had to do. and, of course, i am not really speaking of chris mccandless as a person but rather of the character of mccandless as i saw it in the film.

what i really enjoyed most about the film, beyond the gorgeous shots of the sea, woods and sky, was being able to contextualize my own longing to live "the truth" that i think exists outside the social world we have built. i have entertained fantasies of living in the wild for many years and read books on it and fallen in love with people who i thought were capable of doing it, and i see now that it is (at least for me) a symbol for being able to live the truth of myself. but the truth of myself is who i am right now - perhaps it's a truth i don't fully recognize often enough, but more probably that the truth i want to see doesn't correspond to that which is really there.

el regreso

well! it certainly has been quite a while since i've posted, and as far as i can tell the person who last wrote never really existed, much less lived in another country. i've fallen back into the american rhythm of life - mostly, that is... there was a little incident with me almost dying on a runaway horse - as seamlessly as i left, and now i'm back in new york. teaching grammar. yes, the very thing i said that i didn't want to do now occupies at least 5 hours of every day of my life until the beginning of december.

it's not so bad. the people are great, and their english is so good they can absorb - and even respond to! - my pseudo-philosophical rambling. the things that really suck about it are 1) only sleeping in once a week, 2) working 9-5 both days of the weekend, and 3) my creepy boss. i have a lot of creative freedom, half days from monday to thursday, and, because of the unrestrictive curriculum, a renewed interest in doing the work necessary to keep a classroom afloat. i would even go so far as to say that i'm honing my craft, and that i might even be more suited to working with this population than i am to working with NYC teenagers. or am i? only time will tell - because god may strike me dead if i don't get myself a Real Teaching Job soon. or at least get the weekends off.

y otras cosas - ahora hay un hombre en mi vida. we met this summer and it was like something out of a nora ephron movie (well, if nora ephron movies had protagonists who think actual thoughts and/or smoke drugs) complete with starlit beach cuddling, couples mini-golf and a bunch of other stuff that i am ashamed to say i totally enjoyed... the kind of stuff that sounds horribly cheesy when you're recounting it but was so much fun when it was happening. i can't talk about this anymore - i'm never watching another romantic comedy again, or at least until i can feel like my experiences aren't the montage in some hack screenwriter's first act.

but fuck that. they were beautiful, (dare i say it) meaningful experiences - they may have borne more than a passing resemblance to all of that schmaltzy drek that's forced down our throats from the moment we can say "cinderella," but they felt good when they were happening. this is how it goes, i guess, and it's a terrifying thing, because i can look at my life from one perspective and see it as my own, my experiences and feelings as genuine and irreplaceable, and then i can look at it from another and see myself as a facet of this manifold human beast and see myself as a sort of pawn, doomed to play out scene after scene of The Human Game.

it's so much more than i can even put into words - somehow the act of writing a blog entry with the knowledge that someone i know, or perhaps more intimidatingly, someone i don't know, may eventually read it makes me balk, makes my thoughts (and "Me") come off half-baked, insincere, dimwitted. i wonder how many other people are sitting right here in this very city writing this exact entry about how they don't have any

oh god. that's enough. alright, let's stop with the metameta bullshit - no one's even reading this anyway, so i may as well come out with something straight and readable, something i'll be able to look back on and actually use. so here's the real story, because that's what we're here for, right?: i came back from mexico, had a harrowing experience that left me with a sprained ankle and sense of malaise i can't quite shake (the realization that, a la don juan, my death is indeed sitting - lying in wait - on my left shoulder), taught Nature and got a sweet tan. i met an incredibly sweet guy, a quiet, smart person who brought me flowers for no apparent reason other than that he really likes me (something no one has ever done as far as i can remember), a guy who has that really sexy pair of muscles that stand out on his lower abdomen and what can only be described as Soccer Legs, and we had a tremendous amount of fun, and then i moved to (back) to New York City. i started working for an ESL school, and my students were from all corners of the globe, and i learned more about how to be a good teacher from them, and i saw a bunch of people i hadn't seen in a while. i also realized that i have to tow my own load now financially, that i am indeed a Grown-Up (Groan-Up, more like), and that i am the only person directly responsible for myself and my sense of satisfaction. and there is much much more to tell, and i will be endeavoring to tell it, if i can only get out of my own way long enough to see that it doesn't matter if 10,000 other people almost exactly like me are having the same experiences because this is my goddamn life and my goddamn story.

(...and no one is reading this anyway.)

el ultimo

well, this is my last entry in mexico! i'm excited to be going home... have contracted some sort of unfortunate stomach infection that has made these past few days pretty much a living hell (excruciating stomach pain, diarrhea, fever, chills and a wicked headache). i'm finally feeling better and about to go to our farewell barbeque at the country club. i can't believe that such a big journey is coming to an end - of course everything feels kind of mundane and half-finished. to be honest, i'm looking forward more than anything to sleeping in my own bed (the original version, that is, in mass.)

the reunion of the known and the unknown

eight days until i go back to the states.

i'm overjoyed to go back... looking forward to being immersed in familiar things that i've been apart from for so long, and of course to seeing my family. i know that i can make it as big or little a deal as i want, too, and that i'm indulging myself in making it a big deal, but when i start thinking about how i've been here for six months and then suddenly won't be, i can't help but feel like it's enormous. it's a kind of panic. of course, everything is going to be fine. it's another chapter of my life that is almost over, and i'm lucky that i'll never be the same.

speaking of closing chapters, mom and dad's bid on the house in middlefield went through so it seems that when i get back (in eight days, for three days) will be the last time i spend in my childhood home. i knew this was coming as mom's kept me posted, and i'm genuinely excited for them, but it feels like a little too much today. i guess this is the part where i become a real grown-up.