When I Grow Up

I want to be:

a voice actor
a dancer
a singer
a soap opera star
a librarian
a secretary
an event coordinator
a painter
a proofreader
an online movie critic
a superhero

Justification

Anastomosis - a scientific term for the interconnection between two entities, such as vessels, channels, or cavities. Also applied to the folding of one word between parts of another, as in Joyce's "underdarkneath" in Ulysses or a vernacular phrase such as "my own self." Extended to mean the interrelation, interconnection intercommunication or intersubjectivity or persons - used thus in J. Hillis Miller's Ariadne's Thread (1992).
(Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature)


I am henceforth going to be literarily correct in using anastomosis in the phrase "a whole nother thing". Good to know. Up to this point, I've just been using it ironically.

Hello, Thirty.

Hello, Thirty,

I didn't realize you would arrive so soon, and, to be honest, I wasn't looking forward to seeing you. Now that you're almost here, though, I'm delighted to admit that it's not a devastating thing. You see, Twenty was a bit selfish and Twenty-five was a bit pushy, and you, Thirty, seem to be the perfect blend of forgiveness and hope.

In honor of you, I will try to redeem the mistakes I've made with Twenty and Twenty-five. I hereby swear off the tanning bed and dieting, and, instead, commit to drinking only the good wine and making a real effort to get out for a walk once in a while.

Here's to you, Thirty.
Now let's not &%$ this up.

Kisses!
Leah

Guilty Pleasures

I love it when Leisure Girl posts about her love of YA books or teen TV, because it gives me respite from the shame I usually carry.

I'm surrounded by cool people: people who listen to bands I've never heard of and watch movies that depress me, people who only read books that educate them or push boundaries of social acceptability, people who would totally mock me if they knew I was going to the New Kids on the Block concert next week. From time to time, I harbor some shame that I enjoy pop music, movies with happy endings (old, new, kitschy, whatev!), read books generally reserved for the pubescent populus, and, dare I say it, play video games, but, dammit, I will no longer be ashamed!

I am ever so aware that these are choices I make for a reason. If you notice, I like the things that are easy to come by, positive in nature and free from the over-analytical self-awareness that weigh down the everyday. I am aware of the world around me and of the world within me, but I've already taken the time to measure the lack. I want to be fancy free and to wear my contentedness like a lapel pin.

Please, feel free to do the same, even if your happiness rests in Sufjan Stevens or Chuck Polohniak (or Palahniuk, if you wanna be a big nerd about it - John!).

Biggest Potential Shames:
Jane Austen (books & movies)
Meg Cabot
Twilight
boy bands
Murder, She Wrote re-runs
Pushing Daisies
Wicked & Phantom of the Opera
choreographed dances to Michael Jackson songs
Movie Soundtracks (Thomas Newman!)
Nick & Nora
Fred & Ginger

Getting in Touch With Nature

Except for the tiny vacay to San Marcos for three days, these were not a pleasant couple of weeks. The family home is still standing, minus only a few shingles, but, coastal mugginess plus two weeks sans electricity is no way to spend one's free time.

At least there were the few days at my mom's: we brought bare necessities and survival tools: the laptop, the baby, Diet Coke, Pop-tarts (non-perishable!!) and the Tivo.

Creativity

I used to write when I was a kid. I wrote stories, songs, poems - I even tried to write a novel in the fifth grade (I only got about 3 chapters in). I used to be inspired by things and had to control the urge to spill everything onto the pages of my little notebooks.

It's much more difficult for me now. I still have the urge to spill my thoughts onto the pages, but the thoughts don't flow like they used to. Perhaps I've become too aware of my potential audiences and am fearful of appearing foolish, but I've recently become frustrated with my stuttering creative impulse. Is it gone? Am I too grown-up to allow my imagination the freedom it used to have? I refuse to believe that is the case.

I want to be published. I've dreamed this for years. I have potential titles, plots, outlines and characters all stored away in the corners of my mind and spiral notebooks. Every time, though, I try to sit down and put the thoughts together, I either feel stumped or over-analytical. I'm going to keep trying, though. Twilight author Stephenie Meyer had a dream one night, and she sat down and wrote out the story of it in two months, and then had a three-book-deal within the year. Her talents as a writer are not unparalleled, but the spark - the idea -the inspiration - gave her the edge that she needed to be recognized and published. I'm praying for the dream. I'm racking my brains for the spark that will set my keyboard ablaze and allow me to realize one of those big, lifetime goals. I know it's in there. Somewhere.

Someday my inspiration will come.

Wall-E

What a lovely, fun movie!

I heartily suggest seeing Wall-E as a date movie if you're not a kid-toter and, perhaps, even if you are you can leave them at home and watch this without the distractions. (They will watch it a million times on dvd later anyway.)

The plot is precious and the characters endearing. The animation, as is usual with Pixar, sets the standard high above all other animation thus far. For the first act of the show, you may even forget that it's animated.

Go see it, it will be ticket money well-spent.

Twilight

I had noticed in recent years the rise in popularity (especially among teenage girls) a book series by Stephenie Meyer about vampires. The cover art was compelling, but I'm not a vampire book kind of girl. One might note that I'm also not 15, but I find adolescent fiction to be the perfect books to get lost in on summer days - I call it "cotton candy reading" because it generally has little nutritional (critical) value and is gone so quickly. I know I'm not the only one because of the multi-generational popularity of the Harry Potter series.


It's usually just fun to get lost in a story for a while, but I really connected to this Twilight book. It wasn't for any literary reason: the plot is a bit contrived in places, most characters have little depth to them and the prose was sometimes repetitive and weak. It was just that I felt like the story reflected so well the romantic fantasies I had as a teenage girl myself. Not that I dreamed of vampires, but my little heart did swell with hope every time I watched Sense & Sensibility or Meet Joe Black. I had the yearning and desire for that romantic sensation that I knew was part fairy tale, part possible. As a grown-up, with most romantic ideals come and gone, it was really fun to reconnect with those flutterings that were so compelling when I was younger.

I'm gonna be honest here: I pre-ordered the next book in the series, I'm considering going to the release party at B&N when it comes out, I've already got someone else committed to going with me to the movie (December 18), and I'm now a member of the TwilightMoms group online. I'm sure this phase will pass, but I'm going to revel in my teenagery infatuation for just a little bit longer.

Copying

I always warn my students against this, but I'm totally copying someone else's ideas. I mean, seriously, I'm off for the summer! How could anyone use their brains in the thick coastal heat?

Anyway, Claire mentioned blogging about the people she loved and I'm inspired. I think I'll start with the short list:

Frankie
The Boy

This is easy peasy, right?
Husband.
Child.
But really(!), I have reasons.
The Boy has changed me, softened me and yet totally allowed me to be all I've ever been. He smiles when I do silly voices and looks into my eyes when I sing. He charges toward me (on his belly) when he sees me coming and acts like my peeking from behind the couch is pure comedy. He is, also, the definition of the love in my marriage.
Frankie + Leah = The Boy
I've mentioned before about my husband: awesome. One of the best things is that he and I contain the exact same ratio of geekiness to coolness. Other people may disagree about what that ratio is, but we're fully aware of our delicate balances.

I made a list when I was about 15 or 16 about the things I wanted in a husband. (I could probably dig that precise list out from some shelf or basket in a couple of hours if I thought it was important, but it feels unnecessary.) I knew him then, but he was not on my internal list of potential husbands: that really only included a wispy idea of a man.

I wanted someone who:

• was musical (especially one who could sing),
• was attractive (more attractive than me or less? Always the quandary. Do I want to have a trophy husband or be someone's trophy wife? I'm not making any grand claims to beauty here, just ),
• could make me laugh (so much more important than romantic: this I learned from a combination of ex-boyfriends: Shawn & Dan. One was the romantic poet, the other a constant joker. I remember the moment of epiphany: I was so much happier with the funny guy.),
• was more intelligent than me (not quite the Feminist, I guess),
• was athletic - specifically good at baseball (a girl's got to know what she wants),
• was Christian,
• & could be publicly affectionate (How many of us have had that boyfriend who won't hold your hand at the mall, but wants to explore forms of affection when you're alone together? Yes. I thought so.).

These are not groundbreaking desires for a girl of sixteen, but I honestly didn't believe that I could find someone with all those properties who would be interested in me. I know better than to think I just got lucky: this guy claims to have been pining for me since the 6th grade, so I know God just looked down at my list and said, "I've been wondering where I put that blueprint for this guy!" (Ok, so, if you know us, you know there's one thing missing. Frankie doesn't sing: at least, not publicly, right? When I made my list I was thinking of some bold tenor singing a solo in church, but I realize now that made-up lullabies sung to an audience of one count, too.)

Truth

Most families tend toward some level of dysfunction these days, and mine was no less normal in that regard.

It's almost like a separate version of my life: it can seem really bad on some days and really normal on others. I know that things that my stepdad said to me were wrong: his constant, often sarcastic comments about my weight, my lack of talents, my nerdiness (well, okay.) and other general insults were the words that shaped my sense of self from the age of 3 or 4 until sometime around graduation when he started talking to me like I was his best friend and confiding in me about how sick he was and how much he thought my mother didn't love him (this is so wrong, right?!). So I spent from preschool through high school defending myself and from then till their divorce defending my mom and sorting through his hypochondriacal nonsense ("seizures" the doctors couldn't explain and procedures inexplicable and probably unnecessary). During most of that time, though, that was normal for me.

I remember all these stories he told about being in the mafia (in Pittsburgh?!) when he was a teenager, how he got caught with the money and, instead of jail, he was given the option of going into the military to Vietnam; how he did so well in the military and got his ankle shot out in the war and got a purple heart; how he travelled all over Europe in the military and met all these people; how his cousin, Tommy, was a vice president for Nabisco and another cousin was the Tommy from Tommy James and the Shondells. I believed every word, never realizing the audacity or unlikelihood of these claims. Then, one day we were watching TV and we saw a commercial for a Protege and he pronounced it "prodigy". I corrected him and he deflected, saying that it was the same thing. It was as if, all of a sudden, I realized that he didn't know: that he didn't know all kinds of things. That's not an unusual thing for a 15-year-old to think, I'm sure, but surely most teenagers aren't given proof very often.

The major fallout to any trust I had in this father figure came, though, when I was in college and he was looking for a new job. He had applied for a job somewhere and, because he was tired of being passed over for jobs for which he was well qualified but not degreed, he lied and said that he had a degree in engineering. The company began the process to hire him but rescinded their offer when they realized that his degree was fictional. Naive though I may have been, I still found it outrageous for a grown man to lie about his qualifications so blatantly on a job application. I wasn't crushed in an emotional sense, but any idea of him as a grown-up or a real man was obliterated in my view. He became a farce.

After that, news of his cheating on my mom came to light and they struggled for the next year to have a marriage. In the meantime, he continued to cheat and, even at my wedding, created drama. Their divorce, which came a month before my first anniversary, was a blessing in that it rid us of the created chaos he brought, but it still felt like the shredding of a family. In the midst of that and a few other things, I was having my own personal crisis of faith: not just in God, but in everything. Where is Truth? In anything?!

My sister was just a kid when things were at their worse and she didn't see a lot of what went on because she was so busy trying to get his attention herself. He seemed so intent on persecuting me, then making up for it (in his shame?) by lavishing attention on me that my sister literally fought him to get him to see her. This admittedly led to some of her attention-seeking issues, but that's not for me to blog about.

Now, he's dying. After years of saying he only had "a few months left", his doctors have called in hospice and he's arranged to have my sister brought back from England for his last days or weeks or whatever. I feel like I should have some sort of sadness about the end of his life, but, really, I don't know how to feel. It even makes me angry that he should inflict this kind of drama on me regularly every few months: he's "about to die" ALL the time! I already cut off ties with him a while back to get rid of the bad energy he brought into my life. Should I go to see him before he dies? Should I go to the funeral? He's not even really my dad. But then that thought makes me feel sad in a way that I can't begin to describe.

Research Paper Foibles

I've had this blog now for a while, but I never can think of anything original and clever to post on it. Today, though, I decided I'm just gonna start throwing stuff out there and see how it goes.

For instance, I have shared with a few others some of the flawed writings and conversations of my students, but here are some recent favorites:

Some kid just wrote in their research paper that the author Michael Hague (a children’s author) “published The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 1980 because he always believed in his imagination that there was a world where animals knew how to talk” and also that “in 1991 he made up a story for his daughter called Peter Pan”. Can you smell the Wikipedia?

Another one answered, when I asked the significance of the tapestry of David & Bathsheba in The Scarlet Letter, "Isn't Bathsheba the vampire in the Bible?" When I prompted her to explain (to see if maybe she was misquoting or misunderstanding), she proceded to tell me all she had learned about the vampires mentioned in the Bible. Niiiice.

One that I use as a lesson every year is how a former student included information in a research paper once about how Mark Twain & Edgar Allan Poe were friends and inspired each other in their letter writing. When prompted for her source, she told me found it on Wikipedia. Together, we looked it up in a *real book* and found that EAP died when MT was about 9 years old.

Classy wedding momentos...

I was at my in-laws for mother's day and I came across the following can-holder-thing:

"Wendy and Chuck got married and all I got was this damn koozie."

I, quite literally, Laughed Out Loud.

i

I found this on a friend of a friend's blog. Here goes me.


i am: thrilled about the end of the school year and the chance to start being Leah and Mommy again instead of Mrs. Stevenson.

i think: my kids are not going to do very well on the AP Lang test because of my maternity absence last semester.

i know: a little about a lot.

i want: to play tennis.

i have: a house full of things (and people) I "always wanted" waiting for me at home.

i wish: that I was less self-involved.

i hate: being left out.

i miss: being a size 8.

i fear: only for my child(ren)'s safety, success and happiness - but I am always able to turn that fear into hope.

i feel: weightless from the amount of responsibility I'm shirking by writing this blog instead of grading research papers.

i hear: calm music, a locker slamming at the other end of the hall, the classroom next door watching a movie.

i smell: very little because I have a cold.

i crave: Christmas: the music, the lights, the chill, the merriment.

i search: for the balance of healthy, frugal and easy meals for my family.

i wonder: how other people really live in the privacy of their own homes.

i regret: my own insecurity.

i love: laughing with my husband.

i ache: to be a better, more well-rounded woman.

i care: about my students on a personal level.

i always: check my spelling.

i am not: consistent.

i believe: that prayers are answered.

i dance: in my car when I'm alone.

i sing: loudly in church, but rarely elsewhere.

i cry: at "maternal" moments in movies and tv shows now - even when I tell stories.

i don’t always: brush my teeth before bed.

i fight: with my husband about his video game addictions (which are currently better).

i write: story and craft ideas, drawings and grocery lists in a little purple notebook I got for Christmas from Claire.

i win: Scrabulous like mad.

i lose: everything: clothes, jewelry, books, credit cards.

i never: get there on time.

i confuse: who I am with what I've done.

i listen: proudly to pop music, boy bands and Broadway.

i can usually be found: voraciously reading something, even the cereal box.

i am scared: that my husband and I will perish and someone else will raise my child.

i need: affirmation.

i am happy about: the way these 7 1/2 years of marriage have turned out.

-lks