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 The company began the process to hire him but rescinded their offer when they realized that his degree was fictional.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.