Category Archives: Personal

Breaking News!

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First of all, for my sarcasm-challenged readers, I just want to begin with a disclaimer that the title of this blog is drenched with sarcasm. Moving along…

There is a picture of me at three years old, sitting in the front of a firetruck with my best friend. We are wearing fireman hats. His name was Peter. I don’t know his last name and I doubt if I’ve seen him since 1986, but if I were going to blame someone, maybe it would be him. I’m not going to point fingers, though, because that seems pointless. I hope Peter is having a great life.

In first grade, I started having a bit of a crisis regarding my dolls and my Nintendo. I had two best friends: one who would argue over Barbies with me, and the other who just wanted to play Nintendo and ride bikes. When it came to that point in elementary school when the clear divide between girls and boys started to make itself apparent, I started becoming something of a tomboy because I didn’t want to alienate that boy who was my best friend. The one who liked video games and bike rides. So I started pretending to be interested in basketball (a sport in which I truly have no interest. I honestly enjoy baseball and football, but basketball bores me to tears). I played video games like nobody’s business. In an effort to hide my weight and disguise the fact that I felt so ugly compared to other girls my age, I just started wearing guys’ clothing for a period of time, too. I developed an interest in what are generally thought of as boy hobbies, and as the years went on and I started to be treated like it, I started to feel like, well, one of the guys. Continue reading →

All the Concentration I Have

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In my last post, I talked about writing through blocks – writer’s block, that is. I was eager to try this out and had (and, really, continue to have) high hopes.

I went on vacation for 5 days and, knowing that there wasn’t a chance that I’d have time to work on the novel, decided it wasn’t worth lugging the computer through the airport. So I didn’t. This week continues to be very busy for me, but I am bound and determined to  work on the novel around my appointments this week and my weekend out of town. This writing plan will not happen between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Yesterday when we all woke up in our own beds, we got up and moved the furniture out of most of our first floor. This morning, with a pillow over my head, I could quite clearly hear the entire conversation happening between my father and the workers who will be refinishing our hardwood floors. Then the hammers started, followed by the tearing noises. About a half hour later, I came out of my room to discover that the carpet in the living and dining rooms was gone. I brought the dogs down to the basement, took some allergy medicine to combat the dust flying around here, and spent the morning with the dogs. When I emerged at lunch time to take a shower while the workers were out, the carpet in the hallway and the stairs was gone. There continues to be a massive amount of noise coming from upstairs. It sounds like my house is imploding. How will I write through this? I can barely focus on this blog entry. Continue reading →

Making and Breaking My Stride (I’ve got to keep on moving)

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When I crossed the 50,000 word mark to become a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) 2009 winner in November, I estimated that I would need somewhere around another 10,000 words to finish my novel. As of last night (I haven’t worked on it yet tonight), my word count was just shy of 67,800 words. Obviously, I grossly underestimated what it would take me to finish. I am, however, happy to report that I have the pieces coming together. This is good because virtually nobody knows anything about this novel. Literally, I think I’ve given only two people details, and even those were rather skimpy. Knowing that I struggle with endings, I’ve been very tight-lipped about it because I wasn’t entirely sure where it was going. Or rather, I didn’t know if it would work. Perhaps in the next few months I will get to a point where some of those who have expressed interest in reading it will be able to take a look at some of it.  Continue reading →

Feeling Old Vs. Being Old

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I have friends who think they’re old. These friends are mostly in the 26-30 age bracket, and in no way constitute as being such (unless you’re asking a nine year old), but it’s just what they think. I have never said that I’m old. I’m 27 and I don’t feel or look like I am.

There’s the adage “You’re only as old as you feel.” I don’t know if I believe that, either.

A friend of mine turned 23 on Friday, and we went out for her birthday to a local sports bar. After her mother, I was the oldest person there, and I found myself saying out loud that I felt old – something I don’t usually say. But I think there’s an important line to distinguish here: I FELT it. Sometimes I feel sick, but it doesn’t mean that I am. So saying that I’m as old as I feel makes absolutely no sense to me. My age would change constantly. I felt 27, but empirically, I was older than the rest of her friends there. Continue reading →

Dichotomy

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This past Saturday I had the unique experience of celebrating life in two completely contrasting ways: a wake followed by a birthday party.

Obviously the party was a lot more upbeat and happy; it was a celebration. The wake was exactly how one expects a wake to be: there were a lot of hugs and flowers, and there were a lot of people crying. Yet, in their barest and most simplistic forms, they each represented the same thing.   Continue reading →

I’m Sorry You Majored In… (anything other than teaching)

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Though I touched upon this in an earlier post, and I tried so hard not to bring this up, the abundance of snowy days this winter and the amount of whining and complaining I keep reading have driven me to feel the need to say something. First and foremost, I’m not saying any of this to be overly harsh and I’m not out to disrespect or alienate anybody. I’m also going to say right now that I’m using “you” in the most general sense because it’s easiest for my purpose. I am not yelling; I just want to make my side heard. That being said…

Look, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I’m sorry that you weren’t an education major, but until you’ve taught for three weeks in a school, I really don’t want to hear you say snarky things like “Oh, I wish I still had snow days” or “Gee, it must be so nice to be a teacher right about now.” People like me are becoming silently infuriated at you, and my guess is that you know more than one teacher.

I’m not entirely sure where the idea got started that teachers have this luxurious, easy life. Just because when you were in school you did nothing at night, on the weekends, over holidays, and during the summer doesn’t mean that teachers follow the same schedule. In fact, many of the days the students aren’t at school, the teachers are. They’re sitting through horrible professional development seminars and in-service presentations. The funny thing is that, in many districts, they have to sit through those same things periodically during the summer.

First, Pennsylvania has a really good teacher education program that permits reciprocity in something like 35 or 38 other states. That’s why we churn teachers out of here. It’s not an easy program though, and so while many people I knew of had light semesters of 16 credits and went out drinking and partying all the time or had a lot of downtime, I can think of two semesters in my entire college career where I had 18 or fewer credits. Usually I had a course load of anywhere between 20 and 24 credits so that I could make myself as well-qualified as possible for the job I wanted. You know how your senior year spring break was so awesome because you either went on some crazy trip with your friends or you just went home and relaxed? Education majors were still at school doing their student teaching.   Continue reading →

On Goals

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As I write this, I’m sitting in the classroom where I first read about Romeo and Juliet and Miss Havisham: my 9th grade English classroom. A new teacher came into this room the next year, and while the teacher’s desk is now in the back corner as opposed to the front center, while the desks are now facing the back of the room as opposed to the front, and the blackboard has since been replaced by a white board, this room is still familiar. The same sickly green paint typically reserved for hospital rooms covers the walls, and the view out the window hasn’t changed (aside from the house across the street that burned to the ground and was rebuilt). I can quite acurately walk to the spot in this room where I sat and read Great Expectations. I can see the spot where the new girl was sitting in study hall when I wrote her a note welcoming her so that she would feel more comfortable here. She looked nervous. Where I sit right now is very near the area where I would rest my head against the side board during 9th period and wait for the day to be over.

I wasn’t a stellar student in 9th grade. I could have had amazing grades if I had just tried a little bit, but I didn’t really care. My attitude toward academics would change in a few months, but I was a much different person in 1997-98. Once the fog lifted off of 7th and 8th grade, arguably the worst two consecutive years of my life, I was actually relatively happy. In truth, I had just as much of a love-hate relationship with myself in 9th grade as I did 10 years later with the 9th graders I was teaching. But in my mind, it is always springtime when I think about 9th grade. Everything seemed just on the verge of happening: softball season would be starting, school would be over soon, summer league would start up, I would finally be done struggling my way through biology with a teacher who seemed to hate me for reasons unknown. Junior high would be over and high school would be starting. More importantly, I was making new friends, coming out of my shell a bit. New friendships are fabulous because there’s always that sense of, well, newness. Continue reading →

Possibly Offensive Commentary: The “Why I Don’t Respect Skanks” Edition

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Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about the image I want to convey and the impression that I want to leave. This has led to an awful lot of pondering about what it means to be respectable. Sure, I could say that I don’t care what people think about me, but it seems that somewhere in there, nearly all self-respecting people care at least a little about how others see them.

I’m not a huge bar person, so when I’m out, I’m not there looking to impress anyone. I really don’t believe in finding quality relationships in bars. A wise friend (who is male) once told me that the guys I would meet in such establishments are not the kind of guys I would want to date, anyway. When I go out, I like to observe, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of sizing people up from afar. Is that judgmental? Maybe, but I don’t really think it is. And besides, perhaps we shouldn’t be so fast to say that judgment is a bad thing. Good judgment has kept me away from a lot of unfavorable situations and unsavory people. It’s also helped me to realize why self-respect is so important. Continue reading →

Back to the Book

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Last month, as I was feeling like a fraud for not seeing National Novel Writing Month beyond the confines of November, I wrote a post where I essentially questioned my validity as a writer. I was having a problem where I wanted to finish my novel, but I just couldn’t muster up the ambition to do it. I had built up quite the momentum in November, sometimes writing as many as four thousand words a day, and when I crossed the fifty thousand word mark days before the deadline, I crashed. I was burnt out and convinced that I had no more ideas and could give no more to this story right now. I kept saying that I would go back to it, but it’s hard to say how seriously I would have taken that promise.

This obviously begs the question, “Why do all of that work for nothing?”

Point taken. Continue reading →

The Invincibility Complex

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Like most teenagers, I had a mouth on me. I got myself into trouble by making sarcastic comments at my mother and other family members in evil tones (there’s a difference, see. Now I make sarcastic comments at her, but I say them in a joking tone and so she doesn’t want to smack me that way).  Also like most teenagers, I found myself grounded frequently with no use of the phone, computer, or television. In a shocking move, I was also pretty moody.

Where I differed from most teenagers was that instead of feeling like I was invincible, I always felt the exact opposite. I always felt like danger was lurking just around the corner and something really bad would happen to me if I didn’t work hard enough to keep it away. I think that perhaps the fact that my life as a teenager wasn’t quite as carefree as most of my peers’ had something to do with it. Then again, it also could have been a lot worse.  Continue reading →