Category Archives: Thoughts

Some Things Never Change

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Yesterday I wrote about how things need to change. Today I’m back to write about how some things never will (although they still need to). It’s tied in with Easter (to a degree)… and there are pictures. If you think my drawings are ridiculous at best now, you have to see my skills of an artist in second grade.

As my mom and I were decorating for Easter a few weeks ago, we discovered that one of our oldest decorations, a basket shaped like a rabbit that, for years, held eggs, had been damaged by stuff from our roof. Before we threw it out, we cleaned everything out of it. I love finding things from the past, things I’d forgotten all about or never remembered in the first place, so I was pretty pumped to find a letter that I’d written to the Easter Bunny when I was in second grade. Then I read the letter and thought to myself, “Wow. Our society is full of really awful people.” The letter was actually really sad.

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Turn and Face the Strange

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Why is it so easy to get comfortable? We call ourselves proponents of change and say that we welcome it, but we settle into this state of happy lethargy and contentment. We might not be fine with where things are or where we are with them, but we’ll choose to be (or at least say we are) because it makes it easier and then we don’t have to think about it. When did it become favorable to never want to push ourselves or test our boundaries in any and all areas of our lives? Continue reading →

On Why I Think Tina Fey Should Be My Best Friend

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Oh, Frank. The neglect!

Well, readers, I’m really sorry that almost two weeks have gone by with no post. I’m going to apologize if I seem like I have wicked A.D.D. or if this is really rough. I’m easing back into writing. Building up my chops, if you will. Remember a few weeks ago when I said I’d had about the busiest week that an unemployed person could have? I lied. That was actually last week, carrying over into this week. And let me tell you, it wasn’t all very pretty. But I’m here now. And also, since I had a lot of time on my hands at the end of last week to sit and worry about something over which I had no control, I decided to read a book. My criteria for this book included being funny and being smart.

Enter Tina Fey.

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Things That Don’t Make Sense

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There are certain things throughout the course of writing this blog that seem to come up again and again. Though I try not to beat things to death, I’m sure I’ve repeated myself more than once. While I try to not broach subjects that could potentially cause a lot of controversy, there are times when I need to write it out because I feel like my brain is on fire.

This is one of those times.

On Tuesday, my governor announced unprecedented cuts in funding to public education, and try as I might, I can’t find any sense in it. In fact, like many, I’m sure, I’m pretty enraged about it. Sure, I could keep these thoughts to myself, but I suppose I’m also curious to see if anyone can tell me why this makes sense.

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A Strange Fascination With Tragedy…

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When I was in third grade, we learned about The Challenger explosion, which happened 25 years ago today and is the reason why I’m thinking about all of this. In some way, my nine year old mind managed to turn this lesson into a cause for concern, that perhaps something equally as tragic could happen to my beloved teacher or even to me someday when I became a teacher. I managed to convince myself that if I really paid attention and became totally fixated on in, I could somehow prevent further tragedy from happening.

When I got home from school, I told my parents all about what I’d learned. In turn, my dad told me about how he remembered watching it live in the kitchen at my grandmother’s house where we were living at the time (whether I was there with him or not is still unclear. I may have been at pre-school, but he thinks I was there). He was talking to my mom on the phone and told her that it had just blown up, and she didn’t believe him. I have a memory of being in my grandma’s kitchen, of my dad sitting there with the TV on. I can see the coiled phone cord stretched across the room. I just don’t know if that’s the same memory. It’s been driving me kind of crazy for 19 years.

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Resolve

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I’m not typically the kind who makes New Year’s Resolutions. It’s not really my style. That being said, the only resolution I can ever remember making was on the final day of 2005 when I let a friend make my resolution for me: I’d start carrying a purse and not just my keychain wallet. Sigh. Okay. I stuck to it too, and now it feels weird if I don’t have my purse (mostly because it’s full of the gum that I compulsively chew).

The theme of my 2010 seemed to be, coming off of a terrible 2009, that I was just trying to figure out what I want. I don’t know if I’ll ever totally figure that out, but as I’ve been sitting on these first couple of weeks of 2011, it’s occurred to me that there are a few things that I want to work on.

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Me and My Sham Education

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For my senior colloquium course in college, I had to read this book, The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by (you guessed it!) Richard Rodriguez. In it, Rodriguez talks about being a “scholarship boy” and the opportunities it provided him for a life amongst the gringos. He was given opportunities that his parents (who suffered because of a language barrier, in particular) just didn’t have. He was always concerned, however, that he was just pleasing people and going through the motions, that he wasn’t really as smart as everyone led him to believe. Much of this book examines the concept of duality. For a plethora of reasons, I hated it. Something about the language or his opinion of himself. I couldn’t necessarily put my finger on it, but I just hated it.

Then, a few years later, when I was in grad school, I had to read it again. Twice.

The more I read this book, the more I continued to dislike it. But as I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my education lately and where it’s gotten me, I keep coming back to this book. Curses! Something about that idea of duality and binary oppositions, that his entire education was something of a sham started to resonate with me.

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Fall 2001: A Retrospective

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As the oldest of three children whose parents were both working commuters during their college days, I didn’t get much in the way of advice when it came time to pack up and set off for life on campus. Now that it’s been five years since I graduated and nine since I began college, the Person I’ve Become often wishes I could go back and smack some sense into the Person I Was…or at least impart some wisdom. Continue reading →

Mission: Editing – Accomplished.

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Maybe it’s part of my process that I take a lengthy hiatus from what I’m doing. I took a pretty long break as I was writing my novel, but after a few months I went back to it. I started off really strong with doing my first round of edits on my first draft…. and then I stopped. It wasn’t as bad as the writing break – I’d still do some editing here and there, but a few weeks ago I finally gave myself a proverbial kick in the pants to get working on it.

It’s fitting, then, that I finished writing my novel at 3 a.m., and last night/this morning, I finished doing the first round of edits at 3 a.m., as well.

Now I’m once again faced with the “What next?” question. I already planned to do another round of edits on this one as I go from the paper copy back to the computer, but then what? Hopefully I’ll be able to get myself to work at a pace that will allow me to be finished in time to participate in NaNoWriMo ’10 this year (or at least in a good place to work on both). But what then? Continue reading →