Billy Graham's Electric Rodeo

The "Ugli" Truth about Tomatoland

2011-07-17T19:48:00.005-05:00

I have been on a hot streak when it comes to great books this summer; the first was The Poison Tree, the second March, and now I've just finished Tomatoland and I feel like I just have tell someone about it. So here it goes.

Tomatoland is the "Food, Inc." for the Florida tomato industry but that doesn't really do it justice. The idea for the book began when Barry Estabrook, the author, was driving behind a big tomato truck and a large tomato flew out of the back and bounced onto his car window. It then bounced two, three, four times onto the pavement and landed on the side of the road -- totally unharmed. The author began with one burning question -- what made this tomato indestructible? -- and found that one query led to thousands.

The book talks about how, if you buy a red tomato from Florida in the winter (or even if you get them sliced up on a salad or a sandwich from a restaurant), it is actually green and unripe but has been gassed with something called ethylene so that it will appear red. The fact that it tastes like a cardboard box comes from the fact that ethylene doesn't actually ripen the fruit at all but instead acts as a cosmetic mask. In fact, very few tomatoes are allowed to ripen on the vine; instead, they are bulked up with pesticides and various chemicals to keep them worm-, fungus-, and rot-free, which is a necessity since tomatoes don't grow well in the Florida sand. Tomatoes that do ripen on the vine are tossed out or left in the field to shrivel up. Heirloom tomatoes -- which are by and large responsible fruit varieties because they've adapted to their environment and so don't need chemicals to thrive -- have fallen out of favor because the Florida Tomato Industry have banned any fruit that isn't perfectly round and flawless (a sure sign your tomato has been tampered with, since natural, organic tomatoes are neither).

Fifty to 60% of these chemicals used to grow most Florida tomatoes stay on the fruit long after they've been hosed down by the packing plant; you then feed these carcinogens to your kids, your friends, your partners. What's worse is that, if you're buying a Florida tomato in November, there's a good chance that it came from Immokalee, Florida -- the modern-day slavery capital of the United States. Immigrants (legal and otherwise) are locked into trailers with 10 to 12 other men, forced to urinate in cups and fed 1 bag of chips per household per day. Holes are drilled into the floor to allow air -- and spiders, roaches, and mosquitoes -- into the sweltering buildings. Come daylight, workers are heavily guarded and forbidden breaks, even when coated with the pesticides they're not supposed to be anywhere near. Many who attempt to escape are beaten, at best, and murdered, at worst. An overseer guards the fields to mete out punishment.

Not long ago, three female workers in Immokalee were sprayed with pesticides while pregnant, and their children were born with horrific deformities. One woman's child never developed a jaw, so his tongue constantly fell backwards into his throat, threatening to choke him. And two children were born without either arms or legs, something the tomato companies said were "total flukes" -- despite the fact that the children's mothers were not related to each other.

Right now, your options for buying responsibly are limited but companies such as Whole Foods have started supporting growers such as UgliRipe, which allow their tomatoes to ripen naturally, without ethylene or pesticides. Small farms in Florida are starting to fight back, trying to get their misshapen but flavorful heirloom fruits back into stores. So far, our best solution is to grow our own or support the small farms that do so responsibly.

For those of you who want to read for yourselves, here's the link. I'd love to hear what you think about the book or any others you've found moving/inspiring/thought provoking.

The Not-So-Blind Review

2011-05-14T21:27:00.003-05:00

This is a post for all of my academic friends, since ya'll are pretty much the only people I know of who, on a frequent basis, are preparing proposals or articles for blind review:

So I recently discovered that just taking my name off of my articles I'm submitting to journals does not make the submission "blind." If you are sending a word document to a journal for review, the reviewer only has to click "properties" to see that you were the last person who saved it. I found this out when a certain jerkface wrote a really nasty (rather than, say, constructively critical) review of one of my articles and sent it to me -- complete with her name in the "properties" box in Word. I was able to look her up to see the kind of unoriginal, underwhelming work she does at Nowheresville University, thereby reassuring myself that my work may not be as bad as her inferiority complex. Anyway, I learned how to "wipe" Word of its properties and thought I should pass the instructions along to everyone I care about.

For Word 2008 for Mac, go to "Word," "Preferences," and select "Security." Select "remove personal information from this file on save." Hit ok. Now your personal properties are wiped from the document, thereby officially making it a blind submission. This website will show you instructions for other versions of Word to achieve the same goal.

Words Don't Pull the Trigger; They Load the Gun

2011-01-13T15:53:00.004-06:00

I've been trying to process the various responses to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' attack, and I feel very conflicted when listening to both sides.

On the left, people are saying that recent vicious political rhetoric is to blame for Jared Loughner's shooting rampage. Sarah Palin, in particular, has been on the defensive because of the map dotted with crosshairs she put out some time ago, urging Tea Partiers and Republicans to target 20 House Democrats who supported Obama's Health Care Plan. The argument seems to be that the right's use of violent words (such as "target") and images spurred Loughner to commit the crime, and if we are to avoid another tragedy like this one, we need to tone down the rhetoric.

The right is responding a number of ways. Some, such as Palin herself, are saying that Loughner was a madman and that Tea Partiers and Republicans should continue to speak out against policies they disagree with, using any metaphors they please. Others -- and I find this most interesting -- have decided to skirt the issue altogether and focus instead on making a devil of Loughner's attorney, Judy Clarke, the death penalty expert who represented Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Susan Smith.

To briefly address the approach of making Clarke somehow the real villain in this story: as my husband reminded me the other day, John Adams represented the British in the Boston Massacre and was humiliated for it, but he did it because the criminal justice system distinguishes the law-abiding society from the anarchic forces that seek to undermine it. The Right always trots out the founding fathers when it's convenient -- might as well be consistent with that strategy, eh?

As to the other (more viable) debate -- did madness pull the trigger, or did Sarah Palin? -- I don't believe the answer is clear one way or the other. I side with the right when I say that the spark of insanity had to be present in Loughner for him to believe that killing a 9-year-old girl (which he achieved) or a Congresswoman would change anything for the better. Without some chemical imbalance, or deranged upbringing, or both, he'd probably just be another "me," mumbling at the television or newspaper when I see the democratic system isn't working the way I'd hoped.

But I also have to admit, as a literature professor, that words do things. Speech act theory tells us that words such as "I now pronounce you man and wife," or "we. . .do. . .solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states," change people's lives in tangible ways. Strong words can cause people to see the world differently, can call them to take action, either for the better or, in Loughner's case, for worse.

Perhaps words don't pull the trigger, but I believe they load the gun. In that sense, then, I also side with the left. We should be careful of the rhetoric we soak in and spit back out, and, most importantly, we should refuse to elect the people who seek to polarize us with hate speech. We should agree to continue to debate but should try to do so civilly and without embracing fallacies instead of facts. We can't prevent another shooting like the one in Arizona because we can never get rid of insanity, but we can decrease the likelihood by refusing to feed madness with vitriol.

Food (and other) Rules

2011-01-03T08:02:00.005-06:00

So, I absolutely appreciate that, at the heaviest I've ever been, I'm going to write a blog about weight and health. But who doesn't appreciate a little irony in the new year?

At the beginning of 2010, a friend of mine wrote me an email and said that she was tired of being unhealthy and was gathering tips from people about making lifestyle changes. I typed up a response, thinking little of it until I noticed a few months later that my friend had lost several sizes. "What have you been doing?" I asked her. "I printed out your email," she said, "and your suggestions worked." We were sitting with a colleague, who asked for the "plan," and others started asking for it, too, so I thought -- why not use the blog to type it up? The 3 top goals for the new year are, after all, saving money/getting out of debt, quitting smoking, and losing weight. So in the spirit of things, a la Michael Pollan (from whom I borrowed a bit), here are my "Food (and other) Rules":

1. Shop on the periphery of the supermarket. Milk, meat, and vegetables are sold there; the stuff in the middle is processed, and full of unpronounceable ingredients with which your body can do very little. If you limit what you buy from those aisles, it's likely you'll greatly cut down on sugar and sodium without even trying or calorie counting.

2. As soon as you get home, wash and cut up your fruits and vegetables and put them in a see-through ziplock bag. My husband unloads the other groceries while I do this, so that I'm not stuck in the kitchen for an entire afternoon. People use being too tired to chop as an excuse to grab a burger on the way home, but if the veggies are already chopped, and it takes 3 minutes to steam them in some chicken broth, you've already spent less time making dinner than you have sitting in the drive-through.

3. Put good-for-you food at eye level. I noticed when I put the chopped-up veggies in the vegetable drawer, they were out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But when I put them on the middle row in the fridge, when I opened it to think about what to have for lunch, "cauliflower!" was suddenly an easy answer I didn't have to dig for. The same rules go for your pantry -- putting those little bags of almonds with sea salt or 100-calorie packs of dried cranberries where your chips used to be takes the thinking out of what to have for a snack.

4. Eat on salad plates and out of ramekins. Throw out your giant pasta bowls -- if you fill them, you're eating enough for 3 people. But if you fill up a salad plate, you trick yourself into thinking you've indulged. As for the ramekins -- they hold about 1 cup of food. The average serving size of cereal is 3/4 of a cup, and a recent Cooking Light article I read confirmed that something like 90% of all people overpour, sometimes eating 400 calories for breakfast without even meaning to do so. You can't overpour in a ramekin.

5. Eat pizza, once a week, but make it yourself. No, seriously -- dieting means deprivation, and deprivation causes you to overeat, go off track, and go back to old habits. So plan to eat something you really like once a week, but make it yourself so you can control the ingredients and quality of the food. Homemade pizza is about 1,000 times better than take-out anyway.

6. Exercise 5 times a week, but make bargains with yourself, and rest for 2 days. Now that I'm about 7 1/2 months pregnant, the "bargaining" part of this rule is really important for me. There are several days that I wake up at 5 and don't want to go to the gym (my own rule is to work out first thing in the day so that you can't put it off, or so that people can't step on your workout schedule with surprise meetings, but that doesn't work for everybody). So I compromise; I promise that I'll take a lap in the swimming pool when I get home from work, or that I'll go ahead and get up at 5 but I can work on the recumbent bike (which is easy) instead of doing interval training (which I hate). Or if it's a really pretty day, my bargain is that I abandon the gym (where I get a more strenuous workout) and powerwalk near the lakes by the house, only I double the time I do it.

7. Vary your workout. This is kind of related to #6. Do different things so you don't get bored, or injured. Seems like a no-brainer, really. Last year I bought rollerblades and found out, using a heartrate monitor, that 20 minutes burned 300 calories. It took about 45 min of jogging to get the same results. Yay!

8. Give up on diets. Diets don't work because, when you're done, you go back to eating the way you did before.

9. Plan 3 meals a week ahead of time. The other reason people eat out is that they're hungry and they don't know what they're going to make for dinner, but if you planned your meals ahead of time, then you eliminate that problem. And there are several cookbooks out there (Sandra Lee has one, as does Robin Miller) that show you how to make one main dish and create 3 meals out of it, for people who are stretched for time, hate cooking, or are on a budget.

After teaching my food class, I've developed several other food rules, but I do not know how they'll affect my waistline. I've given up substituting splenda (which is apparently toxic) for sugar and have abandoned eating things with the word "lite" on the front, opting instead to just use less of something made with recognizable ingredients. I've also tried to cut down on eating red meat to once or twice a week, which has been easy since the baby reacts negatively to it most of the time. I'll have to wait until the spring/early summer to see if that has affected me at all, but so far, these "food rules" must work, since I'm on schedule (God willing!) to gain little more than the minimum 35 lbs the doctors recommend, have struggled with only minimum aches and pains during the pregnancy, and have managed to avoid other unfortunate pregnancy pitfalls, such as gestational diabetes.

Now that I've written this, I'll probably swell like a sausage and gain 20 lbs in the home stretch, being forced onto bedrest. But at least my strawberries will be prepped and ready for when I recover. =) What are your food (or other) rules?

Everybody Eats

2010-11-19T11:57:00.004-06:00

I taught composition for about 8 years before I got to the University of Tampa, 9 if you include my time in writing centers at the beginning of my MA degree. I always worked very hard on the course, but I never could make anyone excited about the class. Sure, there were moments when students told me they learned vital skills in Eng 101 or 102, but few ever said they liked writing and research -- until this year.

This year, my research & writing course got a complete overhaul and a new theme: American Foodways: The Study of American Food Culture through Research and Writing. I divided the class into 3 sections: Food Memories, Southern Foodways, and Food Politics. One section encouraged students to write autobiographically about a memory they had that involved food (using the book Eat, Memory as a model); the next studied the culture of southern food through Cornbread Nation (a section that involved a food project -- edible research, yum); and the final section, which I'm currently teaching, is the "Food Inc," Omnivore's Dilemma, gritty agribusiness portion of the course.

A miracle occurred. Somewhere between my African student telling about his refusal to eat a sacrificial ox and my Hindi student defending her choice to eat halal, the students became interested -- not only in writing and research, but in each other. They became friends, in some cases, but colleagues, mostly, sharing resources, pairing up to go to Epcot to research The Land, engaging in vegan diet experiments together and comparing notes. It was . . . weird. People were speaking voluntarily, actually completing the assigned reading, and consistently bringing in current events, video clips, and other news references pertaining to the class.

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what suddenly went right but I've had to admit finally that it wasn't me; it was food. Everybody eats. I wanted the students to love what I loved -- I tried memoir, the South, even a class with open topics. But what I needed was an undeniably common ground, and that, apparently, was food.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

2010-10-09T12:48:00.003-05:00

I just finished the wildest story that I have ever read, and all of it was true.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot tells a tale I was unlikely to be interested in, at first, since its focus is the origin of the HeLa cell, one of only a few cells that not only grows in culture, but multiplies. I don't really care much about nonfiction science stories, but this one was different.

Skloot tells the story of a young black woman from the South who had her cancer cells taken and experimented upon; neither she nor her family were the wiser, even long after Henrietta had died and the cells had become so remarkably important that every lab in the nation had a sample of them, leading to the development of vaccinations and treatments for polio, AIDS, syphilis, and a number of other diseases. The book is about the fight over the cells but also about the family tormented by their mother's "immortality." It's a story of eugenics, degeneracy, lies, rocket-ships, violence, forgiveness, trust, and faith.

Since most of the surviving Lackses never had more than a third-grade education, Skloot's journey to find the truth about Henrietta is long and hard, as she fought to win the trust of a group of people who both never understood and couldn't trust the science that made their mother immortal. Plagued by their own demons, the Lacks family members suffered from paranoia, depression, anxiety, rage, and high blood pressure -- none of which, ironically, they could afford to have treated, despite their mother's important contributions to science. Their story is hopeful and heart-wrenching. I would strongly recommend it, even if neither science nor nonfiction are genres you typically embrace.

Warming Up to the Kindle

2010-09-23T08:52:00.002-05:00

I'm a bibliophile. I love everything about books: the smell of their pages, the triumphant feeling of turning that last sheet of paper at the end of a good story, the escape. So when the Kindle came out, I frowned and shook my head. "Not for me," I said. "I spend 3/4 of my day staring at a computer screen. Why would I want to spend my evenings doing that, too?"

At least, I felt that way until I filled my house up with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, cramming books into hallways and stuffing them under beds. If there's one thing I like more than books, it's a decluttered house. Clutter makes me unable to think; people who keep things for sentimental reasons baffle me, since a memory is worth much more than the thing with which that memory is associated. If I have too much stuff in my home, I feel anxious and sweaty. But I wasn't about to give up reading -- so, I turned, finally, to the Kindle.

No, the Kindle doesn't have that glorious smell of old dusty pages, but let me talk about what it does have. First of all, every time it goes to sleep (it is remarkably energy efficient), it digitally weaves a new "cover," made of art, the faces of familiar authors and poets, or classic book titles. It's a constant surprise and I find it delightful. As for the "computer" screen, it isn't one. Amazon has manufactured "digital ink," which reads like a book page, doesn't promote eye strain, and doesn't have a glare. I am no more fatigued after reading from it than I am from a paper-and-ink page.

But the best part is the giant online selection of books, which I can peruse from my own home, in a big comfy chair. I recently finished Mockingjay sooner in the evening than I'd hoped, which left me without a book to read for the rest of the week. My schedule is so busy that bookstore perusal can only happen on Saturdays, if I'm very lucky. But because of the Kindle, I was able to download 3 previews of books I'm considering reading and read 20 pages of each as a trial run before committing to buy. I can spread out my trial all week long, something I don't have the luxury of doing in the hour I might have to spend in the bookstore.

I can see this wireless / 3g feature working out really well on holidays, when I visit family with space to spare only for Christmas presents and not for the 4 books I think I might be able to read in two weeks. The newest version is as thin as a comic book and twice as light; it slid into my purse without adding a bit of extra weight, making it ideal to take to the many doctor's visits I have these days.

Did I mention brand-new hardbacks are $9.99? If for no other reason -- sold.

Reality News

2010-08-16T07:50:00.002-05:00

So, this weekend at a monster truck rally, a truck went out of control and smashed 8 people in the crowd, killing them. While I was eating breakfast, the news decided to play it for me, causing me to immediately hit the power button to switch off the grizzly scene. At what point did it become necessary and acceptable to show scenes like that on TV? And why can't I become desensitized to it?

I trace the moment I became disgusted with sensationalist news to 9/11, when CNN ran a close-up shot of people hurling their bodies out of the windows of the towers before they completely collapsed. Their free-fall to the jagged stones of concrete below is something I will never be able to erase. If I'd been warned, I would have looked away; I did not need to store that image for instant recall, nor can I see how it added to the reporting of the atrocity in any way.

The Digital Age makes video so accessible that I rarely hear anyone talking about the appropriateness of screening a shot before considering airing it. On iphones, digital cameras, flips, and laptops, cameras are ubiquitous. The 24-hour news cycle makes the eyewitness account imperative, since it ostensibly keeps viewers from switching to another channel to get a summary, rather than an up-close-and-personal view, of the story. But what's lost in the fight to be first? Sure, it's the verifiability of the story, but it's also the respect of the subjects and the subjects' families being filmed, not to mention that of the viewers.

Dreams

2010-08-05T16:07:00.004-05:00

Lately, I have had some very odd dreams. Last night, I dreamed that an old friend of mine was held hostage in the attic of a suburban home and she was traded for me and my dog Sierra. The couple who kidnapped me wanted me to be their maid so that they could throw dinner parties and look richer than they really were. When the wife was out of the room, the husband would try to slash my wrists with scissors, and when she was in the room, he'd pretend I did it to myself. At the dinner party, my parents showed up and began helping me wash knives and forks, trying to figure out why I couldn't leave. I kept slipping them tiny paring knives to hide under dishtowels and trivets so that I could stab my keepers and escape after the party, but my parents kept exposing the knives, shining them, and putting them into drawers. I woke up before I could escape the house.

The night before that, I dreamed I wanted to visit a former professor and friend at my alma mater, but instead of looking for him in the Foreign Languages building, where he worked, I ended up in the English building. It had been turned into a corporate office with suits and filing cabinets and papers everywhere and not one familiar face. Someone did tell me that my friend now worked in the elongated glass Toyokyo Building (a combination of Toyota and Tokyo, though I don't know why -- this building isn't real) and that I could find him there. But when I entered Toyokyo, all I could find was an underground basketball stadium with hundreds of Japanese businessmen everywhere. Above the concession stand, Baylor had submerged about five athletes in a "water coma" so that they could recuperate. You could watch them hooked up to underwater monitors being operated on by surgeons. I never did find my friend.

At least I no longer have insomnia.

The Cross-Dressing Patriot

2010-07-03T08:41:00.002-05:00

As you lift your beer and sparklers in celebration of our nation's independence this 4th of July, don't forget to give a toast to Deborah Sampson Gannett, the crossdressing patriot. Although present-day Tea Partiers would probably write her out of the history books if they could, she's certainly someone to remember.

Gannett was about 20 years old in the late 18th century when she strapped her breasts tight to her body with a strip of cloth and donned a man's suit she'd been secretly sewing in a barn for months. One would imagine she sidled into the New England tavern where Revolutionary troops went to sign up for combat and collect their reward money for doing so. The story goes that, upon collecting this large sum, she drank herself into oblivion, passed out in her bedroom, and missed next morning's roll call, thereby invoking the ire of her superiors, who searched for her in her house and, apparently, discovered she was a woman.

Gannett wasn't to be deterred, though. Sick of farm chores and suitors, she put on her suit and ran away to another New England town, where she signed up for the Revolutionary War again, this time assuming her brother's name, Robert Shurtleff, and began her 3-year service with fellow patriots.

As with all cross-dressing war stories, this one gets complicated when she gets a small bullet (read: miniature cannon ball) in her upper thigh. As her body is carried into the tent where the doctor is going to take off her pants to dress her wound and, thereby, discover her secret, she tries to shoot herself in the head, but the gun is too unwieldy and her resolve fails her. She goes with plan B instead. She distracts the doctor by telling him she just needs to sleep, and when he leaves the room to tend to the others, she steals his surgical instruments and cuts the ball out of her own thigh. She then hobbles back to the battlefield, telling her comrades, "I'm just fine, boys; let's get moving."

So they do, and she serves well for the remainder of the war -- at least, until she reaches the fever epidemic in Philadelphia and comes so close to death that her body is dumped on a wheelbarrow intended for a row of cold unmarked graves. Doctor Binney notices her movement and plunges his hand into the front of her shirt, immediately coming to two realizations: (a) Soldier Gannett/Shurtleff's heart is still beating and (b) He has breasts.

Binney carries her to his house where he "leaves out" the fact that Shurtleff is a woman and allows her to recuperate there. He then parades her as a Revolutionary war hero to his friends, still maintaining her disguise. "Shurtleff" is courted by a lovely young 17 year old woman, who baffles Gannett in her ardor. After accepting loads of gifts from the young girl, Gannett finally tells her the truth and takes off with the other troops. Her biographer maintains that Gannett/Shurtleff and the scorned lover "remained friends," but, woman-to-woman?, I doubt this is true.

Binney rats out Gannett to her superior officers only after Gannett has moved on. She is honorably discharged and provided a sum for the remainder of her life from the American government. It isn't enough, though, and to make a little dough on the fascination with the war shortly after its close, she acts out her biography onstage at the Boston Federal Street Theatre. Each night, she paced through 27 military exercises before giving her speech to a packed house. Audiences loved and hated her.

So this fourth of July, as you celebrate all that the red, white, and blue stands for, don't forget to the thank the crossdressing soldiers who made this holiday possible.

8,172

2010-06-28T08:39:00.002-05:00

8,172 views and perhaps a total of 6 comments over the lifetime of this blog? Is anyone out there?

Back in Boston: Other People's Mail

2010-06-22T07:28:00.002-05:00

Imagine the fall rolls around and my students and I are playing "my summer vacation." Sally went to the Virgin Islands to play Carnival and visit her folks. Rufus hiked the Himalayas, and Joan studied abroad in Prague. It's my turn and, giddy, I say, "I spent the summer in a library!" It probably wouldn't win me any awesome professor points, would it?

And yet, there's something wonderful about the library I spent the past 2 weeks in, researching for my book project. The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is a cool, quiet marble shrine to everything that means anything to people who want to preserve early American culture. The first time I sat down under the librarian's watchful eyes to touch Abigail Adams' letters -- to trace the worry for her husband in her slanted penmanship, to wonder if the paper's softness came, at least in part, from John's propensity to read her missives over and over again -- I became addicted. The yellowed pages, smudges, stains, misspellings, crossouts and cracked red wax seals made the clean, crisp, white, ellided, footnoted, neatly edited published versions of these letters look like lies. The letter's body often tells as much about the correspondence as the words on the page do. There is no substitute for the Real Thing.

This time around, I was visiting the MHS to read loyalist's letters -- you know, women who sided for the "wrong team," the Brits, in the Revolutionary War. And by the end of it, I was with the Tories. According to their version of the story, the Patriots were undisciplined, ungrateful, unfaithful children. The American soldiers were rude, vile, indecent men who barged into women's homes, often drunk, to make a spectacle of themselves before stealing wood and valuables to take with them back to camp. Those that fled the war took agonizing journeys to Nova Scotia to establish towns like Halifax that would become safe havens for British sympathizers, but they often did so while leaving behind brothers, husbands, and sons, who stayed behind to defend land the families would eventually have taken from them by the eighteenth-century version of Homeland Security (then called Committees of Safety).

At any rate, the whole trip got me to thinking about the death of letter-writing, and how letters and journals, like this blog, are at best semipermanent, so easily taken down and deleted that I ache for the archivists and historians who will want to know anything about millenials in the Digital Age. What will we leave behind?

Back in Boston: Edie Sedgwick

2010-06-14T08:37:00.002-05:00

So yesterday, after a dinner of buccatini and pancetta, I needed a long stroll, so Andrew & my friend Lisa & I decided to cut through Boston Commons to see Faneuil Hall at sunset. I wanted to show Andrew the newest crop of baby ducklings, but when we got near the pond to see them, we found, instead, two men flicking water on the poor creatures. They turned to see us gawking, and, per my luck, one of them stumbled toward me.

"EDIE!" he said.

Here we go, I thought.

"EDIE SEDGWICK!"

"I do not look like Eve Sedgwick," I said. "Eve Sedgwick looks like a man." I was pretty impressed that someone as high as this guy could conjure up an image of a respectable feminist critic like Eve Sedgwick at the height of his hallucination, but was just as confused as to why he'd feel comfortable calling such a formidable woman "Evie." In case you don't know her, this is Eve Sedgwick:

He seemed confused by my response, so he wrinkled his brow and tripped over a tree root. He decided I couldn't speak English very well, so he started yelling at me.

"YOU LOOK JUST LIKE EDIE SEDGWICK!" he screamed. "FROM THE 60s!"

I thought the most logical way of dealing with him was to yell back.

"I DO NOT. LOOK LIKE. A MAN."

This was all entirely too confusing for him and, anyway, his companion was trying to sit in a perfect stranger's lap. She was flapping her arms trying to shoo him away, but it wasn't working. He swerved toward his friend and pulled him down the pathway away from the ducklings and, thankfully, away from us.

Of course, it was only after hours of giggling about it did I find out who Edie Sedgwick, 1960s pop icon, was (see below).

I have to admit, I was a little relieved.

Back in Boston

2010-06-09T08:46:00.005-05:00

Boston looks different in the morning than it does in the day. By day, I can't help but associate Boston with the belly of a beast, mostly because, by day, I ride the subway, which smells like blown-out tires and hot exhaust and dirty feet and old newspapers. But this morning, I saw Boston at daybreak when I went for a jog at the Commons. And it was an entirely different scene.

There's a long hidden stretch of pavement that runs along Commonwealth that's shaded by old, long-fingered trees and tall apartment buildings. Bronze statues of women I've studied for years but thought no one knew about interrupt the sidewalk. Lucy Stone. Phillis Wheatley. People pour out of tiny apartments with big dogs on leashes. German shepherds, fat labradors, unnamable English-looking showdogs that probably cost more than my car. How do they all fit inside, I wonder? Then there are the impertinent little creatures -- Jack Russells, Rat Terriers with bellies larger than their little legs, Wirehairs with perfectly straight earpoints and leather collars, walked by women wearing 3-inch high heels at 6 o'clock in the morning.

There's no way I could ever fit in here, were I to momentarily go insane and move to New England. This has a little to do with the fact that I'm a hick and a little more to do with my complete lack of urban fashion sense. My Coldwater Creek sweater and so-five-years-ago wedges make me look dowdy around the women who shop on Newbury street, where they apparently develop some superhero ability to pair breezy pale colored skirts with floral vintage-but-not-bargain-basement collared button-downs. Their long bare legs seem impervious to the weather, which is a steamy 50 degrees in the middle of June. I wear a hooded jacket and scowl at them as I clunk down the street but it doesn't make me feel any less out of place.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Coming Out in Cass County

2010-05-14T07:39:00.003-05:00

I recently went home and opened the newspaper to a story about a man who was living a closeted gay lifestyle with a crossdresser who called himself Sa'Derius. You have to understand that crossdressing is something you have to drive 4 hours to Dallas to do; it must've taken a lot of stealth and planning on Sa'Derius's part, and somewhere between Commerce and a club in Deep Ellum, Sa'Derius must've done some soul searching. He decided that he and his partner should come out to their families and stop living life as if they were ashamed of themselves. When Sa'Derius approached his lover to convince him to come out to Cass County (ok it was Bowie but the alliteration is appealing), his lover shot and killed him. He told the judge he was convinced Sa'Derius was clutching a gun in his hand, but when he pried open his cold, dead fingers, all he was holding was a bottle of blue nail polish. Honest-to-God true story.

It's hard to come out in Cass County. When I was teenager, I had a friend who didn't so much come out as she was outed by her lover, who was a wild girl with dark punk hair and Goth white skin and acne. When she sat down at the prep table and put an arm around my friend, she was making a statement. Before we could blink, Goth girl had taken out a rotten banana and taught us how she and my friend had learned to do all kinds of things with it. She took time to take in our faces, and then she left. My friend never recovered from the ridicule that followed her outing in the school cafeteria. She moved and didn't tell a soul where she'd gone. I haven't heard from her since.

When I was a bit older, I met one of the best preachers I'd ever had. She helped me through the worst year of my life -- 1996, the year I became a 16-year-old, had my first heartbreak, and lost my grandfather to cancer -- and helped me understand Faith and Doubt can, in fact, go hand-in-hand. When she moved to become a pastor in another city, she divorced her husband and took a female partner, a Lindenite who had also been married with children. Everyone buzzed. I'd heard some people xeroxed her partnership announcement in the paper and tacked it up on telephone poles, but it's impossible to say if that was true.

It's hard coming out as anything different in Cass County, and that applies to just about any label someone might try to adopt. It's hard to be a drug addict, divorced, depressed, alcoholic; it's tough to be too smart or too dumb, to have no job or two jobs, to have no kids or ten. Being part of a rural town is a lot like being part of a big family. Some types of deviation can bring you closer to everyone in it, while others can make you a permanent outcast. Which it'll be is anyone's guess.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Lacy's Bridge

2010-04-23T10:51:00.000-05:00

Lacy was dead, to begin with. That's all I can really tell you because I don't remember the true story behind the ghost that allegedly haunted Lacy's Bridge. Variants of it have something to do with a young girl, a suicide, maybe an unborn kid, maybe a lover scorned -- who can tell?

Rumor had it that if you crossed Lacy's Bridge at night, all manner of things could happen to you. Your car would stall. Your lights would go out. Faces would press up against your window while you stared out into the dark night.

If you wanted to reach the witch's grave, you had to cross Lacy's Bridge, and that's just what we were doing one Halloween night when I was about 15 or 16 years old. The car was stuffed with teenagers dressed as slut-whore bellydancers, slut-whore cheerleaders, and slut-whore nurses. The guys smeared gooey fake blood on white t-shirts, halfheartedly playing along with the charade. We turned the car engine off at Lacy's Bridge to call her out. You don't know quiet until you reach the country in East Texas at night. Bullfrogs turn to vampires. Bellowing cows become the moaning dead. I surreptitiously put a handprint on the humid back window and tapped my friends to show them that Lacy was trying to push the car over the edge into the black water. Someone, undoubtedly Carrie, maybe Lauren, gave me a good smack for pulling my old antics.

Let me pause a second to tell you that smack was entirely justified. One night, at a sleepover, I forced my friends to watch the Exorcist when we were entirely too young to do so, then crept outside and, at the scariest part, raked my fingernails down the dark glass that looked into the livingroom. Thereafter, my friend Steph slept in the bathroom wedged between the toilet and the wall. This was a stunt topped only by the time Melinda & Carrie tried to pull one on me by planning (a little too loudly) a sneak attack on me after I'd fallen asleep. Since I'd overheard the plot, I unscrewed all of the light bulbs in the room and hid, so that when they pounced on my bed, they found it empty. When they went to turn on the lamp, all they heard was CLICK. And then, my favorite part: CLICK CLICK.

So I'm saying I deserved the smack. At any rate, I was about to try something else to elicit a scream when we heard a gunshot. Everyone slipped and stumbled and scraped, a flutter of gauze and sequins and fake wigs and high heeled shoes, trying to cram back into the car and speed away. Lacy must have been preoccupied because the car started -- did it do so weakly? -- and we skidded away on the dirt road back home.

We say, to this day, that somebody's daddy was firing at us for trespassing near his house. In Texas, you don't step on someone else's land uninvited in the middle of the night -- especially Halloween Night -- and expect a glass of sweet tea. Maybe it was Lacy, trying to teach me a little something about fear.

If Necessary, Use Words

2010-04-11T15:56:00.002-05:00

Every day on my way home from work, I pass a used car lot, and that used car lot has a sign that hasn't changed in the year I've lived here. It says, "Go forth and spread the gospel. If necessary, use words."

I've always thought that was a ridiculous sign, mostly because evangelicals who might follow that advice are probably already too full of words and too short on action. But for some reason today, the sign struck me. It made me think of Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream, which says the South is marked by signs with words and signs without words, and while she was talking about state-mandated and social segregation, it still has resonance with me today. Everywhere I turn, I see a message.

Take, for example, the other day. I was sitting at a red light next to a homicidal maniac who decided that, when the left-turn-only arrow turned green, he'd shoot out of the go-straight lane I was in and attempt to careen into the cars veering left on their protected signal. Seconds after the maniac made his attempted suicide, I sat at my own red light, wondering how in heaven's name he hadn't been smashed to pieces. Suddenly, the car behind me sat on his horn and gave me an ugly hand gesture. Beeeeeeep. He wanted me to run my red light, too. His message was, "I'm more important than your safety," "I have somewhere interesting to be," and "You don't matter very much."

I was recently engaged in a service opportunity with a woman I didn't know well. A man walked in after all of the food had been cleaned up and approached me. He'd missed breakfast and the access pass he needed to obtain clothing for the month. "Do you have any shoes?" he asked. It was 95 degrees on the pavement outside. Summer was approaching with fury. "The clothes closet surely does; let me get you the ticket you need to get them," I said, turning to the woman in charge, expecting her to give it to him. "You're LATE," she said sharply at the man with no shoes. To add emphasis, she looked at her watch and blew out a huff of air, rolling her eyes. "I'm sure they don't have anything. Because you're SO LATE. But I GUESS you can look." He was eyeing the 13 loaves of bread she was preparing to toss in the trash can, and she noticed it, and she took them away anyway. "I am important here," she was saying without saying it. Her sign read: "I matter here. I feel powerful when I deny you what you need. I am in charge and you are not."

I thought about my own signs without words. What have I printed there for everyone to see?

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Drugstore

2010-04-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

I didn't know, at the time, that spending every day after school at a real, working drugstore would one day be an unusual thing, but it would be.

A drugstore in a small town is about more than just pharmaceuticals. Like the Country Store, it's where old guys go to drink coffee in a drab room in the back. And it doubled as a video store with neat rows of plastic VHS boxes. I always wanted to rent the ones that had titles like "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" but I was a creature of habit. I would always pick Labyrinth even though I knew every word from the beginning to the end.

The drugstore also had rows of neat white Whitman's chocolates for men who forgot their wives on anniversaries and valentine's and didn't have time to make the hour drive to a big city to pick up a present. It was the best place to pick out cards with bad puns before stepping down the street to Capital Florist, which let you charge your flowers to your account because they'd know where to find you if you didn't pay your bill. I didn't want chocolates, however; I was most interested in the Wetslicks Fruit Spritzers Lipgloss which I was convinced would make boys want to kiss me. It didn't.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Legion Hall

2010-04-02T08:41:00.000-05:00

Sure it's "Music City" now but the Legion Hall used to be this big dusty auditorium with concrete floors, peeling paint, and musty-smelling velour curtains. I loved every inch of it.

It's where the Lions Follies, a show featuring local talent, took place, and my dad and Mr. Penny (male adults in small towns don't have first names) were the emcees. Mr. Penny always wore a red shirt and red pants and suspenders; he could wiggle his hips and feet in two different directions at the same time, which I found remarkable.

I used to perform at the Follies too. When I was little and it was OK to sing off-key, my mom dressed me up in a poodle skirt and put my red-headed boyfriend in front of me in a sailor suit and told me to sing "Soldier Boy" to him. The only thing I can remember is that his face turned as red as his hair and when he kissed me on the cheek at the end of it, the crowd started to whistle, which I didn't understand. When I got older, my mom sat me down and said, "Kacy, I have to tell you something. You're not very good at singing." Which was true. So she strapped a two-headed styrofoam dummy to my back and put boots on my hands and feet and I did a weird puppet show to a song I can't remember. That was the end of my career as a stage performer at the follies.

The best part about the Lions Follies was the underground "green room" which wasn't green at all but solid cement and cold. Follies participants would party there after the show; everyone brought food to stash in the kitchen for the celebration. My friend Lauren and I would tiptoe downstairs and steal one of Miss Billie's sandwiches, which she made with ham and crack, and my mom would always catch us and fuss at us for being the little piggies we truly were.

When I got older I watched the show from the audience, usually balancing on the yellow handicapped railing at the back of the building, practicing gymnastic flips over the bar and barely escaping smashing my head into the concrete floor. Later, when the fun of the follies was long over, the building was used as a gym, when a husky guy from out of town came to teach wouldbe cheerleaders backhandsprings. One night, he took everyone's payment for that month and skipped town without so much as a kiss-my-foot. I wonder whatever happened to that SOB.

Do You Trust Your Guards?

2010-03-27T22:15:00.003-05:00

I was flying to Albuquerque for a conference the other day and had the privilege of sitting next to a trio of the most amusing people I've ever met, though I can't say I thought so at the time.

The experience began with me squeezing down the plane's aisle to stop at my row which was, of course, already occupied by two people. The older man got up to let me stumble to my window seat. The woman next to him, who was probably 20 years his junior with a face stiff with botox injections, refused to move. "May I sit down, please?" I asked. I couldn't take one more Yankee attitude. She clutched an oversized Gucci handbag tighter and stared straight ahead, setting her lips. "IF YOU DON'T MOVE," I say louder as if she's old rather than mean, "I WILL SIT IN YOUR LAP."

This makes her pick her dainty toes up and swivel them to the side to rest in her husband's chair. She will not be moved.

I attempt as quickly as possible to turn on my ipod but I'm not fast enough; she immediately begins whining through her nose, "Why do we have to sit back HERE? WHY aren't we flying first class?" So now it's clear. I'm the riffraff who has put her out. The proletariat has infiltrated the ranks.

But her husband doesn't hear her because he's taken up a conversation with a woman across the aisle from him. This woman is about his age, a psychiatrist, and, judging from their conversation, has no idea that Botox is his wife, which is when things get interesting.

After the man declares to the plane that he can "surf the internet in flight any time he wants because he owns $28 billion dollars worth of stock in this company," his new friend gets interested. "Have you been to New Zealand?" she asks. "I once considered living on my friend's 20-acre golf course overlooking the ocean," he responds, "but I didn't want to leave my 4 houses here in the states." His answer doesn't matter; she's asked it so that she can tell him, "I lived a month there after my husband left me. Now I couldn't be happier."

At this point, Botox begins taking things out of the Gucci so that she can slam them into his lap. By the end of his conversation with New Zealand, makeup bags, magazines, and various sundries are piled up to his forehead. But he takes no notice.

Instead, he says, "I might as well move there. You know, for when the anarchy descends."

I cut my eyes sideways and wait for New Zealand's attempt at a girlish giggle but it doesn't come. Instead, she closes her eyes and smiles as if he's passed a test and she's proud of him. "I have a house on a mountain," she tells him. "You can only get there by helicopter." "Us too," he says. They're starting to get excited. "I have a water tank big enough to run a house for four months," she says, giddy. "And we have a house run by a generator that could power a Wal-Mart for six," he adds, more coolly than she did. "Yes," she replied, "but" -- and I'm not making this up -- "do you trust your guards?"

Now, I would've had enough of a story to tell if she'd stopped here, but she didn't. It finally dawns on New Zealand that he speaks with the plural pronoun. "Who's we?" she asked. "My wife," he replied, pointing to Botox who, by this point, has stopped breathing in her absolute fury. Her swollen lips are puffier than before; she's narrowed her eyes as if to slice holes in the back of the sticky airplane tray; her arms are crossed so tightly that her elongated, manicured nails dig into her overtanned skin. "And she's as beautiful on the inside as she is on the out."

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: Shae vs. the Tornado

2010-03-20T10:23:00.003-05:00

My first Texas tornado that I can remember happened when I was ten years old and in school. We'd had drills for as long as I could remember but we'd never had to use them. Tornadoes were legends in Texas; I expected to hear a train, though I remember wondering if I should be listening for the clack-clack of its wheels or a shrill whistle. I didn't hear either. In fact, everything was silent, which was quite a feat for the fifth-grade hallway, where several kids were hunched over, faces touching the dirty floor, the top of our heads touching cold lockers, tiny hands covering the backs of our skulls. As if that would protect us from the ceiling that I just knew was going to fall on our heads. The sky turned green. The air became so thick you could eat it. The only other time I've felt something like that was during hurricane Katrina, when my old house breathed in and waited to exhale for what felt like days.

That's when Shae started to chant. It was weird because he was sitting cross-legged -- a direct violation of duck-and-cover tornado code -- and saying words I didn't understand in an even monotone. I was grateful because he'd interrupted the deal with God I was making that I surely would be unable to keep (I promise I'll be good forever; I promise to clean my room every day; I promise to give my book money to the communion plate). "What are you doing?" I asked him. "I'm talking to Buddha," he said. And the storm stopped.

Now, you have to understand that Linden didn't have any Buddhists, at least as far as 10-year-old, sheltered, close-minded Kacy was concerned. You were either Baptist or Methodist or you wore long skirts and spoke in tongues or you were a heathen; Catholics had to drive 22 miles to the closest church and so that didn't count. Why had Shae's God stopped the storm when mine didn't?

Shae was already mystical to me because he could eat an entire hoagie sandwich without any help. In my memory, he brought one to school every day piled high with shiny delicately sliced meats -- I imagine mortadella, salami, chorizo, and serrano ham with lettuce and tomato peeking out of the side. Now there's no way that's true because Milsteps only carried Carl Buddig turkey and bologna and something vaguely resembling meat studded with olives and pasteurized cheese. But the way I remember it, he carried a feast with him. Somehow Shae's ability to eat man-sized sandwiches and to stop tornadoes made him magical. Maybe he was.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Country Store

2010-03-15T21:48:00.001-05:00

The Country Store sold icees, stale coffee, those sugar-coated orange slices, and something called "potato logs," which my dad used to buy me for "dinner" when mom took night classes in Texarkana. You could buy gas there and you could count on it being overpriced, or, like the old men who hung out at the tables inside, you could treat it as a place to read the paper and buy black coffee and see your friends when the domino hall shut down. Primarily it was a spot for socializing.

Since it sat at the crossroads of 59 and the gateways to downtown, it was the ideal meeting place. The only problem is that no one really met there to go anywhere; the Country Store was the destination. It was a classless place: the dopesmokers, cheerleaders, rodeo-riders, nerds, freaks, and everyone in-between mingled there, and by mingled I mean that they stood on opposite sides of the parking lot and glared at one another. This so-called party would only be broken up by a fight, a curfew, sheer boredom, or a run to the county line for beer. As a girl with a perpetual twelve-year-old's face (or a judgmental goody goody reputation), I was almost never invited to the latter.

Miss Paula, who wasn't a "miss" at all and should, by Southern standards, never have been called by her first name, bought icees every morning of her life from the country store. She lived in the boonies -- yes, that's a real place -- but made the drive anyway and as far as I know never missed a day. Someone tried to buy her an icee machine once but she never used it. I never really understood the draw but now that I live in a place without a country store, maybe I do.

Chronicles of a Life in Linden: The Dairy Queen

2010-03-10T15:46:00.004-06:00

I've always wanted to write an autobiography, not because my life is interesting, but because the people I grew up with were. I'll never have the time to do it, so instead, I'm going to tell you about Linden, the little town where I grew up, in a series of blogs I'm calling Chronicles of a Life in Linden.

When I lived there, Linden had 2,000 people and one stoplight and only two official hangouts I was privy to: the Country Store and the Dairy Queen. This is about the Dairy Queen.

The Dairy Queen sold fried steak baskets with fries and gravy and a heartstopper called the DQ Dude which was a fried steak sandwich on two fat butter-laden pieces of bread slathered with mayonnaise. I'm almost positive the side dish was a coffee-can of bacon fat with a straw. My friend Lauren and I would beg for our parents to bring one to us while we were stuck at the daycare, trying to weasel our way out of eating string beans the consistency of cornmeal mush and overcooked macaroni noodles. I divided my fries into even numbers and dipped every other one in the DQ's peppered white gravy and tried to chew each one the same number of times as the last one, an early sign of the OCD nature that would get me my PhD.

Later, it'd be the place where this neighbor kid keyed my shiny blue sports car with 4 round bugeyed headlights for no apparent reason. This same kid spent almost every balmy summer night with me and Bobby on our deck listening to Weird Al tapes and eating Doritoes until the powdered cheese was so caked on our fingertips that we'd have to scrape it off with our front teeth. By day, he'd knock down forts we'd built together and attempt to tear up my family's swimming pool while we weren't home but I could never figure out why until someone told me he loved me. I stand by my own hypothesis that he must have been bipolar but, then, who could ever tell the difference?

Later I learned the Dairy Queen wasn't known so much for its food or vast parking lot full of teenagers but for the drug deals that went on in the kitchen. It's still open despite the fact that someone found a condom in his cheeseburger, sandwiched between two beef patties and a pool of greasy cheese. So much for the bucolic nature of the rural South, eh?

How a Homeless Man Called 911, or, My Adventure on the Way to the ER

2009-12-09T19:46:00.006-06:00

The morning began, as usual: early. I was getting ready for classes when I suddenly felt a stitch in my side. It began like any kind of running flank-cramp I've had after pushing myself a bit too hard. Only this pain made me unable to breathe, and, unlike a cramp derived from exertion, this didn't go away but increased tenfold as the seconds ticked by. Nausea rolled over me and I tried to hold onto the counter, the walls, the bed. Sitting made it worse. Standing was out of the question. I needed help.

I jumped in the car and made the longest three-mile drive of my life to a doctor's office that had just opened. I dragged across the parking lot into the small office, where three nurses were working. Although I created a strange sight, surely, as I could do no more than bend over at the waist and could barely eek out words, the nurses ignored me. Cutting their eyes at me from the side, they pretended to be very busy with paperwork. "Someone please talk to me," I said, trying not to overdo it despite my penchant for hyperbole. By this point, I'd convinced myself some important organ had exploded and was leaking some vital liquid into my body cavity. To say I was worried is putting it mildly. "You a patient here?" one woman finally asked, barely taking her eyes from the paper in front of her. "No. I'm new. Something's happened to me, and I need help." She spoke over me, pointing down the highway saying, "The hospital is that way. 30 minutes." And she resumed her paperwork.

I paused only a minute to lose all faith in humanity. Then I began the long crawl back to my car. I prayed I would make it to the hospital, but I didn't. I swerved violently off of the road, which was packed with rush-hour traffic, into an empty parking lot as I fought violent pain and sickness.

On my way into the lot, I saw two feet sticking out of a six-foot rusted dumpster. These feet belonged to a man who abandoned his dig to run over to my car. I was trying not to crawl on the asphalt, but I could not longer stand or sit, and I needed to think.

The homeless man climbed into my car and took my keys from me; he started the ignition. "If this guy steals my car while I'm dying in this parking lot, I am really going to lose it," I thought. "I'm just going to park it properly," he called out over my desperate pleas for him to get out of my car and to give me my keys. At this point, Dollar Store employees just arriving for work were rushing over to me, calling out, "Are you looking for a little dog?" Apparently the only rational explanation for a woman in business attire on all fours on the blacktop would be that she was looking for a lost pet. Made sense to me.

The absurdity of my situation began to get the better of me, and while I wanted to laugh, all I could do was cough out my explanation, "No. Dog. Can't. Breathe. Trying. Hospital. So. Far." At which point, the homeless man, who had, minutes before, been ankle-deep in rotten banana peels, whips out a cell phone and dials 911. I don't even have time to think about how freaking bizarre that is before I'm pulled into an ambulance and whisked away to the ER.

The last part of the story isn't nearly as interesting as the first. My doctors treat me like a hysterical drug-seeking maniac for four days, refusing to give me the painkillers that would have allowed me to eat, sleep, or sit still. All I can do is writhe, moan, sob, and beg them to listen to me tell them that my kidney feels like a hot, swollen watermelon. On day four, a specialist recognizes the signs and sends me home with meds that allow me to swallow jello and water. Hurrah.

Seven of the most excruciating days pass before I'm able to function again. Andrew takes off of work and stays with me to care for me. I drop 7 pounds in 7 days but recover. I find myself thankful for a dedicated husband, concerned Dollar Store employees, and the dumpster-diver with hot pink hi-tops and the willingness to call an ambulance. And I wonder, do these things happen to other people? Or just to me?

Scammed

2009-11-15T11:04:00.002-06:00

It's a well-known fact that people with PhDs have no common sense. It has something to do with spending too much time in dark rooms with books, and something else to do with idealism and ivory towers. Anyway, I'm here to reinforce that little stereotype with a story.

A young kid showed up at our door on Friday. He was wearing skinny jeans and dirty converse shoes and some nondescript t-shirt. He was probably in his mid-20s and he stood, pigeon toed, and fidgeted through a speech he'd clearly practiced. He was a junior at UF, he said, and was raising money to study with a BBC TV program we recognized. He didn't want money directly, though; he would be funded if he convinced people to purchase a certain number of books for a children's literacy program. He showed me a brochure I was too busy to examine closely; we were on our way out for the evening.

At this point in Pigeon-Toed's speech, I began to hear sirens. They sounded like fire engines and they got louder and louder, trying to blot out the kid's voice. But I remembered growing up in Linden -- the capital of small town USA --, and how hard it was to fundraise, and how people always helped me out when I needed to go on a school-related trip. Andrew seemed to think the guy was OK and he has much better sense than I do. So the kid gave us his name, pointed to his house, took our check, gave us a receipt for tracking our book order, and disappeared.

By this point the sirens had dulled. Instead, I felt a gnawing in my gut that translated to "wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong."

Fast-forward to one day later. That same gnawing chewed my husband out of sleep at 2 AM. His city-boy instincts finally kicked in. He searched the internet for the scam, and there was the boy's canned speech, the general description of the types of scammers who engage in this scheme, and all of the actions people had taken to try to stop the criminals.

The rest of what happened isn't important. We put a stop payment on the check and signed up for fraud monitoring, since this crook now had our bank account number. He never got the money.

But it taught me a lesson I'd hoped never to learn about trusting young faces and supporting people's endeavors in hard times. It also taught me something frightening about the state of the economy; what kind of a person has such a hard time that he decides to show his face to the people he's robbing? What WON'T a person like that do? And why, in heaven's name, didn't I know any better?

Cacoethes Scribendi

2009-11-01T18:07:00.003-06:00

I am a hypocritical composition teacher. Let me explain why.

I tell my students that I believe anyone can develop the fervor for writing, when really I believe I was born with a hunger to do it. This impulse used to be called cacoethes scribendi, often erroneously translated "the urge to write." While it's true scribendi means to write, cacoethes is more akin to madness than inspiration. I could no more ignore the impulse to write as I could to eat or breathe, and trying to explain that to people required to take a composition class has always seemed silly, if not strange and overtly sentimental.

I tell my students that six sources is enough for a research paper when I truly believe that scholars are born with a fire located in the center of their bodies that tells them when they can begin losing themselves in books and tells them again when they can stop and write. I don't read to get to know a subject better. I sink my teeth into subjects like a rabid dog tears into his last meal. I want to rip open every last bit of the subject before I put pen to paper and God help anybody who tries to stand in my way.

I tell my students the best work is carefully outlined and prepared when I secretly write like a woman possessed, letting the pages come out of me like some kind of sickness. When I'm done, I always think of Anne Bradstreet, not because I come anywhere close to her sense of irony or wit, but because she compared her finished product to a monstrous child, hideous when shown to the light of the world.

Sometimes I wonder how I could share this kind of thing with my own composition students without making them suggest that I belong in an asylum. How do you tell people who so desire structure, who want you to show them the steps to becoming a better writer, that it's an urge in the back of your mind or a fire in your core, and that, when you listen to your instincts, they'll take you farther than any composition textbook ever could?

Rookie

2009-10-21T19:13:00.000-05:00

Everyone says the first year of any new job is the hardest, but really that did nothing to prepare me for what these first few months have been like.

My typical schedule goes something like this: I push my way into rush hour traffic while blaring BBC Radio 1, which I turn all the way up so that I can ignore the four jerks who will attempt to ram my car in an effort to quickly wedge themselves into the traffic, which is at a standstill.

Then I get to my office to grade and attempt to form a coherent thought before class. Some days, I steel myself for ignorance, resistance, apathy, boredom, and willful misunderstanding of the directions I spent years working into my syllabus. Others, I can barely wait to go into the classroom to discuss an important text or issue, as I think back to the first day I learned about Thoreau or Dickinson or Faulkner.

Then the tedium takes over. I sit through a meeting about a meeting, which usually ends in a discussion of splinter meetings I try to avoid getting sucked into. Someone needs someone to sign up for something on a Saturday morning, on a day late in December, which will last for 87 hours without a break. Anybody? Nobody? Come on.

I attempt to work on my research and am stymied by something. An inability to concentrate. A lack of resources. I research anyway. I can't help it. I open an email about a conference I applied to and then ignore it. It's too much to think about. I thumb through the calendar and try my best to remember why I decided to sign onto this or that project. I can't. It has something to do with tenure though; I'm sure of it.

If I'm lucky I catch dinner with a fifth floor friend. If not I eat in my office--leftover soup that is cold in the middle.

I'd go home but there's another meeting at 8 PM that goes until 11. I stagger home, tripping on a mountain of comp papers, and crash into bed, only to awaken bleary eyed to a cruel alarm clock that goes off four minutes later. I wave to the man I'm positive is my husband and begin the cycle over again.

I eventually learn secret exits out of the building where I work. It dawns on me that some papers may take a while to grade and that's ok. I figure out, slowly, how to ask for help. I apologize to the family I never see and stuff down the guilt that accompanies living in another time zone. I say no to people I like being around to make time for a dinner date with my husband (the person I like best). I get sick from the exhaustion. I make time to walk the dogs. And I stop to thank God I have this job, these friends, this life.

Have you Lost Your Dog?

2009-09-30T17:13:00.005-05:00

The day began with bad signs I chose to ignore. The first was that my dog woke me chain-barking at 4:30 in the morning. The second was that my cat woke me thirty minutes later by sticking his claws in my closed eyelid. Then he bit me in the face.

The third was rush-hour traffic that crawled to a standstill. It did that, I found out, because people were rubbernecking to see a motorcyclist, unhurt, in an accident. I can't tell you why that makes me angry, but it does.

My class went well, so I thought perhaps this "bad-day" beginning was a fluke. I was wrong. I returned to my office to ensure I had the rest of the week's lessons lined up, when I suddenly did a double-take at my syllabus.

What was planned for tomorrow was written down for next Tuesday. What the students should be reading for Tuesday was on Thursday. My syllabus was one. day. off. Which means: the blogs the students were supposed to post were all screwed up, the day Valentino Deng was supposed to visit now didn't make any sense, & the due dates for the composition papers were wrong, wrong, wrong.

And I had the dubious honor of telling 50 freshmen about this problem. In my experience, no student likes a change in the schedule, but freshmen despise it because it leads to 10,000 other questions. I wanted to sit down in my office and cry. Instead, I went home.

When I walked in the front door, I got a call from my vet. In Batesville, Mississippi. "Have you lost your dog?" she asked. This was a mystery to me. Of course my dog isn't in Batesville Mississippi. "No," I said wearily. "I live in Tampa now." I can hear my vet shake her head. "Someone from Tampa called; you still have your MS tags on your dog. She's out." This is impossible. And yet, when I step wearily out on the back porch, there's a hole where Sierra should be. Fantastic.

It gets better when the woman who has Sierra calls and begins quizzing me: Why does the dog have a broken leg? (It's not broken.) Why won't she take water? (She's frightened.) Why did she escape? (The @#$% mowers let her out.) These questions and her tone all mean: why do you abuse your pet? should I give her back to you? maybe I should keep this animal?

She reluctantly returns my dog to me. I walk into my house, exhausted. All of the strings holding me together break, and I begin to weigh the advantages of alcoholism. I'm still weighing them, actually. I'll let you know what I decide.

Barefoot Running

2009-08-31T19:52:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, I get a little overeager about things. Nothing really illustrates this more aptly about my latest experiment with barefoot running.

See, I'm reading a book called Born to Run, the story of the Tarahumara ultrarunners, who run ultramarathons through canyons in Mexico -- barefoot. And the strange thing about these people? They don't have injuries, depression, heart disease, obesity, or diabetes. They are happy when they run; they are happy because they run.

The point of this study is to bring to light ever-increasing evidence that the tennis shoe is ruining our feet -- and our backs, knees, and ankles -- because it deprives us of our natural pain-sensors. When you put your foot in rubber and foam, it doesn't know the proper way to hit the pavement, so it strikes heel-first and as hard as possible in search of something solid. But when you take off your shoes, your pain-sensors (there as many in your feet as in your groin) tell you to roll your feet from the inside out, to spread your toes wide, to tuck your legs under your hips, and to avoid striking the heel at all cost. People who have tried it have found they no longer suffer pain in their knees, feet, or back -- in part, because we were all (at some point) engineered for running.

So, the more I read of the book, the more stories I heard of people taking off their shoes and suddenly being able to run 80 miles instead of 2. As someone who has been forcing her way through 2 or 3 miles a day for 15 years, I was eager to give it a try.

Totally inspired, I kicked off my tennis shoes and socks. Andrew, wrapped up in my hypothesis, decided to try it, too. Exhilarated, I shot forward onto the pavement and smashed my heel into the ground. My foot instantly corrected itself -- VERY wrong form, it told me immediately -- and I felt my toes spread. I waited for a sensation of flying, of freedom. I waited to feel like I could run a marathon in 15 minutes with nothing on but flip-flops.

Instead? In my zeal, I pounded my pampered, pansy little toes onto the suburban sidewalk, cutting and bruising feet that have never run barefoot and rarely go dirty. I'm brought up short by the sharp gravel I have to cross to get to my driveway. Rather than flying, I'm tiptoeing around the loop in pain. My teenage neighbors look at Andrew and me askance.

"I could've gone much longer!" Andrew says, smiling, apparently unscathed. I hobble past him into the house, to soak my feet.

Cereal-Box Decoder Rings for the Code of Life

2009-08-25T08:31:00.007-05:00

Adjusting to a new place involves more than just finding a house or making new friends. It means breaking the code.

Here's what I mean. Yesterday, I attended 11 hours of meetings, 4 of which were about health care benefits. While I knew this was very important information, I missed much of it because it was delivered in code. We had a rather self-important representative -- self-important people love to speak in a code only they can decipher -- and her presentation sounded like this to me:

"Your options are to sign up for the PPOL, the PPOH, or the PHMO. The VLETS -- don't worry about what VLETS are -- will tell you that PPOs are better than the PHMOs, but after a quick glance at your W4s and I9s, I can tell you the VLETS don't know what's best for you. I do. I've worked with Barb here for 15 years." Here she stops to pat Barb, whose name is Joan, on the head. "She can vouch for me."

Needless to say, I left that orientation, disoriented. But really that's not the only code I've struggled with since moving here. For example, I've just begun to crack the traffic code. On the road, "big construction switch" means "plan to sit still on this road for 3 hours." At work, the words "highly recommended" mean "mandatory for those who'd like tenure." At home, the term "HOA dues" translates to "fees you pay your neighbors for tattling on you."

Working through a code is typical of any move, and it always takes time, which makes me wonder -- why doesn't anyone make cereal-box decoder rings to crack open the code of life?

Junior Faculty

2009-08-18T08:55:00.008-05:00

The first day I heard I'd have an office, I was ecstatic. I get a job and an office I don't have to share with 15 other people? I just couldn't wait. I called every week I could, asking if my keys were ready, if the furniture was moved in, if the paint had dried. Finally, I got the room number. The person who gave me my office assignment laughed a little when she gave me the keys, but seeing the confusion on my face, she pulled herself together. "Well," she said as lightly as she could, "No one will come to bother you there."

I did not know what that meant.

At least, I did not know what that meant until I moved in. Andrew and I loaded about 6 heavy boxes of books and other paraphernalia and set off for the fifth floor of the building where I work. What with required ADA compliance, I didn't even consider the possibility that the elevator only stopped at the fourth. I should have.

Forty-five minutes later, all of the books had been hauled upstairs to a stifling attic with no air conditioning. The ends of the hallway were littered with "take me" books and discarded waste bins and broken filing cabinets. The lights were out.

But I didn't care. I was excited to see what the view from the fifth floor looked like. And, anyway, I'm healthy. I can take stairs.

I flung open my office door and was greeted with a view of . . . the roof. A rusted nasty debris-littered roof whose slopes and angles hindered any view of the city or its river. My furniture was peeling, the handles on my office chair brown with rust. My carpet was filthy, and my desks and bookshelf were covered in a fine layer of gray dust, no doubt courtesy of a long stay in a storage building. I felt as if someone had poked a hole in my elation.

I channel my mother, and wonder what she'd do. She certainly wouldn't whine, not after all it took to get to this dusty attic office. So with Andrew's support and the downtown Ikea, we reconstructed it. And these were our results.

The Lawn Seats

2009-08-13T20:22:00.002-05:00

I have a short bucket list that contains some pretty strange but not wholly unusual things. See the pyramids of Egypt. Go scuba diving. Try windsurfing. Visit Italy. See a Bollywood film in India. See Dave Matthews move his feet in a live concert.

So I crossed off the latter last night, when we went to the Dave Matthews concert and sat in the lawn seats. I should say it's been 10 years since I've been to a concert, and the last time I attended one, I made up some incontestable truth about seeing live concerts only when you could sit in the lawn seats. I must've been thinking something about stars, romance, a cool Tampa Bay breeze.

Apparently a lot can change in 10 years. Suddenly the people who helped you create that community of music when you were 20 -- those people who let you know you belong in the world because you all know the same words to the same weird songs -- at 30 become slovenly naked weed-smoking drunks. When did this happen? Young twentysomethings tripped over my beach blanket and poured margaritas on my bare toes, giggling as they did so. Rather than apologize, they did things that didn't belong to their generation at all, like yelling "right on" and holding lighters in the air. One guy came up to us and said, "Have you seen Waldo? WHERE'S WALDO?!" which wasn't as strange at that point in the evening as it was obnoxious.

The people my age weren't much better; they arrived harried from rush hour and sloppy-drunk to make up for it. Most of them spent much of the concert thumbing through their blackberries, pretending to be bored. If they weren't doing that, they were yelling at the spouses they never should've married in the first place, and saying things like, "Well if you'd REMEMBERED it, I wouldn't have to go and buy one now, would I?" and "You've turned into such a SCHMUCK."

This pretty much ruined my idea of romance and cool breezes and recapturing the feelings I had when I first listened to DMB about 15 years ago. My conclusion? You probably think it has something to do with getting older or becoming jaded but I have decided to adamantly deny what is probably the truth. Instead? I've learned to just give in and buy a seat.

Community Supported Agriculture

2009-08-04T07:00:00.005-05:00

I used to dread grocery shopping. Even at midnight on a Thursday, Wal-Mart, which was often my only choice in the small towns I lived in, was unpleasant. The aisles were narrow, the carts large, and the people pushy. Children screamed and wallowed in the floor, begging for some toy they didn't need. The vegetables were rotten by the time I brought them home, and the chicken I marinated and pounded was still sinewy by the time it reached the dinner table. But I now know grocery shopping doesn't have to be this way.

Because of the growing interest in organically grown foods, Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, is getting more and more notoriety, even though it's certainly nothing new. CSA programs allow people to buy a share of their local farmers' crops, and in return, they can pick up (or have delivered) fresh, organically-grown produce at 1/2 the cost of what they'd pay for the same products in their local Whole Foods store.

CSAs work something like this: you pay a fee (in my area, half-memberships are $400 and full are $725) that provides you with about 4 bags of fresh food -- this includes veggies, fruit, and herbs, and occasionally chicken, eggs, flowers, and cheese -- either every other month (for a half membership) or every month (for a full) during the growing season. In Florida, that can be year round, or, typically, November through May.

The benefits are endless. Not only do these programs make buying fresh, healthy food affordable but they also mean you're sure to buy in season. This means your lettuce will always taste like lettuce, rather than styrofoam, because you won't be trying to eat some chemically altered lettuce-like product shipped in from Chile in the middle of January. It means you'll be doing something for the environment without even trying; by not paying someone for the gasoline and manpower to ship lettuce in January from Chile to your grocery store, you've helped, in a small but significant way, minimize your carbon footprint.

But most important of all, you get to know exactly where your food comes from because you buy it directly from the farmer. The added bonus, in my opinion, is that many CSAs require you put in 4 volunteer hours (over the course of the year) in order to join the program. That means you pull weeds, dig in the dirt, harvest the crops -- you get to have a hand in growing what you eat, all the while getting to know the people responsible for growing the food that sustains you and your family.

And beyond all of those liberal, granola-crunching reasons, it's pleasant to get your groceries this way. The farmers/merchants are happy to be handing over their hard work to people who appreciate it, and as a result, they're usually happy to see you (as opposed to the stockguy at Wal-Mart, who just wants his next break). Many CSAs also run farmer's markets, and so when you pick up your groceries (if you don't have them delivered -- how awesome!), you might find music or artists, which you can enjoy while sampling goods like freshly-baked focaccia or organic herbed cheeses.

Sound appealing? Go to www.localharvest.org to find a CSA or farmer's market in your area.

And Goldilocks Said, "This porridge is just right."

2009-07-31T16:59:00.000-05:00

This is the pipe organ from the United Methodist Church of Hyde Park. It may seem like some gaudy tool for an ostentatious religion to you, but to me, it was a very good sign. That is because music is a very important part of worship to me. People can screw up religion without trying very hard at all. Pastors can preach temperance and have a drinking problem. Youth ministers can profess a dedication to family values while having an affair. Congregants can be conniving, jealous, vindictive, and never miss a church service. But music doesn't cheat, lie, or scheme, and what you get out of it is up to you. This church had beautiful music.

I glance around this mid-sized church and see -- to my relief -- stained-glass windows. The educational tool for the poor, the illiterate, the young. Now an archaic symbol to many, to me stained glass represents the church's desire to reach everyone, not just the elite. I feel like I can breathe again.

I also see many different faces, many of whom I did not see in the other churches we've tried. I see old and young, children and twentysomethings, white, black, Asian, Latino/a, a myriad of people. The visiting pastor is an African-American woman; one of the regular pastors is a female. A good sign! I feel like squeezing the stranger sitting nearest to me, and asking them, "Is this home?" But I refrain. Wouldn't want to seem like that crazy fellow from Idlewild, now, would I?

The sermon is about food. The pastor discusses the bread and fish miracle, and interprets it to mean we are spiritually fed, and we are often materially blessed; she encourages us to feed others in any way we can. She then outlines ministries in the church that would allow us to do just this. I am excited by her practical application of scripture, by her call to make the community we live in better, and by her specific suggestions outlining how to do just that.

My experience at Hyde Park reminded of Goldilocks's porridge experiment. The first was too hot, the second too cold, but the third was just right, and so she ate it up. And so did we.

Try #2: The Unitarian Universalist Church

2009-07-26T16:37:00.003-05:00

After the megachurch "incident," as I would like to call it, we needed something much more broad-minded. Fewer references to women in the kitchen and fewer crazy people writing letters from Jesus. The criteria was loose but important. We decide to try the Unitarian Universalist church.

For those who aren't familiar, the Universalist churches welcome all faiths. They believe that all religions worship the same God but call him/her by different names. I am, at heart, a Universalist, so I had high hopes for this service.

In many ways, I was not disappointed. Despite its strange outward appearance -- this church was a large dome, actually more bizarre looking than the one in this picture -- the congregation was warm and inviting. People came early to talk to each other and to visitors, and they stayed late to reflect on what they'd learned in the service and to share coffee with each other. Universalists are against proselytizing, so no one tried to convert or pressure us. And the highlight of the service occurred when, before the "joys and concerns," the pastor reminded her liberal audience that "just because the microphone is available doesn't mean this is a time for political rants or polemics." That. Was. Awesome. "So this is where liberal democrats and academics go to church," I thought to myself. And all this time, I've been looking for other people who think like I do, who embrace all faiths as different interpretations of the same story. It was quite refreshing.

But it wasn't a fit, not wholly. To begin, unitarians (not universalists) shun the trinity. No matter how open-minded of a raving liberal professor I am, the trinity is a very important concept to me. And because the universalists welcome all faiths, the service worked very hard not to step on anyone's toes. While the principle is wonderful and welcoming to me, the practice translates into an entire service where nothing definitive is ever actually said. The hymns were purposefully vague; because no one worships the same way, the songs could only discuss the universe, space, and family. And "sameness." The sermon talked about the parking lot growing weedy outside, and lamented the fact that the Universalist church rarely attracted members who gave money. The credos expressed the idea that we are all one, but it was not a credo in that it professed any one belief. And for some reason, some stubbornness ingrained in me, this irked me a little.

In sum -- I appreciated the warmth, open-mindedness, and intelligence of the Unitarian Universalist church. But I'm in a new place, in a new job, meeting new people; I long for just a dash of something familiar. So for next time: the First United Methodist Church of Hyde Park.

My Visit to a Megachurch

2009-07-12T10:48:00.007-05:00

We needed a church. So we decided to try Idlewild Baptist at the recommendation of one of Andrew's family friends.

When we walk in, the sanctuary is the size of a collegiate basketball stadium. There are no stained-glass windows or hymnals; in their place are two gigantic megascreens, a 75-person orchestra, and a balcony that must hold at least 300 people in a choir. The megascreens make me have palpitations, but I breathe, and tell myself to give it a good college try. They advertise a Starbucks coffee shop just outside of the sanctuary. I choke down a scream.

The deacons come forward, streaming down 6 church aisles all in nearly-matching suits. They are all men. This makes me wonder. I take a good look at the four-person ministerial team. All men as well. Strike one.

The preacher steps up to the pulpit. He is a visiting speaker and the president (or maybe former president) of the Southern Baptist Convention. No. Please no. He begins with an anecdote, and I think, at least it isn't a joke and he doesn't mention football. I try to stay open-minded. He makes a crack about women and cooking. I restrain from volleying one of those stubby pencils toward the megastage. His sermon goes something like this: Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Buzz words synonymous with salvation, damnation, Hell, and Born Again. A smatter of guilt. A pinch more of guilt. And it concludes with "Turn to your neighbor and tell him or her that you know you're saved by Jesus." Strike two.

I peel myself from my seat, where I've tried to remain as low and still as possible to remain unnoticed. My tactic has not worked. Crazy McCrazy, apparently a regular congregant, sidles up to us with an envelope in his hand. He says, "I've had my eye on you since I walked in. This is for you." We wait to open the note until we're in the car. Apparently McCrazy has channeled Jesus, as his scrawled note is signed by none other than Christ himself, and in it he insists that Andrew is David (a philandering man-whore?) and I am Esther. Strike three.

Next week: the Universalist Church of Tampa. Updates to follow.

Carl, the Neighborhood Alligator, & How I Accidentally Ended up at the Social Security Office in Florida

2009-07-04T10:22:00.006-05:00

Moving is irksome. But for us, it was particularly adventurous because we had to drive 19 hours across the country at 45 miles an hour in a Penske truck with 5 animals. We took 2 days to complete our move to Florida, and along the way we stopped at a Best Western that promised it took pets. I'm not sure it knew what it was getting with the Tillmans. We had Brinkley, the 75 lb Golden Retriever, Sierra, a dog half his size, and 3 devil cats, one of which found great amusement in waiting on top of the entertainment center for a dog to walk by to drop claws-first on its back, making the dog bark, the other dog howl, and the rest of the cats hiss, spit, and knock over furniture. We were tired. The front desk calls. "Do you have cats, too? You didn't say you had cats too." I lie. "Nope, no cats here." Worm gets next to the phone and answers for himself: Mrrrrrow. Mrow! Mrowwwww! "Nope," I reiterate. "We don't like cats."

We get on the road and arrive in Florida what feels like 3 years later. As we drive into our subdivision, I pass all kinds of interesting creatures: an ibis, something that lives in a nest the size of an SUV, colorful lizards and frogs, and, yes, an alligator, sunning in the lake not 2 blocks from my house. People pass him as if he is a mailbox. We name him Carl.

For mundane reasons I won't explain, we have to get our licenses changed over quickly and it is one of the first tasks we undertake. I wish we hadn't. I go to the DMV with an appointment, all of my paperwork filled out, and a box full of every piece of paper they might ask for and some they won't. I'm ultra-prepared. I'm psyched; I'm there early and there's no wait! Andrew breezes through the process and I prepare to as well, but there's a woman who has it out for me that day. "The social security office says June 1 isn't your birthday," she says. She seems almost happy to follow up with, "You'll have to go there to straighten that out." "No!" I say. "I've ordered a passport with that card; there has to be a mistake on this end." "Nope," she insists and sends me to the 9th circle of hell.

If you were wondering what that is -- it's the social security office in the Old People Capital of the US. Hours of waiting. By the time my number is called, I'm furious. The woman behind the counter pulls up my record and says, "There's no problem here. Everything is correct." I want to stab someone in the eye. I drive 1/2 an hour back to the DMV, where a new guy pulls my SS# up on the screen and says, "Why did you go through all of that? Your birthdate was fine all along!"

Andrew, thinking himself immune from this insanity, inwardly chuckled at me, I'm sure of it. At least, he does until we get all the way home, and he finds out his new name in FL is "Andrew Tllman." A big ugly misprint on his shiny new license. I love moving.

True Genius

2009-05-31T21:22:00.003-05:00

Let's just cut to the chase. If you're not watching True Blood, you should be, and this post will hopefully tell you why.

Based on Charlaine Harris's brilliant 8-book Sookie Stackhouse series, True Blood is a series full of surprises. It's not your typical vampire story; it's about Sookie, a mind-reader, and her efforts to uncover the murders plaguing the small town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. She has quite the motivation, too; both her brother and her new vamp-boyfriend Bill are under suspicion, especially since Vampires have just "come out" and not everyone in Bon Temps is happy about it. Think you know how this story goes? You don't. Sookie never becomes a vampire. The most lovable character is a black effeminate gay drug dealer/cook at Merlotte's, where Sookie works. The most intriguing is Tara, her best friend: a girl who nursed her mother (briefly) out of alcoholism, all the while building a tough-girl veneer so she could cope. And just when you think you've figured out the key paranormals in the series, Harris introduces shapeshifters, blood drainers, and, in the next few series, will coax out the witches, fairies, werewolves, werepanthers, and whatever other army of strange she can come up with.

The story is enough to make it worth your while, but it's the attention to detail that highlights its excellence. Sookie's grandmother drinks Community Coffee, the only coffee any sensible Louisianan (and east Texan!) will have as a wake-up call. Rene speaks perfect Cajun -- none of this ridiculous fake Hollywood BS -- although that turns out to be a bit ironic later in the story. And Sookie's coworkers and boss speak like East Texans, which they basically are, rather than Georgian Southern belles. Hollywood always confuses the two, but finally, and perhaps strangely, we get verisimilitude in the most unlikely place. Many of the characters are faithful friends and closet racists, diligent workers but close-minded cops, devoted family men and murderers. Everybody has a twist.

Look, if it's escapism you want, walk away from Paris Hilton's My New BFF. Run screaming from Heidi & Spencer's wedding in The Hills. And pick up True Blood (and the Sookie Stackhouse series of course). Then recommend something for me to watch or read; I'm in full and utter Sookie Stackhouse withdrawal.

Teaching under Tension

2009-05-23T11:04:00.002-05:00

I haven't written much lately because I've been teaching an intersession course, which means I left for work at 4 PM and got home at 10:30 PM and basically wanted to curl up under my bed and never come out again. This is not because the class was bad -- it was a modern american drama course with an interesting class roll of former students and a few new firecrackers -- but because the people that keep me sane were denied me during this period. I couldn't see friends or family, and I saw Andrew about 10 minutes each day if we were lucky.

The class started off as intense just because of my schedule.

The tension increased when I introduced the reading list. My students read The Emperor Jones, W;t, Doubt, Angels in America, Streetcar Named Desire, and Crimes of the Heart. Despite that I told them on day one that modern drama is by its nature reactionary and at times outlandish -- that it remains important because it addressed taboo topics concerning race, sex, and gender -- my students were still shocked to read about graphic gay sex or child molestation.

There were several times during the class that the room got uncomfortable, not because the students said anything incendiary, but because they were discussing possibilities they'd rather not entertain (such as the idea that gender is learned rather than innate). It was an odd experience: though the students were comfortable with each other and with me, just about every play made people shift uneasily in their seats.

Is tension necessary for growth? Have you learned something if you've been introduced to an idea that made you feel a little out of sorts?

On Saying Goodbye

2009-04-30T10:47:00.004-05:00

Many thanks to Paul Larson, whose blog on goodbyes got me to thinking about this topic.

The end of the semester is always a good time for me. By this point, many students have learned to think analytically, or write with a little more panache, or have found a favorite writer, poet, or literary work. Maybe they've learned to love reading more than they did, or maybe they've found a voice they didn't know they had. If any of those things have happened, I feel I've done a good thing.

Teaching writing and literature usually leads students to "confess." This year, I taught an autobiography class, which of course led to a lot of sharing. The book my students connected to more than any was one called Paula by Isabel Allende, a beautiful true story of a woman trying to write her young daughter out of a coma and into existence once again. One of my students had to excuse herself from the discussion, since she was currently spending her evenings next to her terminally ill father, going through the exact stages of grief outlined in the book. Another had coached her abusive, meth-addict father through the end of his life just recently. Another had never known his father, except for a fleeting glimpse of him in the street. Another had made the decision to pull the plug on his dad's life-support machine and was still angry at himself (and, as a result, the book) for telling his father it was "ok to let go."

So, the point is that I got to know a lot about these remarkable people in a short amount of time, and just yesterday they turned in their papers and left. I'll grade them as fairly as I can, attempting to block out any connections I made with that class while I do, and then I'll post the grades and begin teaching the intersession class that looms ever closer. But I can't shake how anticlimactic that end-of-year -- or any -- goodbye can be. I never have been able to, not in 7 years.

My way of dealing with goodbye as a teacher is usually just to awkwardly smile at the students as they leave and pretend this is all just part of teaching, or part of living, or maybe a little of both. Goodbyes are on my mind quite a bit these days, really. So if I don't make a big production out of leaving you this summer, when we begin our trek east, don't think twice about it. It just means I'm not ready to let you go.

Abandoning an Agenda

2009-04-08T20:07:00.003-05:00

Most professors will tell you they never teach with an agenda, that they don't try to push their beliefs onto their students. But the truth is that any teacher in a classroom does this to a certain degree. It's rather hard not to do so. Let's say you're faced with a room full of racists, and you're reading a book about empowered black women. Would it be wrong to encourage your students to rethink their stereotype of the African-American community so that they can approach the book in a way that allows them to appreciate these characters? Let's say you're faced with a room full of homophobes, and you're all reading a book about a lesbian who refuses to apologize for finally finding the one person who makes her happy. Would it be wrong to encourage the students to be open to this literary character's admirable strength in the face of oppression, despite the students' reservations regarding what they do not understand?

I find I'm faced with this delicate balance every day. At what point am I teaching them to think for themselves, and at what point am I encouraging them to see the world as I do? I'm constantly faced with people who say things like, "Homosexuality is an aberration of God," just like I might casually remark, "That's a very nice lamp you have there." As if they haven't just shunned an entire group of people based on a narrow reading of one Biblical passage. And I have to struggle each time with how to respond. Do I take the expansive, professorial role and say, "Oh? And what informs that opinion?" in an effort to get them to examine their beliefs? Do I point out that their profession of intolerance could've just isolated 1/4 of the room? Do I shake them by the shoulders for their close-mindedness? I'm happy to say I have never chosen option #3, though getting a little riled up has its benefits.

The Watchmen: A Review

2009-03-19T10:18:00.002-05:00

Spoiler Alert: If you haven't seen or don't know the story to the Watchmen, don't read this blog. I'd hate to ruin it for you.

This is a review of the movie, not the graphic novel, which I hear is quite different and certainly more complete. The movie's plot concerns a group of former superheroes, called The Watchmen, who are being picked off one by one by an unknown murderer. The living, naturally, want to figure out who this is. Side plots include avoiding a nuclear holocaust, a series of failed or corrupted relationships, and the dehumanization of a mutated physicist named Dr. Manhattan. But really, I do the plot very little justice.

The film suffers from having three competing artistic visions rather than a unified one. To begin, it cannot decide how it would like to represent the comic book world. At times, it would like to make fun of comics, with bam-boom-pow, 1950s Batman-like fighting scenes and lines from the evil villain like, "I'm not going to reveal my plan to you. What do you think I am, an evil villain in a comic book?" This approach could have been quite a bit of fun, if they'd stuck to it. But then the characters would drop melodramatically out of airships or strut across the screen in purple-and-gold tights delivering serious lines about a nuclear holocaust without a trace of humor, as if they'd forgotten they were, just a few scenes earlier, making a parody of the comic genre.

Alongside these 2 versions of the same film was yet another fighting to get through the macabre, violence-laden storyline: that of a post 9-11 vision of the United States. The graphic novel, which was written in the mid-80s, imagines what would have happened if nuclear war between Russia and the US hadn't been averted (or had, in a way . . . well, I don't have time to explain that). The directors of this movie reinterpreted it to be both about the graphic novel's original concern -- war with Russia -- and the terrorist attacks on New York City. While they occasionally make the parallels, showing shots of the twin towers still standing, ready to fall, they do not do so faithfully, making their point clear only when the film ends, as they pan out to show a gaping hole a nuclear explosion has left in NYC. The hole is the construction site for the 9-11 towers, suggesting we have already survived our own near-annihilation.

But since the graphic novel was already such a complicated story, these three artistic visions fight each other the entire way, struggling to stay faithful to the novel for all of its die-hard fans while simultaneously trying to mock the genre, honor the genre, and turn it into a political commentary that it only barely mentions and at the most inconvenient times in the film.

These factors, coupled with the gratuitous sex and violence which add nothing to a story that was fascinating all its own, made it a disappointment to say the least.

On Pet Ownership

2009-03-13T12:33:00.004-05:00

These are just 2 of our 5 animals. While most blogs on pet ownership might be about the joys of playing with these precious creatures, this one won't be. I am certainly a blessed pet-owner; don't get me wrong. Wormwood, the kitten, provides endless entertainment. Sierra and Brinkley have grown up to be loving dog-companions. Chloe and Allie, our first animals, continue to be an important part of the furry family.

However, lately the hairy children in our household have been quite a handful. Chloe has been quarantined and put on cat-paxil for an anxiety disorder that causes her to ruin anything that's fabric. And today Worm had to go to the vet to be neutered, which meant no food or water after 7 PM last night. THAT meant that at 4 AM he decided to let me know how he felt about what was apparently cruel and unusual punishment by biting me in the ear, bringing me out of REM and into a panic-stricken state of semi-alertness. "Mrow?" he asked. I told him to go away and put my face under the pillow. So he burrowed under the covers and bit me in the chin. "Mrow!" I get it but there's nothing I can do. I shove him off of the bed. He sneaks under the bedclothes and nips me in the big toe. "Mrrrrrrow," he adds, as if perhaps I am dense. I try to put him outside, but he's a young tomcat, and it is as if I have channeled his voice into a bullhorn. "Mrow mrow mrrrrroooowwwwwwww," he protests, upping his volume so he can be heard from inside my bedroom. I let him back in.

Just as I am about to fall back to sleep, the yellow cat, Allie, lets me know that, while she hates Worm, the two have formed a union. She entwines herself in the wooden blinds next to my face and starts batting the blind-pull against the wall. It's now 4:30 AM. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK THWACK THWACK. I shoo her. I'm almost asleep when Worm bites me on the ear again, and Allie THWACKS the blind-pull at the same time. They are certain I am an idiot. And I must be, because I try to spray Allie with lavender linen spray, only in the dark I have turned the nozzle towards my own eye. I give the pump a good hard push and cover my face with the stuff, getting it in my mouth and eyelashes, which causes me to sputter and the cat to fall out of the blinds, soundly knocking over my eyeglasses and a bedside lamp. Andrew groans.

This cycle repeats itself for 2 hours until my alarm (needlessly) sounds. As I finally get Allie off of my head (where she is attempting to sit to draw attention to her lack of food and water) and Worm in the pet taxi, I turn around to find Chloe-the-quarantined-cat has escaped from the sun porch and is now standing in the living room, ready to demolish our new living room furniture we added because she ruined the old.

I sigh and realize it is going to be a very, very long day.

On Humility

2009-02-27T12:17:00.002-06:00

An extraordinary thing happened to me today.

The day began with lots and lots of pain. I have some respiratory disease I can't shake that makes me cough until I feel like all of those little bronchial tubes in my chest are on fire. As a teacher, I haven't been able to rest my voice, which only irritated this feeling, so I finally decided I couldn't take the burning anymore and called the doctor.

"Sorry, we're booked," said the woman on the phone, who really didn't sound sorry. "I can transfer you to Dr. Smith's office." So she did.

"Sorry, we're booked," said the woman at Dr. Smith's office. If possible, she sounded less contrite than the first. "You can try Dr. Jones's office." And so I did.

"We might be able to work you in," she said doubtfully. "Just come down here and sign in."

I trudge to the doctor's office with my books and my laptop, prepared to wait and work, this being my only day to plan lectures besides the weekend. I feel like sludge. They take $115 dollars from me, and I remember that I now have state insurance with no copay, and I feel even sludgier. They send me to Dr. Jones's office with my chart. Thirty minutes of my life have passed during this process.

I hand my chart to the receptionist and she glares at me. "Who are you?" she asks. I cannot understand the hostility. I should be angry at her for stealing $115 out of my paycheck, which isn't even hours old today. I tell her my name, which is clearly printed on the front of my chart, and it makes her more angry. "I JUST talked to you on the phone and said we had NO ROOM." I open and close my mouth. I have nothing to say. She's lying. And she's making me feel like dirt in front of a hallway full of people. She rolls her eyes at me and huffs a big breath, blowing at the papers clipped on the clipboard. "I guess you'll just have to wait for two hours and see if you get lucky."

I return to where she gestured -- a large germ-infested waiting room -- and then decide I'm wasting my time. I tell the attendant at the front I must've misunderstood, that this doctor couldn't work me in after all, and I ask for my money back, which they grant to me. I am quite distressed at this point, feeling, as I do, on fire, now aware that I will continue to feel on fire for some time, untreated. I am not indignant or angry. I just want to disappear into the floor, where maybe I won't feel sick or exhausted or upset for being yelled at for no reason at all.

I leave.

I go home and pity myself for a while. I get a phone call, unexpectedly.

"Is this Kacy?"

It is.

"I think I was rude to you today, and I wanted to say I was sorry."

No one ever tells me they are sorry. I stumble around for a response.

"I was short with you and I realize that now, and I think I'm why you left, and, knowing that, I couldn't even eat my lunch. So I just wanted to tell you I apologize, and that if you come at 2, I'll make sure you see a doctor."

This was a remarkable thing for her to do. That room was full of patients; that business did not need my money. She doesn't know me at all. She had no reason to track me down and apologize, and she did it anyway, even though dialing my phone number must have been uncomfortable. So today I'm thankful for her humility, which restores a bit of my faith in humanity.

Mandatory Maternity

2009-02-19T10:06:00.003-06:00

So here's what happened. I have an old friend who doesn't like to hear news second-hand, so I called her to tell her I was moving to Florida. She said, "Oh," rather deflated. "What's wrong? You and I haven't lived near each other in years, " I asked, misinterpreting the disappointment in her voice. "Oh, it's nothing," she said sheepishly; "I just thought you were calling to tell me you were having a baby."

I actually don't blame her for this reaction. This post isn't about her, at all; if I've heard this once, I've heard it 1,000 times. Many of my friends are on child #2. To many people, I am "behind."

Recently, at my father's 60th birthday, I saw several former teachers who guided me through elementary, junior high, and high school. My mother told them (and everyone) that I'd gotten my PhD, and these teachers said, "We're so glad for you. Do you have any children yet?"

This has been an unusual reaction for me. I'm not sure what I expected -- I've been too busy to wonder what other people would think -- but I find it odd that my identity, while for me has been defined as academic, scholar, teacher, wife, friend, and daughter, is not complete to other people unless I adopt the persona of mother. People are often quickly apologetic after they point out what they see as an omission in my life. They say, "Oh, I know I never liked it when people asked me." "It's none of my business of course." "You don't have to tell me."

Isn't it odd that, while I've finally achieved self-sufficiency, while I've gone to college for 10 years, searched for the right job for almost as long, own my own house, have a successful marriage, and am involved in my community, because I'm a woman, it isn't enough?

The End

2009-02-12T10:21:00.003-06:00

Well it's not the end, not really; it's the beginning -- but I've gotten a job, finally, and that signifies the end of a lot of things. For one, my insides are no longer tied in a knot. I can listen to people when they talk to me, and I don't feel tired from worry anymore. I don't have to wonder if I'm going to stay here in the fall or not, and I have at least a decent idea of what life will be like in the 2nd part of 2009. I can focus on my teaching instead of seeing my students in a blur since I stayed up all night packing, grading, scrambling to teach someone else's class at an unfamiliar university, acquiring books I haven't read or don't own.

I have a lot of people to thank. Since I've told friends and family the news, they've said things like, "We're proud of your accomplishments" and "You worked hard for that" but the truth is that there were so many people and so many factors that helped me get the job that I can hardly take credit. Maybe I got the PhD, and maybe I tried my best to be an appealing candidate, but that's not enough to get a job.

First of all, I had friends who stayed friends with me even though I have been glassy-eyed with anxiety for about 6 months (ok probably a year). My husband didn't leave me, even though I brought up these anxieties to him day in and day out for what has seemed like an eternity. The people I worked with got me a temporary job so I didn't starve during all of this, which would've pushed me over the edge most likely. My writing group kept telling me to keep my head up; my religious friends continued to pray for me; my mom and dad remained positive even though all of my options took me far from them. And Tampa gave me a chance, even though I probably wasn't the smartest person they could've hired. I'm really still not clear on why I've been smiled upon in this way. I certainly haven't served in enough soup kitchens or stayed up with enough sick friends to earn the karma for it. I feel indebted. To everyone.

I also owe the people who rejected me. That sounds weird, so let me explain. I applied for 55 positions. I interviewed with 8 schools (which I can now name): Longwood, Corpus Christi, Wofford, Simpson, Kutztown, Edgewood, Ball State, and Tampa. I received offers for campus visits from Longwood, Wofford, Simpson, Kutztown, Edgewood, and Tampa. I accepted 5 of those invitations but only ended up making it to 3 campuses. I got offers from two schools, and accepted one. I am indebted to Wofford, particularly, who rejected me.

What I mean by that is that Wofford called me the day after I returned from San Francisco and asked me to visit on 1/5. I loved everyone there -- still do, really -- and loved South Carolina and decided if they offered me the position, I'd take it without visiting the others. This would have been stupid, but I didn't know that at the time. They chose someone else. I yelled at God. I was pretty angry with him; why show me a great place and give it to another person? Everyone told me things work out for a reason but you couldn't tell me that. I was angry and, naturally, insulted. I'm human.

But their rejection made me visit Edgewood and Tampa, where I met remarkable people. And I ended up taking a job where it's always warm, where the department is a great size, where there are more people near my age and with my interests, where there is more travel money, a larger salary, time off for writing my book, and something they call "relocation assistance." They're helping me move. I'll be working in a building that was a former hotel -- a magnificent building called Plant Hall where all of the offices have giant windows and a fireplace -- and I'll most likely buy a house on or near Davis Island, where, if you take your dog for a walk in the afternoon, you're likely to see dolphins. It's less than an hour from Disney, Andrew's favorite place in the world, which is also the home to a dear childhood friend who has been homesick for her friends for quite some time. And if I'd been offered the SC position, I would've worked every Christmas as part of a wintersession program -- which means when Andrew and I have children, we wouldn't have been able to let them visit their grandparents several states away.

Needless to say, I apologized to God for all the yelling. But really, I think he's used to it.

People are quick to point out the hard parts are just beginning. I have to sell my house in a market where no one has money, and I have to buy a house from far away. Andrew has to find a job, and we have to make all new friends and learn a new city. These things used to frighten me, but not anymore. If we can make it through the job process, we can make it through anything. And anyway, I'm slowly becoming resigned to the fact that someone's looking out for me. Maybe it won't be easy, but it'll be OK.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-19T21:14:00.003-06:00

Imagine you were an expensive French cheese enthusiast. Just bear with me. Imagine that the one thing that took you away from your worries was expensive French cheese, and each chance you had to order some, read about some, taste some, even attempt to age your own, you took it. As an expensive French cheese enthusiast, you may have tried once or twice to share your passion with your friends, but it made you seem uppity, and maybe a little weird, which was often disappointing to you, since sharing your passion was the one thing that you wanted to do. And then -- one day -- one bright, shiny day, it happened: an American company stumbled on an affordable fantastic French cheese that brought your hobby to the masses in the USA, and everyone loved it, and everyone suddenly wanted to talk fromage with you, and the sun came out, and you were deliriously happy.

This is what happened to me in the theater this weekend. Well, so to speak. Slumdog Millionaire brought India/Bollywood to America and I sat next to people who loved it as much as I did and I could have squeezed everyone as I exited the theatre (but I did not). I could barely contain myself from sounding like Hermione Granger. "Do you see that interviewer?" I wanted to yell; "That's Anil Kapoor! He's in Tashan, which is awesome, and Welcome, which is hilarious, but he's always the bad guy. And the police inspector? That's Irrfan Khan. He's amazing -- watch the Namesake! You should see Aaja Nachle! Do you hear that song? That's my favorite song from Don -- you should SEE Don! It's 3 1/2 hours long but worth every second." Again, by some miracle, I was able to avoid such an outburst.

What was amazing about the movie was that it was not a typical Oscar-worthy film. It didn't make me want to tear my own eyes out from sorrow. It didn't make me turn away from sticky, overdone gore. It was a suspenseful, clever, poignant, brilliant love story. It's the story of a young guy from the slums -- which makes him a Slumdog -- who, when the film opens, is winning India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. But the hero isn't interested in money; he wants to find a girl. He and Latika were separated when they were children, and he's spent his life trying to find her again. He's hoping the sensation he creates on the show will draw her to him.

The movie is about family, colonialism, caste, poverty, prejudice, and perseverance. Well, WHAT are you doing still reading this blog? You should be seeing it right now, for heaven's sake. And be sure to stay for the credits. You wouldn't want to miss the dancing.

That Was Instinct

2009-01-10T23:32:00.005-06:00

So I forgot to tell you the story of what happened when I was coming home on the plane from my campus visit.

It was very late -- later than it should have been, in fact, because of cross winds that delayed my flight. I squeezed into a seat next to a woman who had been chattering on the cell phone, ignoring my pleas to let me sit down until I poked her in the shoulder. Rolling her eyes and sighing, she got up to let me attempt to fold myself into a sitting position. She continued to chew on the person on the other end of the phone until the plane was well underway. The flight attendant practically had to make her swallow the contraption to get her to turn it off.

Being off of the phone seemed to have a negative effect on my flying companion. We had to idle on the runway for an hour because of the weather, and the longer we sat there, the more fidgety this woman became. She began chewing off her fake nails, one by one by one. She achieved this by gnawing the glue close to the quick and then prying the nail off with her front teeth, giving it a quick feral yank at the end for good measure. Once she'd done that to all ten digits, it was time for the plane to take off. Unfortunately for me (and for her, in all fairness), this did little to ease her.

As the plane began to ascend, she rustled anxiously in her bulging bag and pulled out a white crocheted toboggan. This she pulled down tightly over her ears, keeping hold of the sides of the hat until the plane leveled off. Had she not been behaving this way, I would not have known she was upset. Her face was completely serene. Only her fierce clutch on the hat suggested flying was not her favorite activity.

She finally let go of the toboggan and began ordering drinks when we reached altitude. Since she reeked of bourbon, I assumed these were just a few in a long line of beverages she'd begun drinking way before our boarding time. This might explain what she did two hours later when we finally descended.

I missed whatever other odd behavior this woman exhibited while we flew because I gave over to my exhaustion and fitfully slept. I might have had a few more minutes of rest had this strange person sitting next to me not done what she did. Right before the plane's wheels touched asphalt -- which, to me, is the worst part of flying (next to the screaming, germs, body odor, and security searches) -- this mentally deranged person fully extended her arm and whacked me in the face with the backside of her elbow. I snapped open my eyes to gape at her. I guess my face demanded an explanation before I could form any words. "Did you see that?" she asked me in her East Tennessee drawl; "That was instinct."

On Possibilities

2009-01-09T13:59:00.002-06:00

It is a rare day that someone can say "today, I have stood at the threshold of the rest of my life." But during the job process, there are days (or early mornings, or late nights) when one can actually pause a moment and think those thoughts. The feeling is quite strange. You could very well be sitting next to the person who could be your best friend and colleague for the remainder of your life. There is this possibility that you have walked by your own office. It is not altogether unlikely that your town tour has taken you by your future home. And while these thoughts might be exciting -- while these possibilities may be absolutely thrilling in a way nothing ever has been before -- in the job process, it is equally likely that everything you have seen could be offered to someone else. What a strange, wonderful, hopeful, anxiety-ridden experience this is.

On MLA

2009-01-01T19:36:00.003-06:00

So, I have returned from the the MLA convention.

I read more blogs than I should've about what to expect. Some emphasized the smell of failed deodorant; others discussed strange and unusual interviews that involved people going to sleep or attempting to conduct an interview drunk. These were not my experiences. At least, not exactly.

I accidentally (but fortuitously) booked us in the Fairmont, a convention hotel but not the main one. Initially, I was confused -- where was the mania? The evidence that everyone was going through his/her worst fear? This was a golden lobby. The only people in it were shaking it to the Tonga Room or enjoying a bellini at the hotel restaurant. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all. We met up with people we'd missed a long, long time. We shared excellent meals and watched the ice skaters on the square.

But that was all until we were summoned to the Hilton. The Hilton was the hub of all activity -- where most interviews were, where all sessions were being held. I walked through the double doors and finally realized why everyone shudders when they say the word "MLA." The first breath I took felt hot and sour; I actually breathed in everyone else's panic like it was cigarette smoke. There must have been 200 suited, strange people in the hotel lobby. Those who weren't fidgeting or sweating were ecstatically embracing people they'd missed. What I tasted in the air was one part terror and one part impatient joy. Everyone was scanning everyone else's nametag. They wanted to know, "Are you somebody?" I tucked mine away to save them the trouble.

Then I found "the phones." In case you didn't know, MLA interviews are held in hotel rooms. And you have to call the room where your interview will be held 5 minutes before it's scheduled to begin. There was a line of phones in the hallway with young professionals and graduate students hovering around them. Everyone was glancing at their watches, glancing at the phones, glancing at their watches, and breathing heavily. Most looked like this was their first time in a suit. Everyone was shifty. The energy made the air hard to take in. It was horrible. Everyone was thinking the same thing. Call now? Call NOW?

But that wasn't as weird as the elevator ride. The elevator ride to the interview room took 1,000 years. While taking it to the designated interview room, time stopped. I died about 10 times, came back to life, and somehow by a miracle made my way out of the elevator. This enjoyable experience was comparable only to the moment outside the door of the interview room. For one second, I wondered if it wouldn't be a better idea to crawl down the stairs, slink out of San Francisco, and hide out in my closet the rest of my life. But I didn't do that. I felt fairly proud of myself each time I avoided this alternate plan of action. I breathed. I avoided hyperventilating. And then I knocked.

What happened in that room is fodder for 1,000 stories but all of them could jeopardize my chances of getting a job. So we'll skip over that part.

Perhaps we'll fast-forward to the time we saw a cat strapped to a dog walking down the street outside of where we were dining. Or perhaps I'll just stop there.

1001 Reasons to Smile

2008-12-19T09:17:00.002-06:00

Andrew has a gigantic book of reasons to smile that I have always appreciated. My favorite is: the tilt of your head as you eat a taco. And while the holidays may be a winter-wonderland, cookie-smorgasbord time of enjoyment for some people, I find it inordinately stressful -- all the more reason to consider reasons to stop grinding my teeth and smile at someone. So I thought I'd make a list of things that make me smile. I had to cut it short because I thought I'd lose you, so feel free to add any that inspire the same reaction in you.

1. Someone's face when he/she is genuinely happy to see you.

2. Wormwood hiding in the Christmas tree, waiting to ambush the other cats/dogs.

3. Bing Crosby's serialized radio show.

4. Thumbprint cookies.

5. The word "zither."

6. Candles that smell like you could eat them.

7. Newspaper cartoons.

8. Unexpected snow days.

9. The sled my grandfather built for me on the only unexpected snow day I've ever had.

10. Acceptance letters.

11. Naps in front of the Christmas tree when it's cold out.

12. A dinner with friends that runs late.

13. A student that has an epiphany

14. Sangria

15. Seeing two movies at a theatre in one day

16. The smell of a book you loved as a kid

17. Seals

18. Puffins

19. Cookbooks

20. Poorly made Sunday-afternoon 80s movies

Second-Guessing

2008-12-15T13:33:00.002-06:00

This blog is inspired by a phone interview I recently had with a university. It just ended and my fingers itch to pick up the cell and say, "You know, I said this, when I really should've said this." That's right. I'm second-guessing myself.

This is a particularly irksome thing to be doing for me because I do not second-guess myself. Most decisions I make undergo grave consideration before any action is taken. I rarely regret break-ups, or moves, or job changes for this reason. I also believe that I am shaped by the mistakes I make. So while I don't think every decision I've made has been the right one, I still rarely second guess a decision since I know it probably happened for some unknown reason. I'm not a Calvinist. But you might think of me as someone who has walked by the pool of predestination and caught a bit of condensation on her cheek. I have been lightly sprinkled with its possibilities.

But these interviews do not fall in line with my faithful life pattern of little regret. As soon as I shut off the phone, I think, of COURSE I can define transnationalism! It's the study of cross-border communities! It's the deconstruction of thinking us versus them and the recognition of the complex relationships involved between the colonizer and the colonized! It's not whatever garbage I just gave five minutes ago. The answer I gave five minutes ago sounds now like "Words! Verbage! Transatlantic! Literature between colonies! Vomit!" Not only that but I begin to worry: can Julia Sterne be considered a theorist? Is Erving Goffman too archaic to bring up as an influence? Is Judith Butler overdone even if there is no better substitution?

But I can take none of it back. I've got a monkey on my back I can't shake, and I've got to learn to do that and much faster than I have because at MLA I only have 1 hour to recover from anything stupid I might have said. My momentary bouts of idiocy cannot affect each interview I undergo. The only thing getting me through? I keep hearing over and over from gainfully employed academics that the interviews they thought were the worst resulted in the campus visits. Maybe that won't be true for me, but maybe it will help me temporarily pry this chimp from my shoulders.

I don't have a poker face; may I borrow yours?

2008-12-05T10:41:00.003-06:00

I'm not blogging right now because everything that's happening to me has to do with job interviews, and since blogs are public, I don't want any of the schools reading something that might jeopardize my chances of getting to work for them. But I think I finally found a neutral topic.

Sometimes, and on very very rare occasions at that, I allow myself to daydream about what happens next. I pull up maps of the places I applied to and squeeze my eyes shut and try to picture myself walking Sierra on a beach or throwing snowballs at Andrew. I imagine carrying reusable grocery bags on the subway or buying a convertible to cruise sunny highways with the top down. But besides the ugliest of my ugly characteristics -- self-doubt -- there's one thing that always bursts that bubble: my lack of a poker face.

You see, all of the candidates who ever made it to a campus visit at Baylor or Ole Miss had great poker faces. I ate with them, drove them several hours to the airport and back, and none of them let me know if they would pick BU or UM if they were invited to do so. Nor did anyone show unbridled enthusiasm or obvious disdain for the campus they were visiting. They masterfully held their cards close to their chests, undoubtedly because they didn't want to seem too eager so they could make negotiations later.

But I'm not like that. If I'm lucky enough to get a campus visit, while I might have the intention to act like a normal, intelligent, reserved human being, my true self always comes out with adrenaline. If we pull up to a campus next to the loveliest ocean I've ever seen, my tongue will surely develop a mind of its own as it blurts out, "My GOD you must wake up every day and be ecstatic to be alive, living in a place like this!!" Or if we walk through some classic, austere New England town and pass 4 museums, 8 art galleries, and 32 specialty food stores, even though my brain might be saying "don't do it Kacy!" my arms will detach themselves from my body and grab my guide in a feverish clutch as I babble: "THINK of the different kinds of PEPPERS I'll bet you can buy here!" And then, of course, it's all over.

While other people play coy, I'm completely incapable of doing that. Take, for example, Dr. Prickett's grad class on early British literature. While I liked Prickett, a severe Brit who belonged at Oxford and not Baylor, sometimes reading all of Darwin's Origin of Species made my mind wander a little. We sat at a small table trying to discuss beetles and turtles and Darwin one day and no one was talking. No one had anything to add. It'd been 2 hours and I felt like my brain was going to explode. I looked down at one of the pages and saw the name "Cicero." I leaned over to my good friend and whispered, "Do you know that Cicero in Latin means chickpea? Can you imagine? All Hail the Chickpea!" While my friend possesses that thing called the poker face, I, as I have mentioned, do not. While Prickett did not hear my whisper, he did see my suddenly animated face in a sea of dead ones. "Kacy! Finally, someone has something to say about Darwin. What are you thinking?" "No, sir," I said, turning scarlet and blotching like always. "Don't be shy Kacy. Be confident! What you have to say is most likely insightful." "No, sir, I am ashamed to say it isn't," I said, trying to find a way to surreptitiously start a fire or crawl under my friend's chair. Long pause. "Oh, come on," Prickett urged. I'd been a teacher. I knew what he was going through. 2 hours of silence were brutal. I swallowed: "Cicero in Latin means chickpea, Dr. Prickett." I wasn't giggling. I'm not a class clown. It was mortifying. He wasn't angry; he looked utterly disappointed.

You might wonder why I didn't bluff him. I'd read the book. (I always do, as a nerd.) I should've been able to come up with something about bird beaks or barnacles. But I don't have a poker face and I'm LOUSY at lying. So I just -- couldn't. Not because I'm a good person but because I don't have the knack. My face always screams the truth even as my words try to cover it up.

So if I'm ever lucky enough to get a campus interview, the school will probably know everything it wants to and most of what it doesn't after 15 minutes of talking to me. And if I'm wholeheartedly in love with the place I've visited, even though I don't want to do it at all, I'm most likely going to tell every person I meet. Just think Honey when she meets Anna Scott in Notting Hill: "Oh God this is one of those key moments in life, when it's possible you can be really, genuinely cool -- and I'm going to fail a hundred percent. I absolutely and totally and utterly adore you . . . and more importantly I genuinely believe and have believed for some time now that we can be best friends. What do you think?"

The Best Books You Probably Never Read

2008-11-20T09:44:00.006-06:00

I don't mean to suggest you aren't well-read; I just mean these books are fairly obscure and most of them are children's books, so you might not have heard of them before. But they're worth a read even if you already have kids of your own.

The first is Briar Rose by Jane Yolen. I read this when I was 12 years old and I've never forgotten it. It's the story of a man in a concentration camp during World War II, but it's told alongside the original German version of Sleeping Beauty. By the way, the original is no bedtime story. Every other chapter tells the heartache of the prisoner, and every other chapter tells the fairy tale, only the stories are intertwined. It was the first book I ever read about World War II and concentration camps, and it was the best one, too.

The second is my response to the Stephanie Meyer phenomenon, Twilight. A note to all of you secret vampire-book fans -- L.J. Smith beats the pants of off Meyer anyday. In the 1990s, she came out with a series of books called The Vampire Diaries; they're now being sold alongside Twilight at most chain stores, the trilogy repackaged as a fat black book you'll probably overlook if you ever wander into the adolescent book section (don't worry; I won't tell if you do). It's the story of Stefan, his twin Damon, and Elena; like Twilight, it's a love story, but unlike Twilight, the main character has a spine and some intellect (sorry, Bella fans). Stefan is the good vamp who wants to resist his nature; Damon is the bad one who wants to embrace it. And of course, as with all tween books, Elena has trouble choosing. But unlike most tween books, the story is fantastic, the characters well-developed, and the imagination inspiring. At least, it was when I was 12. . . . OK so it's probably no Harry Potter but I loved it and still do.

The final book is not a kid's book: Phantom by Susan Kay. I'm completely biased on this one for two reasons -- 1. I have always loved the story of Phantom of the Opera and 2. It's the catalyst for my life's devotion to literature. Phantom is Kay's retelling of the Phantom of the Opera story, with much more emphasis on Christine's relationship with the famous masked man living in the catacombs of Paris's opera house. It's a romance, and a complicated one, since Christine is engaged to (Pierre?). I read it when I was 12 (I see a pattern developing here) as part of an AR reading program. My history teacher interviewed each child and asked him/her questions about the book they selected, in part to see if the child read it, but in part to see if he/she interacted with it. My history teacher, who was amazing, heard me babble for weeks about the book, picked one up for herself, and read it. So, when it was time for my interview, she knew enough about it to ask the meaty questions. The end of the book (this gives nothing away) is undecided; Christine enters a room to be with the ailing Phantom, but the author doesn't take us there with her. She just describes Christine as she exits. The suggestion is that Christine finally gave the Phantom what he wanted, but nothing is overt. Mrs. Jones asked, (and it was an appropriate question, given the scene), "What do you think happened at the end?"

Well, I'd never been asked a question like that before. I had always been told what happened in a book. I'd learned to take notes, write down themes, regurgitate answers on exams, but I'd never been asked my opinion about something unclear in a book before. I answered her, and she gave her idea of what she thought, and we went on our way. It was a really small moment but it changed everything. Books were not pages of facts but stories with endless possibilities. Everyone has to know about this, I thought.

And so, here I am today. An innumerable amount of books later, I have a completed dissertation, set a defense date, and I'm one good committee's nod away from getting a chance to work at what Mrs. Jones only started. So here's to optimism, good teachers, memorable books, and the holidays to read (or reread) as much as possible.

Youth and Hate

2008-11-06T12:43:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, I was saddened to learn that students at my alma mater, Baylor University, strung up a noose and burned Obama memorabilia upon learning the results of the November 4th election. I don't like to think of myself as naive, but perhaps I was, thinking that the Obama supporters might get a brief (say, 1 day?) grace period to breathe. Apparently, I was wrong.

It turns out Baylor's was not an isolated event. Two of my friends have posted blogs about encountering hate first-hand; one, Lisa, whose post can be found in my blog roll, said one of her students posted the following status update upon hearing of Obama's victory: "The white house is called the white house for a reason!!!!!" Her school is now in arms. Another, Claire, said she'd been accosted on facebook immediately after mentioning the election day. Her "friend" asked her what reason she could possibly have for celebrating the downfall of our nation. My own acquaintances have not been so openly bigoted, though some have posted that they now feel free to "have all the babies they want so that someone else can care for them."

The problem, for me, isn't that these people were hateful. This world is so big and the thinking often so small that I don't wonder that sexism, racism, and classism still exist. No, the truly disturbing characteristic that all these stories share is that every one of the slurs I mentioned were made by someone young.

It's not that the youth were supposed to be pro-Obama; it's that the youth are supposed to be forward-thinking. They're the people who have grown up attending integrated schools. They have been friends with children who have homosexual parents. They are the most technologically connected generation the world has ever known, which means that what they don't know or understand, they can research in the time it takes to ride the subway or wait for a fast-food order to be filled. In other words, they should know better. They can't claim ignorance. They can't say "well, the world has always been divided by sex or race" because it hasn't, for them. Their opens minds are supposed to take us one step closer to erasing sexual and racial barriers. But if the youth are the ones stringing up the rope, what are we supposed to do? If the youth burn hope in bonfires and yearn for a more violent time, how will change come?

Last-Minute Thoughts on Election Day

2008-11-04T08:09:00.004-06:00

It's election day, but this post isn't about who I think you should support. It's just a few last-minute thoughts that have been running around in my head in the past few weeks. It'll be the last post on politics for a while -- at least, as far as I can predict. =)

1. Democrats do, in fact, have moral values.

2. The word "liberal" is not dirty. It just indicates a belief in the idea that the government shouldn't get to tell you whom you can marry or what you can do with your body.

3. People who say "Let's put God back in America again" (as the billboard down the street from my house pleads) are suggesting the Constitutional framers put him there in the first place. The framers were pretty freaked out by government-regulated religion, so this is misleading.

4. The founding fathers, while admirable in some regard, were not the keepers of Christianity or virtue. Ben Franklin was a man-whore. Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves. At one point, John Adams was more fond of a monarchy than a republic. Very few were Christians; some were Deists, if they claimed a religious belief. None of them wanted equal rights for women or other marginalized figures. The 18th century really isn't the most idyllic time, so wanting to restore its "values" doesn't really make much sense.

5. People who vote for Barack Obama are not anti-America, or insane, or morally defunct. People who vote for John McCain aren't gun-waving Bible-thumping idiots. Most people have given a lot of thought to the candidate they're supporting. Maybe I don't agree with McCain's policies, but I can still respect voters who disagree with me.

6. People who wear flags (in any form), live in small towns, or enlist in the military are no more American than I am. We are equally American, whatever that means.

7. There is no real America and fake America. There's no "America." All nations are constructed. Most are stolen from someone else.

8. All people who run for president are, to a degree, elite. It's not a bad thing. I want the person running the country to be better than I am.

9. Just because the media talks about how volatile John McCain's election has been doesn't mean it is "in the tank" for Obama. Reporting the facts, just because they're upsetting to one political party, does not indicate bias. So invoking the phrase "liberal media" doesn't mean that the news organization in question is making up information, just because that information happens to be unfavorable.

10. None of us is red or blue. We're all just people, living in the same country, together, no matter who wins or who loses.

11. Fear is no reason to vote for or against a candidate. If Barack Obama becomes president, we are not going to become an Islamic socialist anarchy. If John McCain becomes president, we are not going to turn into a theocracy. People who resort to politics of fear are relying on an argument ad metum fallacy to sway your vote, which is, by its definition, faulty logic.

On Halloween, Granddaddy, and I.P. Freely

2008-10-30T08:02:00.004-05:00

For some, Halloween is a time for children. It's a chance to watch them wear their imaginations on the outside and to eat so much candy that they become sticky all over. For others, it flirts with reveling in all things unholy -- satan, poltergeists, demons. But for me, it's more special than Christmas, and it's all because of one man: my grandfather.

My grandfather loved Halloween in an over-the-top way. He didn't just kind of enjoy passing out candy; he turned his entire home into a haunted freak-show, and he let me help. The first thing we did to ready the house was set up the trick coffin. My grandfather would rig a pulley to a man-sized stuffed dummy, who would be concealed. He would make his own gravestones to put around the grizzly scene -- most of them had really inappropriate names carved on them (like I.P. Freely), his signature crude humor. Then, he would set up a soundsystem that would blare scratchy records of Halloween sound effects: screaming witches, yowling cats, howling wolves, creaking doors. It could be heard all over the neighborhood, echoing off the pine trees. It would have made Vincent Price proud. The last step was to position my grandmother at the front door with a bowl full of candy, and to wait for dark.

I would rush through trick-or-treating so that I could get back to grandfather's sound room (aka the guest bedroom facing the street) as soon as I could. From where we sat, with the lights off, we could see the trick-or-treaters, but the trick-or-treaters couldn't see us. It was a great way to view the prank. As soon as the children decided they were brave enough to pass the ominous coffin to get to the candy they so desired, they would try to run for the door, where my grandmother stood with the bowl. Their sprint never saved them. As soon as the children passed the coffin, granddaddy would yank the pulley and the life-sized dummy would stand straight up, face-to-face with the kid or parent. Only adding to the terror, granddaddy had rigged the dummy with a microphone; as soon as the kid looked into the face of the gigantic dead guy, he (granddaddy/the dead guy) would growl in his lowest voice, "GIMME SOME CANNNNNNDY." This would cause a frenzy of screaming, almost ALWAYS from the parents. Most ran away. Some punched the dummy in the face. Many swore. A couple just fell out. Grandaddy and I would mute the microphone and laugh until we couldn't breathe.

Those who were brave enough earned their sweet tooth that night. You might think people would avoid his house out of terror, but that isn't so. We had lines and lines of people wrapped around the block. My grandmother always -- always -- ran out of candy. The night usually ended with a recruited friend, my grandmother, and I popping popcorn and stuffing mini treat bags with it so we could continue feeding all the people at the door. (This was a small town and a time predating seals on food.)

Eventually, when we ran out of all food for the crowd, we'd have to turn out the lights, lock the door, and huddle near the fire as we waited for people to stop coming. I usually fell asleep in that year's outrageous costume, terrified from that night's ghost stories but exhausted.

My grandfather died twelve years ago. I do not mourn him at Christmas, or on his birthday. I don't cast a glance anymore at his empty chair at Thanksgiving. But the first time I smell burning leaves, pumpkin pie, and the cold, clean air that signals October in the South, I think of him. Now when I wait in the dark, out of candy, near my own fire, in my own house, I know he's nearby. And it's as if no time at all has passed.

Liberace in Church

2008-10-26T09:08:00.005-05:00

This morning on NPR, I heard a piece concerning a new breed of church organ player. Wait -- don't stop reading. The man leading the way wears leather tights and wild hair, and he's replaced the church organ with a grandiose electronic keyboard. He's a youtube star, has rock albums, and has changed the way people in New York City think of (if they think of) organists. His flamboyant musical style has drawn a few critics, of course; the dissenters generally refrain that church music should never be showy. His pastor disagrees. She says that the "Greatest Story Ever Told" is a dramatic one, so what's better to represent it than a little theater? "Churches have lower attendance than ever," she said; "People need a grand performance to bring them back."

OK. That statement has had me scratching my head all morning. My first instinct, informed by a very reserved Methodist background, was to bristle. Is it ok for someone to advocate bringing in congregants with a show? If someone decides to come to church, should it not be for a number of personal spiritual reasons -- not to see Liberace?

Then I realized that habit, not how I really feel about the theatricality of church, initiated that reaction. Methodists, by their name, like order, neatness, predictability, logic. You don't wave your hands or dance; he who speaks in tongues would probably be ushered out. You don't shout out "Amen!" -- you sit with a kind of reserve that borders on boredom. You take what you're given. You rise to sing, recite the creeds, sit, and file out. While I have represented this as dry and uninspiring, I have found the rituals comforting. And I always get more from the hymns than the sermon. Always. Either silence or music lead the way to God -- not talking. It's never been talking for me.

So what if this NYC organist walked into my church this morning and began representing the gospel with wild runs, dramatic crescendos, and cacophonous dissonance? Whether it inspired or outraged, wouldn't it awaken me? Wouldn't it interrupt that slumber that descends over every person, now and again? And what if people came for the music? What if they stayed for the verses? For the people? What if it led them to some other religion that inspired them? What if it led to soul-searching, inspired them to be better people, moved them to do something greater for the world than they'd thought of before? There's really nothing bland about Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Islam -- why should the services that represent them be anything less?

Grilled Pizza

2008-10-25T15:19:00.004-05:00

Hey, South! The two weeks of autumn we get each year are here! Get out there and fire up the grill before it drops to freezing and rains 'til February. If you're tired of the same old meat and veggies, though, give this recipe a try. I made it up, so nothing is exact, and everything is adaptable to your palate. If you have a favorite grilled pizza recipe, or this recipe inspires one, please share with me.

It starts after you have made your favorite homemade pizza dough recipe (or, if you're lucky to live in a city with frozen pizza dough in the freezer, use that). If you don't have a favorite, Paula Deen's is great: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/basic-pizza-dough-recipe/index.html

My recipe list is long because I used just about everything I had left over in the fridge. It would have been just fine with the spinach and marinara mixture alone.

Ingredients:

(Whatever you need for your favorite basic pizza dough.)

About 3/4 cup bottled pizza or marinara sauce

1 package of frozen spinach, defrosted & squeezed dry

2 garlic cloves, chopped

1 oz light cream cheese

1 oz reduced-fat ricotta

1/2 cup diced ham

1/4 cup bottled, roasted red peppers

3 tbl diced black olives

1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese

Cooking spray

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp cayenne

1. Preheat the grill to medium-high heat.

2. Roll out pizza dough to desired size.

3. Spray both sides of dough with cooking spray.

4. Place dough on grill. (Trick: It's easy to transfer dough from one surface to another if you roll the dough onto your rolling pin to pick it up from the counter.)

5. Grill 3-5 minutes on each side or until dough is firm and displays light grill marks. Remove from grill, placing on baking sheet or pizza pan.

Here's what we put on ours, but at this point, you could add anything that inspired you:

1. Place thawed, squeezed frozen spinach in a microwave-safe bowl.

2. Add to the spinach one ounce of light cream cheese, about 1 ounce of reduced fat ricotta cheese, 2 minced garlic cloves, and a dash of salt, pepper, and cayenne.

3. Heat spinach mixture in microwave 1 to 2 minutes or until cheeses are soft. Stir well.

4. Spread bottled pizza (or marinara) sauce onto your pizza shell.

5. Top marinara with spinach mixture, spreading to cover.

6. Add diced ham, olives, and roasted red bell pepper strips.

7. Top with parmesan cheese.

Prepare grill for indirect heat.

Place prepared pizza (on its baking sheet) on the grill.

Bake 20 minutes or until the cheese has melted and the marinara sauce is warmed through. (This last part can also be done in your oven.)

On Being Robbed

2008-10-20T08:42:00.002-05:00

I should begin by saying that we have not been robbed. But this weekend, at least one odd thing happened to change my perspective a little bit.

So Sunday morning at 8 AM, about the time we were convincing ourselves to climb out of the massive piles of covers we're using to postpone turning on the heat, we hear a tap-tap-tap at our back door. It's Marion, the 90something year old cotton farmer neighbor. The only time Marion climbs the big hill to the house is about once a week each summer to deliver the tomatoes. Otherwise, all conversations between us happen when we make the much easier downhill climb to see him. That he's at the back door in the morning in the fall, then, is strange.

The first thing he asks is, "Were you robbed?" Well, despite knowing that I had not been robbed, I felt ice water in my stomach. "What do you mean?" Andrew asked. He explains: "The cops were in my bushes last night with a high-powered flashlight, looking for the guys who were trying to break into your house." Now, if I didn't feel light-headed before, it was now necessary to sit down and shiver.

Andrew asked him to back up and slowly explain. He did: "I heard your dogs barking like crazy and then I saw a bright light and saw it was the cops in my back yard. It had to have been midnight or 1 am, so I raised the window and said, 'What're ya'll lookin' for?' And they said someone had called to say they'd just arrived home late to find someone breaking into their house, and when the homeowners caught them, the robbers escaped, running through ya'll's [that would be, our] yard and maybe mine. I asked the cops, 'Was it the house on the hill?' and they said 'Yes.'"

Hence the misunderstanding -- we're the house on the hill, to Marion, but as the property keeps slanting upward, his vague gesture could've indicated a host of other homes. And anyway, we didn't call the police, so it certainly wasn't our house being robbed. But it still could've been our backyard that was the escape route.

This changed several things for me. I no longer saw my house as protection but rather a glorified, decorated pup tent. That night, I went through each room and closed the blinds and curtains so no one could see in. Andrew taught me to use a 9-millimeter, a .38, and a shotgun, two of which are now loaded in various parts of the house. I currently sleep with a bat. I brought in the dogs, not because they've vicious -- anyone who knows Sierra would find that giggle-worthy -- but because they're loud. They now sleep in the house with us, near us. And we are permanently keeping on the brightest porch light you've ever seen in your life.

I have never felt afraid in my house before. I grew up in a town where everyone knew everyone; as an example, one of my classmates in now in jail because he held up the Country Store -- one of only 2 convenience stores in the 2,000-person town -- with a bag on his head but everyone knew his voice when he said "give me your money." The whole store stopped and said, "Mike? Is that YOU? Your dad would be so ashamed of you right now." He was pretty easy to track down after that.

So this idea of drawing the curtains close, checking and rechecking the locked doors and windows, learning to load and fire a firearm, fearing this old house's creaks is alien to me. It's not so much a sign of my neighborhood, which is OK, but a sign of the times. Who's hungry enough, withdrawn enough, desperate enough to come into your house when there's a good chance you're already in it? It's that desperation, more than the person behind it, that worries me the most.

The New Dirty Word

2008-10-14T09:53:00.003-05:00

This blog is inspired by an article by CNN's Campbell Brown that addresses the rise in hate speech at John McCain's political rallies. In case you haven't caught the latest videos, at the past few public appearances McCain has made, the crowd has gotten increasingly ugly, particularly after Palin accused Obama of befriending terrorists (and by terrorists, she means William Ayers, and by befriending, she means he went to a campaign fundraiser he hosted). One woman in McCain's crowd shouted "[Obama's] an Arab, and I don't trust him." Another yelled out, "Kill him!" McCain attempted to calm the crowd by assuring them Obama was a good man and not an Arab, and the crowd booed him.

Most Democrats are quick to point out that Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. They do this in part because it's true, but in part because the word "Muslim" has become the newest dirty word. The rebuttal comes a little too quickly, the disdain a little too evident. The reason the woman at the McCain rally spat the word "Arab" is because she deemed it the ultimate insult. It's our version of the 17th-century "witch." All you have to do is point to someone and say it (or "terrorist") and whoever is accused must swim, and be burned, or sink, and drown. Whoever uses the label wields all power.

But since when is Muslim a bad word? What if John McCain or Barack Obama were Muslims? I KNOW they aren't -- but so what if they were? Since when is a Muslim incapable of ruling the country? If Americans think Christians should be the only ones allowed to run for office, then they should put it in writing (so I can move to Canada). Religion isn't a prerequisite for holding office. What are people afraid of? That a Muslim president would break out some kind of crazy machine that turns them into jihad-loving terrorists? That logic is seriously flawed. Did John F. Kennedy convert the masses to Catholicism? Did George W. Bush turn everyone into evangelicals? Mitt Romney holds congressional power; do you suddenly feel yourself morphing into a Mormon? Of course not; people decide what they will believe by soul-searching, maybe by following the lead of a pastor or a friend. They do not expect their president to convert them to one religion or another.

And even if the president were able to break out this magical crazy Muslim-loving machine, there's nothing to fear from Islam. It's a peaceful religion that worships the same God Christians do, shares the same Bible (with additions), and holds the same values (often, tighter). It stems directly from the Old Testament, in fact; its brother-religion is Judaism. Both share a family tree. The people America fears are radicals. Just like Christians -- remember the Branch Davidians? Or those nike-wearing people who killed themselves to prepare for incoming aliens? -- that religion has extremists. Extremists are not the rule; they are the exception. They are not Islam, incarnate. They are not model Muslims, just as the Davidians were not model Christians.

In short, we shouldn't stand for the stigmatization of Muslim or Arab. We shouldn't let the mob make dirty what isn't.

Fix It

2008-10-11T12:22:00.001-05:00

I like Kenan's plan: fix it.

SNL VP Debate

2008-10-05T11:09:00.001-05:00

Freaking Hilarious.

Dear Congress

2008-09-30T07:40:00.002-05:00

Dear Congress, and by Congress, I include you, Senators McCain and Obama:

I can't sew. I know -- that's just not what you're thinking about right now, is it? But maybe it should be. You see, if we plunge to a Depression, like that crazy guy from MSNBC keeps saying, I won't be able to make my clothes, as they did in the 1930s, and then I'll have to spend a good part of my adult life naked. This actually would affect you, as I'm no spring chicken, and, as any good academic, am rather pale. Not pleasant.

Speaking of chickens, I've recently discovered my parents/grandmother own a dilapidated farm in East Texas. I have decided if you can't pull yourself together, I'm going to have to give up my academic career, because colleges will surely be one of the first institutions to go, since they don't feed or clothe people. That means I'll have to move to this farm and grow hens. As every good farmer knows, you don't "grow" hens, you raise them, which tells you how much trouble this is going to be for me and my family. Having grown up 10 miles from the Pilgrim's Pride plant, I have to say that farming would be unpleasant. Congress, have you ever smelled a chicken farm? I swear to you that if you screw up this economic bailout, as it appears you seem determined to do, I will find each and every one of you, bring you to my chicken farm, and rub your nose in the dirt. Because that is basically what you've done to me.

Dear legislators, it's time for you to stop playing with me for your political gain. We all know that you, Republicans, rejected the bailout so that you could, upon running for reelection, say you rejected it. But this is a cruel game. Perhaps the bailout wouldn't have worked; perhaps it was a terrible plan. Anyone who's lent money to a gambler has their doubts about giving $700 billion to banks who clearly have bad decision-making skills. But I'm not sure that's why you said "no," and that makes me angry. Democrats, you're just as bad. It may be a partisan issue for you, but it's a home loan for me. It's a car loan for my friend; it's a college loan for my students. If I buy the paranoia, it could cost me my paycheck if my employer can't get the funding to meet payroll.

And if I sound a little frantic, Congress -- if I sound needlessly worried -- that's because you've spent zero amount of time telling me just what this really means for me. Just because you use the words "main street" doesn't mean you know what's happening here; and as a result, neither do we.

In short, Congress, I'd like to slap you in the face. Not figuratively -- I think you all need a good hard whack across the nose. I would like to volunteer my services. And when you've come to your senses, I'd like for you to reach across the aisle and figure out a plan that keeps our banks from failing completely. Because I've got a gunny sack, but I've no idea what to do with it.

Sincerely,

Kacy

Whatever's In the Cupboard Mac & Cheese

2008-09-29T09:15:00.003-05:00

I got home after a long road trip -- I'm working on reunion posts -- and craved something that made me feel good; unfortunately, my fridge and cupboard only had a few leftover items here and there. I made this out of pantry staples and have since adapted it with whatever is on hand. Any small pasta will suffice, as will any cheese or vegetable (such as frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed, or chopped, bottled, roasted red peppers). Diced ham or turkey bacon would be a nice addition, too.

Whatever’s In the Cupboard Mac & Cheese

1 cup uncooked seashell pasta
4 oz low-fat cream cheese, cubed
½ cup shredded 2% sharp cheddar
¾ or 1 cup 2% evaporated milk, regular milk, cream, or 1/2 and 1/2
1/3 cup frozen green peas, thawed (run 'em under hot water)
1 egg, beaten
2 tbl Italian breadcrumbs
2 tbl grated parmesan cheese
½ tsp red pepper
½ tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp salt

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350.

1. Boil pasta. Drain. Transfer to mixing bowl.

2. Stir in cream cheese, cheddar, milk, green peas, red pepper, black pepper, salt and beaten egg. Pour into 5-in square casserole dish sprayed with cooking spray. Top with shredded parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs.

3. Bake 30 minutes or until the dish is set and slightly pulled away from the sides of the pan.

When the Big-Top Came To Town: The Ole Miss Presidential Debate

2008-09-24T09:09:00.003-05:00

I work in the town hosting the first and probably most significant debate of the 2008 Presidential Election year, and I have to say, it's been interesting. While I can't give you the perspective of someone who lives there, dealing with traffic and media on a day-to-day basis, I can tell you a little about Oxford in the days preceding the circus that is the Obama/McCain media extravaganza.

First of all, I just have to say that Oxford is letting its "crazy" show. On my way into town just a few days ago, I noticed at least 8 new billboards and yard signs that gave me an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The first was a gigantic sign that you have to pass to enter the town that has a very, very lengthy bible verse printed on it in bubble letters. The sign is so full that its message is obscured, but not completely: we get it -- the South loves God, as evidenced by exhibit A's giant, unreadable sign. Check. As you continue through the town, the same people sponsoring the first sign have constructed others. One particularly enigmatic one says "If our universities would lead, our kids could read." I wasn't aware that the university taught the fundamental principles of phonics; please don't let NBC (or the Daily Show) get a close-up of that one.

The yard signs are lined up row upon row as you take the primary road to the "Square," the town's main attraction, which boasts shops, restaurants, and bars. Each sign has a small white cross on it and one word: Pray. What does this mean? The election choices are so bad either way that all we can do is "pray"? That Oxford thinks its president-elects should pray? That prayer should be integrated into this government process? That you should pray before voting? What? The South loves religion; ah yes, I had forgotten the gigantic illegible bible verse on my way in, and now I am reminded. Check check.

For those of you who don't know me well, I happen to be a practicing, believing Christian. But I get really peeved when people use my spiritual belief system as a tactic for winning a government race. I am strongly for the separation of church and state, and I have the feeling that if the government adopted a different religion than the majority (Judaism, anyone? Islam? Hinduism?) then everyone else would be, too. I believe as soon as the Church enters the state, one corrupts the other. (Heck I might be Quaker; they believe the church's bureaucracy makes it corrupted and argue instead that everyone carries the "inner light" of God in the body's sanctuary, making everyone a church!) But I digress.

You might wonder if I'll be attending the debates. The answer is no -- but not because I don't want to. You see, I'm not invited, nor is 3/4 of the University. The debate organizers fear an unstable audience will cause a ruckus, so if you wanted to be part of this monumental event, you had to write an essay that fit their version of patriotism, and then you get the golden ticket to go inside. There is one group who'll be present, golden ticket or no: the KKK. They said they're coming plain-clothed to recruit. The best part? They'll be there, they said, not because Obama is black, but because his middle name is Hussein. I have officially decided to change my middle name to BinLaden, just to mess with people who use this ridiculous argument; the internal combustion that will surely happen as people try to compute my white face with my "eastern" name will be all too entertaining to watch. I love fireworks.

In its defense, Ole Miss is greeting the KKK with an art exhibit where a photographer has replaced the bodies of tortured African-Americans with KKK clansmen in gruesome lynching photos. There are "white knights" being hooked, tarred, and skinned alive; the photos are so graphic that they are constantly guarded by armed officers. That's a pretty strong response, UM; way to go.

When you watch the debates this weekend, when the news will certainly find that one lunatic who laments the days of slavery and can only babble incoherently about terrorism, I'll be in Texas at my 10-year high school reunion, far away from the madding crowd. But you can bet I'll be watching. Even if I'm not invited there, it's just too important to miss.

A Reflection on Beale Street and Smushmellows

2008-09-21T13:22:00.003-05:00

This weekend was long overdue. With deadlines looming, paperwork to be completed, and our entire future up-in-the-air, it was time for a little dancing and celebration.

Friday, we went to Beale Street (shirking the local home game's debut on ESPN! The huge-manatee!) and went dancing at Alfred's and I was reminded how much I like it there. It was a warm night, and the streets were stuffed with people dancing, twirling, and drinking margaritas from Wet Willie's. Beale Street is an odd combination of Memphis blues and New Orleans charm. It smells of pork barbecue, red beans and rice, and spilled beer. Strong men line up in the street to perform acrobatic feats for money. And there's always this one guy who sits on a throne on the sidewalk, pulled up to a standalone table. He doesn't offer anything -- doesn't tell fortunes, doesn't perform magic -- he just seems to want to talk to people. If you go to BB King's, you'll hear the best blues in the South (short of Clarksdale, I hear), where some of the most soulful music I've ever heard causes people to sway drunkenly on the smoky dance floor. We went to Alfred's, which was stuffed with bachelorette parties of veiled reeling brides wearing flashing lights around their waists and necks. One drunk guy spun aimlessly around the floor in a pink shirt, dancing with his own shoes at times, stopping occasionally to stand still for several minutes while holding his middle finger in the air. I'm still not sure who was (or was not?) involved in the insult.

While the night was undeniably odd, Beale Street's music is so toe-tapping, the dance floor so entertaining, the bands so glad to be there, and the food so delectable that I found myself just glad to be alive and out under the warm night sky.

The next night was also outside but in a very different setting. We went to the lake to enjoy a campfire, smores, and early autumn lightning. I walked a dog around the site's loop and enjoyed the absolute darkness, interrupted only here and there by the twinkling lights of a plastic palm tree or Christmas lights someone had erected in their camper's "front yard." The world smelled like cut grass and ozone before a storm, thrown in with the happy smell of slightly dirty children who have played outside all day long, barefoot. Campers played oldies and grilled hamburgers on rusty charcoal grills. I was unable to get melted marshmallows (or smushmellows as one friend's child calls them) off of my hands, and that was OK.

It reminded me of growing up in East Texas in a town with no restaurants or stores, with nothing open past 9. I spent hours outside on the front lawn drawing pictures with the stars, which were bright and unhampered by any lights from any city, the closest one being an hour away. My friends and I told ghost stories on my trampoline, letting the wind from the dark woods behind us send shivers down our backs, between our shoulder blades. The smoke from the campfire would tangle in my long hair and stay there.

While I can't buy the founding fathers' suggestion that a rural life is a virtuous one, I have noticed that spending a little time with the open sky reminds me of how small I am, how small my problems are. And who doesn't need that little reminder, every now and then?

Palin/Clinton SNL Genius

2008-09-15T08:46:00.001-05:00

A little humor in the midst of recent insanity

MLA, the JIL, and other Acrimonious Acronyms

2008-09-10T08:31:00.004-05:00

This Friday is a day to turn the stomach of any up-and-coming literary academic: the day the Modern Language Association (MLA) posts its job list. That's right. While everyone else is enjoying happy-hour with coworkers, going out on a date for a little escapist moviegoing, or just taking the time to relax after a long week, Andrew and I will be picking our new lives out a catalogue.

For the uninitiated, people who work in higher ed English departments don't usually get to just call up the place they want to live and apply for a job there, like all other good young job-seekers get to do. They have to go to the MLA convention, which is always either in San Francisco or Philadelphia, and it's always a couple of days after Christmas. Yep. Christmas Day. You can think of it as the nation's biggest English job fair, only it's (relatively?) mandatory for anyone seeking a tenure-track job. (These generalizations don't apply to academic superstars -- there is TOO such a thing, although outside their own circles they generally feel pretty lost -- and people who are fine with instructorships/adjunct work, which is always temporary.)

Once the MLA posts the jobs you can apply for, you have to select the jobs that appeal to you and then send each school a phenomenal amount of yourself on paper. Not only do they want a resume (or vita, in our case) but they want a teaching philosophy (aka a stilted version of everything you believe about the classroom in one page), a dissertation abstract (aka everything you've devoted your life to studying and writing about for 200 pages crammed into 1,000 or so words), and a writing sample. IF they like you enough on paper, you get "the phone call."

Legend has it that "the phone call" can come all the way up to Christmas Eve, or not at all; if Santa comes early, this phone call results in an MLA job interview, which is like speed dating with nausea. Exhausted professors not very good at talking to people anyway push multiple interviewees a day into a cramped hotel room, trying to find someone to invite for an on-campus interview. I hear that the smell of coffee and alcohol is enough to turn anybody's stomach; there are tales of people vomiting in the stairways and elevators, and everyone I've talked to seems to remember the stink of failed deodorant, evidence of the anxiety on both interviewer and interviewee's account.

The combination of nerves, alcohol, caffeine, long days, and exhaustion makes for some pretty terrifying stories. One I've recently read, but shouldn't have, began with a guy sitting down for his interview and being told this: "I find your scholarship totally irrelevant. Would you like to comment?" Others have recounted how people on the hiring committees would slide out of their chairs to hide under the table, never to come out again. Another said she watched one man, a pretty high-up muckety-muck, fall asleep in front of her, drooling on her CV.

But the truth is, I want to be there. I want to have my chance. If you pass this particularly grueling test, you might get invited to a campus interview, where you teach a class, discuss your dissertation, talk to the provost, and generally try to convince people they want to work with you.

So as this Friday rolls around, stop a minute and think of our family and all of our friends who are going through this process too. If you're a praying person, we really wouldn't mind if you'd remember us in your weekly laundry list of people who have concerns. If you're not, whatever you normally do for well-wishing would also be appreciated. If you happen to see me puffy eyed, a little on edge, distracted, unable to eat, and generally more insane than usual, just keep in mind -- the MLA posted its job list this Friday. And that could change everything.

How to Fight a Wild Animal in your House, and Win

2008-09-05T10:08:00.003-05:00

It all started while we were watching a recorded version of John McCain's speech. It was late. We were folding laundry and hurling insults at the TV.

"*I'M* for change," McCain insisted.
"Idiot!" I ranted. "No you're not! Stop lying to people."
"I'm a war vet and that means you should vote for me," he continued. I'm paraphrasing but whatever.
"No it doesn't!" I throw a pair of socks at the television screen. "It just means you would be really good at Survivor."

This goes on for some time and, meanwhile, in the floor, Wormwood is knocking things off of tables, as usual. He skitters into the next room, chasing a cat toy with a bell in it. I hear what sounds like a marker rolling around on the floor and think to myself that I'll have to dig it out from under something dusty later and roll my eyes. My mind vaguely registers the familiar sounds of the house at night -- Worm destroying something, the ancient air conditioner wheezing in its struggle to cool our old house, the creak of the wooden floorboards, and a cat crunching her dry food. I pay very little attention to any of this.

The speech ends and Andrew and I exchange our exasperations. While the marker-rolling, air-wheezing, and floor-creaking have all stopped, the catfood-crunching has escalated to a noise level I've never heard before. There's now an added bag-rustling which suggests one of my animals is about to get into trouble. No cat has ever eaten out of the cat-food bag. I head to the kitchen.

Allie is standing in front of the washing room with not one hair out of place. She looks at me calmly and raises an eyebrow. I see a big furry body submerged in the supersized bag of cat food and I at first assume that Chloe has finally lost all self control and is eating her weight in Purina. Allie's look contributes to my assumption; I swear if she could talk, she'd say, "Well, we finally lost her." But on a second glance, she could also be saying, "So I see you've brought ANOTHER animal into the house and told it that it could live in the food bag. How like you."

Because it's not a cat in the Purina -- it's a possum. And it's making a lot of noise.

I utter a string of curses I rarely invoke and the little weasel pokes his eyes up out of the bag, his cheeks puffed out with food, and stops chewing. "Oh hey," he seems to say. "Didn't think you were up."

He reluctantly pulls himself out of the cat food and hides behind the washer (as he's doing in this picture). He cannot get back into the hole he has come in through; it's high on the wall, and he seems to have fallen out of it. We are at a stalemate.

So Andrew sets up a mousetrap-like maze in the kitchen with boxes, baby gates, and laundry baskets, all the while shouting all the diseases these demons carry. He stands on the washing machine with a baseball bat and a broom, and I stand on the stove island with the same tools. When it comes time to act -- no one wants to touch it, and both of us are only halfway convinced that they don't jump or fly -- Andrew shoves it out from behind the washer with a broom. I expect it to hiss and try to frighten me, but it just shuffles out, as if exasperated, and pauses next to the food and kind of looks up at Andrew, like, "Can I just pause for a bite? Just a small one?" The answer is of course, no, and I push him in the backside with my broom toward the back door.

I don't like touching him at all but he follows the maze of boxes and baskets well enough and out the door, which has been propped open for him. We wearily construct a hack-job of patchwork over the hole behind the washing machine (this "hole" is really where the pipes enter the house) using leftover boards from crown molding construction projects and duct tape. We sink into bed about 1 AM and wonder, how do these things happen to us?

You Ain't Nobody unless you are F-R-U-M Somewhere

2008-09-03T09:30:00.004-05:00

Labor Day weekend, Andrew and I drove for four days (total) to Ft Worth, Texas, to visit my brother and sister-in-law and to see their beautiful (did I mention gigantic?) new home. We were fortunate to see my parents as well, and between audiobooks, while making the 18-hour roundtrip, I started thinking about Texas, which is home.

I'm coming up on the point in my career when I need to start thinking about where to go next. There are a lot of reasons not to return to Texas. Gun-toting NRA supporters. People who call eating chicken instead of steak one day a week "environmental conservation." Unnerving prejudice against all Spanish-speakers or "furriners" as my friend Sabahat jokingly called herself. A kind of pride in an unwillingness to change.

But despite the deficiencies, there's something about home that gets in my blood and stays there. In that ironic voice that would become her calling card, Flannery O'Connor once said, "You ain't nobody unless you are FRUM somewhere." And I'm "frum" Texas, but what does that mean?

The answer to that is tied to family but since I'm removed from them, it's tied to food my family made for me. When I first moved away, my first night in this big empty house I wanted to make enchiladas. My version incorporated jalepeno cream cheese, but when I went to the store shelves to find it, it wasn't there. Of course it wasn't there. I was in the Deep South, not the Southwest, and then it hit me how far away from home I was. I sobbed right there in front of the shredded cheese. No one noticed.

Home is also in that dark, earthy spice cumin, and in the rich warmth of chili powder, which my mother used to dust over cheese toast. Anything topped with cilantro makes my heart hurt a little. When I feed friends in my new home, I serve them what I know. Homemade salsa spiked with lime, hot with chipotle peppers. Avocados mashed with garlic and cilantro and sweet chopped red onions. Pitchers of tart, cool margaritas. Some approve and teach me about their own regional fare. Some, though, poke the avocados, saying, "Ew. It's green. I don't eat green mashed food." Some say -- "This food is hot. I do NOT eat hot food." I cannot fathom what heat they're talking about, and this is not some weird, faked, food-bravado if there is such a thing. I cannot explain to anyone why this is like insulting my mother and father, but it is. (Upon reflection, then, D.W., I apologize for any disparaging remarks about pork barbecue, which I have grown to love.)

Texas is about more than spices, of course, though that's enough for me really. The air is different, for one. While my current home smells overly sweet, especially during the summer when the magnolias vie with the honeysuckle, my birthplace smells like linen and hot pine needles. Even the ground is different, the dirt a dark red clay. My friend used to tell me that if you dug up clay and shaped it into quarters, you could set out the discs in the sun to dry, and they would turn to gold. We tried it one night at a catfish fry near Club Lake, laying out rows upon rows of rust-colored earth, dreaming of what we'd do with our riches the next day.

There are a dozen other distinctions as well, though you may think none of them remarkable. While I still live in the South, the twang in Texas is different. East Texas words are flat but not long like here. Central Texas has big hair but clipped speech and no trees. The sky seems bigger.

But no one can say if we will call it home again. Academics don't pick their careers, not really. Even if we return there, I'm not sure people can ever return to the place they remember.

Peanut Butter and Chicken Sauce Euphoria

2008-08-27T08:56:00.006-05:00

When I got married 6 years ago, I realized that if I wanted something other than macaroni and cheese, I'd have to make it (Andrew can cook and will help anytime but it's just not something he gets excited about). So I ordered Cooking Light, one of the best health decisions I've made since I started running in 1994, and have been inspired ever since. Besides helping me keep track of my calories and teaching me tricks for preparing good food that's good for us -- like using fresh herbs, sea salt, and small quantities of good olive oil -- it's helped us broaden the kinds of foods we eat. We've added Indian and Thai to our standards, Southwestern and Italian (I think Andrew would also add his favorite, "meatloaf," as a food category but I'm not sold).

The following recipe is now in the rotation of go-to recipes for our household because of its versatility; it uses staples, it's not too weird, and it can be altered to be a sack-lunch or dressed up for company. It would be a great way to try something new -- it incorporates classic Thai ingredients -- even if you have picky people in your household. I'll include the original recipe but then tell you how we've changed it to stretch it, make it vegetarian, alter it to be a soup in the wintertime, and dress it to make it more colorful. The recipe is courtesy of cookinglight.com.

Ingredients:

Cooking spray
1/2 cup matchstick-cut carrots
1/3 cup chopped green onions
2/3 cup light coconut milk
1 tablespoon low-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
3 tablespoons creamy peanut butter
1 teaspoon curry powder
1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper
2 cups shredded skinless, boneless rotisserie chicken breast
4 (8-inch) fat-free flour tortillas
1 1/3 cups packaged angel hair slaw

Preparation

Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Coat pan with cooking spray. Add carrots and onions; sauté 1 minute. Stir in coconut milk and next 5 ingredients (through pepper); cook 30 seconds, stirring constantly. Add the chicken; cook 1 minute, stirring to coat. Remove from heat; cool. Warm tortillas according to package directions. Spoon about 1/2 cup chicken mixture down center of each tortilla, and top each with 1/3 cup angel hair slaw. Roll up. Cover and chill. (I top mine with Sriracha, or Thai chili sauce, and a few extra unsalted peanuts for crunch.)

Yield
4 servings (serving size: 1 wrap)

Nutritional Information
CALORIES 321(28% from fat); FAT 10.1g (sat 3.3g,mono 3.7g,poly 2.1g); IRON 0.9mg; CHOLESTEROL 49mg; CALCIUM 37mg; CARBOHYDRATE 25.5g; SODIUM 844mg; PROTEIN 24.1g; FIBER 4.3g

So this is the basic recipe. But you can omit the chicken, tortillas, and cabbage and double the carrots and onions, and add matchstick-cut red peppers and toss with warm fettuccine for dinner. Garnish with green onion tops, peanuts, cilantro, and Sriracha, or Thai chili paste, the red bottle with the giant chicken on it (which is why Andrew calls it "chicken sauce"). It's beautiful with all of the vibrant colors. This same meal is also excellent on white or brown rice, if you're looking for a boost in fiber.

The other way you can alter it is by making it into a Thai Chicken Chowder. Saute the onions and carrots like before, but add 2 cloves of garlic, 1 cup chopped bell pepper, 2/3 cup snow peas, 1 1/2 cups (1/2 inch) cubed sweet potato, and 1 1/2 tsp of ginger to the pan as well. When that has cooked 8 minutes, stir in 2 (14-oz) cans of chicken broth and simmer 10 minutes. Then add 2 tbl lime juice, a dash of Sriracha, 1 1/2 cups cooked chopped chicken breast and one can of light coconut milk; cook 1 minute or until heated. Serve garnished with onion tops, cilantro, lime wedges, unsalted peanuts and Sriracha if your guests like food HOT!

If you end up trying it, lemme know what you think. If you have another recipe for me, send it my way. I always need new ideas.

RIP Jerry Wexler

2008-08-19T10:10:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately for me, this blog is a little pretentious. It's a panegyric to Jerry Wexler, the president of Atlantic Records partially (mostly) responsible for the fame of the likes of Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and Otis Redding. He died Friday, 8/15. But that's not what makes the post pretentious; it's because it's partly a paean to music of the 50s and 60s but it's written by a girl born in 1980 who can't claim soul and blues and rock n roll from 20 years before her existence without a little bit of affectedness. It's a little hypocritical coming from a person who has voluntarily downloaded a Britney Spears song because it made her want to dance around the room. It's a little high-minded because if you snuck into my car today, you might find it on XM's 20 on 20, and you might find out I know the words to that new song by Carrie Underwood, "Last Name."

So at least I'm honest.

But I was listening to a tribute to Wexler the other day, which included a sampling of songs like "These Arms of Mine," "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," and "I Know a Woman." Driving down the road on my way to Oxford, I was singing along at the top of my voice when I thought -- who will pass down this music to my students? To my children? To my children's friends?

Flashback to 1992. I'm 12 and very impatient with my dad. I've come to ask him a question about history, a question I always precede with, "And can you give me the short answer please because I just don't have 4 hours this afternoon." Very bratty. But I come in on him singing.

"These ---- armmms ----- of ------ miiiiiiiiiiineeeeee" he croons.

"Dad, I have a question about the American Indians."

He smiles at me and raises his eyebrows but doesn't answer. "They are yeeearrrning, yearning."

There's no music playing. I roll my ungrateful teenage eyes at him. I've gotten in trouble for this a lot.

"From wanting youuuu."

"Dad. Are you listening to me?"

"I need somebody. Somebody to treat me right ohhhh."

I sigh. And wait until the end. "That's Otis Redding, Kacy. I love Otis Redding. But not as much as Bob Dylan."

A typical conversation in my household. My mother compromised on the radio and let me listen to Bon Jovi. My father would not. "You need a musical education. This stuff you listen to is all boom boom boom boom." He was talking about the beginning of hip-hop.

So he played Aretha Franklin. And Sam Cooke. The Drifters. His favorite thing to do was imitate the 50s falsetto, especially if it was a Frankie Valli song. He made up his own music too and sometimes paired it with really moldy country songs. It resulted in an odd "Ode to Charlie Pride/Ode to Myself." Here's just one example: "Ohhh the Crystal Chandeliers light up the paintings on your wall. . . plunka plunka plunka -- I'm wonderful, I'm marvelous, I'm terrific and I'm great. I'm one of the greatest people I've ever knooooowwwwnnnnnn."

The music Wexler helped get to the public is the soundtrack to my childhood. What do I have to give my own (nonexistent) offspring? "Make 'em Say Unnnnn?" "Gin and Juice?" Shooting stars of hip hop & R&B who flare up just to fall down as quickly?

Nope, no thanks. I'll risk being a musical leech -- a person who makes claims on music beyond her generation -- any day.

Sittin in the morning sun. I'll be sittin' when the evveeening comes. Watching the ships roll innnn . . . Then I watch 'em roll away again. . .

RIP Jerry Wexler. (And thanks, Dad.)

Wormwood, or, Kacy Gets Mistaken for a Homeless Person Outside of Walmart

2008-08-12T10:42:00.004-05:00

This post is not about the cuteness of kittens. It's actually about a really tough weekend, and a little about this guy, whose name is Wormwood.

It began about a week ago with the appearance of those kittens I told you about in the last post. They started sleeping in the space between our kitchen door and the screen door, piled on top of each other, trying to avoid the rain. I tried, as quickly as possible, to find homes for them so that I wouldn't get attached. But when I woke up each morning to find one sleeping in my flower pot, another sleeping pressed up against the door, another mewing at me with his feet on the glass -- I couldn't help it. I became attached to them. I knew my very small window of opportunity for giving them away without trauma was slipping closed. "We could keep all of them," Andrew suggested. Uh-oh. Must act quickly.

Andrew and I decided to catch them and bathe them, since they were covered in fleas, so we could begin finding homes for them. This was easier said than done. Worm, the black-and-white kitten above, walked right into the house, rolled over on his back, and purred. Everyone else put up a deadly fight. After we finally managed to pick up the first one, she shredded us both. Our hands dripped blood and we were clawed from finger to elbow. We dumped her in the (empty) bathtub. When we went to get the others, we wore gloves, which both kittens bit all the way through. Did I mention they were leather?

After some time standing in the rain and one can of tuna later, everyone was in the tub, washed, shivering, and resembling drowned rats. They eyed me resentfully.

I put them all in a box and trudged up to evening church, which was just letting out, and I pushed my way through the people trying to leave. "Would you like a kitten?" I pleaded. "Please take a kitten." Most people were amused but uninterested. Until Jackson. Jackson, who is a little boy, began pulling on his mother's pants. "Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. MOM. MOM. MOM!" "Yes Jackson?" "Mom, I want one." And so he got it. One down. Three to go.

But the church was empty. No one was left, and I still had two babies to go (Worm, for complex reasons I won't go into, was still at my house). Jackson had picked my 2nd favorite, and I felt my chest go tight but I knew I should just be glad someone had taken him who'd play with him.

The other two, on the other hand, were demons incarnate. Every time someone tried to touch them, they'd swipe and snarl and growl and hiss and not in an endearing way. What was I going to do? (In case you're wondering at this point, I don't take animals I've fallen in love with to animal shelters to be euthanized. I just can't do it. Oh, and yes, it is possible to love even demon-cats, if they're 4 inches long.)

One person who remained at the church, washing dishes after the evening meal, said, "Take them to Walmart and give them to people there." This sounded like a very distressing and rather embarrassing thing to do. But these devils were not going home with me. I swallowed all pride and positioned myself in front of the electronic doors, holding a big red plastic box with a towel draped over it to prevent the escape artists from leaving.

"Would you like a kitten?" I asked. Eyebrows raised, lips pursed -- some shook their heads, but most just ignored me. "Would you like a kitten? Please take a kitten," I begged. Everyone looked suspicious of me and the box. I could see them trying to work out what I was doing; was I nuts? was I homeless? I didn't look homeless. I didn't look nuts. But who else stands outside of superstores and talks to strangers?

Children peered in, charmed, but their parents snatched them by the back of the shirt and towed them to the car. "Would you like a kitten?" I asked, by this time nearly overwhelmed -- embarrassed that I looked pathetic, upset I might not give away the animals, depressed at having to give away creatures I'd come to love even though they ruined my potted plants -- and then two sisters approached me. "Oh no we don't need a cat. But let me see it." So I did. Just as the first one was about to put her hand in the box, I went to stop her, trying to say "Oh they're a bit nervous, so don't. . ." but she did anyway, grabbing the cat by the nape of the neck. This little twisted possessed ball of fur went absolutely limp in her hand. No teeth, no screaming, just stillness. She put the animal to her chest and it began to purr, which it had never done before. The other sister did the same thing with the 2nd kitten, with the same results. "My God!" I said, awestruck. "You have to take these animals! They've shredded every human that got within 10 feet of them. They're meant for you." And oddly enough, neither sister, like their new kittens, put up much of a fight. They sighed. "We're such suckers," they said, taking the animals to their necks and carrying them home.

I was left with Wormwood (originally misnamed Wormtail -- it appears I mixed Lewis and Rowling, which is either a sign of too little reading, or too much). The next day I carried him to three different people. The first was a friend who agreed to be his temporary home while we searched for another; I didn't last the night. I had to pick him up again. The next was a mere acquaintance; she greeted me with, "Oh no I can't have a cat," and when I let her hold him before leaving, I dissolved into sobs. This was very odd behavior for me, not just because I'm 28 and grown people don't cry over small animals but because I'm not a sentimental weepy woman. I'm kind of stubborn and fairly level headed. And I'm definitely the practical one in this household. I could not adequately explain to this person that I was never like this, nor was I able to pull myself together.

Taking Worm back in the car, I pointed my vehicle to the next place I'd try to give him away, but I couldn't see the road for all of the crying. He licked my face, tracing the tracks of tears down my neck. I threw my hands up (metaphorically -- I was still driving) and gave in. It was not economically feasible to have a fifth animal, and it would mean more hair, more litterbox cleanings, more food. More shots. More flea medicine. But for some reason, the rational part of my brain that always wins -- that always carefully balances pros and cons -- lost out. And I took him home. And now he's ours.

Our Mockingbirds Mimic the Sound of Shock Collars, and other stories

2008-08-07T09:51:00.002-05:00

So this post is about pets. If you live near me, you might've heard most of these stories but since I have new readers from facebook I thought I'd record some of the weird and funny stuff that's gone on with our animals.

It's inspired by the fact that I have 4 baby kitties living in my siding. Well, they probably are living under the house, but they get to the pier-and-beam hiding place by going through a hole they've dug just under the siding. This morning, the little devils got brave and decided to come visit Allie, who was standing guard at the door. I went to get a cup of coffee when I heard "Mew mew mew mew mew" -- very much like "Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey." Much to my surprise, there were 4 furry bodies about 3 inches long with front paws pressed against the glass, talking to me. I watched them for a bit before attempting to open the door, and the bravest of them, whom I've named Wormtail, began hissing at the doormat. It's a rough green cheap thing and I believe he'd never seen such texture before. So when he put his front paws on the mat he leapt up in the air like it'd bitten him on the feet, making him explode into a small puff of hair and eyes. The other, who has named himself Marlow (sometimes cats do that for me) is afraid of marigolds. Marlow would lean very close to the little orange flower and mimic his brother, fluffing instantly into a small round spiky-haired devil possessed with the need to put this annual in its place. They continued to relax and explode on and off again all morning long. I've had to force myself to go to work and stop watching the charade.

But really this is just one in a series of odd animal behavior that's happened in this house. When we first moved in, our 100-year-old dwelling needed more than a little work. Just below the dryer connection, for instance, "something" had knawed a small hole in the wall that we knew we'd eventually have to patch. But when I was carrying a box of stuff to unpack and came across a small cat that wasn't there before -- standing in my living room, though all the doors were closed -- I dropped the box and turned to Andrew, saying, "If that hole is big enough to let a cat in my living room, I believe it's time to patch it." The feral feline just cocked its head and looked at me, as if to say, "Hey. Food?"

The picture at the top of this post is of our devil-dog Brinkley, a golden retriever who never grew out of the terrible twos. He's an absolute maniac. After he was hit by a truck he thought he could catch, a miscalculation that got him a broken leg and us $2,000 in vet bills, he was put on a radio collar so that he could play ball in the backyard while not being tempted to leave it to pursue another vehicle. (Although Brinkley's wild, he's clever. A month of training with the collar and he now almost never leaves the yard, so the system has been dismantled.) Apparently the mockingbirds who live in the back yard paid close attention to the warning beep the collar gave before shocking Brinkley in the neck because when he returned to his pen, they would watch him as he barked and yipped at them and would respond to his frustration by mimicking the warning sound from the shock collar. This would cause Brinkley to randomly throw his body the ground and not move. A very odd site to see from the house, where you can't hear the birds.

His life companion, Sierra, a mild-mannered sweet mutt who keeps him company, likes to agitate this entire process by biting him in the legs while he tries to stay still. She finds this to be an amazing amount of fun.

Meanwhile, inside, Chloe our tortoise shell cat snores like a fat man and sleeps on a pillow with the covers over her little furry shoulders. And she washes her hands at the sink. Her friend Allie's only quirk is that she eats rubber bands.

Sometimes, when I walk past the window and see the baby kitties hissing at my flower pots, Brinkley throwing himself on the ground to avoid vindictive avians, Sierra biting him on the ankles while yipping, and Chloe snoring like an overweight sumo wrestler, I think I'm entirely too underqualified to operate this zoo.

Go Meat

2008-08-01T21:17:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, I have small thoughts I want to share that I'd rather piece together like a quilt than elaborate upon, so that's what I'm doing tonight.

In the summer, when it rains, the most beautiful spider lilies spring up out of nowhere and are gone just as quickly the next day.

I like to go outside in my backyard and gather figs from my tree by folding them into the edge of a long t-shirt. I like to think of the t-shirt as a fig parachute. I get sad when I drop one. A fig, not the shirt-chute.

My neighbor, Marion, can't pick his crabapples fast enough, so my back yard smells like fermented cider. I talked to him about the abundance of fruit on his tree, and he looked sad. "People used to pick them and make jelly out of them, dry them, preserve them anyway they could. Not anymore." For some reason, when he says this, I feel responsible. I hate crabapples.

Marion takes a gigantic fig the size of a silver dollar and shoves it at me. "Eat it," he demands. I can't tell him that, for some reason, I'm convinced that all figs harbor worms. I imagine biting into the sweet purple flesh and chomping onto a grub, and I repress a shiver. "I have to eat them only after I've split them with a knife," I tell him. He narrows his eyes at me and says "EAT IT!" but I won't.

I take Marion some basil from my new "winter basil" plant I bought from the farmer's market. It's starting to take on a likeness to Seymour -- I swear I came in on it singing and gyrating lewdly the other day -- so I had to clip it. I was so happy to return Marion's kindness (he always brings tomatoes) but when I handed him the basil and smiled at him he said, "What is it?" "Basil," I repeated. "I don't know nothing about no bagels," he grunted. "Not bagels," I tried to say clearly. "BASIL. The herb. It goes on tomatoes." "I don't know nothing about no BASIL," he said, equally loudly. "Put it on your tomatoes," I said, emphatically poking the bright red fruit sitting behind him. He eyed me dubiously -- perhaps he thought I was trying to poison him -- and said something that sounded like "thanks," but I don't think he meant it.

I spend too long in my study reading about epistolary novels and decide to do an experiment. I send a text message to my friend and my sister in law that says, "When I say Hilshire, You say Farms! Hilshire, Farms!" Andrew thinks, in their wonderment, they'll write me to ask what substance I'm abusing. Instead, both of them reply, "GO MEAT!" In a very small and bizarre way, I feel contentedly understood by people who love me.

I've decided what makes an adult, an adult. Lamps. I think if you have lamps in your house that you don't need -- lamps that just make a room cozy -- then you've arrived. Each time I walk past the small, warm, earth-colored lamps in my bedroom, I have to take a quick breath. It looks like Mom's house, only it's mine. When did that happen?

What to do with a Bumper Crop

2008-07-22T11:28:00.002-05:00

Inspired by Ellie, Anna, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, I went to the farmer's market last weekend to do my grocery shopping. I have to say I haven't had a more pleasant experience in a very long time. Everyone was happy to be there, people were playing music for "money or vegetables," a couple of vendors were selling homemade foccacia and were more than willing to give me tips on how to "dress" it. But my prize find there was basket of gigantic tomatoes. I didn't like tomatoes until I moved to Mississippi. I thought they tasted like cold cardboard. But I hadn't had a farmer's tomato -- sweet, fat, juicy fruit that tastes like sunshine if anything ever has.

When I got home with my find, I found Marion, my cotton farmer neighbor, had deposited another box of his own lovely red tomatoes on my back porch. Bumper crop. And not one of them went to waste. Although I ate some on triscuits with cheese, and some on my favorite sandwich -- Bottletree bakery bread, onion-and-chive cream cheese, fresh spinach, tomatoes, and thinly sliced cucumbers with just a little salt and pepper -- I was still left with a ton of fruit. So, I put together a combination of recipes and made what has become my favorite marinara sauce EVER. It's not too sweet -- I hate saccharine-flavored Ragu -- and it's not too bitter like mine usually turns out. It was ideal. Since a lot of ya'll are growing your own tomatoes or have generous neighbors and friends like I do, I thought I'd post this all-too-easy recipe, which will provide me with spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, and calzone toppings well into December.

Crock-Pot Marinara

Chop the following and put into a crock pot --

About 6 gigantic fresh tomatoes or however many fill most of the crock pot

1 of the big cans of whole tomatoes with juice

2 cans tomato sauce

1 yellow onion

1 medium sized carrot (this, not sugar, seems to be key)

4 garlic cloves

2 tbl fresh oregano

2 tbl fresh thyme

2 tbl fresh basil (I used globe basil)

2 fairly good-sized pinches -- and by pinches I mean meager hollow-of-the-palm full -- sea salt or to taste

a dash of freshly ground pepper

a dash of red cayenne pepper

1 tbl white wine that you would drink

a splash of balsamic vinegar (the other key to offsetting acidity)

Heat on low 8 hours. I then blended with a hand mixer to break up some of the chunks but you may not want to. If it isn't thick enough for you after that, you can also add about 1 to 2 tbl tomato paste to make it more like the consistency of bottled sauce.

Coming Home

2008-07-18T11:39:00.000-05:00

I'm home from a very long trip in a very strange place. As usual, that lends itself to a little reflection.

To begin, there were several things about home I missed. My friends. Kind people. Sober people. Slow drivers. Clean sidewalks. My animals and house. My bed. My herbs and vegetable garden. That means there are several things about Boston I was glad to leave behind, too. Being afraid to go home in the dark. Being afraid to set out the trash. Being afraid to walk to or from the bus. Being afraid to ride the bus, and the subway. Being afraid of night, period. No air conditioners. Small yards. Carrying my groceries 2 hours home. Small, cramped grocery stores. Pushing. Groping. Crowds of people who don't wear deodorant. Working 7 hours in a library without talking. Rush hour. Sticky rain.

But as with most formative experiences, I felt changed by my time in Boston, too. Mixed in with the relief of being around something familiar, and being near people I love, I felt trepidation when I came home. So there are things about Boston I miss, and they pull on me too. Time to read a book in the morning on my commute. Chicken sausage. Fresh, affordable, organic food. Barack Obama stickers. Anti-war sentiment. Faces, languages, belief systems different from mine. Public transportation. Not paying for gasoline in my car. Bollywood movies in movie theaters. Used book stores everywhere. H&M. Walking. 77 degree weather. Historic landmarks on every single corner. Schooners. No TV. No radio. Talking to Andrew. Concord. Stores that sell tea. A library full of every single resource I've ever needed to write my dissertation. Living statues. People who dress up as revolutionaries. Whales.

But I guess being torn at this point in my career is natural. It's probably my brain getting me ready for our eventual move -- God willing I get a job --, which is going to be emotionally draining. Change is terrifying. For now, I think I'll go pick a tomato. And drink iced tea on my porch. And talk to Andrew.

Fenway, Or, Manuel Ramirez

2008-07-17T11:23:00.005-05:00

The second to last day of work, Andrew and I took a lunch break at Fenway Park, which is a little over a 5 minute walk from the MHS. We had to take a tour of the place to see it, as tickets are sold out through next year.

This is the green monster, one of the most recognizable symbols in baseball. If you want to sit in the seats on top of it, you have to enter a lottery to have the CHANCE to buy the seats. Sports Illustrated listed these seats as the #1 place to sit before you die, and we got to as part of the tour. They say if you sit here, you get to come 2 hours early and catch practice balls that the players will inevitably hit your direction.

Another part of the tour was that you get to go in the press box and see what the writers see. This is Andrew, sitting in the front row, which is reserved for veteran reporters. The second row is for out-of-town and local press -- rookies, mostly -- and the back row, our guide said, was saved for New York newspeople. Ha, ha.

These Budweiser seats are known as the "lucky" seats. They were built in 2004 when the Sox won the world series, breaking that 80-something year curse. These have to be part of a lottery too, and if your name is chosen, you can win the opportunity to buy 4 ticketed seats at a table near the Budweiser bar. That means you also get your own waiter/waitress and bathroom in your section. These group tickets cost $440! To me, if you can afford to sit here, you can afford to sit in one of those swanky boxes with leather seats. But I must not be an aficionado.

When we left the stadium, I told Andrew that I'd decided to be a Red Sox fan. Andrew, an avid Yankees enthusiast, frowned at me. But he appeared more puzzled than disappointed. "You don't care about baseball," he challenged. "Name one Red Sox player. Then, you can be a Red Sox fan." I thought for a minute -- this was a test I really wanted to pass. "Papi," I said confidently. I had seen his name on a poster inside the stadium. And, as a bonus to up my credibility, I added, "Manuel Ramirez." There was no talking to Andrew after that, who dissolved into stomach-shaking laughter and immediately had to call his brother to share the news. "What?" I said. "Isn't his name Manuel?"

Call Me Ishmael. No, really, you should.

2008-07-13T19:45:00.003-05:00

This was a week for madness. It began with the drunk guys who couldn't decide if they wanted more to relieve themselves on the sidewalk or beat up Andrew and take his watch. It ended with 2 crazy people -- one who was so drunk that he couldn't tell the police officer what day it was when she came to chase him out of the subway for panhandling, another who was so wasted at 8 AM that he was singing "AYE AYE AYE AYE" over and over and -- get this -- FOLLOWING US. From one train car to another to another. . .we could not get away from him. So by the time we got out of the subway, another unwashed stumbling guy began making his way toward us when I looked his direction and said "If ONE MORE CRAZY PERSON approaches me, I am GOING TO SCREAM." He about fell down the steps then but left us alone. We sat down on a bench to consult a map near Boston Common and another drunk man (this one had vomited and/or poured Vodka down his shirt -- I know because he was still carrying the glass bottle) came straight up to me and began to babble incoherently. I started waving my arms and yelling at him too -- "I can't take this crazy city one minute longer! If you are a crazy person, DO NOT APPROACH ME!! Aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!" And of course he stumbled off as well.

So it was beyond time for a break from the metropolitan loveliness that is Boston. We hopped on a train to Gloucester, Massachusetts on Cape Ann and left the skyline all behind, embracing Judith Sargent Murray's bright yellow house and the charm of the seaport town she once called home. Since it's an active port, there's little for tourists to do there -- thank heavens -- so we took a Whale Watching tour. Incredible.

The boat goes about 1 million miles an hour to lose the coastline -- of course, whales don't frolic in shallow shores unless they're in trouble -- and we were driving into a headwind. The boat tipped, plunged, rocked, rolled, and dived. It had no mercy for any of us. Thank the good Lord for my past boating experiences and a little patch called "Transderm Scop" that keeps a weakling like myself from throwing herself overboard. Everyone else was green to the gills. I got soaked with saltwater, the harsh mineral lashing at my face and drying in my hair, making it stiff, but I couldn't think of a cooler place to be.

Then, we saw the whales. 10 humpback whales, mainly calves, moms, and "escorts." And while they didn't do any acrobatics, they did show us a few fins. I have a video but blogger for some reason is making it impossible to post. I, along with the camera, crew, and other tourists, pitched and rolled with the waves. If I ever get it posted, I recommend dramamine if you get curious.

Urban Patchwork

2008-07-11T21:00:00.003-05:00

We board the bus and it's pitch-black outside, another chunk of daylight gone from a long commute. A drunk man presses up against me and everyone he's near but is strangely polite about it. When he gets off the bus, a couple of boys run from it, rather than boarding it, and I pause only a second to think how odd that is before I hear pop pop pop pop pop. I find myself and the rest of the bus flat on the floor. My bones go hollow. Even after I smell the sulphur -- fireworks -- I cannot stand.

When I go to work in the morning, a security officer at the bank I pass by never fails to greet me. "Have a happy Thursday!" he says. In a city where men usually say things like a construction worker did the other day -- "Hey you I gotta hole in my pants wanna come stand in front of me?"-- I am always surprised to be greeted the way the security officer greets me.

I step over a woman painting white doves on the sidewalk. These doves are on pavement all over the city. They're beautiful and they're outlined in purple and they say "Spread Peace Stop Violence." Another woman uses her lunch break every day to go outside of a church in Copley square to place one stone on a heap of stones for each soldier dead in Iraq. She prays over each one. She will be up to 17,000 before the year's end.

A young man runs the front desk at the library I'm visiting. Inside the room, he's a wart. "Don't let that corner of your folder hang over the edge of the desk," he says, thumping it back into place. Sometimes he picks up my papers, jumbles them, and says, "You MUST keep this folder in ORDER." When I go to lunch with the fellows, never failing to feel like a wannabe since I am, he makes jokes with me about the pizza or the veggie burgers. I wonder if he has a secret twin.

I learn the secret of a Boston accent. Abandon all "R's." I like to try new words -- Glah-stuh; Woo-stuh; Bah-stahn -- but still have trouble substituting "heah" for "here." My "r's" and "ee's" and "aa's" are too loud and long and they betray me. I try to stay quiet but have never been good at that.

I come across a titillating find. I discover one of the women in my dissertation was a Revolutionary war spy for the British. I've found a spy letter she received from a Scotsman in jail for treason. I find evidence she's hidden a response in a jar of hair powder. I struggle to decipher who "the Great" is. Andrew and I crack her code. We feel triumphant.

Come on Ride My Trolley Trolley

2008-07-10T17:00:00.002-05:00

So you might wonder if I'm up here doing any work at all, since I haven't been posting about my research, which I do every day but weekends, but I do in fact have a routine. For instance, I have to ride the T every morning to work and every evening back home to Roslindale. But sometimes people shake up the day-to-day for me a little, and I usually admire the change of pace.

So yesterday was a particularly good example of this. Somehow, we got on the train at rush hour, which we don't usually do, and the subway was stuffed with sweaty bodies. We could barely get on, and while this wasn't completely unusual, especially before a Sox game, the train conductor's handling of the situation was. Although all the conductor USUALLY says is "rugglesnextstopdoorsopenontheleft," this conductor said "MAKE WAY MAKE WAY EVERRRYBODY! I see some ROOOM in there and I know you SEE IT TOO." When everyone just looked puzzled at the other train occupants -- there was in fact no room -- he started to sing. "Come on ride my Trolley Trolley," he said. "My Trolley Trolley Trolley!" Andrew turned to me and asked, "If you have to report suspicious activity to the train conductor, who do you tell if the conductor is acting suspiciously?" A good question.

Every morning on my way to work, I pass a young woman -- I'd say 22 or 23 -- walking down the sidewalk holding a hand mirror up to her face. It's the size of her head, and I have no idea how she sees where she's going, or what she's looking at while she walks, or if she's ever been hit by a bus during this routine. I have come up with a few theories as to why she does it, though. Maybe she got a new face after a disaster, and somehow can't rectify this new identity with the old one. Or maybe she's psyching herself up for the daily grind. Or maybe she's in love with her own eyelashes. Maybe before I leave, I'll ask her.

Today I read about a woman trapped in Cambridge in 1775 on a farm besieged by soldiers. Her husband fled to England, leaving her behind, and I got to read all her letters bawling him out for being a utter loser. Her name was Elizabeth Murray Smith Inman and she was super-wealthy -- a shopkeeper fortunate enough to have drafted a prenup in the 18th century! -- and when her gem of a husband Ralph left her to the English soldiers, she took all of his money with her, and survived, and cut him out of her will for spite. I love my job.

Salem, Or, Indecent Exposure

2008-07-09T12:16:00.002-05:00

Today was the day for Salem, Massachusetts, a wild and weird way to spend Andrew's 29th birthday. As a fan of Halloween and ghost stories, I thought it would be right up my alley. Not so.

When we got off the train, we should've known the day would be odd when we came across a group of people dressed in costumes pretending to stone each other, leading a group of bewildered tourists toward a gallows that had been erected in the middle of the square. When the crazies finally got the mob to the gallows -- a mob a little too eager to see an unjustified death, I might add -- the reenactors suddenly stopped, telling everyone they had to pay a ticket if they wanted to see the actual murder, which would take place inside. Cheese. Weird cheese.

We passed a tarot shop and a series of places selling lame t-shirts and funny-colored stones. I had to admire one shirt that had a picture of one of the "witches" being strung up, with onlookers cheering on the murder, and under the picture was printed one word: "Oops."

So we go to the main attraction there in Salem, which is the Salem Witch Museum, where they usher you into a circular room and turn off the lights. All around the room, up high toward the ceiling, the museum has erected little scenes from the witch trials, which light up and speak when its time to tell that part of the story. Slightly lame, but props for a gesture toward creativity. The best part though was when we exited the exhibit, we were ushered through to one of the weirdest places I've ever been.

It's a triangular room, part of the museum, meant to dispel current stereotypes about witches. It begins with movie posters pasted to the wall -- the Wizard of Oz, Macbeth, and so on -- and the guide points to them and accuses them of giving witches a bad rap. Then she shows you a lit-up witch with a green face that says "Hollywood has done me wrong." Then the guide shows you a timeline that has "Western" dates on top of it -- when Christ was born, when Christians started persecuting witches, when Nancy Reagan approved space travel -- and "pagan" dates on the bottom -- when Stonehenge was probably created, when witches started being hung for their beliefs, etc. Only the pagan part of the timeline was oddly missing dates.

The last wall was the BEST. It was a series of equations. It said "God/Satan + fear = witch trials; Ignorance + McCarthy = red scare; infection + AIDS = the gay community." We didn't really have anything to say to that, but we overheard one couple discussing the complete and utter ridiculousness of it. One woman said, "I don't think that adds up." Her companion said, without irony, "It's on the WALL so it MUST BE TRUE!"

The exhibit ended with plastic talking pagans who said, "Please ask us what we believe when we see you on the street. We don't believe in the devil. And please don't use the word 'warlock,' as it means 'traitor.'"

Very, very, very odd.

We couldn't get out of Salem fast enough, and it turns out, we would have quite a bit of trouble getting home too. When we arrived at the bus stop to take us home in Roslindale, two drunk guys accosted us, threatening to expose themselves, which one actually did, and steal Andrew's watch or beat him -- whichever he decided would be more "fun." In an effort to get away from these baffoons, we tried to take a taxicab, but we should've known we were in trouble when he elbowed his friend and grinned before letting us in. He took the "scenic" route to say the least -- all the way through the arboretum, about 3/4 to 1 mile out of the way -- before depositing us at our street. Andrew, who was by this point exhausted and not a little furious from the culmination of the day's activities, asked for all of his change back, and the taxidriver, no doubt insulted and miffed he hadn't fooled us, chunked the change at us through the window, spitting and cursing as he did so.

Is it your Birfday?

2008-07-07T21:45:00.002-05:00

Happy Birthday to Andrew, who is 29 today, and is the reason the sun shines for me every morning.

Andrew spent his birthday in the weirdest town in North America. Roswell, move over. You have nothing on Salem. But that is for another day.

Sold Out

2008-07-07T07:54:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was the perfect day to visit John and Abigail Adams's house, and so we did.

We happily marched up to the visitor's center in Quincy, which took about an hour to reach, only to be greeted by an avid enthusiast's worst nightmare: tour tickets sold out. I approach the desk. "I love Abigail Adams. I'm writing about her in my dissertation, and I came all the way from Mississippi to 'see' her. Is there anything you can do?" The woman gestured helplessly toward the mass of people in the waiting room. "No."

But I hate no. I'm an only kid, so I bristle at the word. I turn to the group I'm with and say, "We're going to see Abigail." And so, we begin a 45-minute hike to her house, where we encounter a giant tour group standing outside of her birthplace. A very odd thing is happening. The tourists are Japanese, and the tour guide is yelling the same thing over and over to them in English, although they clearly don't understand him, as they are just standing in the same spot he's asking them to move away from. A youngish guy, about 26 or 27, is running up and down the street in front of them, singing. One way, he sings, "I'M SO EXCITED....AND I JUST CAN'T HIDE IT. . ." while skipping, staring at the tourists the entire time. On his way back, he did the same thing, only he changed the words: "J - F - K - WAS A GREAT PRESIDENT OH YEAAHHHH." The tourists just blinked at him.

I went up to the tour guide and said everything in a rush. "I know I'm not supposed to be here but I write about Abigail Adams I mean I'm writing a dissertation and I love her and I've always wanted to see where she was her space I mean I HAVETOSEEWHERESHEWROTEHERLETTERS." He just looked at me sideways. "You WALKED here?" he asked. I took a deep breath. "Yes."

He set us aside and looked around cautiously. The tourists left, and in between groups his friend, Will, gave us a tour. "If you want to see where they married, you'll need to do the same thing at the next house. Grovel. Plead," he suggested. So we did. 45 minutes into town, 15 minutes to Abigail and John's married house.

"WE WALKED ALL THE WAY FROM THE BIRTHPLACE" was all I could get out when we finally made it there. "Jesus!" the guide said. "Sit down." She disappeared into the carriage house behind the Adams mansion and returned with a piece of cardboard that said "Four complimentary tickets." She liked our enthusiasm. And I got to stand in the very place where Abigail Adams ate, laughed, made butter, even breathed her last breath.

So this day wouldn't have been remotely possible without the patience of the people traveling with me, or the benevolence of the guides working at the Adams estates. Here's to big-hearted humanity and all lovers of literature for making one dream of mine come true.

So This One Time I Met a Blind Man

2008-07-05T21:48:00.003-05:00

On my way to the Trader Joe's Grocery Store in Brookline, I came across a tall, rotund blind man with white eyes and fluttering eyelids walking into the middle of a very busy intersection. As I had just seen him slam into a Walgreen's door three times, I was keenly aware that he didn't have this "no sight" business down pat quite yet. Either he was suicidal, or he wasn't aware that the white walking stick that led him was smacking the tires of cars that were about squish him. So, I grabbed his arm and pulled him backwards onto the sidewalk.

"Would you like help crossing the street?" I asked, thinking someone, maybe my mom or my Sunday School teacher, might be happy I offer.

"Why yes," he said, and promptly grabbed me by the breast. "I would."

Emerson, Walden, and the Alcotts on a Fruit Commune

2008-07-05T20:34:00.000-05:00

This is not going to be a panegyric about the loveliness of Walden Pond, at least, not at first, because that's just not how my story went. My story begins in the rain.

We arrive in Concord, Massachusetts to a sodden sky. Determined to make the most out of the brief time I have away from the MHS, we squeeze under a tiny portable umbrella, keeping only our eyelashes dry, and make a very long, very muddy trek to our first literary site: the home of the Alcotts. On our way, we pause at a bright yellow house to admire it, only to realize that it was Thoreau's home. Just down the way was his friend Emerson, which on this afternoon was being mowed by a shirtless fat guy. We wonder if the shirtless fat guy owns Emerson's house and goes in afterward and drinks a beer and watches the Red Socks game, and if so, what would Emerson say about it?

When we finally get to the Orchard House, it isn't what I imagined at all. It's not yellow and sturdy like Thoreau's fine mansion, nor is it crisp and white like Emerson's, but is instead a looming brown monstronsity that leans and peels. It's the kind of house that needs a shawl around it on a chilly afternoon, if you know what I mean.

Inside, we learn that the inhabitants were just as odd. Before moving to the Orchard House, the Alcotts lived on a fruit commune as vegans (pretty odd behavior for the 19th century). May/Amy Alcott, when the fancy struck her, drew on her walls, mostly mythological creatures and animals but sometimes swear words, which made me love her. I felt especially close to Louisa May because she sat at a desk 14 hours a day, writing; being in her space made me feel like I'm not alone in the world.

After the Alcott tour, we take the notion to walk to Walden pond, probably one of the worst ideas we'll have this whole trip, because the rain soaks us to the skin, the chilly New England air adding to our misery. Our feet are soon soaked in mud, which has oozed into our shoes, and the path just gets longer.

By the time we actually reach Walden, I don't want to be there at all -- frozen, soaked, hungry, exhausted, swollen feet protesting this entire idea. But as we approach Walden, the rain slows, the clouds break, the sun plays with the light grey water. People dive in, splashing, laughing. Bullfrogs call to each other. And we reach Thoreau's house. Or, at least, what was left of it.

Like any good nerd, I get out my copy of Walden and read my favorite passage in front of his homesite. "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes," I recite, "and not, rather, new wearers of clothes."

If this were a fictional story, a hush would fall over the woods and I'd somehow be able to channel the spirit of what Thoreau meant to encourage people to do (despite that he went home every night and threw dinner parties). But since this is life, a very loud family started yelling at each other in a mixture of English and a language I didn't recognize, the young boy in the family turning the last few feet up to Thoreau's house into a race, rushing over to the stones marking the historic site and knocking some over.

I consider at that moment that Thoreau was onto something in his praise of solitude.

Ben Franklin's House is a Sir Speedy, And Other Stories

2008-07-04T20:10:00.006-05:00

So today is the 4th of July, a day off of work in the library, since it is closed, and a day spent sightseeing, with all of the city's glorious strangeness out in full force.

On my way to the site of the Boston Tea Party, I meet a homeless guy who has apparently torn the wing off of a bird and left it in the sidewalk. He sits a few feet away from the wing, which is bloody and stiff, and when we pass it, he says, "Don't touch my wing. I set it in the sun to bake so I can eat it. You know. 'Cause I'm homeless." I'm beginning to wonder if I'm wearing a sign.

I see a woman in a group of site-seers wearing matching Detroit Red Wings shirts (complete with maps and fanny packs) get on the subway with a small McCormick bottle. It can either be almond or vanilla extract, or food coloring; either way, when no one is looking, she surreptitiously drains the whole thing, then makes sure no one has seen her and pretends it never happened.

We randomly run into Revolutionaries that people treat as everyday citizens. "Did you see the guy in the three-corner hat?" I ask. But I don't get much of a response.

We make it to where the Boston Tea Party was supposed to have taken place. I'm not sure what I'll see: perhaps a replica of the ships there, or at the least, a marker. Maybe a tourist or two. But I'm not prepared for what I find -- a gigantic old abandoned, burned building covered up by a large white sign promoting an upcoming "tea room" to be built right over the historic waterway. I don't really have a problem with commercialism, but the sign blocks all view of the site, and I have an uncontrollable urge to rip it down.

We follow the "Freedom Trail" and find that the beginning of the day is a pattern. The Old Corner Bookstore where all of the famous 19th century transcendentalists met and were published is a cheap jewelry shop. And Ben Franklin's house is a Sir Speedy (see pic below).

We give up on history for the day and head to Cambridge for dinner. On the way back, night has fallen and the subway overlooks the harbor, and what a site. Since it's the 4th, everyone is excited about the free Boston Pops concert going on, complete with fireworks show, and the harbor is stuffed with boats. Big boats and small ones, yachts, sailboats, waverunners, little fishing boats and rafts. Those who can't stuff onto the boats are lined on the highway and the piers, trying to get as close as they can to the show. We decide to opt out on the Pops.

Tomorrow is Plymouth, the Mayflower, and Mercy Otis Warren's house. If I don't come home, just know this: it's not you; it's New England.

New York, Part Two

2008-07-01T10:31:00.001-05:00

New York, Part Two

We get entirely too little sleep but it’s somehow okay because we have brunch at the New York Eatery, which serves good coffee and banana-strawberry-chocolate-cream cheese french toast topped with ice cream.

I come across a heavy-looking bundle wrapped in newspaper and tied with a rope. Written across it in red marker are the words “Please Don’t Throw Me.” I want to throw it, but don’t.

It starts to rain, and the water that runs off the building tastes like dirt and trash and leaves an odd film on my skin that I want to scrub off. Tourists become testy and all of the cab drivers go, inexplicably, off-duty. A homeless man rams an empty shopping cart into a telephone booth – one, smash; two, smash; three, smash – and then glances sideways at us and mumbles “sorry.”

We stuff into another theater to see In the Heights and we’re on the very back row, no one sitting together, but it’s okay. Lin-Manuel, the writer and the star, comes onstage and everyone roars for him. The people in front of Andrew are convinced the entire show is in Spanish, even though the characters are only speaking with a slight accent. “I hate it,” the woman says, “and I hate rap.” Lin-Manuel freestyles a little but it’s hardly rap.

When the show is over we press outside to more rain, more cabless streets, and begin fighting to ride standby on the Bolt Bus back to Boston. One young woman pushes and waves her ticket in the air, soaking it, insisting “Let me on! Let me on! These people don’t have a ticket but I DO.” The bus driver refuses to let her on; she realizes all too late that she was trying to get on the Boston bus to try to get to Philly, realizing her mistake too late as the Philly bus pulls away. She stands umbrella-less in the rain, her ticket nothing more now than a wet kleenex. I wonder what will happen to her. We make it onto the bus, first in line on the waiting list, to the chagrin of about 10 angry people standing on the sidewalk, grimacing. The bus goes through the Bronx and I realize I haven’t been here before. Everyone I see is shouting. One man follows another through a landscape garden, waving his arms angrily, eyes narrowed, face flushed, mouth wide open. The object of his derision keeps his back to him, and continues to calmly water his plants.

New York, Part One

2008-06-30T10:04:00.002-05:00

$15: that’s all you need for a bus ride from Boston to New York City, and so we went. The Bolt Bus travels just four hours before dropping you just a few blocks from Broadway and Time Square, and as luck would have it, it deposited us – of all places – at the doorway of the hotel where our friend Kim lives while interning for DKNY. Kismet.

In just over 24 hours, we stuffed in more activities than I usually do in a week. Upon arrival, we picked up Kim and a gigantic slice of pizza, most of which I ended up wearing, and took a Liberty Cruise to see the statue in all her glory, passing by that strange absence on the ride there. Even if you’re not sure where the Twin Towers used to stand, you know you’re there when you reach the most silent part of one of the noisiest cities in the world. The first time I saw it, I didn’t have my bearings and was unsure what part of New York we were standing in, but as soon as we crossed the street to where the memorial now stands, I just. . . knew. No one was talking. Everyone moved slowly. Cars didn’t honk, people didn’t yell, no one shoved or catcalled or anything. They just – looked. Even passing it by boat, I felt the same thing.

After the tour came Saks Fifth Avenue, the only store I’ve ever seen whose shoe department literally has its own zip code. Prada, Jimmy Choo, Gucci, shoes shaped like fish, shoes in bright blue, shoes with tall heels and rich leather flats and women EVERYWHERE, pulling, pushing, trying on, discarding, debating, arguing, considering, purchasing madness. I just watched.

Then, Macy’s with its odd wooden escalators and a children’s department that is every person’s nightmare: children wailing, throwing clothes, mothers begging, making bargains, jamming hats on infants, pinching chubby little arms, exhausted fathers negotiating strollers through narrow aisles, insanity. I buy a hot pink dress.

It’s Pride Parade weekend. We pass transvestites in hot pink wigs and black miniskirts. Everyone’s wearing a rainbow.

Night falls. We enter the Eugene O’Neill theater, an intimate place. The set of Spring Awakening involves the audience; four rows of wooden schoolchairs sit on the actual stage, and we have tickets to sit there. I notice nervously that some of the chairs lack numbers, and Andrew points out the little bottles of water under the unmarked seats. Before I can really fathom that possibility, the actors march out in single file and those not singing sit beside us, all around us, on chairs behind us, stomping, singing, cursing, spitting, sweating – our friend Phoebe, who plays Anna in the production, takes the seat next to us and laughs when she sees we’ve purchased seats 111 and 113 right next to where her character is always placed. I squeeze her on the arm, completely overwhelmed to do anything else. After the show, she grabs us and pulls us through the side door for a tour backstage. I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but the alleys and rooms and byways and stairs are precariously narrow, the walls dingy, the light dim with bulbs out here and there and exposed pipes hanging low from the ceiling. We brush actors from the show and I don’t speak, entirely too afraid to say anything in case I say something stupid. “This is where we have birthday parties,” Phoebe says and points to a stale case of doughnuts and laughs. I can’t imagine living her life and am so glad for her that I have nothing adequate to say.

We eat and walk her towards her home, past a group of men who yell “titties titties titties” at every woman who walks by. Phoebe is unfazed. A tall young guy touches her shoulder and says “Phoebe Strole!” and kisses her face and says “Ohmigod I’m not a crazy fan I used to work with you don’t mind me I’m drunk woohoo!” and she walks away. “I’ve never seen him in my life,” she says.

It's the City

2008-06-26T21:15:00.004-05:00

When we arrive in Boston, Toni is there to meet us. Toni is a transplanted New Jersyite African-American lesbian buddhist classic-pianist/sociology professor with a law degree. She likes to use the word "gentrification" and she refuses to let people take pictures of her because she says she wants to own the rights to herself. I love her. But she didn't love us, at least not at first. She had several misgivings about housing two white kids from Mississippi, and she told us as much. We only had a short time to help her peel away her reserve, which was heavy on her and almost tangible. Before she got on her plane, she said, "Come next time when I'm here. We could talk for a very long time," and she seems surprised.

We spent a good part of the morning learning the idiosyncrasies of this old house, which is beautiful and newly refinished, from its shiny pine floors to its stained glass windows. Each time Toni would show us something that was supposed to bolster the security of the house, she would sigh the same refrain: "It's the city." Like, "This is how you turn on the house alarm. You know, it's the city." Or, "the television and lamps are on a timer, in case you're late. It's the city." And, "Please hose my car off for me while I'm gone, so that dust doesn't settle and people suspect I'm not here. It's the city." These are parts of her routine I would never have thought of in my life, and yet, here they are, part of her daily existence, and now, mine.

Toni lives in Roslindale, which is Boston with the shine taken off, situated at the end of the Orange Line. It's a wonderfully confusing place, which bright-white new condos and sturdy detailed porch stoops and landscaped yards next to burned buildings and Taquerias and auto shops. Roslindale boasts a triangular city center with a bakery and a coffee bar and a tiny grocery store that sells chickpeas and wheat germ and expensive cheeses. It is unsafe to walk to the subway, so we stuff onto the bus, where I'm forced to stand. Naturally, I launch into a man's lap, prevented from direct touching only because he's carrying an oversized suitcase.

The subway smells like tar and heat and it's littered with odd signs, like "Do Not Feed the Pigeons," even though there are no birds underground. There's also "Flash someone and find yourself on surveillance" and "If someone touches you inappropriately, take a picture of them with your camera phone." Who knew public transportation could be so erotic? I suppress a giggle picturing myself being fondled by an aggressive youth only to make him pause in his endeavors so I can snap a picture of his face.

We head to Chinatown for dim sum and find an abandoned-theater-turned-chinese restaurant. The theater-restaurant retains its gold ceilings and walls but has been added that strange gilded Chinese deco that adorns most Chinese restaurants you're familiar with. So next to marbled cherub faces are bright blue-and-gold dragons and the room is enough to hold 500 people, though only 3 tables are taken. We order dim sum and the waiter insults me by bringing me a fork, which I end up needing. Andrew orders a meatball that entirely too closely resembles bull testicles that we are unable to finish because I tell him so. I do not tell him that I have never seen bull testicles; perhaps he assumes that, being from the country, I am just born knowing such things.

The Night Before

2008-06-24T11:43:00.002-05:00

The night before is always daunting. You know what I'm talking about -- when you were a kid, and you went to summer camp for the first time, how did you feel the night before? I was terrified and nauseatingly excited, that butterfly excitement that makes you unable to eat or breathe in all the way. I still get that feeling; I have it today.

We leave tomorrow to begin our negotiations with the concrete jungle. When I get really anxious about something, all I want to do is sit in the middle of a room and hug my knees and picture how it'll go, over and over and over, like mental rehearsal will make the actual experience all okay. This tendency can be debilitating, however, since there are 1,000 little things that come with leaving bills, a house, and 4 animals behind. So I'm resisting the urge to let my inner autism get the best of me.

So here's to anticipation. Here's to that nervous not-sleep that precedes long trips and possibilities.

In the Clouds, In the Heights

2008-06-15T23:44:00.006-05:00

It all started when I was 8 years old. I was stuffed in the back of an AstroVan coming home from a movie with my parents and was arguing with my dad, who had switched the radio off of my favorite station and had put in a tape. I was whining because the music was unfamiliar.

"What IS this?" I demanded.
"You'll like it. It's called Phantom of the Opera," Dad said.
" I WON'T like it. I HATE opera. This woman sounds like a bird on crack."
"It's not that kind of opera, Kacy. Where did you learn about crack?"

Despite myself, I listened to the music. I believe I pouted all the way home until some part of the story sucked me in. I was completely unwilling. And I was hooked, somewhere deep down where few things are permitted to settle and stay.

Phantom and all of the shows like it quickly became for me the ultimate escape. Even though I might as well have been an ocean away from Broadway, stuck in the East Texas Piney Woods with kids who made fun of me for drawing pictures of Mungojerry and Rumpleteazer from Cats, I was truly in love with musical theater. I was a dumpy short fat kid with glasses and braces but when I listened to Starlight Express, I twirled around in my room and sang at the top of my lungs -- thank the Lord for everyone involved that I was (am) an only child -- pretending I was really there, in New York, a place I could only imagine. And I forgot about everybody who thought I was a spoiled hideous weirdo kid and I was somewhere else entirely.

Fast-forward to spring of 2007. I'm weary from a 2-day drive in a snowstorm from Mississippi to New York City, riding an escalator out of the subway, when we emerge onto Times Square, right under a gigantic, bright sign for Phantom of the Opera. I remember that I couldn't breathe, or move, even though stopping on the sidewalk in Times Square is almost impossible. Sign after sign after sign of the musicals I'd followed for years, and the only thing that separated me from them was a door. It was like someone had given me a present I hadn't earned. I was almost positive a taxicab would instantly kill me right then and there and prevent me from going into a theatre to see Wicked, which I'd been butchering in my car and the shower for over a year. We'd bought front-row tickets -- supercheap for their "obscured view" -- and I had one of Elphaba's monkeys in my lap for most of the performance. I'm fairly certain I let my mouth hang open for the entirety of the show, completely unable and unwilling to pull myself together to behave like a normal person just out to see a show.

At the end of this month, I may have the chance to redeem myself. While we're in Boston, we're taking a bus to NYC and, due to the grand generosity of a good mutual friend, Kim, we'll be bunking on her floor and stuffing in as many shows as we can in a 24 hour period. The first one, Spring Awakening, we'll see from a unique vantage point; we'll be on top of the Eugene O'Neill stage and I'm ecstatic. I have a friend in the show who plays Anna, and that makes it even more special. In an effort to get ready for the euphoria, I just watched the 2008 Tony Awards and when I saw "In the Heights," my heart stopped. Hip-hop Puerto Rican Rap does Broadway? If it were a show I could eat, I would have. And thanks to broadwaybox.com and my complete willingness to sit behind a pillar on the last row in the very back of the theater, I'm going to, and now all I can do is blog about it because it's 2 weeks away and I should be in bed and there's no way I can go to sleep now.

I can't really describe it but seeing New York is like going to see someone I've been infatuated with but separated from ever since I first experienced what an "obsession" was but being told that, now that the reunion is official, I'll have to figure out a way to bide my time until then. The anticipation is sure to make me, yet again, an absolute fool in the audience. If you happen to be there, and I'm squealing, or sobbing, or gasping, and unable to stop clapping, just know that I'm well aware very few adults act that way in public. I'm fully cognizant than grown women who enjoy themselves typically just nod, smile, and write journal entries about something they want to remember. But I'm not like those women. If you see me visit Broadway, just know you're in the presence of pure, unadulterated joy. And I just can't apologize for that.

Did you know my bird has mites?

2008-06-12T21:19:00.006-05:00

I've come home to Linden for a couple of days before we set out for Boston. I love to come home because I always hear stories about people I thought I knew really well but clearly didn't. My favorite so far is this one about my great-grandmother, Mary Magdalene Jackson, or, affectionately, "Magda," the sweetest human that ever lived. Somehow, she gave birth to one of the cruelest -- my grandmother. During reminiscences over dinner, my parents told me a story about Grandmother Jackson I'd never heard before. It went like this:

Grammy (my grandmother) would frequently come over to her mother's house to "unload" all of the day's woes on her. As a school principal suffering from actual hypochondria and some kind of disease I'd call "chronic anger", my grandmother often had woes. So one day she sat in Grandmother Jackson's kitchen and said something like this: "The kids are horrible today and my children never behave. All of the parents are stupid and come to me with stupid problems I can't solve and the cleaners messed up my laundry. AGAIN. I can't see how they can't remember to just steam the shirts instead of starch them theyalwaysusetoomuchstarch and nooneeverlistenstomewhenItalk and Idon'tseewhypeoplearetooincompetenttodotheirjob" and just when she was about to get good and wound up, Grandmother Jackson would smilingly interrupt her, asking, "Did you know my bird has mites?"

This question would cause my grandmother to lose it. The conversation would end with I-DON'T-CARE-ABOUT-YOUR-DAMN-BIRD and Grammy would stomp out of the front door and not speak to her mother for a week. Grandmother Jackson would go back to stirring her butterbeans with the hamhock in it and tending to "Underfoot" and "Loudlung," her showcats, until Grammy would come around again to repeat the cycle all over again.

Waverunning

2008-06-09T09:52:00.003-05:00

After a very hard week of working in the yard, setting up the yard sale, writing dissertation chapters, and completing various projects, Andrew and I fixed up the jetski and went waverunning at Sardis Lake. There's something so odd about being in the middle of a big body of water. I always feels like hope is the only thing keeping me afloat. Nothing feels more tenuous, like one wrong sneeze could toss me in the water, never to be seen again. But there's something really defiant about the experience too, like despite everything I know about the properties of water and the body, I'm still on top of the waves. It's amazing.

When I'm riding, I like to imagine what would happen if I stopped at one of those floating lake islands and camped there for the rest of my life. I picture fashioning sticks into spears and pilfering cornmeal from boathouses and frying catfish for three meals a day and loving it. In my daydream, it's never winter, or raining, and no one ever finds me, and I'm ok with that. Then I think of one of my favorite books, Life of Pi, where the floating island turns out to be carnivorous. That always ruins my fantasy.

I like to think of a name for the color of a lake when you look down into it and you can see through the top layer of water but not beyond it, a translucent/opaque conundrum I have always wanted to describe but couldn't. Opaluscent, perhaps.

My favorite thing to do on a waverunner isn't to jump waves; it's to cut the engine and lie back on the seat, which is always so hot that the vinyl sticks to my wet back, but it doesn't matter because lake water is freezing until July. I like to look straight up at the sky where I can't see any land around me and imagine I'm in the ocean with nothing around for miles and miles.

This is pleasant until a motorboat runs me over, or some vindictive skier glides by and splashes my open eyes with lakewater. But most days this doesn't happen and I get to go home and bask in languid sun-exhaustion, that exuberantly happy feeling that can be likened to a cross between eating too much chocolate but not feeling sick about it and being shot with codeine but skipping the hazy, addictive side effects.

Birthday

2008-06-01T21:28:00.000-05:00

Today, I am 28. Please do not hold back on the party horns.

San Francisco, Episode 2

2008-05-26T19:34:00.000-05:00

I see friends I haven’t seen in a long while. It is like we have not been away. One is so gauntly thin, now, that I can count the bones in her wrist. Her eyes and cheekbones are hollow, and her wedding ring is gone. “What happened?” I ask. “Spinal Meningitis. And he left me for his secretary,” she says. “I’m still mad at him for making me a cliche.” This is unthinkable. I see another friend, a newer one. This one looks healthy but seems to have acquired a taste for liquor that he takes immediately after conference sessions and in large quantities. He, too, is missing his ring. “What happened?” I ask again. “My wife told me she’s a lesbian,” he explains. “I think we can work it out.” I doubt that, but check myself at the impulse to share this information – what good has discouragement ever done? He gets a note from her at the end of the conference saying, “I’ve gone.” He does not know what this means – although everyone else does -- and is inconsolable.

Tracy, Rachel, (good Baylor friends and my roommates) and I play a new game: “Vagrant or academic?” I lose, spotting what I think is a vagrant outside of Starbucks who turns out to be wearing an ALA nametag. We become instant friends with two people who introduce themselves as Sari-like-Mary and Corinne-like-Maureen and talk about children we don’t have and reality shows and smutty books we love. We eat veggie burgers and Thai food covered in too much chili sauce and it keeps me warm even though I haven’t brought a coat and the ocean wind is cold here.

Kacy Runs a 5K

2008-05-17T19:06:00.003-05:00

Andrew and I have been training for the Batesville 5K for a couple of months now and the morning finally came to put our hills, sprints, lunges, weight lifting, distance and speed training to the test. (We ran as part of a Sunday School class team. Some members saw that other groups made shirts and suggested we should, too. I heard someone ask, "Yeah! But what would we put on them?" I said, "How about 'my Jesus is faster than your Jesus'?" I'm not sure how my suggestion was received.) It was my first race, and I came in fourth in my age group! Andrew came in eighth in his, and we both have the shin splints to prove it. It was fun in a very painful kind of way. Watch out Water Valley Watermelon festival -- I've got the fever!

Duffy

2008-05-17T19:03:00.003-05:00

Duffy is a new British pop star I can't stop telling people about. She has a beautiful new (old) sound straight out of the 1960s when people still knew how to sing. The song below is just a taste of her new album, "Rockferry." This is the video of "Warwick Avenue." Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

God Hates Shrimp

2008-05-16T12:21:00.002-05:00

Today's post is about what I'm calling the "doctrine of exclusion." Lately, it's all I hear about. The post was inspired by California recognizing gay marriage as legal, only the second state to do so. And, of course, it brought outcry from several Christian groups.

What I don't get is why people are so absorbed with "who's not invited." That is -- who doesn't belong in heaven, who isn't worthy of salvation without repentance, and so on. Lately, the only Christianity that gets any press are the people preaching the doctrine of exclusion. For example, I've heard that Muslims "aren't invited," nor are gays, lesbians, and Hindus. Terrorists are absolutely "not invited." Nor are democrats. Or liberals, especially; in fact, I believe they've been sent a polite letter asking them to stop filling out applications for the hereafter. But what intrigues me is that this rhetoric does not stem from the Bible so many base their rage upon. I was trying to think of the times that someone came to Christ and he turned them away for not fitting into a certain paradigm and -- lo! and behold -- I came up blank. Take the prostitute who bathed Jesus's feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. His disciples advised him to stay away from her, lest she "infect" him with her sin, but he chastised them for these exclusionary principles. The lower-class leper that touches the hem of Christ's robe is rewarded by being healed and praised for being a man of the truest kind of faith. Even David, a lech, a philanderer, a murderer (like Moses and oh so many others) is rewarded by God, not turned away. So where are we getting this doctrine? Why is the most visible part of Christianity, its hate?

It seems so ridiculous to me and apparently, I'm not alone. There's a website dedicated to satirizing the hundreds of things Christians have spoken out against (Harry Potter, Oprah, gay marriage, Obama, public institutions, video games, the Golden Compass, Disney, Wal-Mart, Johnson and Johnson. . .do I have to go on?) called www.godhatesshrimp.com. Funny as I found it -- and I found it damned funny -- is that really what we want to be known for?