On the bound

I knew i'd come back to this at some point within the year. 10 months in, and i'm true to my word. Every day something happens that makes me want to write; often times though, the problem with creating something is that nobody cares but you. Knowing full well how self-indulgent this is, i've decided to give in and let it happen. It feels good.

Like I said to my dear friend Bill last night: When people refuse to allow others to tag them on facebook, the desired effect of remaining aloof and grounded does not at all occur- au contraire, you seem egocentric and stuck up. What kind of arrogant fuck are you? Who are you hiding from? Confess: you would very much enjoy emblazoning the internet with zillions of photos of yourself. Something to compliment the concept of cyber-self you have carefully been constructing since late 2004. We all do. I truly believe that. It's human. Who wants to leave this world without leaving a mark? The internet makes it all too easy; that being a problem in and of itself that we'll get into some other time, perhaps.

I say, if you want to post shit online, have at it. Even if you're hiding behind the facade that is your profile pic, whatever it conveys, your desire to inconspicuously (but not too inconspicuously) sneak around the internet makes you real. The world needs more of that. I didn't always feel this way, but this is where I'm at. I don't care who you are, I want you to put everything out there. Even if I don't want to know.

So anyway, justification-diatribe aside, I'm back. Self-deprecation has always suited me well. In fact, it's a little secret weapon I picked up sometime in high school and really has yet to fail me. My students admire it.

I cannot muster up the creative energy to dive into convoluted depths of my life since the last time i posted. Allow me to debrief you:

I moved to New Orleans. I work on the bayou. I teach high school. I live with my cat and my boyfriendl. I miss my friends and family around the country but I'm happy.

On to today's teaching story: A student got up today to ask to call home. As I'm writing her a hall pass, she passed out and fell down backward onto the floor. Total moment all we n00b teachers envision happening: I leapt over my desk to her rescue, performed chest compressions and successfully revived her within seconds, all while maintaining the academic focus of my other students and continuing to enter grades on powerschool.

Nah. Everything was fine, but I felt so bad for her. She was so disoriented at first, and then she seemed so embarrassed. She rubbed her eyes with her hands the way I sometimes do upon waking up at 7 am on a rough Saturday morning- reality comes in with the sunlight and then you just want to hide. Get me out of here. I did what i could to comfort her- she was fine physically but i felt worse for her little ego. More fragile than a skull at that age.

On to last week's teaching story:
One of my students said he tries to be a good Christian but he thinks he's too smart. He can't stop thinking about things. He can't stop wondering, what if it's all fake? My response: Never stop thinking.

I want to get into the details of how I feel about being who I am, teaching where I am. My job is not to preach nor indoctrinate my students, simply to urge them to use their heads, and hearts. Still, my chosen profession undoubtedly has roots which grow into political waters. I really don't label myself but I know who I am and how I feel...I do what I can to conceal it where I need to and do very little to conceal it when i need, and should, not. My students don't know what they don't need to, but they know I'm different and I feel quite good about that.

As I told my brother last weekend when he asked what I do in those "teachable" moments (they are unavoidable when you talk with teenagers about the Government for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week) I told him the truth- I pause, look pensive, look 'em in the eye, and say "...think about that." And because they are truly wonderful human beings, they do.

In unrelated news, my cat is half feral and I wouldn't want her any other way.

The Long Way

I've been a bit of a vagabond in recent months, traveling the country in almost all directions and putting many desperately needed miles between myself and reality (not that it's ever far, is it?) I haven't had a good "outlet" for my self-indulgent little photography habit since jettisoning cargo and jumping ship on facebook back in March (it was not nearly as emotional devastating as I'd mentally prepared myself for it to be) so I think I'll just go right ahead and "share" some gems on here.

I've sidled "share" in between quotations because sharing is generally an activity which requires more than one person, and I'm well aware that at this point in Makeshift Shapeshift history, this blog is a top-secret underground agent X-9 type of deal.

Regardless, here we go:

Trip 1:
Florida. Early March. I did a lot of interesting and productive things on this R&R getaway to my friends Dolores and John's house. I met Dolores and John back in the mid-eighties through our mutual friend Harry, who as luck would have it, happens to be both my father AND their son.
We kind of hit it off and the rest is history. Anyway,
considering that where I currently call home sees snow on the ground 5 months of the year, sunlight was kind of this trip's driving force, main objective, downtime filler and the whole fucking point in general. So as you can see, i did some bike riding, did some lounging (those shells just kind of landed in my hair that way when i washed up on the driveway shore). I also read 4/5ths of a very good book by Toni Morrison, one of my personal faves. On my last day there i almost finished it but Dolores wouldn't let me take home with me, so that sucked. Also, have you ever tried to smasha coconut? I did, and it turned out a little like this: "mmf!...." boink!



Trip 2:
Baltimore. Mid March.
I visited Megan (another friend i met through Harry- she happens to be his other daughter) and
here's a photojournalistic peek into the essense of the trip:



The above photos were taken over a period of roughly 13 hours.


Trip 3:
Late March. North Carolina.
The first of three recent [potential] business trips to one of my favorite states (despite the recent Pizza Hut booger/fart scandal...I'm assuming that wasn't near the coast). I took Harry himself along on this awesome excursion, which turned out to be a pretty memorable bonding experience. Between chilling on the beach and sampling microbrews, my job-seeking, zero-professional connections, awful-at-networking desperate ass actually whored myself to high school principals at a career fair. Despite having graduated at the apex of the worst economic crisis since '29 and a major upswing in nepotism, i actually feel good about my prospects.

Bloggae

At one point in my life I was able to follow the mind-numbingly easy steps involved in blog customization so that the colors, fonts and layout were what I believed to be an authentic representaion of myself. While any 15 year old with a myspace would likely devote their damn-near entire life to getting that shit just right, I tried for 4 minutes, did not achieve the desired results and happily gave up, after which I felt nothing. This is a life-pattern I'm trying to break.

Backtracking- Prior to my untimely defeat (basic HTMLing: 1; Me: 0) I remembered the site I used to use for color codes. I used this site in 2003 roughly 7 times and it came back to me in a manner of seconds. So that's pretty much an epic win in my book.

Can you tell that I'm attempting to be coolly indifferent to the fact that I'm dipping my toe back into the theraputic waters of recreational blogging after a hiatus spanning several relatively (in relation to everything) uneventful years? This should by now be widely discernible, considering my lack of any exclamatory punctuation and utterly listless approach to providing my reader any real semblance of entertainment. You see, this is all my reverse-psychology approach to life. If i pretend to not care enough, maybe things will turn out amazingly.

In all honesty, it is past 2 am, my wrists hurt (I HAVE NO IDEA WHY), and I'm teetering on the edge of lonely. I quickly realize that the previous statement coupled with all-caps sounds like I was making a hand-job joke but I assure you I was not. Only elbow-jabbing myself for suffering from the early onset of carpal tunnel due to, lets admit it- excessive internetting.

Would you have guessed it? Well, let's look at the cold hard facts. It is 2:37 Am on Saturday night, I'm closing in on 23 years of age, and i just spent the last four hours in the exact same position in which i spent the last four seconds.

After carefully pouring the data for all of no seconds, my answer is yes. I would have.

And here, at the end, in absolute honesty, there's not much I'd rather have been doing.
Feels good.