Sure, Deirdre

May 11, 2008

This was a very productive weekend, for the most part.

I did a ton of grading (finally caught up after the literary event at the college had set me back), took care of

my three rapidly growing tomatoes (yes, we have 3 now!), did a little note-taking and fleshing out of a character for my novel, and made two new postcards for the latest postdue postcard swap.

Here they are:

This first one is for a woman in Brazil, Indiana, who loves knitting.

And this second one is for a woman in Singapore, who loves, among other things, mermaids (I tried to find some ephemera with Esther Williams on it but, alas, I couldn’t; plus I wondered if she might not get the reference, after all not everyone has been infatuated with the MGM Film/swimming star of the 1940s and 50s since they were eleven, like I was).

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Blah Blah Blah

May 9, 2008

Just got a new laptop. Ok, not JUST got a new laptop… more like, got one 3 weeks ago but was so darned busy with school stuff that I only got to setting it up yesterday.

Ok, wait. Ted only got to setting it up yesterday.

I’m so bad with computers.

Anyway. We haven’t yet figured out how to get my scanner working (ok… I haven’t yet figured out… you know what I mean!), so I can’t put up new pics of my rapidly growing Patio tomato. But as soon as it gets set up i’ll do that.

This weekend is going to be a grading, writing, postcard-making weekend. I’m actually excited about getting some projects done (let’s see if I do it, huh?).

I got some awesome discarded books from the library at one of the colleges where I teach and so i’m going to make postcards out of the book covers. Is that bad? Destroying a book? They actually were going to be thrown away, and have stamps on the inside and the spine and the pages that say: Discard. I’m actually going to recycle them, right? I’m going to use the covers, and most likely the pages, too.

I’m not a bad person am I?

Hermia says NO.

Category Posted in ted, hermia, crafts 2 Comments »

Sleeping with Cats

May 4, 2008

That’s the title of a memoir written by the incomparable Marge Piercy. Piercy spoke Friday night at the Literary Arts Festival at one of the colleges where I teach. She was great: cranky, funny, obnoxious, generous– and such an amazing poet. When asked by a student what advice she had for new writers she exclaimed: Read! Read! Read!

Amen.

Sleeping with cats is also what i’ve been doing the last two nights since Ted is in San Francisco for the weekend. With more space in the bed Betsy and Hermia have been flanking me– i’m terrified to roll over on one of them; no matter which way I roll they are right there.

I’ve also been doing some gardening. We don’t really have a yard, but we have a patio and i’ve been tending to the plants. About 6 weeks ago I bought some tomato plants. They were about six inches tall then, but now they are about two feet tall and one is growing a tomato!!! This is the first time i’ve ever grown a vegetable. I’m so exited. It’s called a patio tomato, and will hopefully turn red (it’s pea-green right now–see the pic on the left). I’ve also planted yellow tomatoes and peppers.

Friday I bought a lemon tree and re-potted it. I don’t know how long it will take to grow lemons (the guy who lives upstairs from us has a lemon tree in a big pot and it’s growing these huge lemons), but maybe by the time Ted and I move out of the apartment i’ll be able to plant the lemon tree in an actual yard.

I’ve also got a bougainvillea growing, several cacti and jade plants. You should have seen me out there, re-potting in my little green garden gloves, spraying for bugs, feeding the plants with Miracle-Gro, while Jack and Betsy sat in the sunshine. Here are some pictures of the cats in the ‘garden.’

Jack contemplates the tomatoes

sometimes Jack runs away from me and I have to chase him into other peopless’ patios– he’s especially partial to the patio belonging to the cute, blond, Scandinavian-looking surfer guy next door. Bad Jack! Bad!

Hermia thinks that rolling around in the dirt and grass and filth is detestable.

But she does miss Daddy.

Category Posted in ted, poetry, cats, books 2 Comments »

39

April 30, 2008

You may have heard a piercing, high-pitched wail coming from San Diego yesterday; it was just me, turning 39 years old.

Sigh.

Yes, 39. But I don’t feel a day over 37. Just kidding.

Actually, I really do feel younger than my 39 years. I feel somewhere close to 32 or 33.

I still wear black converse low tops and wacky t-shirts; blue jeans are my primary pants (does anyone really say blue jeans anymore?). I carry a book bag that has buttons on it– one shows the B-52s, another is a felt patch that says “Wenis.” I have a sort of faux-mullet-haircut (courtesy of that other Peter Pan, Eduardo).

Will I ever grow up?

So how did I spend my birthday yesterday?

I taught my classes and had office hours — at two campuses. Then I drove back to the first campus through rush-hour traffic to go to a Student Reading (part of our Literary Arts Festival). A definite highlight was my buddy Jess, who read a piece titled “The Chemical”– Jess and I read together at the Photobooth Reading (and will be doing it again in June). The other standouts, were, of course, my two students who read their poems.

When I finally got home about 9:30 pm Ted was waiting with champagne, raspberries, and a WW Chocolate Cheesecake he had made himself! What a stud, eh?

We watched American Idol on our brand new WIDESCREEN television (little David Archuletta now looks like a 40 foot Robot).

Natch we voted about a zillion times for David Cook.

And Natch, I bought myself a birthday present:

This AWESOME Calendar from a 1974 beauty parlor (from equally awesome Etsy seller Loubelledejour).

Makes turning 39 just a little easier, no?

**thank you to all who called, texted, myspaced and facebooked me to wish me happy day (that means you felicia, david, jason, jason, jason–I know a lot of jasons, kevin, james, peter, janel, heather and peyton, wendy, syd, laura, drew, my sisters Andrea and Allyson).

Category Posted in ted, shopping, food 6 Comments »

I ♥ The NYer

April 27, 2008

Write now (ha ha, I made a literary joke!) i’m totally into my New Yorkers.

Especially at the gym, which i’ve mentioned before. The elliptical… you know what I mean.

This last week I read the article A Dip in the Cold, by Lynne Cox, about her latest long distance swim through the Northwest Passage near Greenland. It was so completely entralling, gripping, intriguing.

It was featured in the Travel issue (called “Journeys”)– always one of my favorites from the magazine. This is the issue where various writers contribute stories/essays about travel and geography both physical and emotional. This is where I found the essays by Mary Gordon and Nicole Krauss that I teach in my Creative Writing classes.

I love how Cox weaves the amazing history about some of our most notorious explorers, like William Perry, John Ross, and especially Norwegian Roald Amundsen, throughout her own story of swimming through these freezing waters, bumping against jelly fish and with the fear and knowledge that she is the prey of other deadly animals. The last few pages had me completely in their grip:

I paused mid-stroke when I noticed a scarlet jellyfish the size of an apple moving towards me. The tentacles, fire read and thick as spaghetti strands, trailed behind;they were six or seven feet long and I knew that they would hurt if I touched them. As I swerved right, my left hand grazed the dome and I recoiled. Staring down into the sea, I saw hundreds of these red jellyfish. They were beautiful–like flowers blossoming in an underwater garden–and terrifying. I pulled my hands in tight under my body, trying to get higher in the water so that I wouldn’t get stung.

Eeesh!

Today, while doing my 25 minutes on the elliptical, I read about the Penny– the article from the March 31 issue of NYer, titled Penny Dreadful, by David Owen. Such a great essay about, what else, the penny (as the subtitle states: America’s Most Annoying and Useless Coin).

I loved this piece. Come on–the history of the Penny! What’s not to love? It also introduced me to the term–

Seigniorage: The difference between the value of money and the cost to produce it - in other words, the economic cost of producing a currency within a given economy or country. If the seigniorage is positive, then the government will make an economic profit; a negative seigniorage will result in an economic loss.

Seigniorage may be counted as revenue for a government when the money that is created is worth more than it costs to produce it. This revenue is often used by governments to finance a portion of their expenditures without having to collect taxes. If, for example, it costs the U.S. government $0.05 to produce a $1 bill, the seigniorage is $0.95, or the difference between the two amounts.

Brilliant!

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TGIF

April 25, 2008

Amen to that. (did you know Jeff Goldblum was in this movie?)

It’s been such a long week; i’m so glad it’s Friday.

Last night was another function for the Literary Arts Festival that i’m a part of at the college where I teach. The readers were all local/San Diego writers and included:

Jim Miller read from his novel Drift.

his lovely wife Kelly Mayhew who read from Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See

Adrian Arancibia (who did some amazing spoken word poetry)

and Mel Freilicher who read from his fascinating book The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, which looks at the lives of Dorothy Dandridge, Bettie Page, Joey Stefano, Margaret Fuller, Margaret Sanger, Bayard Rustin, Billy Stayhorn, through biography, poetry, and prose. “Fact and fantasy mingle in this work which looks squarely at grave social and personal ills - abuse, prejudice, neglect, and loss - while heralding the intellectual and creative triumphs of seven provocative figures from history.”

One of my favorite parts of the night was during Jim Miller’s reading from Drift, where the character refers to San Diego as

Bland Diego

hilarious.

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That’s SO Gay!

April 22, 2008

Last night, at the community college where I teach Ted and I gave a presentation titled That’s So Gay! for our annual Literary Arts Festival. It was the kickoff event, a reading/interrogation by several of the professors of the school. Our theme for the Lit. Arts Festival this year is The Writer As Activist and we have Marge Piercy as our final event. She’s coming out May 2 and will be both reading and offering a workshop to some of our best and brightest creative writing students.

So Cool! A chance to work with Marge Piercy. I’m envious of them. Two of my students were chosen to work with her. Not too shabby, i’d say.

Anyway, last night, Ted and I split our presentation. I spoke for the first half and he spoke for the 2nd half. My half talked about the bullying and harassment of gay teens and pre-teens. Basically harassment, teasing, bullying of any GLBTQ youth. I ended the discussion with the mention of Lawrence–Larry– King, the 15 year-old Oxnard, CA boy who was killed by a fellow student for being too gay. King was a jovial, bubbly, out and proud kid who wore eyeliner and high heeled boots to school. He loved bugs and chess and Project Runway.

The administration knew he had been harassed and bullied, but nothing was done to curb this. No intervention, no assembly to discuss how to deal with differences, how to respect individuality. Larry was shot in the head–twice– in front of his fellow classmates, by a 14 year-old boy, whom Larry had professed a crush on.

It’s preposterous and horrifying to think this happens EVERY day in our schools.

One statistic I found said that Gay students hear anti-gay slurs as often as 26 times each day; faculty intervention occurs in only about 3% of those cases. (from GLSEN).

(from Advocate.com) Shelia Kuehl, who is the first lesbian person elected to California’s state legislature is working with a number of school districts to put education programs in place to keep our students safe, to promote compliance with the laws we have passed and to prevent future violence.

She suggests that we might ask what is being done in our public schools to teach conflict resolution and respect for differences. She states, “If we are to be self-critical, we might better ask ourselves if we have done all we can to promote that sort of necessary education.”

I began my discussion with an anecdote about my own experience–being bullied through junior high by a kid named Kenny La Fond who was a couple of years older than me and the older brother of a classmate of mine. Here is an excerpt from my discussion, with photos:

This is a school photo of me from when I was eleven years old. I was in fifth grade at Hill Creek Elementary in Santee. That was the year the soccer team I played on placed third in the county. It was the year my mother took my sisters and I on a trip to Hawaii—the first trip we had taken as a divorced family—without my father. It was one year before I made my community theater debut at The Santee Community Theater in the children’s play, “Alaska,” where one reviewer game me a “nod for best stage presence and timing.” It was also the year that I was famously, or infamously dubbed “Fairy Lips” by Kenny La Fond—a seventh grader and the older brother of a classmate. He called me this for an entire school year, and through most of the rest of middle school.

You might wonder why he called me Fairy Lips? There’s nothing in this fifth grade picture of me that would suggest that my lips were anything other than thin and maybe a little chapped, my teeth were large and I had an overbite (later fixed by braces), my hair was longer than usual but that was the style then, and I think my mother might have made that terrycloth shirt by hand, but I can’t remember.

What I do remember is a couple of years of feeling like something was wrong with me. A couple of years of dreading walking from class to class when someone like Kenny La Fond or one of his friends—and he had many—would say something demeaning, or humiliating, to me. Say something that would suggest that I was somehow less of a person than he was, or some sort of freak because I had a little more spring in my step. Or I preferred going to the library at recess to read biographies of people like Florence Nightingale and James Madison. Or maybe because, as one teacher put it on my 5^th grade report card:

Bobby Williams is a conscientious student who loves to talk, especially to the girls in the class.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I knew I was different. I wrote a novel about a talking Sunflower Seed when I was seven. By age ten I was an expert player at Trivial Pursuit, the Silver Screen Edition—I was once interviewed at a local tournament by newscaster Marty Emerald. I was especially adept at memorizing the names and films of movie stars from the 1940s and 1950s. I liked to draw, I liked to write. I was a creative, sensitive boy.

It’s reprehensible, though, that, as a young person growing up, these differences, which could have been, perhaps should have been, a celebration, were instead an invitation for harassment and bullying, and for me—a cause of shame.

At the age of eleven, I was too young to refer to myself as anything yet—gay or straight—I didn’t even have an inkling of what those words meant. Too young to have any sort of identity other than I was a fan of the TV show Charlie’s Angels and I liked to collect Star Wars action figures.

I was merely a boy that wanted people to look at me and like me, for my creativity, for my individuality. But instead, I was being defined by Kenny and his friends, and the people—my peers, my teachers—who didn’t know how to deal with, much less respect, difference. Probably because they were never taught to.

With the words that were being used to define me, by Kenny and others, words like Fairy Lips, or sissy, or gayboy, and many others—they wanted to tear me down, to ridicule me, to make me feel that I was unworthy, unlikeable, and most of all unacceptable.

And they knew just the right words.

[…]

But the reality is, that as silly and seemingly insignificant a name as “Fairy Lips,” or sissy, or calling a boy a ‘girl,’ or calling a young girl a lezbo, or being called a freak, or strange, or unnatural, does cause harm, it does affect us.

Words are powerful. We know this. We learn this in school. We teach this in school from an early age.

Ted’s discussion/speech was equally effective and wonderful. He spoke about the careful choice of words to describe and attack gay people. (maybe he’ll post his discussion on his blog…?). In his discussion he quoted Whitman, notably this beautiful poem (my favorite of Whitman’s poems, and the one that I sent to Ted when we first started dating):

Category Posted in cute photos of me, ted, poetry, questions that plague me, teaching, my writing 6 Comments »

Honor Moore

April 18, 2008

Like most folks, I get behind in my NewYorkers.

But since I started back up at the gym i’ve been taking them to read while on the cycle-thingy and the walky-army thingy (the bike? the elliptical? stairmaster?)– you can see how much time i’ve spent in a gym in my life.

Anyway, recently I read the story (per Amy’s recommendation) “The Bell Ringer” by John Burnside in the March 17 edition. Wowza. That one packs a wallop at the end. Read it here.
I also just finished (yesterday) the excerpt from Honor Moore’s memoir about life with her father, Bishop Paul Moore, growing up in NYC (the memoir is called The Bishop’s Daughter, and will be published in May).

I’ve long been a fan of Honor Moore’s poetry– which often times read like conversations in a comfortable living room; they are honest, generous, lyrical. And in this new book she details her father’s life (he was an Episcopal Priest, activist, and Bishop) as well as his and the family secrets. The excerpt garnered an angry letter from Moore’s brother and sister just a week after it was published in the NYer.

I have to say, the excerpt was heartbreaking, and beautifully written (when her elderly, dying father tells her a story about a little girl, I was riding the elliptical thingy and wanted to start sobbing right there; though part of that could have been due to the level I had programmed into the machine). The piece was much too short, though, I was wanting to read more when it ended too abruptly.

Here she describes going to Evensong one night:

Once, after supper, my father swept me up into his black seminarian’s cape and across the street for Evensong. I remember the starry sky, the cold darkness as we climbed the stairs to the seminary path to the chapel. I could already hear it, something like the rushing wind, the coming of a storm. We were late, and as we slipped into the pew in the candlelit church full of men I understood that the rushing sound was singing. The rumbling voices of priests and seminarians, resounding against the stone walls of the small chapel, were otherworldly, even Godlike. I was scared, and so I leaned against my father, nuzzling the black cape still fresh from the night air, but he didn’t look down at me or put his hand on my head. Now he belonged to something else, this big and strange sound, so deep and loud it made me shake. I could hardly breathe as all the men together spoke words I couldn’t yet understand. And with thy spirit. Ah-men. Alleluia.

You can read the entire excerpt here.

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Happy 78th Birthday Hermia! (my cat)

April 15, 2008

O. M. G.

I totally forgot it was Hermia’s Birthday today.

Two days of celebrations!She was born on April 15, 1991– which makes her 17 years old. But, according

to this website , she’s really 78 years old (in the human equivalent).

Here’s their chart:

Here’s a look at Hermia through the years:

1. (first picture) she’s just about a year old here.

2. here, she’s about two.

3. this is hermia in the sink, from about 1997 or 98, when we lived in Arizona. She loves taking a bath.

4. in NYC, (hence the hard-wood floor) around 2000, so when she was about eight or nine. The lack of exercise took its toll on her once youthful, svelte figure.