unlike most of my young classmates, I never had any trouble imagining my public school teachers as real people outside the classroom. it made perfect sense to me to picture them as people who ate breakfast every morning, washed dishes, went grocery shopping, got sick, had children, tried on shoes, planted gardens, had birthday parties, played hockey, talked on the phone, went to the movies. I never even struggled to realize that they, like me, might be moody or nervous or giddy or heartsick or even in love, though boston public may have served to ascribe those last few feelings to the species of teachers in the public's mind as well. now, of course, I see all those things firsthand, in both myself and my coworkers. still, I can't for the life of me imagine any of my teachers, past or present, walking home from school and exuberantly lipsynching along to bouncy synth-pop. I can't picture them lying upside-down on the couch to eat the cheeseless pizza sticking off the edge of the coffee table without using their hands. I can't see them climbing across the tops of their classroom desks, falling asleep on the subway underneath a carefully spread magazine, having dreams about skeletons in welding masks, or running around the backyard throwing cherry tomatoes in the air by the handful to see how many might be caught in the mouth. either I've suffered an acute shortage of imagination, or being a teacher has failed to cure me of being a freak.

[ 27.9.03]  ·  [ ]



after (or perhaps merely coincident with) my weekend-long absence, lucie has progressed neatly from the idyllic early days of perpetual agreeability into something resembling either the terrible twos or the throes of surly adolescence. she growled and snapped at my arm when I tried to crate her for bed, her first display of aggression towards me, which left a small purple indentation surrounded by a sickly green bruise at the exact spot where my wrist bends into my hand. she had been snappish around other people, but never me. her first bucking of the new authority. all her bad behavior comes from her mouth: she is beautifully housetrained and will ask to go out; she sits with a word and is near mastering the hand signal; she's toned down the jumping and will quickly back off with the right command; she's even stopped frothing so much at passing squirrels and housecats. but she chews on pillows, clothespins, paper, flyswatters, beads, coins, chapstick, garbage, grass, t-shirts, and anything related to feet. she hasn't tried her teeth against me again but will bare them at my roommate from time to time. she knows it gets attention. of course I've been giving her as much good attention as possible, and she's at her best during our afternoon walks. I've become quite well acquainted with the sidewalks and stoops around my house, as I trot or lope or stroll through the neighborhood with my eyes always trained to the spot beside my left knee where lucie's head is supposed to be. she is heeling like a pro as long as we keep in a straight line, and she'll catch up with my turns and has managed to ignore almost half of the other dogs she's seen across the street or down the block. as we walk I keep a steady stream of quiet praise flowing to her ears, not just for positive reinforcement but also because I like the gently rhythm it lends my footsteps. I mean to be saying "heel, lucie, heel, lucie, heel," but I keep hearing it like this: heal, lucie, heal. heal. well, that is what we're working on, isn't it?

[ 23.9.03]  ·  [ ]



during the reception after the funeral memorial service celebration of life, I was accosted by an elderly gentleman in a grey suit with a green tie. he put his arm around my shoulder in a way that made me think he must have known me from somewhere, and whispered conspiratorially, "come with me."

"okay," I whispered back, and followed him around the corner.

"let me see your hands."

I offered them up and he grabbed both of them in his cool, dry senior citizen palms, so that I had to balance my plastic cup of fruit punch between my forearms. maybe my hands look like gramita's, I thought, though I couldn't see how: mine are small, pink, flecked with tiny scars from rugby games and bicycle accidents; gramita's hands were sturdily elegant and always bedecked in chunky silver rings.

"you're a nail-biter, aren't you." it was more a statement than a question, and those of you who have ever seen my fingernails can attest to how little room I've left for ambiguity in that department. (about as much as I left of my original nailtips, which is to say less than zero.) still, I rewarded him with a mildly sarcastic "yeah, I am."

"I used to bite my nails too," he told me. "but when I was your age" -- (I asked how old he thought that was, but he ignored me) -- "I started putting tape around my fingertips. so then," and here he demonstrated by bringing my hands uncomfortably close to his teeth, "I just nibbled at the tape. and I broke the habit."

"congratulations," I said, several decades too late.

he held my hands tighter and looked beseechingly into my eyes. "you're such a beautiful girl. I hope you can break the habit too."

"okay," I said, pulling my hands away and resisting the urge to put them straight into my mouth. "I will try."

I won't, of course. I've eaten whole rolls of tape -- masking, scotch, and even some duct -- straight off my fingers. I've sucked nail polish, fountain pen ink, and that foul-tasting thum stuff like they turned my hands into lollipops. I consider it enough of a triumph that I rid myself of the habit where I cut slices into my lips with the sharp edges of plastic pens I had chewed to a mutilated death.

also, I could be wrong about this, but I suspect there might be one or two people out there who think I'm at least a little bit beautiful in spite of my chewed-up nails. maybe.

[ 22.9.03]  ·  [ ]



for some reason it didn't occur to me the last time I was in denver that I would soon be flying back. it's not that I thought my grandmother's memorial service would come to me... but somehow I was so concerned with her dying that I forgot I would have a reason to visit her (or rather, her ashes) after she was dead. nonetheless, here I go.

[ 20.9.03]  ·  [ ]



picture this: me, wearing black heels (still trying to break them in), green and orange cargo shorts (it's hot!), and a chalk-covered blue dress shirt (it seems silly to get another shirt dirty just because school is over), walking around the living room in circles, left hand picking up the paper scraps from last night's work, right hand war-of-tugging my feisty dog behind me on the other end of a saliva-sogged rope toy, gripping the cordless phone between my shoulder and my ear, giving a phone interview to a magazine reporter in philadelphia. ("telescopes use digital cameras just like media photographers do," I said, curling my fingers tighter through the frayed ends of a knot left too slippery by lucie's drool. "astronomers can't do much of anything without computers.") the universe is a truly absurd place, you guys.

[ 17.9.03]  ·  [ ]



for the most part, lucie is doing great so far. her transition from shelter dog to pet dog has gone almost unbelievably smoothly, with the exception of her erratic responses to crate training. but like any dog with a history of abandonment, she has her share of quirks. she's neck-shy, so even when everyone involved knows she wants to go outside, getting the choke collar and leash on takes some very patient coaxing and agile maneuvering. she's dog aggressive, and flips out the minute she sees another animal on the block. (the pekingese in particular drives her bonkers.) but those are normal quirks. the weird one? my dog is camera-shy. I've never seen anything like it. you don't have to point the camera at her, or even open the lens cover; as soon as she catches sight of it she runs straight in the other direction. (or, sometimes, in confused little circles.) she is fine with the tv remote, the walkman (before it was stolen), the discman, the kitchen sponge, my index card filer, cd jewel cases, cassette tapes, the watering can, her fur brush, rubber balls, dustbins, and pretty much anything that doesn't indicate her imminent crating. (I am trying to make it sound appealing: "kennel up, lucie!" but really, I don't blame her for not being thrilled about it yet.) but the camera -- it's the reaction I imagine I would have if someone pointed a crossbow at me. could it be that she had a traumatic photographic experience as a puppy? too many flashes in the eyes, perhaps? or maybe a really embarrasing baby picture: the tongue hanging out; the ears too big for her head; front paws inelegantly crossed like the feet of an awkward ballerina. needless to say, there haven't been a lot of photos taken since she came home with us. I'm trying to desensitize her, not so much because I want to take pictures of her (though I do) as because it seems like an inconveniently commonplace object to inspire such a reaction. we don't need her freaking out every time someone wants to play photographer. so far I've gotten as far as pointing the camera in her direction, but not in front of my face, without operating the zoom or turning on the flash. if she looks at it or stays in the vicinity long enough that I could have released the shutter if I wanted, she gets enough praise to placate a whole herd of skittish dogs. if I actually do take a picture (of god knows what; I may have gotten a shot of her tail once but it's impossible to know since my eye was a good sixteen inches from the viewfinder), she gets a treat. so far she's eaten nearly a tablespoon of peanut butter in return for three wasted exposures. if that dog has half a brain, I'm sure she thinks I'm crazy.

[ 14.9.03]  ·  [ ]



a nested list of things that no longer belong to me because some wankstain in starbucks stole them last night

[ 13.9.03]  ·  [ ]



it took me by surprise when the principal's voice suddenly filled my classroom near the end of second period -- we'd already sat through the optional pledge of alleigance and six minutes' worth of invitations to join the SAT prep club, the swim team, the fall musical production, and a score of other things that none of us remembered by the end -- but I only needed a quick glance at my watch, whose minute hand was just past the 9, to know what was going on. "it's the first airplane minute," murmured one girl. as if no airplanes had ever flown before then. maybe they didn't; just then, I wasn't sure I remembered. it was strange to be in brooklyn all day, here in new york city but not there downtown, which I felt tugging at me just the way it did two years ago. even after all the things that have made me lividly, dizzily angry -- the justified discrimination, our wretched war on terror, those commercials where every house sprouts an american flag, and most recently the way our president spun it like blowing the budget on the occupation of iraq is a prerequisite for still having human feelings about what happened -- I just wanted to be there, to hear the names and be quiet with my little self next to the big hole. instead I was half an hour away observering a long moment of silence and the sneaker-clad feet of three dozen kids who were middle-schoolers when the towers fell. I thought about going to visit the tip of manhattan at dusk, but instead we drove up through brooklyn and across queens into the dark northwestern corner of long island, where the streetlights make pools instead of a river and everyone kept safely ensconced inside their cars and houses. a lot of things were broken two years ago, mostly things that were not so easily photographed as those steel girders and crumpled tunnels. and now, I think it's time to unbreak some things.
  §  §  §  
this is lucie, in the animal shelter where she spent the second half of her life, after she turned from a cute puppy to a real live dog who runs and jumps and drools. she was lucky enough to be rescued from an aspca shelter where she was slated to be put to sleep after no one would adopt her because she was skittish and still reeling from abandonment. and now, she's been rescued by us. all the way home on three different expressways, I held her on my lap in the backseat while she alternately smudged up the window and nuzzled her head into the bend of my elbow. from everywhere I could see the twin pillars of light reaching up to fall, in quiet defiance of gravity, across the soft bellies of the clouds that swam across the sky. at first they were just a thin stripe bisecting the tree-filled horizon beyond the highway, but once we were speeding down the bqe under the brooklyn bridge and alongside the glittering manhattan skyline, they were huge, impossibly tall, straight as a rungless ladder to the sky. I stroked lucie's head slowly, tipping my head backwards so I could watch the city even as we turned east to plunge deep into brooklyn, and I told her, "lucie, we're real grown-ups now." I'm glad that in spite of anything we've spent the last two years still growing up.

[ 11.9.03]  ·  [ ]



my grandmother died this morning, just a bit more than a week after her eighty-eighth birthday. it didn't really hit me what that meant until I was lying in bed trying to think of was important to remember about her, and I imagined myself having a conversation with her, and all her characteristic inflections: the way she said, "hello, dear," on the telephone; the way she liked to finish stories with "you know," as if whatever she had just told us about manhattan in 1933 was supposed to be obvious; the way she opened her eyes so wide whenever she said something that amused her; how, when she was pleased that you had found something to be happy about, she would say "ye-eah!" as if it were the most blissful word in the language. at some point in the middle of all that it occurred to me that none of those things actually exists outside my head anymore. how very strange. but I don't want to tell you about how my gramita is dead. I want to tell you about how once, twenty years ago, I was a two-year-old riding on the carousel in central park. that leather strap wrapped around my back and under my arms, holding me high atop my horse, whose head was reared in a frozen imitation of wild-eyed rebel spirit. I remember lots of things, the same things that populate all my carousel memories. I watched my pole go up and down as the arm above me pumped round and round. I pretended my mother was standing next to me simply because she loved the calliope music, not because she was worried that I would forget to hang on to the pole or that my short legs might let me slide off my horse's slippery saddle. and I also remember watching gramita watching me, from her seat outside the carousel. she waved to me as I disappeared around the bend, and when I came back on the other side, she was smiling every time.

[ 8.9.03]  ·  [ ]



when people ask me what I'm doing with my post-collegehood, I say, "I'm teaching high school science." it sounds weird, but at least I can get it out of my mouth. "I'm a teacher"? not a chance! it would be easier to tell them I have a unicorn horn growing out of my head, and it almost seems like they'd have a better shot at believing such a thing. I'm not a teacher. I'm just teaching.

part of the problem is that I am, in the words of one of my colleagues, "a little girl." but the bigger problem, the thing that keeps me from claiming to be a teacher by profession, is that I don't really believe people like me should be allowed to teach.

at least, not in a perfect world. (or even a significantly-improved world.) teaching should never be a default job. it shouldn't be that thing you do because you can't quite think of anything better, or anything with better benefits. (and they are killer, let me tell you. not only do I get to have my teeth cleaned four times a year, I only have to pay five dollars to go see a movie. now that's the kind of thing you want your union working on.) it shouldn't even be something you do because you're a big-hearted college kid with an overgrown sense of social justice and an education to match.

teaching should be something you do because you're the best at it. it should be fucking hard to get a job as a teacher, at least as hard as it is to be a doctor and much harder than it is to be a lawyer. and the people who are lucky and smart and talented and dedicated enough to get that far should be given mentors, allowed to progress slowly from observing to student teaching to team-teaching, carefully watched and supported by their wise and dedicated older colleagues. and when a new teacher takes over her own classroom for the first time, she shouldn't have to worry about where the chalk is kept or what to do when there are five more students than desks in the classroom. would you let an operation begin before the surgeon had figured out where to find a scalpel and while the patient was still lying on the bare floor? I don't think so.

of course it's nothing like what it should be, at least not around here. there are teachers who can barely remember the times tables. there are teachers who think children should be seen and not heard. there are teachers who want to be anywhere else but in school.

and that's why it's okay that I'm teaching, in this wholly imperfect room with so very much room for improvement. of course there are great teachers, really fabulously inspiring teachers who get you to do things you didn't know were possible and who teach you not just about the periodic table or elizabethan poetry or whatever, but about the world and life and the boundless beauty of the human spirit. (or at least one of those things.) I think most of us have been lucky enough to have at least one teacher like that. I have, for sure. and I'll be taking my cues from those teachers.

I shouldn't be, though. I should be looking on in admiration and awe, not trying to execute a muddled imitation. I should be wondering if I'm good enough to ever be an average teacher, not how long it will take me to be a great one. the conceit is required: if we are not supposed to be great, why on earth are we here? and why, truly, should that not be a question asked of every public school teacher in the country?

when I joined the teacher rewards program at staples today, the woman behind the customer service counter raised a skeptical eyebrow at me as she handed over the application. "you're a teacher?" she asked. "I know," I said. "it's hard to believe."

[ 7.9.03]  ·  [ ]



this is cool: seeing the whole symphony. I wish the nature of the analogy between sound and light waves were a little clearer. I know you can have an octave of anything measured in wavelength (it's not eight notes, it's a frequency interval with a 2:1 ratio), but how do we decide that middle c corresponds to red light? anyway, I know that if I had x-ray vision I'd be too busy watching the sun's flares and glowing corona to check out anyone's underwear. not that anyone sane would wear x-ray emitting underwear, right?

[ 6.9.03]  ·  [ ]



I've been so tired this week, getting up just before sunrise to get ready for school but somehow still reluctant to go to bed before two in the morning. that will clearly have to end once we start for real (on monday). I started planning my afternoon nap on the walk home this afternoon. last night I was finishing up an email, thinking about all the things I'd packed away in my brain to write about later, and I said to myself: I'm too tired; I'd rather just go to bed. this morning after I woke up, still too tired to quite comprehend spoken language, I realized that was pathetic. if I'm going to wake up feeling half-dead, what good does it do me to go to bed twenty minutes earlier than I would have otherwise? and what kind of writer am I if I'm not willing to stay up an extra twenty minutes to get some of the words out of my head and onto the page? (I am not making any kind of claim that this is always about writing; sometimes it's simply a mutant form of conversation.) I'm done with college. there will likely never be another professor who makes me sit down to write a poem, an essay, or even a nontechnical paper. there is nothing in any of my degrees, acquired or anticipated, that says I know how to write or even that I've read the words of people who do. yet I still have this idea that writing, in some form, will be at least part of my career. now that I have a job that most of my colleagues consider a career, that writing thing is starting to feel only slightly more plausible than some of the other professions -- mostly invented or involving long-handled paint brushes -- I considered last semester while I was trying to come up with something to do after graduation. I mean, come on: no one is going to walk up to me on the street and commission a short story or something. (when was the last time I wrote a short story anyway? 2001?) my major and minor were both science-related, but I have no experience with journalism, so I doubt anyone will be asking me to do any turns in the popular science world. (plus there's the much bigger problem that my father already has that territory covered.) it's not that I think I'm not a good enough writer to be paid for doing it someday, though I'm under no illusion as to how easy it is (or isn't). it's that, for the first time in my life, I have to be entirely self-motivated about it. it would be easy enough to say I'm just going to wait a while; I have the whole rest of my life to find some years that won't be full by prescription of new cities, new jobs, new schools, and the vague sense of unbalance that comes with new adulthood. but doing things the easy way is not my modus operandi (sometimes it's doing things the slacker way, but that's just a different method for making life difficult in the long run), nor does it seem like the best way to go about convincing the world that I should have any career at all. (the world is kind of stupid that way.) I have no conclusion. that's a good sign, don't you think?

[ 5.9.03]  ·  [ ]



we went out to dinner at a chinese seafood restaurant on avenue u, and we had to stand in the foyer for a while, waiting for an available table. the wall was lined with grimy aquaria, containing prawns, piles of banded lobsters, scuttling crabs, twirling eels, and masses of listless, unidentifiable fish, whose colors and eyes were mostly hidden behind the clouds of scum on the glass. now and then one of the waiters came to scoop one of the fish out in a long-handled ragged green net. the fish were flipped straight from the water into a waiting plastic bag, which was knotted and tightened before the fish even had a chance to beat their tails in protest. later, as the bag-wrapped fish sat atop a scale, they thrashed inside the plastic, so that the needle on the scale bounced wildly in time with the loud rustling of the bag. then silence for a few moments, followed by a new burst of struggle. I imagined the fish inside its bag, panting in between each outburst like a losing boxer forced into the corner of a ring, still throwing a few futile punches every time he could muster the energy. the crabs were lifted out with huge two-tined forks that squeezed them around the shell, leaving their claws and legs free to flail angrily in the direction of the red-vested waiters who bent over the tank. once, one of the crabs twisted sideways and fell from the fork's grip, hitting the edge of the tank with a cracking noise before falling to the floor on its back, legs squirming and writhing in exactly the wrong direction. I watched all this with my usual poise and detached regard, determined to be neither overwhelmed by these so very common life-sized tragedies nor willfully ignorant of their occurence. but the eels -- none of whom were taken away to be eaten -- the eels got to me. maybe it was the way each of their tails seemed to be raw and infected, patchy red and white behind their lanky green bodies. ("what do you think that is?" I said, and my roommate shrugged: "tail rot?") maybe it was the way they had to swim in swerves because their bodies were longer than even the diagonal dimension of their tank. maybe it's just something about me and eels. when I looked at them -- at the way they stretched up towards the surface, opened and closed their mouths like they were trying to voicelessly say something; at the swells of water behind their gills that surged rhythmically in and out and in and out -- I had to look away, eyes down and pointed at the golden rows of take-out eggrolls under the glass cash register counter, to keep from bursting into tears.

[ 1.9.03]  ·  [ ]





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