wockerjabby

2010-02-27T15:12:00.003-05:00

this morning, as I do most saturdays in the winter, I walked two blocks to my neighborhood farmers market. I spent fourteen dollars and seventy five cents on the fresh produce and bread that I will eat this week. most of it is organic; all of it was grown (and baked, in the bread's case) within a two hour drive of brooklyn. the entire shopping trip took me fifteen minutes, and that's only because I paused to chat with one of the farmers about how pretty the city looks under its mantle of snow.

it is, of course, through no small effort of my own, but I am very very lucky to be in a place -- both geographically and in life -- that allows me to be exactly the part of the food system that I wish to be, and effortlessly at that. I expect I will continue to think about my food consumption choices and make adjustments as my physical needs and ecological considerations change, but I feel that in many ways I've reached the culminating point of the process I began when, at age twelve, I decided to stop eating pork. it's hard to understate the niceness of being able to look at one of the most fundamental parts of my life -- of any animal's life really -- and say, hey, that has gone exactly according to plan.

(if any of you are looking at this photo and thinking, "but where is the protein?" rest assured that I am well stocked with staples. I have two pounds each of kidney, black, and navy beans in the freezer, and my bins of dry beans and whole grains are still more than half full. plus there's tofu and tempeh in the fridge, as usual.)

2010-02-20T16:00:00.002-05:00

it's only saturday, but now that the weekend has arrived I feel as though vacation is already over. (it is not lost on me that this is a highly nonstandard vacation week.) I didn't do any traveling this week, and in fact I left brooklyn just once, but it would be wrong to say I didn't do anything special. for an entire week I've barely thought about school. that's more than just special; it's precious.

my official work hours are 8:15 - 3:50, monday through friday, and of course my actual work hours are more like 7:30 - 7:00, plus evening and weekend overtime at home. I'm used to the hours by now, and the truth is it's not the amount of work that feels overwhelming so much as the reality that as long as school is happening, I am always a teacher. I don't know if it works this way for other professions -- I assume some yes, some no; I know I didn't feel this way as a research assistant -- but whether it's the middle of a lab or the middle of my twenty-minute lunch break or the middle of the night, I am never not a teacher. I do other things, sure. on mondays I'm a teacher who runs; on tuesdays and wednesdays I'm a teacher who's writing a dissertation; on thursdays I'm a teacher who tap dances; on fridays I'm a teacher who drinks bourbon; on sundays I'm a teacher who plays street hockey. (I should spend more saturdays being a teacher who is writing a dissertation, but usually I'm a teacher who has a lot of grading to do.) I am judicious with my time and money, and I am careful to spend them on things I enjoy. nonetheless I sometimes feel like an overly strategic teenager trying to get into harvard, padding my life's r&eactute;sumé with proof of my well-roundedness.

this week I was not a-teacher-who.

this week I kept my kitchen clean, cooked more than one meal a day, ran through the snow, went for a checkup, watched a movie, watered the plants, slept until eight, went out with friends, and made smoothies for breakfast every day. it was exactly what a vacation should be.

2010-01-24T21:36:00.005-05:00

two thousand ten,

the end of my second decade,

will you be the year that it all becomes worth it?

my eyes and heart are open.

2009-12-23T19:08:00.002-05:00

I have been hardcore neglecting my internet self and I wish I could say it was just because I've been busy. I have, but I've also been and continue to be deeply sad. (not depressed. sad.) harboring a broken heart for so long takes a surprising amount of energy and, aside from teaching, I haven't been good for much of anything in a long time. it's not as bad as it was at first, when I was lost in anhedonia, but "better" still seems like too strong a word.

and so, the silence.

so many things are different from the way they used to be that I'm not sure if it's possible to pick back up and just start writing again. I find myself not entirely capable of even replying to emails from old friends. I am not the same narrator, and I no longer delight in the storytelling. this present is not worth preserving.

2009-11-26T20:03:00.002-05:00

my darling and well-adjusted siblings. crust on the pumpkin pie. a career that I am, without exaggeration, deeply passionate about. sweet, challenging, inspiring eleventh graders. colleagues who work hard and play harder, just like me. prospect park. living a life in which no one even notices that I don't have a driver's license. the internet. coconuts and avocados. pens of many colors. stars.

2009-11-19T06:15:00.002-05:00

I feel like I've been inadvertently observing NOblopomo, though I suppose I just ruined it by posting this.

there have actually been dozens of things I wanted to write about in the past few weeks, but somehow there are always about seventeen concrete & specific things that are more important to do than write, as my neglected dissertation will attest.

the thing of it is, you know, teaching. it's the easiest job in the world if the goal is to have the kids thinking and experimenting and working and enjoying themselves. hugely consumptive of time, energy, patience, and creativity, but easy. I'm never, ever at a loss for what to do next.

but if your goal is to have the kids learn? really, truly LEARN in a way that changes their brains, lets them process information and make connections and understand a dynamic system of interacting physical processes that's full of feedback loops, even when most of the components are too big or small or distant to actually observe directly in our classroom? if your goal is to have the kids comprehend and do science, real science? (or, I'm sure, math or history or whatever...)

I haven't had every job in the world but this one is just crazy difficult.

(I love it anyway)

2009-10-15T19:56:00.002-04:00

we are sixty miles below the snow line, but it's still a bitterly cold rain that's falling through the yellowed leaves in brooklyn tonight. I'm walking home from the grocery store, two bags of supplies for tomorrow's lab looped over my left arm, with my raincoat's hood muffling all the noise of the street. halfway up the block I see a man lying on the sidewalk, one leg bent casually at the knee, and I wonder if he's channeling andy goldsworthy. a boy, tall but probably still in elementary school, is circling him on rollerblades, talking to him.

I'm not close enough to hear their conversation before the boy comes gliding towards me. as he passes, he says, "excuse me?" but when I turn, nodding, he says, "never mind" and skates past.

the man on the sidewalk is just a few buildings down, now, and as I walk towards him I see his legs start to shudder a bit, his shoulders arching off the wet ground. he's trying to get up but it's as if his arms are dead and useless. I'm nearly next to him and the closer I get the more pointedly he looks in any direction but at my face. he's willing me to keep walking, to leave him alone.

I take a few strides past, into the shadow of a tree. I watch over the corner of my shoulder as he rolls over and gets to his knees, tries to stand, and pitches forward onto the hard concrete. I turn to go home. I can't. I turn around and walk back to him.

"do you need help?"
"no, no. I'm fine." he is shrinking away from me as much as he can while lying flat against the sidwalk. I take a step back, trying to be unthreatening.
"do you want me to call anyone for you?"
"no. I'm fine."

he is wearing a t-shirt and jeans and moccasins. it's forty degrees and the raindrops have an icy edge to them. I wonder if it were me, trapped involuntarily in the spotlight of my apartment building's stoop, if I would be saying the same things to passing strangers. leave me alone; I'm fine. it's usually what I say when I'm not fine at all.

"do you live here?" he doesn't answer so I think that probably means yes. I walk over and peer into the hallway. there's a young woman -- younger than I am, I think -- walking out an apartment with a trash bag in her hand. I bang on the door until she comes over. her expression is a mixture of exasperation and impatience. I cringe in anticipation.

"I'm sorry," I say. "but do you know if this man lives here? I think he needs help."
she steps out into the rain her her sockfeet, recognizing her neighbor immediately. "oh!" she says, all annoyance gone from her face. "are you okay? do you want me to call your wife?"
"no, no! I'm fine."
"let me help you," she says, reaching for one of his arms. emboldened, I reach for the other. the smell of whiskey is a relief; at least he isn't having a stroke.

we lift him off the sidewalk, but his feet don't seem to be feeling the ground. the boy on the rollerblades is back -- he must have been watching from the end of the block -- and telling us in a relieved jumble of half-sentences that the man told him not to call 911, but his hand is bleeding, and he didn't want an ambulance. it's okay, we say. we've got him now. thank you for watching out for him.

the man's slippered feet have found the sidwalk.
"okay," he says. "I'm okay now." but his arm is heavy against my elbow.
"I'm sorry, I just don't think that's true," I tell him. "I'll take you inside," says the woman who still has the ties of her garbage bag looped around her other wrist. he acquiesces, letting her guide him towards the door. I lift him up the stairs and then let his arm slide free from my own. the pack of cigarettes in his back pocket is soggy, crushed flat.

I walk the rest of the way home with my groceries banging against the outside of my knee.

2009-08-28T11:22:00.002-04:00

yesterday I did some back to school shopping.

nothing much. just a new three hole punch to replace the one that I broke by getting a transparency stuck in it, and folders for all my advisees. when the cashier asked, "do you want to donate a dollar to help public schools?" I winced and said, "no, sorry... I'm donating all my extra dollars to my own classroom."

like most people I have often been reluctant to go back to school, but this is the first summer in years that I have felt quite so dismayed at the prospect. it's partly because the school system here is in the worst state I've seen it since I started teaching in 2003, but mostly it's because the summer has been so nice. not perfect -- one thing was missing, the same thing that's been missing from my life for the last thirteen months -- but happy and fun and, most atypically of all, relaxing. teaching is often happy and fun for me, but it is the perfect antithesis of relaxing.

one week left. I have to say I still don't feel much like writing.

2009-07-27T18:32:00.002-04:00

I wonder if it would be different if I'd started doing this as an adult, not a teenager. or if I had entered the blogging world as it exists today, with feedreaders and social networks and corporate sponsorship. or if I hadn't been writing online for what I just realized has now become more than half my life.

maybe it would be different, but maybe it wouldn't be. maybe it is just the case that the internet is kind of grossing me out these days and it doesn't matter how it used to be. (I still like the internet, of course, and I find twitter exceptionally useful for following local organizations. I don't believe you can ruin the internet. it exists to evolve.) I think it's almost certain that I would still be as cautious about being overly candid. and aren't the best personal blogs the ones whose authors have no self-censorship buttons?

none of this is to say that I am quitting the internet, but it all adds up to a lot of silence and not as much to say. I'm okay with that mostly. sometimes I miss feeling like people really wanted to know what I had to say, which is even weirder when I think that back then, I was freaking nineteen years old.

I'm going to turn twenty-eight in a week. on the one hand, that's ridiculous; it sounds impossibly grown up. like I am old enough to own an ironing board (which I do not, although I do have an iron, apparently for no reason) and a car (I still don't have a license) and all these other vague signifiers of adulthood that elude me. or perhaps I am eluding them. or perhaps these are arbitrary things that have nothing to do with age or maturity; my single friends -- not that there are many of those left -- all have roommates, a condition I can no longer imagine living in. and on the other hand, all year I sort of thought I was twenty-eight already, so it's not like anything is changing except that reality is catching up with my internal calendar.

it's a good thing that this will be an unmomentous birthday because I won't even be here to celebrate. I'll be in michigan, working, which I am pleased about in theory. I was contemplating packing myself a cupcake, but I don't know how well the frosting would survive a plane ride plus two days in a hotel. perhaps birthday brownies would be a better bet.

I honestly don't know when the next time I'll decide to write something will be. could be tomorrow, could be next month. but by all means, if there's anything you want to talk to me about, let me know. (except my heart. that is off limits.)

2009-07-02T12:44:00.002-04:00

summer!

last night I was lying on the grass in prospect park thinking about how many layers of nature & construction there were on each (front/back) side of me. I was faceup and above me there were mosquitoes, gnats, frisbees, bats, branches, leaves, clouds, airplanes, satellites, stars. beneath me: grass, soil, rocks, electric cables, subway tracks, water mains, sewer lines. you could feel the little quakes from the F train making its right-angle turn between the 15th street and 7th avenue stations, the rippling soundwaves pushing through the air from the bandshell, and the restrained electricity charging the clouds overhead. all at once.

I completely get nature, I do, but the city is where I feel connected to the planet.

2009-06-17T05:54:00.002-04:00

today is the day. --- it's funny, when I write that, I hear two things in my head:

if you go down in the woods today, you'd better go in disguise... today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

and georgia hubley crooning, today is the day. today is the day I think of you.

-- anyway, today is the day my students take their earth science regents exam, the state-mandated standardized test that determines whether they learned enough with me. in some cases it determines, albeit only partly, whether they will ultimately be allowed to graduate from high school. the kids already took the performance component of the exam, a perfunctory lab exercise in which they identify some earthen objects and draw ellipsoids representing a variety of things (earthquakes, orbits, what have you). they tore it up on the rocks & minerals, and if nothing else we can walk away from this year confident that my little group of concrete jungle kids know the difference between something igneous and something sedimentary. but the rest is all still up in the air.

for weeks I've been waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about this test. (I'm not the only one. the history teacher was apparently lecturing his girlfriend in his sleep about what she needed to study.) do birds know that there is a day when they'll have to shove their babies out of the nest, to fly or flail? or do they just do it when the time feels right? do they look at their broken fledglings, the splay-leg babies with crooked feathers, and dread the day their inadequacies must be put to the ultimate test? or are their tiny brains too stunted and conditioned by the cruelties of nature to care?

(it's six am and I've already been up for a while)

it kills me not to be able to sit next to the kids during the exam. not the kids who cut class or defiantly told me that I could bleed review materials and they wouldn't read them, necessarily (although I want them to succeed anyway). but the kids who know all the answers, but are so insecure that they need verbal confirmation before they'll commit anything to paper. the kids who know all the science, but get tripped up because they don't know the meaning of abundant or range or variation or vertical or apparent or features or... words, standardized tests are such a minefield of words, and I can hardly blame the kids for wanting to tiptoe away in the other direction. but to me the answers left blank are like the places where the most destruction is already done. I'm mixing metaphors here and I think they're verging on the inappropriate.

to keep myself from violating the laws of standardized testing conditions, I will sit down at the start of the exam for my ritual taking of the regents. first I zip through it by myself to test my own expertise -- my second year teaching I got a 99, which was upsetting, but taught me a lesson about the nitpickyness of the scoring procedure -- and then I go over each question to obsess about the degree to which I adequately covered its content. there's always one or two things on the regents that are worth a seemingly huge amount of points relative to the size of their share of the curriculum. like the infamous sand dune question of 2005 that has resulted in thousands of hapless high school students learning about wind erosion for no real reason in the four subsequent years.

and then finally I take the test as if I were my students, collectively, with all their odd conceptions and vocabulary quirks and tendencies to skip reading the important parts of the questions. that way I won't cry as much later, when I'm grading their answer booklets.

when I run I go through a sluggish phase towards the end, after three or four miles, and I have to force my feet to keep moving, dragging myself along in a slodgy jog so I won't lose my momentum. that's how it felt in the classroom for these weeks in june, just forcing ourselves towards the finish line, one labored step after another. but once I'm within a half mile of home, I lean forward, headfirst until I'm almost falling over, and my stride gets faster faster to keep up. that's today. today is the day we lean into the wind, jump out of the nest, and do our best not to fall.

it's weird how much I can hate these standardized tests and still find them so thrilling. all it really comes down to is this: I love my students. I want them to come out of this feeling good about science. I want them to win this stupid game, even if it is stupid.

2009-05-25T23:27:00.003-04:00

on some level I still think this video post thing is a terrible idea, but it's so easy! I recorded this at about 9:30 this morning right after I got home from my park run, and clearly I haven't managed to use it as a writing prompt, so what the hell. at least my mom will be happy to see me.

a few addendums:

1. if I ever do this again I will shower and change first. yeesh.

2. much like the dictionary, I don't have a consistent pronunciation of the word "banal." about half the time it's british-y, like here, and the other half of the time it rhymes with canal.

3. my favorite smell in the park is along one of the bridle trails, between the zoo and the nethermead. you run along and it just smells normal and woodsy, and then suddenly you get hit by a surge of sweet honeysuckle scent. it's like a little firework of fragrance.

4. it's easy to like the smells of the park, of course, but I also really like the smell of the city in the heat. the asphalt-bricks-concrete-metal-subway steam-cooking oil smell. every city's is a little different; the air of new york has a tang of sharpness in the summer that I've never smelled anywhere else. in boston the smell is more wet and mellow, like a cucumber.

5. when I was in seventh grade I thought the illustration on my shirt, with the girl and her cue reflected in the yellow ball, was very cool. I drew my own version of it but with ned hall, the main character of richard russo's the risk pool, instead.

things being what they are, I can't guarantee that it won't be another month before I manage to put something up here. (the last day of school is june 26.) if you're not disgusted by microblogging -- I sort of am but that seemingly hasn't stopped me from doing it -- here are a couple things you can look at for more frequent updates:
- my twitter feed, which shockingly dates back to 2006!
- my tumbl...whatever, which is almost entirely pointless.

(I almost just posted this without embedding the video! good job, brain.)

2009-05-02T20:30:00.003-04:00

today I was at school after all the other saturday school teachers had left. I wandered into my principal's office to ask her something and she said, "why are you still here?"

I said, "well, my subject takes so much physical prep time that I can't really do that and also do all the bulletin boards and filing and stuff during the week."

she said, ".... ohhhh."

I love that she cheerfully okays all my purchase orders -- I recently spent as much on rocks and minerals alone as I would bet the rest of my grade team has spent on all their supplies for the entire year -- even though she obviously hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about what I must be doing with them!

after the kids left this afternoon I got out the hot plates and made fresh ice. I threw a bunch of homemade sandstone against the floor so it would break into nice angular fragments, then cleaned that up and set them out along with the beakers, bottles, funnels, flashlights, marbles, rulers, hand lenses, reference tables, and filter paper for monday's lab. (physical weathering.) I photocopied 77 labs, warmup slips (or do nows or starters or whatever you want to call the thing you make the kids do the second they walk in the room because bell-to-bell instruction is required even if you don't have bells!), and homework assignments. I still didn't get very far with the bulletin boards, to be honest. I stapled up the six best rock classification thingies the kids did onto my classwork board and that was about it. I haven't even taken down the old projects on the hallway board yet.

all our bulletin boards have to be updated with brand-new work & stuff because our school quality review is this week. so they are actually just a tiny bit of the big picture of insanity that is my school right now. (do you non-NYC teachers have to do SQRs too? are they run by bafflingly british people?) I like talking about data and whatnot so I am feeling relatively sanguine about my role in everything, as long as I can get those silly bulletin boards finished. accountability, rah rah rah!

ps I've decided that it is more productive for me to spit out whatever comes to mind instead of pretending I will write about it someday. hence this sort of post. I hope it does not offend you.

2009-04-27T22:10:00.003-04:00

I wrote this on monday:

I'm feeling pretty good about life tonight after leaving my classroom all prepped with materials and photocopies for lab tomorrow, and getting home in time for a twilight jog through the park. my kitchen isn't exactly clean but as long as I'm washing more dishes than I'm dirtying, I'm preventing a hostile takeover in my sink. right?

now it's wednesday and I'm almost out of clean laundry so the kitchen sink is no longer a housekeeping priority. I'm pretty sure the rest of my post was going to be something about how I'm unable to conceive of large outdoor spaces as private property in spite of the amount of my childhood I spent running around outside. or something like that. but I have a very large amount of work to do instead. so it goes!

2009-04-17T15:51:00.002-04:00

c.c. the cat died peacefully this morning after eighteen good years. he was a chatty, personable guy with a loud purr and a bit of a swagger. in his old age he was allowed to sit at the table and eat off the dinner plates. the last time I saw him was over the winter holidays, when he decided to share our sugar cookies.

goodbye, ceecer. my family will miss you.

2009-04-16T14:21:00.003-04:00

today was an interesting day because I carried a stack of one hundred dollar bills around with me for most of the afternoon.

when I was in elementary school -- and bear in mind, as you read the rest of the this sentence, that elementary school in cambridge went all the way up through the eighth grade -- I opened my first checking account with fleet bank. because I was not even fourteen yet there were no fees on anything, ever. I deposited my babysitting money and, much later, my HHMI stipend money, and watched the tiny interest payments accrue penny by penny. about once a week I withdrew a small amount of cash from the atm -- always, always less than half of what I had deposited, a personal finance rule I followed dutifully until I moved into my own roommate-free one bedroom apartment, where my monthly rent alone was more than half of my paycheck -- which I was allowed to spend on used cds or magic cards or vhs copies of the first season x-files episodes.

at some point I started collecting first day covers, which are still stored inside their plastic slipcovers in two giant binders, presumably in my parents' basement. at another point I decided to buy cable for the family television -- entirely for the purpose of watching science fiction shows, I have to admit; have I become significantly less geeky since high school or did scifi peak in the nineties? because now all I watch with any consistency is the daily show, on hulu -- and every month I mailed off my checks and saved the invoice stubs in my filing box.

(I am making myself sound like a wicked fun teenager right now, am I not? I also stayed up until 2 am every night eating toaster waffles and playing star trek trivia on AOL!)

anyway, the bank account served me well and then I went to college, where I joined the credit union that everyone belonged to, and then I graduated from college and moved to new york city and opened a bank account with the bank that has a branch on every freaking corner, including the corner at the end of the block where I lived in midwood. (it also has a branch across the street from the subway stop nearest my apartment now.) in the meantime, fleet had merged to become bankboston and later was bought by bank of america. I left the old checkbooks in my drawer and never used them, but I didn't quite get around the closing the account. it was, after all, free to leave it there.

last week I transferred the contents of my savings account, minus a token bit to leave for continuity purposes, into my checking account. then I wrote a check for that entire amount, went a bit cross-eyed over what I was about to do, tore it out and handed it over to a lawyer. (this is a whole different story and one I can't really tell until I know what the end is, which I don't at this point. it's nothing bad, just uncertain.) after doing a little math and realizing that I would be left with about forty dollars after that check was cashed, I decided it was finally time to bite the bullet and collect the remainder of my high school earnings.

when I closed the account I was expecting the teller to print me a cashier's check or something along those lines. but no: she opened a drawer and counted out a frightening number of large bills, hundreds and then a fifty and some twenties and a ten and some singles. (if I'd had two more dollars in the account I think I would have gotten at least one bill of every denomination, so that was a missed opportunity for a fun happenstance. oh well.) plus a little handful of change, which struck me as a bit comically absurd. all told it was not a huge amount of money by any means, about a month's salary, but certainly more cash than I've ever seen in real life before. It felt like something that people do in the movies, right before they run away to a foreign country and assume an alternate identity.

it was amazing, too, how despite the heaviness of that money in my pocket, it felt like free money that had come from nowhere. it had no obligation to buy me groceries or pay my utility bills, and there was so much of it right there in my hand that I could do anything I wanted! I could walk into a store and pick out anything I wanted and just hand over a wad of cash! I could throw it into the air and leave it to be collected by happy children! (except, in park slope, that would be... stupid.) I could take it home and hide it under my mattress! I could run away and live in hotels for a week!

instead I allowed myself to buy one grapefruit popsicle. then I took the rest of it to the bank, where I watched all the bills disappear into the atm, one by one by one, flickering like a the pages of a flipbook showing benjamin franklin sitting very, very still.

2009-04-11T14:07:00.003-04:00

so I worked nonstop for six weeks straight and then I chaperoned the world's longest field trip (well, just two days, but it felt like an eternity) and then I went to germany:

and I didn't even bring any grading with me! more soon.

2009-03-26T23:32:00.002-04:00

the other day one of my students asked me, "rabi, why are you always so happy?"

if it had been someone else I might have rolled my eyes or laughed. but because it was one of the kids, I smiled and said, "well, I'm always happy when you see me, because I like my job!"

right now as I sit here under my pile of grading, surrounded by things I should have taken care of weeks ago -- unopened bills, unwatered plants, unfilled prescriptions -- that sounds utterly laughable. always so happy. ha. but I meant it at the time, and I'll mean it again tomorrow. if I didn't, how else could I justify working from seven in the morning until eleven at night, every day, after day after day?

(somehow even with all that work I'm still wretchedly far behind on grading.)

I do realize that this is one of the whiniest things I've ever posted publicly. I apologize. if I weren't a complete and total stressball I would at least try to make it poetic whining, but no.

2009-03-05T06:15:00.004-05:00

AMNHaiku

glowing globes reveal
chaotic ocean currents
push of a button.

blue red pink red red
cold and hot anomaly--
steadily warmer.

a happy surprise
solar can (em)power us
one hundred percent!

squid and whale admired.
kids caressing amphibole.
field trip: successful.

(bad haiku are more interesting than a post that says, "I don't even have time for complete sentences right now," yes?)

2009-02-21T20:46:00.003-05:00

check it out: ugly boots in action in vermont! this video is mostly of rick and sarah's sheep, but stay tuned all the way through for the pups and cupcakes. needless to say I had a lovely visit.

2009-02-20T19:26:00.001-05:00

on my long train ride yesterday from soggy new york to snowy vermont, I contemplated the ugliness of my snow boots. it's not that they're offensively garish or clashy or any of the other things that usually qualifies something as ugly in my book. they're just black snow boots, with laces and velcro straps that tighten around the ankle. but they are... ugly. they're utilitarian, inelegant, masculine, a bit on the militaristic side. I got them as hand-me-downs from my younger brother several years ago, enough years that his feet were only slightly larger than mine instead of nearly twice as big, the way they are now. nonetheless they are the kind of boots that a teenage boy would wear before he has begun to worry about being stylish.

this is the first year in a while that we've had enough snow hanging around on the sidewalks for me to need to wear my snowboots out and about, instead of just when I'm playing in the park. I was chagrined to realize that, when forced to wear the black combat-ready clompers to school, I wished I had a prettier pair. not necessarily a girly pair of snowboots. just one that was not so ugly.

worse, I realized that what was really stopping me from buying new snow boots was not so much my environmentalist convictions -- consume as little as possible -- but that I couldn't really afford them. like everyone else in the country, I've been working a little harder to pinch (or stretch?) my pennies this year, although for me it has less to do with the collapsing economy than my perhaps-foolish decision to live alone in my two-bedroom apartment after the summer departure of my housemate. so now, to keep paying the rent and the bills without draining my savings account, I don't buy new (even secondhand, new-to-me) clothes or shoes, particularly when I have perfectly functional if unattractive things in my wardrobe already. if my students have noticed that I wear the same pair of jeans three days a week, they haven't mentioned it.

anyway the upsetting aspect of this isn't that I wish I had different boots. my boots are fine. but the thought that I might have just gone out and gotten new ones, just because I wanted them, is bothering me. I think wanton consumption is wrong yet I could have convinced myself that it was somehow justified if my boots were too ugly.

I do understand why people are worried about stimulating the economy. I don't want working class families to be hurt by layoffs and the inability to pay for actual necessities. but I hope that, as we collectively find that we can no longer afford to buy new stuff left and right, we decide that we actually don't need that stuff. and I hope that in working to rebuild the economy, we are smart enough to realize that we have to base it on something beyond material goods. we can recondition ourselves to believe that ugly, used, warm, waterproof boots are perfectly wonderful, and then spend our money on things like train tickets to snowy vermont, where they can be put to good use.

2009-02-17T08:29:00.003-05:00

I'm on vacation! at least in the sense that I don't have to get up and go to school every day. yesterday I made color-coded lists of things that need to get done. I made my dissertation list day-glo orange in the hopes that the color would give it some urgency. then I took my lists and parceled them out across the week, so that each day (except friday when I will be visiting friends and sheep) has a rainbow to-do list of its own.

I didn't put "update wockerjabby" on any of my lists which sort of means right now I'm doing something I'm not supposed to, but I was hoping it might happen a little more organically. even if that means some short entries. it's weirdly tiring carrying around all the things in my head that I would like to write about but don't have time.

right now, however, I am off to "print & mail franklin mint form," to actually get the money out of the credit union account I haven't touched since I graduated from college in 2003. there's a to-do list item I've been failing to cross out for years.

2009-01-31T22:15:00.003-05:00

the kids were only in school from 9:15 to 12:45 this week, for standardized testing and final exams, so I spent a fair amount of time alone in my classroom. at some point I decided it would be funny to record myself...

... I can't imagine it's particularly interesting to anyone who's not either a teacher, a student, or my mom. but I was amused to see how much time I apparently spend climbing up on things. that's me: professional paper-wrangler and chair-climber. best job ever!

2009-01-17T22:29:00.002-05:00

it was difficult, after a day spent huddled in layers of fabric and fleece, to crawl out from under my blankets and brave the cold air just for the sake of a forty-minute elliptical jog at the gym. once there, of course, I was glad I went, glad to feel the heat radiating from my bare arms and the sweat collecting in the hair at the nape of my neck. the worst thing about a sedentary day is that you don't get to feel your body working.

I brought the newest new yorker with me and glanced back and forth between it and a basketball game while I ran. (basketball is one of the few sports I find intrinsically boring, which tells you something about how good this nyer was. the article on breastfeeding might have been interesting if it had gone anywhere beyond what anyone with even a passing interest in workplace feminism has already red. but it didn't.) lately I've fallen into the bad habit of reading the author's name at the end of each poem before I decide whether it's worth reading and this month I was startled to see the name of my freshman year english professor after the anticipatory emdash. I read the first verse and laughed because it sounded just like how she talks. this same person who called my eighteen-year-old self "outrageous and compelling," nearly ten years ago, talking to me from the pages of a magazine I've been reading almost my whole life. is it a small world or have I just failed to look beyond the horizons of my hyperliterate upbringing?

(then again. I often feel that I've failed to live up to that particular part of my culture, seeing as how I tend to skip half of the new yorker and probably thirty percent of harper's every month. and when I get JEM I rarely read beyond the table of contents.)

at the gym, the other nearby television was showing cnn's coverage of obama's arrival in washington by train. the font they were using made it look as though the caption advertising "the inauguration of barack obama" said "the inauguration OR barack obama." as if we could only have one or the other; either a new president or the barack obama we have now, the one we have placed all our hopes and faith in, the one who's going to pull us back from the brink of disaster.

and both obamas can't exist, of course, because the fantasy savior obama is different for everyone, and so will disappoint everyone in a different way. what I am most hopeful, and most nervous, about is the possibility that science will once again be seen as a valuable, meaningful way of knowing, not just that weird and kind of annoying way that certain people think. a way of thinking is so easily dismissed, like an opinion you can just disagree with if you don't like it. my greatest wish for the future of my government, the future now entrusted, for the first time, to a person for whom I voted, is that it will be reasonable in the most literal sense of the word.

(I also hope that obama will learn to stop starting his otherwise-respectful replies with a dismissive "look." because, look, you sound like a patronizing ass if you do that. don't you think?)

as we approach the second semester of the school year, we've begun to look at our students' credit and regents (standardized test) accumulation with more solemnity. and, to be honest, fear. it is a frightening situation. I won't bore you with the details, but the upshot is that our twelfth graders (who do not yet exist -- I am currently teaching the founding class of students at our new school, who are now in the eleventh grade) may not take either math or science. I understand why; the state requires only three years worth of math and science credits, and they could run out of time for credit recovery in the subjects that our government has deemed more important. low graduation rates will hurt us in a number of ways, so on a practical level we have to do everything we can to get out students to graduate on time. on a philosophical level I think this is absurd; if I had begun ninth grade with the same deficit in skills that my students have, I would have needed much longer than four years to be ready for college, much less adult life.

on an emotional level it breaks my heart to think that my school will buy into that mentality that says that science is somehow less, less useful, less worthwhile, less fundamental. when I was interviewing the principal told me up front that they had not made science a priority, and I knew and understood that -- when you are starting a school, much as when you are starting a career, you can only do so many things well at a time. but when we see science as a collection of facts, or as the purview of the wealthy, overeducated, and hyperliterate, we lose one of the most powerful and beautiful aspects of our humanity. we lose a way of knowing. not the only way, but one that is distinct from any other. without that way of knowing, we are less than we could be.

I don't want less for my students, or for my country. I want more.

it took me long enough to write this, in fits and spurts between meals and work and football games, that it is now time to go to the gym again. this time the afc championship is on so I don't think I will need to bring a magazine.

2009-01-13T22:19:00.001-05:00

(hey, when is someone going to invent that brain-to-text device?)