AEJR

A Portrait of the Teacher as a Student

2010-01-31T05:57:00.000-08:00

Until this past year, I always introduced myself to my students the same way. I told them that I'd been an adjunct English instructor for (1-6) years. I told them that I was a huge nerd and that I'd started writing stories when I was seven. But - I added - I didn't expect them to be nerds for English. I expected many of them to feel about English the way I felt about Math - absolute hatred and disgust.

It was bullshit. I took for granted that it had been ten years since I had to take Math. And while I knew that bringing their interests into the classroom would invest my students in their work, I did not yet understand what it meant to be a good teacher. I did not know how to help them do well.

I had to take Math again first.

Let me explain my life. As well as an adjunct, I'm a writer, MFA grad, who returned to school for certification upon realizing I prefer the classroom to the writing desk. Pretty early in my first semester, I got the bad news - I needed three more credits in Math.

"Math?" said my mother. "But you're an English teacher!"

I just nodded, well trained in jumping the flaming hoops of academia.

The first day of Math class, I was late. I was late to the second class too. And the third. And the fourth. Back in the day - I wouldn't have dared be late to any class. But now, my life was too full. I had stacks of papers to grade. I had yoga. I couldn't go to Math class with my chakras out of whack and my third eye off center, now could I?

Every morning, I trudged in, head hanging, feeling like a jackass. The students - all ten years younger than me - looked at me like I was a jackass. I waited to hear my teacher, Prof. Nitica, reprimand me. But every morning, he said nothing.

Within a few weeks, I realized that was Prof. Nitica. He never gave anyone a hard time. Not the obnoxious music major rockstars-in-training that talked all during class. Not the dim-witted sports who gazed out the window instead of paying attention.

He was easy.

The material was not. It was all logic, truth tables, and these geometric anomalies called Euler paths - stuff I couldn't explain to you now if I tried. But I could do it. Because Prof. Nitica organized the material so efficiently that everyone did well.

We worked like dogs for the first few weeks. Then just before midterm, the homework and tests stopped. We completed small in-class assignments until midterm ended. One day in class, it dawned on me what he was doing. He was testing us when we were at our best.

In order to pass each test, I had to study for - at least - a full afternoon. That's really not asking too much of a student. That's a gift - compared to how things were when I was an undergrad. Thanks to those little in-class assignments and the practice tests, I knew exactly what was on each test.

This repetition helped me the most. In class, Prof. Nitica was like a broken record. He repeated himself so much, he sometimes dropped the tone of his voice, mimicking a robot. Nobody laughed. But I always shot him a grateful smile.

When it came to Math, I needed to hear the same lesson over and over again. It was as if I'd moved to Mexico and tried to learn Spanish by immersion. On the third try, I'd hear the roots of what I already knew and begin to make sense of the language.

By the end of the semester, I was skipping yoga to make it to Math on time. I had an A-plus in the class. On my desk at home sat a pile of scrap paper - notes I'd been taking on how to revise my English class.

Every teacher is taught the importance of empathy, structure and repetition in the classroom. However, it's hard to understand why these components work when you are a master of the subject. Most teachers are lucky enough to love what they teach. Most students don't love what they learn. That's a pretty big gap to fill in forty-five minutes.

Prof. Nitica taught me one way to bridge that gap. In his math class, he cared about what mattered most. What mattered most was that his students did well. Once I became one of those students, I saw how much it mattered to me too.

Home is Wherever I'm with You

2009-09-19T05:29:00.001-07:00

Around this time last year, I ran into an old high school acquaintance at the gym.

"Hi Anney," he said. "Are you home from Boston?"

"No, I moved back. For good."

He stepped back and scowled "Why?" he asked. Like the idea of moving from a hip city like Boston to bumf--- Phoenixville, Pennsylvania was absurd. Like I was really uncool. Like we were back in high school again.

"Because it's my home," I stammered. It was the best I could do at that moment. Flustered and embarrassed, I walked away.

That was a year ago.

I still remember exactly where I was when I decided to move home: a train station in Leeds, UK. Out the window, Leeds looked like a crap town to me. But people poured out of the train. I saw moms and grandmoms, businessmen, teenagers, recent college grads on their cellies, even sleek pretty ladies in power suits. Why, I wondered, are these people here? They could live anywhere! Why here?

A voice answered from the back of my head: Because it's their home. Their family and friends are here. So what if it's an ugly town? Buildings can be torn down. It's people that make a place.

Oh my God, I thought. I am so lonely. I need to move home.

If my life was a movie, the credits would've rolled as I planed back to the states. There would be a montage of scenes, showing me starting over. Packing liquor boxes with books and candles. Driving Yoshi onto the Mass Pike, headed south. Dragging my bags up my parents' driveway. Walking across Molly Maguire's to hug my friends hello. Driving to Phoenixville Hospital in the rain, and stepping into the room where my BFF of 22 years just gave birth to her daughter. "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros would play. "Home, yes I am home, Home is wherever I'm with you." There would be the prevailing "happily ever after" feeling, like everything would be fine now.

My life is no movie.

Shortly after I moved back, everything went to shit. Jobs disappeared. Next, money. I couldn't afford to move out of my parents' house. Try living in a house with five other adults. Scratch that. Make that five other adults that are part of your family. See how much you get done. Answer: Not much.

Our house is a four bedroom Colonial. For the past year, I've camped out on my sister's floor. The fiction book I've been writing has lay in scraps of paper, piled up under her bed. My clothes, balled and wrinkled, in a Tupperware bin behind the door. To be fair, my sister was incredibly welcoming. She treated the room like it was ours, instantly. She was way more gracious than I would've been. But still. It's hard to get your life together when there's nowhere to organize it, besides the floor.

All over the house, there were signs of it being overcapacity. The fridge door never closed right. Inside, there were four different kinds of milk. Mom's lunch chicken. Matthew's rice. Moira's yogurt. My tofu. Racks of clothes hung along the upstairs hallway. Almost every night, I'd get up to use the bathroom and stumble into one of the racks. All the clothes would fall to the floor. Every morning, we fought each other for the shower. Sunglasses and keys were lost. Nobody ever got their mail.

So, yeah. Be careful what you wish for. In four months, I became the polar opposite of lonely. I couldn't get a peace of mind.

From time to time, the question resurfaced. Anney -- Why did you move back home? With it, came this awful shadowy monstrous doubt. What if I made the wrong choice?

Last winter, I got proactive. I started taking classes to get certified to teach secondary ed. Classes rejuvenated me in a way that story publications never ever could. Yet I continued to stress out. It was impossible to cram all of my new interests into a single day. I started to wonder if happiness was impossible too.

Then, this one horrible day, it came to me.

It was late last January. I was rushing around in the morning, late for class. It was snowy out. I was racing back inside from scraping off my car, when my one leg flew out from under me. My right leg went one way, my left, the other - 'til I was breaking a split in the middle of our front hall. I got up and realized that I'd pulled muscles from the sole of my foot up through my calf and thigh, to my ass.

Did I email my professors, telling them of my injury? No way. I drove the snowy thirty minute drive with two feet. I hobbled around campus. I held up lines of people on the stairs.

Halfway through the day, I found out that I'd been denied financial aid. This meant that I had to pay for five classes straight outta my pocket. Then, I failed a test. Spilled food on my favorite shirt. Broke my ipod. You name it, it happened. Driving home that night, I got pulled over on route 113 and was given a ticket for speeding five miles over the limit.

When I got home, I lumbered into the warm kitchen. My dad had Bill O'Reilly blasting and was screaming "Screw you" at Obama. My youngest sister, who hates my guts for moving home, shot me a glare from the family room, as if to say: Don't you even think of coming in here. My mother was doing school work in the living room. Upstairs, I escaped to my little bit of floor, where my other sister was on the phone with her boyfriend, going, "Squeeeeeeeee!"

There was nowhere for me to go.

I dove into the shower. Turned it on as hot as it would go. Then I squat down in the tub and bawled my head off. I squished my eyes together so hard and grit my teeth and squeezed the tears out of me as hard as birth. When I was done, I straightened up, finished washing up, got out and went back to the room.

My sister was off the phone and reading a Yoga magazine.

I said to her: "I just had the worst day of my entire life. And I'm still happier than I was last year."

"Good," she said.

I opened up my journal and wrote down one of my favorite quotes: "Home is where you move fluently through darkness." It's from a story by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. When I first read it, I committed it to memory, just because. I don't think I understood it completely until now.

Yes, I'm banging into the racks of clothes in the hallway. Yes, I'm getting pulled over on 113. Yes, I'm crying in the shower. But I'm home.

Shut Your Mouth

2009-09-05T15:49:00.000-07:00

I went to the recycling center today in a dress. This didn't seem odd to me. But upon walking through the gate, this guy called out, "Hey, you're over-dressed!"

"Not really," I replied, in my snottiest voice.

Sometimes I really like myself.

It's true that the recycling center is kinda like a garbage dump. But whatever. It was hot out. When it's hot, I rock the dress. The damn thing only cost me ten bucks.

The comment didn't get under my skin. It amused me. The inability of proper attire is a talent of mine. The older I get, the more confused I get about the rules. No matter how much I try to pay attention to style and fashion and all that crap, I continue to miss the mark.

As a kid, I dressed as a rainbow. My favorite outfit included a bright orange Flyers t-shirt that hung down to my knees, turquoise stretch pants, a pink hoodie and pink Chuck Taylors. Of course - this was the eighties. Didn't everyone dress like that? We preferred big, loud colors. Most girls knew how to put those colors together.

In high school, I stripped my hair white blond and invented my own look. One of my boyfriends at the time dubbed it as the "I don't care" look. I disagreed with the name. I DID care. My clothes only looked like I didn't. My clothes all came from the thrift store. I wore ripped t-shirts with my old Catholic school uniform, Boy Scout socks, and combat boots that came up to half my shin.

Honestly? This was probably the most happiest I ever was with how I looked.

I do pretty well as a grownup. I mean, I do well when I'm not wearing dresses to garbage dumps. Although my BFF did tell me a couple days ago that my new pocketbook looks like something her grandmother would buy.

The best thing about the exchange at the recycling center had to be my reply. I squinted at the guy hard, shook my head, and spat, "Not really." Something stirred in my chest. My heart gave gave a kick. Then I knew. Rainbow Brite and Courtney Love are alive and well. Both take up residence in some quirky bitch corner of my brain. Finally, I don't have to let the world know they are in there.

It makes me wonder. How many of us actually change as we grow up? How many of us have simply learned to keep our mouths shut?

A Slightly Revised Journal Entry from May

2009-07-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

I've never had a perfect mother. By perfect, I mean, one whom I could say anything to. Of course, all mothers say to their children: "You can tell me anything." But they don't really mean it. That anything can be hurtful.

In my waking this morning, I saw that - like everything else - I don't really need a perfect mother. She is the Earth. She is, what Jung called, the collective subconscious. She is this new, second voice in me.

It is so nice to talk to her. Especially after a lifetime of trying to talk to "God" and hearing only silence. Finally, there's a voice. While it comes from inside me, it's not my own. I don't know how else to explain it.

This voice pulls ideas out of thin air that I've never thought before. This voice does not share the same color as my logic. If anything, this voice is VERY logical. We all know that I am not. This voice likes me, and a hell of a lot more than I like myself.

Some examples.

I have been swimming for thirty minutes. I have reached my twenty laps. I want to stop. The voice inside me says, "Ten more." I say, "But I don't feel well." The voice replies, "I know. But do ten more laps anyway." And I do ten more.

I am tired. I want coffee. I want chocolate. I want french fries and ranch dressing. I want Pizza Hut pizza. The voice inside me says, "But then, you will feel sick. You are worth it to feel well. Drink some green tea instead." And I do. And I bounce back.

After a few months of this, I had to come up with a name for the voice. I started calling her, Gaia. That's the Greek name for Mother Earth. I didn't have to think too hard on it. That's the name that came to me first. That's what she wanted to be called.

Gaia works for me, because my Catholic upbringing has me associating the supposed higher power with some heavy strong-sounding G-word. And while I've stopped believing in God over the last year (shockers!), I do believe that nature has a heartbeat. That heartbeat has a spirit. That spirit has a voice.

So eventually, I got to the deeper, soul-searching questions.

Today, at dawn, half between sleep and waking, I asked Gaia: Why does everyone like me better when I don't talk? Why does the room go quiet and uncomfortable when I speak? Why is it that when I speak, volcanoes explode, streets crack and crumble and bubble up with blood, winds pick up livestock and blow cattle off farms, and people run away screaming?

All of my life, I have the same answer for this question. Simply, I'm an idiot. I'm socially inept. I'm a dumb-ass who needs to keep her mouth shut.

Gaia replied differently. She said, "Because you have a powerful voice."

This is something I would NEVER say to myself.

Out my bedroom window, I heard a rumble. A plane gutted the sky overhead.

"Hear that plane?" said Gaia. "That's how you should learn to speak. Be like a plane moving through the sky. It makes noise as it passes through air. As should you make noise when passing through life. Speak when it's NECESSARY."

Then, I cried a little. Cos for the first time, everything was starting to make sense.

I got out of bed. The hallway smelled like my sisters' skin. I inhaled, wondering if their future husbands and children will notice it, or appreciate it like I do. It's a lovely smell. Not fresh, but not dirty. A little sweaty, dewy, summery. It's just bits of them, bits of their cells, loosening up into the air. It's the sweat of their dreams. Air prayer.

When they wake, they are too dopey to smell it. Distracted by the day ahead, they wonder: Where are my glasses? What time is it? Where is my phone?

But if they took a second to linger, could they smell it? Or is it like knowing the sound of our own voices, the look of our own expressions? We are buried too deep in the caverns of ourselves. It's impossible to truly know how amazing we all are.

We need a mother to tell us.

Fred

2009-06-24T22:14:00.000-07:00

I drank this water today. It reminded me of vodka. Or shampoo.

It was the bottle's fault. The clear taste of water didn't quite match the shape. Long. Thin. The lift and pour into my mouth felt so off. It reminded me of something.

Mad Dog.

Remember Mad Dog? Probably not, unless you were a teenager in the nineties and you grew up in Pennsylvania. It was like the Starbursts of alcohol. Like Kool Aid left out on the back porch for a couple days. Mixed with fluoride treatment & Novocaine. What you drank when you had enough in your pocket for two forties of St. Ides or Old English, but wanted to get more bang for your buck. And by "bang," I mean "effed up."
I never had that kinda money back in the day. I had to wait 'til college to try Mad Dog. One night, some friends discovered a way to make it taste good. We mixed it with Gatorade. Passed it around. Our eyebrows collectively shot to the ceiling.

"We have to tell everyone about this!" I hollered to my college boyfriend. "This is OUR NEW DRINK."

Taste good? Yes. Like liquid Jolly Ranchers. Or whatever candy makes you taste sugar fruity-licious heaven.

Good for you? Absolutely not.

Consider the mixers. Mad Dog: Alcohol and chemicals. Gatorade: Electrolytes and sugar. Put the two together. Electrolytes rush that alcohol all over your body as fast as possible.

Within a span of two hours, the party went schizo. We drank. We sang. We fought. We screamed. We cried. We puked. We said, Never again.

And for once, we meant it.

You know you've got a bad beverage when college kids won't touch it. The next day, we went back to our six packs of Beast and Schlitz. Boxes of Franzia. Icehouse. Bongs. Bowls. CO2 tanks. Whatev. No more hard stuff.

Fast forward ten years. Today, I am afraid to touch tap water. Splenda scares the bejesus out of me. When it comes to alcohol, I'm like Stanley from "The Office." In an old episode, he says, "I drink a glass of red wine once a week for the antioxidants."

When it comes to getting wasted, there's just not enough time in the day for it. There's more important things to do. If getting wrecked was really worth it, 99% adults would be walking around drunk and stoned every day.

Sobriety isn't just a simple convenience. The older I get, the more and more I've become the kind of person I hated as a kid. A listener of Classical music. A fan of public radio. A patron of libraries. A grower of plants. I think going to the farm is fun. Vegetables are incredibly cool.

Maybe grownups are, as a species, nerds?

Maybe it's just me.

The older I get, the more I realize that nerds are the lucky ones anyway. 'Cos with the drinking and the drugs comes drama. I've had enough of that for one lifetime.

Now when I drink, I drink to my health. And yours. Thanks, Fred.

I Plead the Fifth

2009-03-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

If you haven't noticed, I haven't been blogging. Like, at all. But I got a good excuse.

I went back to school. This semester, I'm a teacher and a student, teaching two classes and taking five. If all goes well, I will have my secondary ed certification in two years.

It's something I've been putting off since... forever. I kinda knew since I was very young that I was meant to be a high school English teacher. Teenagers fascinate me. So does literature. In front of the classroom is the only place I've found where I can stand and feel completely at ease with being a total dork. Plus, I like to think I'm pretty good at teaching. Not that I feel like I know what I'm doing. Seven years as an adjunct has left me with lots of questions, but no answers. But when I enter the classroom, I bring those questions, because I know there are no solid answers. That's why I get up every morning. Because I want to keep learning.

They say, those who can't do, teach. I think it's true, sometimes. Toni Morrison might have some beef with it. For me, becoming a secondary ed teacher is less about giving up writing, and more about giving myself a base.

Before I can feel at ease to write, I need a place to live. I need a dentist. I need to know that I can go to the hospital if I slip on some ice outside and break my leg. I need contact lens solution. Blankets. Hot water bottles. Trees outside the window. Paper in the printer. Veggies in the fridge. It may sound superficial, but without all that stuff, I feel like I'm writing FOR it.

Stephen King said it best: Writing is not a support for life. Believe me, I've lived it. For the past seven years, my future well being hinged on every single word I put on the page. When I wasn't agonizing, I was rushing through everything, worried that there wasn't enough hours in the day. It's just not worth it.

So... yeah. I'm out. For now. Hopefully I'll be back in the summer.

The Old Fake Fever

2009-02-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

I had my first Valentine's Day with a boyfriend when I was in the 7th grade. It's a memory that has stayed with me. I didn't really like the guy.

For the sake of minimal privacy, let's call him Rabbit. He looked like one. He was the nerdiest guy in our class. I was the nerdiest girl. We were straight out of the "Nerds" movie with greasy hair and glasses and rabbity front teeth.

It didn't stop at looks. He was obsessed with the TV show "In Living Color." He liked to come to school with a stuffed sock and beat younger kids over the head with it. He prefaced all the boys' names with "Uncle." Except he pronounced it "Unca." So Chris was Unca Chris. Nick was Unca Nick. After getting a free poster of a kitten from the Scholastic Book Club, he drew a Hitler mustache and swastikas on it and hung it from the front of his desk, without a word of explanation to anyone.

Me? I talked without thinking. I was obsessed with Nickelodeon's "Hey Dude." At recess I sat on the blacktop with a notebook and wrote poetry and stories.

Really, who else was going to be my first boyfriend?

Now, when you have a boyfriend or girlfriend in the seventh grade, it doesn't mean much. You smile at each other. Sometimes you swing side by side on the playground. You write notes.

In the beginning, it was easy. Like having a boy for a good friend. Despite Rabbit's sock abuse and unintentional anti-semitism, he was a nice guy. Sometimes he told me that I was pretty. The compliment made my face hot and my nose smell like burning. I thought that meant that I liked him back.

Then came Valentine's Day.

The week before, Rabbit told our class that he planned some big surprise for me. The boys, being Catholic School boys, joked that the surprise was fellatio. On the bus, they told porno stories, starring Rabbit and me. I quickly grew tired of shouting at them to "shut the hell up" and sunk down low in my seat.

It suddenly occurred to me what it meant to have a boyfriend.

The morning of Valentine's Day, I pulled a trick on my mom. The old fake fever. Kids on TV were always trying it with a lamp and failing. I had discovered the right way. With the thermometer stuck in my mouth, I clutched my fist around it and gripped it TIGHT. Mom came and checked the digits, and wouldn't you know? I had a slight fever.

All day, I watched "In Search Of" with Leonard Nimoy and ate butterscotch krimpets. The morning wore on. I felt sicker and sicker.

My best friend Nikki called an hour or two after school let out. It had been her job to tell Rabbit that I didn't want to be his girlfriend anymore.

"He came to school with this gigantic heart-shaped box of chocolates," she said. "When I told him it was over, he opened the box and threw the chocolates up in the air. All the boys were diving around, trying to catch them."

"I feel so bad," I gasped. "But I don't like him."

"You can't help how you don't feel," she said. "He just wasn't 'the one'."

She said this, as if it meeting "the one" was possible at twelve-years-old. Only nerdy girls think this way.

We wanted to meet "the one," because it would help us feel good about ourselves. Once we got boyfriends, we'd transcend all the mean things the boys at school had ever said about us. We'd love ourselves too. We'd know that deep down, we were okay.

Or so we thought.

The next day at school, Rabbit treated me as if nothing had happened. Instantly, we went back to being friends. I felt so grateful. But not so grateful that I saw the forgiveness for what it was. (Validation, maybe?) Some of the boys in our class called me a cold bitch. They said it with a smirk. I smiled proud. I liked it. It was better than being called a dork.

And then, I tripped through the rest of the non-Valentine's days of my youth to arrive at now. Here. Thirty years old. Single on Valentine's Day. What can I say?

I still feel as ugly, weird and self conscious as I did back then. I just care about it less. Today, I can see forgiving and forgetting for what it is. Someone saying, Hey, you're okay. I like you.

Thank God I don't need that anymore.

Adventures with Me and Yoshi

2008-12-02T12:54:00.000-08:00

I started talking to my car right after I bought it.

At six am, on the morning when I was to start teaching at a new school, I greeted him.

"Good Morning, Yoshi," I said.

Our talks continued. On the way to and from work, I talked to him about what was bugging me. When drivers cut me off, I bitched: "Omigod, Yosh. Can you believe that guy?" One night, I was pulling bags out of the trunk, when it came down suddenly, on my head. I yelled at him like a Dad: "Yoshi!"

In my family, it's tradition to name our cars. Currently, we have five. There's George the Geo, Cam the Camry, Holly the Honda, Vercingetorex the Voyager, and Yoshi the Yaris. Each name was carefully considered, alongside several options, and the personality and look of the car. At my house, we don't mess around.

It's hard not talk to a car after its been named. As with any pet, or child, once a name is given, a personality seems to follow, inexplicably. Yoshi has been no exception. He's just like a little boy. He likes to go fast. He growls whenever I hit the brakes. He's also very helpful. Sometimes he goes and gets gas while I'm at work. I'll climb into the driver's seat and find that I have more gas than I did when I left him.

"Thanks, Yosh," I say.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. Duh, Anney. You need to get your gas gauge checked, before you run out on the highway at two o'clock in the morning.

I say, me and Yosh, we got a bond. You don't even know.

Two weeks ago, the first snow of the season dusted down over southeastern PA. Most of the area got only flurries. There was a small area, just outside of Philly, that suffered a mild blizzard. KYW called it "the red belt." My commute took me straight through it.

At a quarter to eight, Yoshi and I were stopped on winding, snow-covered back roads. Cars were backed up everywhere. Because the snow had fallen during rush hour, it was packed into ice. Everyone was being extra careful, inching at a wheelchair's pace. Of course, there's no point in going slow on ice. Ice is ice. Wheels can't catch on it. Up and down route 352, people were coming out of their homes to help push cars that were stuck, wheels spinning aimlessly.

Yosh and I watched as the guy in front of us struggled to coast down a small hill. Every time he tried to go foward, his car slid sideways, an the embankment.

"What are we gonna do, Yosh?" I moaned.

The roads contributed to half of my nervousness. My tank was almost out of gas. Also, I had only a vague idea of where I was, having started teaching at a new school this fall.

Route 352 was our usual route home. Within moments, cars cleared it. I gazed at the hill ahead of us. It was winding and white, like a scene from an ABC Family Christmas special, just before the entrance of a jingling wintry sleigh from the evergreens. There was no way we'd make it up.

We turned around. Major highways passed by on the right and left. Route 3. Route 202. I imagined the mess that awaited us, if we took either one. In our area, the word "highway" means "drive really fast, no matter what the weather conditions are."

Finally, I settled on a road that I knew, vaguely. It took an hour, but I got us out of the red belt. When Yoshi's wheels hit dry pavement, I threw my fist into the air and cheered. We were safe.

I got home and told my sister Moira about my adventure.

"Yoshi did so great," I said. "I'm so proud of him."

She looked at me like I was crazy. Moira, the girl who started the naming of our cars. Moira, who talks to her coffee in the morning. Moira, who at three years old, wrote a song called, "Jacket, You're Lost." She looked at me like I was crazy.

Okay. So I am a little crazy.

This is the thing. My parents taught me to take care of my shit. Throughout my childhood, they yelled at me for eating in the living room, writing with permanent marker too close to the good couch, putting my sneakered feet on the bed, etc. As a kid, I thought they were insane. Like Kevin Spacey in "American Beauty," I yelled back, "It's just a couch!"

But the way you treat your possessions is often an indicator of how you treat yourself. When I take care of Yoshi, I'm taking care of myself. When I talk to him, I'm talking to myself. I'm keeping myself company.

That's kind of a good thing. You never know when you might be stuck somewhere, left alone to fend for yourself. It's kind of inevitable, isn't it?

Nanowrimo

2008-11-06T08:45:00.000-08:00

This blog makes it look like I'm not writing. But since August, I've written about ten blogs... in my mind. On paper, I've been trying to finish my memoir. Nanowrimo is my last ditch, in hopes that I can soon move on to more fun and more violent literary adventures. If you wish to track my progress...

Doppelgangers

2008-11-04T01:10:00.000-08:00

My story "Doppelgangers" has been published in the Kenyon Review. Read it here.

wordle

2008-10-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

Why Do I Like You So Much?

2008-08-21T07:01:00.000-07:00

It’s hard for me to feel truly comfortable in a place. Maybe it stems from being teased as a kid. Maybe it’s genetics, the hereditary hyper-sensitivity I garnered from my father’s side of the family. I think that it must be the latter, because at thirty years old, I’m still uncomfortable in most social situations. The older I get, I find it more and more difficult to relax and just “be myself.”

Does anybody have it figured out? I think my grandfather did.

“All I remember about your father is that he had a big bald head,” said my Aunt Mare to my mother, a few weeks ago at the shore. “He had a big bald head and big round eyes.”

He did have a big bald head and big round eyes. Also a big nose and saggy jowl, strong hands and bad knees.

He died this past Sunday night. Natural causes. He was ready to go; he’d been saying it for months. He could no longer walk, hold a pen to do crosswords, remember long enough to joke with people or enjoy music. For the last month or so, we’ve all been praying that he’d get to his rest soon. And he got it.

Still, my family is sad. He was a remarkable guy, the kind of personality that makes you mad that there’s this thing called death that has to happen to everybody. He was so good-natured, and it was catching. Even in the planning of the arrangements, flying the family down to Florida at the end of the week, we’ve been slightly jubilant.

“Six of us on a plane for two days?” said my twenty-seven year old brother. “This is gonna be awesome!”

Grandpop would appreciate the sentiment. Not to be ear-twistingly cliché, but it IS how he would have wanted us to be.

So many people say in mourning: “So-and-so wouldn’t have wanted us to be sad.” Most of the time, I think it’s bullshit. I mean, who doesn’t want people to cry at their funeral? If I attended my funeral as a ghost and saw nobody crying, I’d be like: Well, thanks a lot. I want melodrama. A mire of people emotionally embarrassing themselves. Crying. Sobbing. Throwing themselves on my casket. Like the end of Godfather III.

That’s not my grandpop though. I know this because he made everyone’s happiness his priority. He often reminded me of Sinatra in that way; I saw him move around his house like I imagined Sinatra moved around the Sands, spending time talking to every single person in the place, making sure that he or she was happy, taken care of for the evening. He also mastered this inner calm, a feeling that spread through the room with his smile. If not cracking jokes, he’d remind us, incessantly, how much he loved us.

“Why do I like you so much?” he often asked.

My grandmother would cross from the family room to the kitchen, and in those few steps, he’d tell her that she was wonderful, and he loved her, at least four times. I’m not exaggerating. It wasn’t just lip service either. He wore that love on his face, in his eyes, in his smile, and the gentle way he spoke to her, and all of us.

Neither he nor my grandmother ever raised their voices. They never got cross with each other. They were quiet and patient. When they visited, Matthew and I woke early, ran to their bed and climbed right in. We stayed there for the early dawning hours, singing songs.

“Here we go,
Into the wild blue yonder…
CRASH!”

“You are the B-E-S-T
Best
Of all the R-E-S-T
Rest,
And I’ll L-O-V-E
Love you,
All the T-I-M-E
Time!”

“Be kind to your web-footed friends
‘Cos a duck may be somebody’s mother.
They live in the woods and the swamp,
Where the weather is cold and dahmp.
Now you may think that this is the end.
Well it is!”

For breakfast, he made us pancakes in the shapes of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty—a feat I’ve tried to replicate many times, and failed. (Seriously, try to make a pancake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. It’s impossible.)

Later on in the day, he’d get down on the floor with us to play, build castles with blocks. He taught us Checkers, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit. When we did well, he marveled at our smarts, bulging out his eyes, terrifically impressed.

As I got older, he taught me how to mix the chemicals for the right pH level in their pool. He let me help him with his crosswords. He taught me everything about Sinatra. Recently, I found a photo of him from the seventies, where he’s lying on the floor with his hands tucked under his head, right next to the speaker cabinet in his living room. The look on his face is pure joy. I felt like I was looking into a mirror; I was like: Yeah, music does that to me too.

The last time I saw him, we drank vodka tonics and joked and laughed. I stopped smiling only when he asked how writing was going. I replied, “Well I’m writing, but I haven’t been published yet.”

“You will,” he said.

This shut me up, not because it had to do with my career, but because of the way he said it. He replied so simply, like I’d said that I wanted to take out the trash, or do the dishes. To him, it was simple. There was no doubt in his mind.

You will.

My grandfather carried this unflinching optimism through his whole life. Who knows where he got it? He grew up in the Philly neighborhood of Tacony, so poor that he stole Christmas trees for his family. He could not afford college, so he went to war, flew planes in WWII. He went to college on the GI Bill. Like a classic old movie, he started working in the mailroom of an insurance company, and worked his way up until he was an executive. People liked him so much that they put him in charge of starting new branches all over the country. He inspired people to feel pride and love in their work. He worked hard, planned frugally, but always enjoyed life.

“You are number one,” he often said.

For years, I thought he meant simply that I should take care of myself, first and foremost. But now I see that he was trying to teach me his recipe for happiness. To be happy is to love yourself, truly, completely.

When you truly love yourself, you carry that unflinching optimism with you everywhere. You are confident. You glow. You spread those good feelings all around. You have a hard day at work, but so what? At the end of the day, you can lie on the living room floor with your head in the stereo cabinet, smiling. You can surround yourself with the people you love most.

I take a lot from my grandfather—his love of music, his big bulging eyes, his saggy jowl. Most important is this. His gushiness. His need to constantly remind everyone around him that he loved them.

It’s important. Not because it’s the nice thing to do or because you never know when they might be taken from you. Because love is how you survive in this world. Love helps you carry that unflinching optimism through every obstacle.

I think that this is why my grandfather was so adamant about saying, “I love you.” Those three words are like spells for love and happiness. They also make a place comfortable. They turn four walls into a home.

Howard Hoke Ireland, flying in WWII

Ireland and grandchildren, 1988

Ireland and granddaughters, August 2007

memoir: prologue

2008-08-09T04:59:00.000-07:00

I look asleep. But I’m not. Sure, my eyes are closed, my lashes are fluttering, and my breath is slight leavening in my chest. It means nothing.

Look closer. I’m a little nerd. Woody Allen in an eleven-year-old girl’s body. Coke bottle glasses. Buck teeth. Greasy braids. Chicken legs. My pj’s consist of an orange Flyers t-shirt and hole-y pale pink bottoms with the feet cut off.

The nightlight burns bright on the bedside table. Somewhere in the swells of blankets, there’s a book. I’ve fallen asleep with my glasses on. But I’m not really asleep.

Inside I feel awake. I can see my room around me, but I can’t move. I lie stuck inside a pocket, halted on the path to sleep. It’s as if I’m lying in a clear casket, cut to the exact perimeters of my body. The blue walls of my room look crinkly, as if awash with static from Channel four. The grainy air hums like a million little mouths. I get the feeling that I’m not alone. Something stirs in my bed.

I look down at my body. Many hands have sprouted from my sides. I look like a spider girl or the Hindu goddess Kali. Only I have no control over the hands. They don’t lie dormant or paralyzed with the rest of my body. They turn on me. They tickle me in my most secret places—behind my knees, the small of my back, the arches of my feet. They stroke the crooks of me, not in a way that makes me explode with laughter, but in a way that makes me squirm and wince. They pick at my torso, my belly, and my legs. They pluck me like a guitar.

The humming air begins to chuckle. It itches the insides of my ears. It feels like something is holding me down in my bed. If I struggle, it will smother me.

It’s not just a dream. It’s sleep paralysis and it’s been happening since I was four.

SP is a condition where a person, either falling asleep or waking, feels unable to move or speak. It happens when a sleeper moves through the stages of sleep too fast. The result is death-like paralysis, coupled with intense fear, and sometimes hallucinations.

I call the episodes, trances. I’ve never told anybody about the trances—partly because I don’t think they are that dangerous, just a little scary and weird, and partly because I don’t know what to tell, or who to tell.

Who will believe me? There’s so much about me that’s wrong. Each of the hands that sprout from my sides is another thing about me that I don’t like. My glasses. My smile that’s like a retard’s. My nose dripping snot. My throat making me cough until I puke. My head that’s so tired. My body that can’t sleep. My brain that won’t shut up. My mouth that always says the wrong things.

If my body is a garden from where these hands grow, then I’m the gardener, fertilizing it with hate. Self-hate, when done right, becomes part of everything I do and don’t do. This is why instead of telling my parents or a doctor what’s up with me, or researching sleep disorders, I stay quiet and still, suffering through the nights of my childhood.

There’s only one way to get out of sleep paralysis, and it’s painful. I have to wake myself up.

It’s like I’m in a little shell, with just enough room to wiggle. I start rocking forward. I tell myself: Wake up, wake up, wake up. I focus all of my energy on these words and where they are coming from, the very center of my forehead. I rock once, twice. I grit my teeth and wrench up, pulling through what feels like twelve feet of water.

I sit up. I feel like I’ve been pelted with bricks. If I stay in bed, I’ll conk out again, and slip right back into paralysis. The rest of the night will be a cycle of strangulation until dawn. I jump out of bed and go to the window.

It’s around four in the morning, I judge by the royal color of the sky. Not much longer until daytime. I place my hands on the windowsill, and rest my chin on my hands.

I live in God’s Country, the suburbs of Philadelphia. Behind our house is a rolling acre of grass and a farm. At this hour, not even the horses are awake. The silence is so loud that it bangs in my ears. The stillness wraps me like a blanket. I feel like I’m the only person alive on earth. And it’s lovely.

I stare at the line of trees at the edge of my backyard. The branches have grown in such a way that they look like a portrait. Their shadows make faces, kinda like how clouds look like different shapes and faces in the springtime. This morning, the trees look like Gone with the Wind, Rhett dipping Scarlett back for a kiss, saying, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” I’ve never seen the movie, but I want so badly to fall into someone’s arms, and have someone fall in love with me.

I am eleven. I think that everything that happens to me means something. I think that this picture in the trees is a sign.

I sigh, wish into the screen: Someday, someone will take care of me.

The wind picks up. A bird lifts off Scarlett’s shoulder. It flaps into the dying sky. For a moment, I watch it fly. Its body catches the dawning light; its muscles throb and flex beneath its threadbare coat.

Flying is hard. Often, I’ve wondered: Do birds even enjoy it?

If not, what a shame. Although sometimes when the body is hardest at work, it feels the most calm, we feel the most alive. This is something I’ve yet to learn, that lying around, doing nothing, and waiting for change only makes a person go more insane.

I circle my room for a while. I flip through teen magazines. I organize my closet. I read my favorite Baby-sitter’s Club book for the 88 millionth time.

Two hours, and the sky begins to change. It turns a deep Navy Atlantic, and grows paler and paler until settling on a crisp salty blue.

Across the hall in my parents’ room, KYW news radio clacks on. Their bed creaks. Mom groans. Dad coughs. I turn and look to the alarm clock on my nightstand. Six. Time to get ready for school. I lay my forehead down on the windowsill and close my eyes. Suddenly, I feel so tired.

Batman!

2008-07-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

I went at the best time. Lunchtime! There were five people in the theater, other than me and my sister. This meant that I could laugh uproariously and she could jump in the seat and pound her fists in the air whenever Christian Bale walked onscreen.

I refuse to repeat what everyone else has said about the movie. Instead, I'm going to point out the little pluses and minuses that nobody else noticed, or wrote on.

To quote my brother, it was a whole lot of movie. It was hard to know if I liked it or not. I wasn't sure I understood it, half the time.

One scene in particular left me scratching my head. How on earth did Rachel and Batman fall off a hundred-story building, land on a car, and not die? Meanwhile, the Joker is back upstairs at the fundraiser, looking for Harvey Dent. Instead of taking us back upstairs, the scene cuts out.

I asked Moira in the theater, "Sooo... what happened to the Joker?"

She said, "I guess the Joker got away."

"Just like the song!" I cried. And we busted up laughing.

If that was the joke, it wasn't funny. We were meant to assume that the Joker gave up, and left. Lame. Totally out of character. I hate when writers end scenes instead of finishing them.

Regardless, that was the only gripe I had about the movie. It was beautifully structured. The plot naturally unfolded out of itself. Whatever that means. It was funny too. Why has nobody mentioned this? Every character shared the same wry sense of humor, that comes only in the most dire situations. They were funny in a way that exhibited how scared they were for themselves.

Maggie G. was my favorite love interest of any movie, even though my brother says she's not pretty enough. Bah! She was flirty and badass. She should've been in the first one.

Oh yeah, and Heath. The whole drive home, I wracked my brain, trying to think of any movie where an actor did a better job than Heath did in this film. I got nothing.

Watching him was like watching art come alive. Yes, like everyone says, he was brilliant. But more importantly, he was entertaining. He was hilarious. Every time he walked off screen, I just wanted him to come back. That's intriguing, in my opinion. It's much much easier to create art than to entertain an audience. The art of entertaining is a mystery. It changes with the times. Our parents don't always find the same movies and music as entertaining as we do. Heath tapped into something timeless.

Still, it's important to remember that Heath didn't write the Joker's lines. He was fascinating, because the writers wrote him fascinating dialogue. There was a director too, coaching his movements. There was a makeup artist, scarring up his face. But Heath makes it so easy to forget that. He makes you forget that there's a writer, a director, a camera, a set. He makes you believe, for a short while, that it's all real.

Am I an Idiot?

2008-06-28T05:36:00.002-07:00

I got a lot of stuff that's wrong with me. Allergies. Nearsightedness. Gingivitis. Chronic Prepatellar Bursitis. Insomnia. Anxiety Disorder. IBS. Lactose Intolerance. This week chalked another one onto the list. I think I may be gluten intolerant too.

I started researching on Wednesday. After reading up on it, I went for a run. The list of symptoms circled through my head.

That damn weird metal taste!

Dry skin? Is that why I'm itchy all the time?

Poor tooth enamel! I did think it odd that I've been drinking coffee since the age of fourteen, but I didn't get stains until last year.

Fatigue? Hell yes. I drink 5 cups of green tea every morning. (Having cut the coffee 'cos of the tooth stains).

Back pain? Hmmm... birthday blog?

IBS. Lactose Intolerance. Decreased appetite. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Depression. Don't get me started.

All the while I'm thinking this, I'm chugging up this hill I've chugged up a million times over the past year, feeling like I'm going to die.

POOR MUSCLE TONE AND INABILITY TO LOSE WEIGHT.

Oh. My. God. I stopped in my tracks.

Is that why I've been working out six days a week for the last three years, and barely shaved off five pounds?

So I decided to go gluten-free, just to see what would happen.

Now I know what you are thinking: Shouldn't you go to a doctor, Anney?

Wake up, people. This is America. I don't have health insurance.

For the past three years, I've self-diagnosed myself as a lot of things. Mostly all of these ailments could be fixed through diet. So I played with my diet. Then last year I went to a doctor, who certified that I had done good homework, that I was right with my assessments.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think I am fit to stand in for a doc. Lest I end up like Sylvia Plath's father, who mistakenly diagnosed his diabetes as cancer, and died of a gangrenous leg. I do plan to go to the doctor again. Once I finish my book. Once I get a job. Once I get insurance. Somehow. Somewhere. Someday.

I keep thinking though... Neither the doctor or I was able to correctly diagnose me, as I still have problems. It makes me wonder - is self-diagnosing valuable? Can we poor bastards use it to put off a costly visit, at least for a while? Or is it terribly dangerous and am I an idiot?

I'm going to have to wait and see.

30

2008-06-17T06:17:00.000-07:00

My birthday reminded me of a pasta commercial. You know-Mom goes to market, cooks in the kitchen, presents food to family, who chatter and laugh around the table. Only for my birthday, it wasn't my mom cooking; it was me.

It's ironic. My lack of mommification definitely ruled as my biggest worry throughout my 29th year. While I'm not in any rush to get married or procreate, nor am I sure I want to, I still feel like I haven't grown up all the way. I haven't gone through any of the typical stages that denounces one an adult.

I mean, a month ago, I moved back in with my parents.

But it doesn't feel like I moved back in with my parents. Everyone works all the time. Everyone has his or her own agenda. Everyone's getting along. It's like we're... dare I say it... friends...?

Two minutes into my birthday dinner, we were cracking up laughing.

Moira's boyfriend became a cop last week. She thread her fingers into a gun and waved it around the table, telling us: "David's getting his weapons qualification! Then he has to take his gun with him EVERYWHERE."

"So he's going to have to bring his gun here?" I squeaked.

Matthew pretended to be Dave, sitting down at dinner and accidentally setting off his gun. "Oh no! Elmo!" he said.

Dad erupted with a barking laugh. He hates our cat, Elmo.

"I knew there was something I liked about that boy!" he roared.

Moira's eyes filled with tears and she cried, "Kitty!"

Which only made us laugh harder.

On our plates was a healthy version of our typical birthday menu. Vegan pizza. Vegan cake. No refined sugar. It went over surprisingly well.

Originally my mother said that she wasn't eating the pizza, freaked out by soy cheese. But she did and with a full mouth, garbled, "This is amazing!"

My dad remarked on how it left him satiated, but not uncomfortably so.

"I think you're onto something here," he said.

And that was the best present-to know that I'm slowly winning them over to healthier eating. Ha!

Next came the cake, or as Matthew called it, "colon cleanser." Can you imagine a cake without eggs? I couldn't. But it worked. Even if the icing was a little runny.

Everyone ate it and got chocolate everywhere. Unlike when we were kids, Mom didn't shriek about our clothes and the tablecloth, and Dad didn't growl about the furniture or the rug. The didn't have to. Us kids know the drill by now. Dab the stain with ice and water. No big deal.

As we stacked the plates and took them to the kitchen, I realized that I HAVE grown up, because WE have all grown up as a family. We've grown together, becoming more like a family, instead of separating like so many do. We've grown in a way that makes us get along better.

Mom's more sarcastic. Dad's less so. Matthew's happy. Cat saves her temper tantrums for a day that's not someone's birthday. Moira talks. I listen.

Together, we are a group of adults who enjoy each other's company. We ARE friends.

Realizing that made me feel thirty.

That, and waking up the next day to discover I'd thrown my back out from all that cooking.

Ugly Naked Girl

2008-06-03T05:20:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with moving back home is that you bump into your past all the time. It's never the people you'd like to see again. It's the ones you'd like to forget.

Last Wednesday, my BFF of twenty years, Plak, gave birth to her first daughter. I went to the hospital, and rocked my soon-to-be goddaughter in a rocking chair, while talking to Plak and her husband. Rain and thunder beat against the dark windows. All of us felt quite serene and amazed at the miracle of life.

Then Plak's mom, Miss Jen, came in.

"Anney, Mike Shaw is looking for you."

"What? Why?"

"He wants to apologize. He wants to take you out to coffee."

"Oh God." I rolled my eyes.

This guy, Mike Shaw (not his real name), is a nurse with Miss Jen at the hospital. Fifteen years ago, he and I were sophomores, flirting in the halls of our Catholic high school.

One weekend, we'd gotten together at his house while his parents were out. I'd sat on his bed, trying not to talk about my ex-boyfriend, who was also his best friend, and the whole reason I was there. Call it revenge. Call it a rebound. I just wanted to get the pains in my heart to stop.

But as we leaned in, drawing our faces closer together, I felt the air punch out of my stomach. You know how faces look different up close? That was Mike Shaw. From a kissing distance, he looked creepy, almost alien-like, with dripping desperate eyes and a tiny pointy chin. I pulled back. I couldn't do it.

He said it was okay.

Rejection is never okay to a fifteen year old boy. Next week in school, he told everyone that we'd almost hooked up-but that the sight of me sans clothing made him physically unable to take it "further." Not only did he lie about what happened, he also painted this portrait of me as an ugly naked girl, when I hadn't even taken my clothes off.

Now, fifteen years later, after the military, college, nursing school, Mike Shaw wants to apologize, officially.

Miss Jen said, "I think he's really changed. He's grown up."

I'm not so sure.

Supposedly, we grow up, get jobs, husbands, wives, kids, and we realize what's important. The old petty drama doesn't matter anymore. By asking me to coffee, Mike Shaw implies that it DOES still matter, that there IS a need for an apology. The slate is still dirty; the childish rumors and adolescent rejections stay with us. In that way, I see him as growing down.

Why would I take time out of my day, so he can get this off his chest, and feel better about the past? If consensus gives words their true definitions, then Mike wants the absolution that I'll never have. He goes down in high school history as a funny guy; I'm the ugly naked girl.

I'm not bitter. I just don't want to go to coffee and rehash all of that again.

So for the next two days, I came to visit my BFF and the baby, I moved through the hospital hallways, as stealth as a member of the A-Team. I took the stairs. Down the corridors, I crept, ducking behind nurse's stations and in doorways.

Not until I reached Plak's room, sat down in the rocking chair with my goddaughter, did I feel safe. I looked down into her big ponderous eyes and felt cradled by the clear, clean promise of the future.

I'm Falling For You

2008-05-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago, just after my apartment burned down, I fell while jogging. I tripped on some unleveled cobblestones, and went right down on them, ripping the skin off both of my knees. A few days later, I still couldn't walk. I went to the doctor and found out that I had bursitis.

Nobody understands why I have bursitis. It's called Housemaid's Knee. Usually maids get it from working on their knees too much. You can imagine the reactions I got when I explained to friends why I was limping.

"You're not a housemaid. What the hell have you been doing?" Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge.

Since then, it's been a never-ending battle to keep my bursitis down. If it flares up, I can be off my feet for a week. Then I miss working out. It takes longer and longer for me to burn off all the malt liquor that I drank into a giant beer gut in college.
The worst part of it? I keep falling. I keep hurting myself.

Last week, while grading papers in my office, I swiveled from the bookshelf to the desk to the computer and back again. Each time I came around, I smacked my bad knee into the side of the desk. I did this not once, not twice, but FOUR times. That night, I fell into bed, digging my knee into the springs. The next day, while writing at home, I turned around in my chair too fast and it flipped out from underneath me. I went down on my bad knee, and the chair flipped up, its legs knocking a stack of books off the bookshelf.

I drop stuff. I walk into walls. I can't tell you how many mornings my hand has missed the spoon and plunked straight into my cereal bowl, splashing soy milk all over the table.

I am a clumsy ox. I come from a family of clumsy oxen. At dinners together, we swap our clumsy escapades. There's the time that Catherine tripped up the family room step, fell into the basement door, which knocked the cat down the stairs. There's the time that Moira gave herself a concussion by hitting herself in the head with a hairdryer. There's the time Mom brought Matthew a glass of water before bedtime, and then tripped and spilled it all over him. Four-year-old Matthew replied, "Thanks for the water, Mom."

The rest of my family handles our clumsiness with comedy. I continue to feel mortified, mainly because the clumsiness extends into a lack of physicality that I've never been able to overcome. In grade school gym class, team captains always picked me last. In mosh pits, I was picked up and thrown. On two occasions, while dancing at some club, someone has pulled me aside and asked "Are you okay?"

Embarrassment is tough to swallow. It tastes like a dish rag. It makes my nose burn. It hurts. But like Dimetapp or Robitussin, I know I have to get it down, wince and deal with it, in order to make myself better.

Sometimes I ask myself: Am I really that goofy-looking, or is our culture too superficial?

Yes. I am that goofy-looking. Yes. Our culture is too superficial. And I contribute to the latter on a daily basis. I drop everything to watch Josh Beckett pitch for the Red Sox. I fall for bands with lead singers that dance around all cheesy. If the second Lord of the Rings is on TV, I have to stop and wait for the part where Legolas skateboards down the steps of Helms Deep on a shield, shooting arrows at Urk-hai the whole way down.

Athleticism is kinda hot. Clumsiness is not. So be it.

Then I lace up my sneakers and head out the door to go for a run. I hit the sidewalk and turn towards the Charles River, which is lined with smooth grey concrete, and not a cobblestone in sight.

anthony's song

2008-04-26T06:14:00.001-07:00

At this time every year, I think about moving back to PA. And every year, I walk around the amazing city of Boston and contemplate the trees and Fenway and think, "One more year." Well, not this year. I am officially moving back to PA, sometime next month.

I love Boston so much, that it took seven years for me to realize that I've been pretty lonely here. All of my grad school friends moved to New York and D.C. The SWiG girls are all married and have their own friends. Peter's moving to L.A. The jobs for adjunct English profs are dwindling, both in the individual institutions and across the armpit of the state. To accommodate the vast number of adjuncts, schools have been cutting class loads. I can't afford to stay here. There are actually more opportunities in Philly right now. And I want to go back to school anyway.

The writing continues to trip me up. I may lose my writer's group by leaving, and that will screw me. But I've been working so hard over the past seven years, choosing work over family and friends. It hasn't made my writing any better. It's only made me more stressed and depressed and uninspired. What do you write about when all you do is sit in your room and write? Stupid dreams. From that comes nothing. There has to be some kind of invention, craft to tell a good story. There has to be the spark of real spontaneous unscripted life. It can't be all personal fantasy; no one cares about that.

When I was in the UK this past March, I stopped in little crappy towns through England. I saw people going to work, living their lives. I wondered: Why do they stay in this little crappy town? Then I realized. Family. Friends. It's home. Why am I not home?

I don't feel like I ever really left.

Honestly? Let me cup my hand around my mouth and bring my voice to a whisper, so the Bostonians don't hear me. Boston is pretty. Boston has beautiful tree-lined streets and gay marriage and green coffeeshops and farmers markets and great recycling programs. But compared to Pennsylvania, Boston is kinda boring.

Now, if I could only deal with losing the Red Sox... sigh.

There and Back Again

2008-03-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

The closer I bullet towards age thirty, the more I grow tired of America. Take my trip home this past Christmas. I drove through the suburbs of Philadelphia, frowning at the shopping centers and McMansions encroaching on the hills and farmland. I rolled down the window and yelled at the urban sprawl: "Thanks for bulldozing my childhood!"

I wanted to live somewhere untouched by man. So this spring break, instead of returning to Philly, I decided to check out the United Kingdom.

Friends and family were ecstatic. They gushed, "You are going to love it!" They imagined me, as I did, a lone writer, wandering through green lands of crags and castles and cute pale boys with whimsical accents. Together, we chanted the amenities of the UK. The museums! The trains! The architecture! The clothes! The Guinness! It was all talk. I had never been out of the country before.

So… did I love it? No. I didn't love it. On my last day in Edinburgh, I sat in a coffee shop with some Scottish guys and told them why.

"It's just like America," I said.

They gasped, groaned, and grabbed their stomachs.

"No offense," one said. "But we're used to thinking that we're better than America. I mean, the stereotypical American."

"What is the stereotype?" I asked.

"Loud. Obnoxious. Selfish."

This cracked me up. It was exactly why I had left the US, and exactly why I had no intention of staying in the UK. In my travels, I met many obnoxious people. Some were Americans. Some were not.

In London coffee shops, British girls screamed Avril Lavigne songs and left faucets running in the restrooms. On the street, Asian mothers banged strollers into my ankles. Little Indian boys escaped from their parents and knocked me over. German teens blew smoke in my face. Cars clipped my toes at the curb. I arrived at one B&B to find the proprietress not home, leaving me to sit on the front stoop in the blustery cold. On the train to Edinburgh, my seatmate, a three hundred pound Caribbean woman, ate three chocolate bars and passed out on me. Everywhere I went, I saw people acting like jerks.

But I met nice people too. I traveled alone, taking trains from town to town. Each time before boarding, I asked someone if I was headed in the right direction. When I got lost, passersby stopped to help. Many heard my accent and stopped me, wanting to know why I was in the country and what I thought of Barack Obama. Without their friendliness, I would have felt more alone than I was.

In one town, a group of Italian PhD students invited me to a party. In another, two Liverpudlian brothers warned me of tourist traps. A British Air Force pilot joined me for dinner, simply because I sat alone. A couple teachers invited me to their primary school graduation. Old Yorkshire men sat beside me on the train and told me the history of every town we passed by. Just outside of Edinburgh, I looked out the window at the cliffed coast to see two people walking their dog, and waving up to our train.

Even the Scottish guys were kind enough to put stereotypes aside. They hung out with me, and didn't hit me when I gave my thoughtless survey of their country. They let me explain myself.

"What I mean to say," I told them. "Is that we're all the same. We're not as different as we think we are. I mean it in a good way."

They nodded and agreed. One of the guys went, "Awww."

Still, I decided not to move to the UK. Being away made me realize how much I loved America. Traveling alone made everything look lonely. The castles and patchwork fields lost their romance, once they became part of the every day. I thought: Give me the Jersey shore, Valley Forge, and a Target any day.

Landscape has so little to do with what we call home. It's people that make a place. If people are the same everywhere, I'd rather surround myself with the ones that I know and love. I'd rather have a place to come home to, than a place to run away from.

Memoirs of a Vale Rat

2008-03-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

I don't remember much from the summer of 1995. I spent it smoking blunts and drinking forties of malt liquor. Every day, that was the goal. I was sixteen.

One night, my friends and I drove around Phoenixville and couldn't find anything. Somebody said, "Hey, let's go to the Vale."

The Vale Rio diner was an electric pink dining car that had sat in the center of Phoenixville since 1943. As we pulled into the parking lot, I wondered why I'd never been there before. It was just the kind of place I'd want to hang out. I wasn't like my friends. When the they talked about moving to Long Beach, California, I smiled wistfully. I wanted to go to New York City or Ireland. I wanted to play my guitar, discuss philosophy and poetry with other intellectual wanderers. My friends wanted what rappers talked about in songs, "A little bit of gold and a pager." But for me, the greasy spoon of the Vale Rio was poetry.

We walked in. The Vale was packed. Kids filled the smoking section. There were band kids from our school, and some of the punks and goths from the Carrie Court apartments. My friends and I tentatively hung at the counter. In no time, the kids that we knew started hollering our names. They introduced us around. We were welcomed into the fold.

A couple punk guys invited me into their booth. Piercings covered their faces; tattoos covered their arms. They wore big ripped sweaters and smoked cheap cigarettes, just like me. They invited me to play Egyptian Ratscrew. When I told them I didn't know how to play, they taught me. We played, and told each other our life stories.

At the end of an hour, we were old friends. The boys admitted to me that they hung out at the Vale, because it kept them from drugs. At sixteen, seventeen, some of them had already been in rehab, psych wards, or Juvy. The Vale gave them a safe place where they could hang out and have a good time.

It came time to leave, and I didn't want to go. The very next night, as my friends and I drove around in search of forties and blunts, I suggested going back to the Vale. Nobody wanted to. It struck me as weird, because they'd had fun too.

The following weeks, I went through a transition. I started my senior year of high school. My summer boyfriend dumped me. By mid-October, I was hanging out at the Vale every night.

My old friends continued to drink and smoke every day after school. Like a bad after school special, they tried harder and harder drugs. Some dropped out of school. Some got stuck in the canticle of drug addiction-on and off sobriety, crime, jail time, homelessness. Some died.

The night before I left for college, I sat out on the corner of my neighborhood, talking to two of them while they snorted coke off a clear glass plate.

"Don't look down on me for this, Anne," one of them said, bending her head into a rolled up dollar bill.

"I don't," I said.

And I didn't. I looked down on our community instead.

We were outsiders. From the first day of school, teachers and school administration dubbed us as bad kids, because we weren't interested in sports, and our clothing and musical tastes skated off the norm. We couldn't relate to them, and we couldn't relate to our parents either. When unleashed from our homes, we wanted to get as far away from it all as we could.

Unfortunately, as of last week, that option doesn't exist anymore. The Vale closed last weekend. The owner sold the lot to the Walgreens corporation. There is talk that the diner will open somewhere else in town. Most townies are doubtful, too disenchanted with all the other recent renovations to Phoenixville. I don't live in Phoenixville anymore, so I don't have the right to say anything. I can only say goodbye.

A man has the right to do what he wants with his business. This is a right that I would fight for, before I'd fight to keep any diner alive.

But still, I wonder what is better for the community. I wonder where the kids are going to go.

The Vale
Photo by Kelly Neff

Me in the Vale, 1997

Photo by Gregg Oldstein

UN-becoming Ally McBeal

2008-02-09T06:59:00.000-08:00

"Mom," I said. "I'm afraid of becoming Ally McBeal."

I was twenty-two, riding shotgun in her van to somewhere. She turned her head away from the road to frown at me.

"How many boyfriends do you have?" she replied.

"Two," I admitted.

"I rest my case."

Neither one of us had to elaborate on what I meant by "Becoming Ally McBeal." It was one of the first chick lit TV shows-Ally McBeal, successful anorexic lawyer, over thirty, struggles to find a man. Nearly every woman complained about the show when it first debuted on TV. Feminists said that it painted an unfair portrait of the typical woman who has everything, but it means nothing, because she's single.

I didn't give a shit about the politics. I loved the show. I loved the characters, John Cage especially, and I loved Ally. But I did not want to grow up to become her. I did not want to roam the world alone in my thirties. I thought that it would be a pathetic existence. I thought that if I was single at thirty, it would mean that there was something wrong with me.

Alas, here I am, thirty years old, and single. I don't even have a boyfriend. In fact, I live with my ex-boyfriend and his family. How's THAT for pathetic?

It happened like this. My apartment burned down. It burned down at this exact time last year. Ex and I had already broken up, but were waiting for the lease to expire. Still, his folks kindly took us in. After a few weeks, they invited me to stay, for dirt cheap. I could barely afford an apartment in Boston on adjunct pay. Now I could live in Cambridge, which is way prettier than any neighborhood in Boston, and I got to quit one of my jobs and work on writing part time. I was like, "Thanks, Fire!"

And you know what? It's working out okay.

It works in the same way our relationship didn't work. We're both too career-minded to pay attention to each other. Ex and I have our own rooms, having gracefully sailed into the land of best friendom, and his parents are nicer to me than my own. There's no drama. No big deal. I love where I am. I love it, until I walk out of the house and begin to converse with other human beings.

I'm the only single person I know.

It's a phenomenon that's occurred over the past five years. Nearly every one of my friends has gotten married, or had a kid. My unmarried friends are in relationships, wearing Claddagh rings, indicating that they are attached, but still coolly residing outside of "the system." If I sound sardonic, snide, it's because I am. I mean, come on, people! Do you expect me to believe that every single one of you magically found "the one" all at the exact same time? Please.

I'm not jealous. I'm Jo March. I'm lugging my guitar to sing and play at friends' weddings, while quietly skeptic in the flurry of white dresses and flowers and teary vows.

"Why is everyone getting married?" I bitch to my brother over the phone.

"It's the age," he replies.

The age? That makes me think of marriage like puberty. Like it's a biological change. Like losing wisdom teeth and sprouting hair on your privates, the late twenties to early thirties is "Meet Your Soulmate" time! And I'm the runt of the class, the freshman with no tits.

I try to make myself feel better about it. I tell myself that I had a compromised upbringing. My parents loved each other and loved me. Therefore, I don't feel the need to justify my existence by attaching it to another's. I remind myself that I've been in abusive relationships that screwed my head on backwards, causing me to make bad choices. I tell myself, It's not your fault! But no matter the excuse, I continue to feel like there's something wrong with me.

So what's wrong with me?

Exactly that question. I have a problem with the fact that I'm different. I'm all grown up, thirty years old, an English professor-and I still want to be like everybody else. THAT'S what's makes me Ally McBeal. Not because I "can't get a man," but because I am embarrassed for not having one. Ally McBeal is not the poster child for single women over thirty. She's the poster child for single women over thirty who are UNHAPPY ABOUT IT.

I didn't have to make the decision to be happy about my singledom, though. I didn't have to spend miserable years, hallucinating dancing babies, hiding in a co-ed bathrooms, Barry White bass thumping inside my head. SIngledom didn't torture me. One day, without trying, I got over it.

It hit me this last Christmas, on a random afternoon, shopping at the King of Prussia mall. I entered through the doors by Macy's, and came out into the mall right where kids were having their pictures taken with Santa. There was this long line-a mess of strollers and puffy coats and fallen mittens. Mothers dropped their purses, gabbed at each other, stopping only to yell at their children to behave, or else they'd march right out of the mall, and cancel Christmas.

Marriage, I thought, makes kids. At least, for me I know it will. Kids make lines. They make lines at Disney World, at toy stores, at the Easter Bunny, everywhere. Now I've made some dumb decisions in my life. But perhaps choosing a career over marriage was one of my best dumb decisions. If I had followed the crowd and gotten married, I'd be standing in that Santa line. I would not have been able to pass by, bullet toward my own agenda, ipod screaming in my ears. I would not have had the peace of mind, knowing I'm right, falling madly in love with myself for being right, and thanking God that I was not standing in that Santa line.

King's Eve

2008-01-22T07:39:00.000-08:00

It was a sunday at Vinny Testa's Restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston. I sat at a booth with fellow wait-staff, all of us enjoying our comp-ed shift meals and talking about what we were doing the next day. None of us had to work, and school was cancelled for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

"Back at home," I told them. "They had King's Eve, where everybody got together to drink forties and watch 'Boyz in da Hood' and 'Menace II Society.'"

Across the table, my boyfriend Peter gaped at me, horrified.

"That's not the proper way to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King!" he cried.

I shrank back in my seat, tried to laugh off my embarrassment. "So I guess that suggestion's out?"

A new topic of conversation billowed up-as it usually does when I say something stupid. And as usual, I agonized, replayed those words in my head, wishing I'd never said them. You're not in Phoenixville anymore, I admonished myself.

The damage had been done. From then on, Peter referred to me as his "racist girlfriend" and my friends back home were "your racist friends back home." Each time, I protested, "I'm not racist." Sometimes I even went as far as to say, "It's complicated. You're not from Phoenixville."

In Phoenixville, I explained, everyone makes fun of everything. Nothing is sacred. Irreverence, to us, is an art. I recalled late nights at the Vale Rio Diner, sitting around and trying to come up with jokes that offended or grossed out my friends. The point was to offend somebody. The object of the game was to shrug at the offensive remarks, to act like you're not offended.

And then, to further prove my argument, I referenced boys of the local Philly suburbs, gone famous-Jackass and the Bloodhound Gang. In the Jackass movie, the guys dressed up like pandas and skateboarded through Tokyo. It was supposed to be funny when they fell, weighed down in their costumes. It was also supposed to be funny because it's pandas in Tokyo, a stereotype shoved in your face. The point was to upset other people-because when people get upset, it's funny.

Or is it?

When we tell offensive jokes, we refuse to take responsibility for what we say. It's as if we are saying: Well, it's YOUR problem if you're offended. It's as if we shouldn't be expected to be conscientious or respectful of each other. It's as if it's okay to blur the line between humor and hurt. It's as if a good joke is worth another's feelings of self worth. Above all, it helps bad stereotypes prevail. You never know when an idiot is listening, thinking that it's okay to refer to female basketball players as "nappy headed-hos."

So often, we say: "It's okay, as long as nobody gets hurt." That's just not true when it comes to race.

We all know how well that rule holds up. How many people wrote letters to Comedy Central, complaining about the Dave Chappelle show? How many want to ban "Huck Finn" and remove "The Kite Runner" and "Nappy Hair" from school reading lists? Read the Letters-to-the-Editor in the paper this Sunday. Everyone's offended.

Perhaps it's because people are so damn touchy, the tradition of King's Eve lives on?

It's been seven years since I moved from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania to Boston. When I lived there, I was in high school. But studies show that adolescents are more apt to say what is on everybody's mind. Is it a Phoenixville thing? Is it a teenage thing? Whatever is the cause, the effect of offensive jokes is always the same. It's not harmless.

On Being a Weirdo

2008-01-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

There's nothing that annoys me more than a person who refers to him or herself as "weird." "Nerd" and "dork" are also labels I hear thrown around a lot. Ironically, it's always fully functioning, khaki-pants wearing, pretty-faced people that claim to be "weird" "nerds" and "dorks."

Back when myspace first started, Drew Barrymore had a profile, and it was really her. In her "About Me" section, she described herself as a nerd. Lord only knows how I happened onto her page, but when I did, I struggled to not send her hatemail. Nerd?! Drew, let me ask you a question: Did you get the shit kicked out of you by boys in grade school for being too ugly? Ever have your mother give you allergy shots? Wear glasses thicker than a dictionary? Nope. While I was doing all that, you were hanging out in Hollywood clubs and screwing the Coreys and snorting coke. Sorry, I still envy you. Well, at least for the clubs and the coke.

It's more than obvious what's going on here. This is self-deprecation at its finest. If you call yourself a weirdo, and you are obviously not, you are in a roundabout way, trying to call attention to exactly how NOT weird you really are. It's the same as fat girls complaining that they are fat, because they want you to tell them that they aren't; and guys saying that they don't want to make out with you, because they really really really do. Backwards psychology, or whatever. Yeah, it works on children. That's about it. The rest of us are exchanging knowing little smirks, wiggling our eyebrows and thinking Groucho Marx-like thoughts.

Take it from a REAL weirdo. When there's something seriously socially wrong with you, you try to hide it. You try to hide it, and you do a shitbad job of it. Which makes you seem all the more weird.

On that note, I'd like to say that from this moment on, I am a person who can call herself weird and actually have it be true. Want proof? Here goes.

A few weird things about AEJR…

1. My mother was a nun before she had me. No, my father was not a priest. Nor did she run away from the convent and get married.

2. My father is a bald songwriting CPA who considers Ronald Reagan to be one of the best things that ever happened to this country. He's not racist, not homophobic, and definitely not religious (despite my mother). He doesn't own a gun. But he voted for Bush. Both of them. Twice.

3. My mother wanted to name me "Minon."

4. When I was little, I was afraid to go to the bathroom with the door closed.

5. I have had chronic sleep paralysis and insomnia since I was four.

6. I can't eat fruit. It makes me gag.

7. But I love mayonnaise sandwiches.

8. I'm synaesthetic. This means that I see letters and numbers in color and I taste shapes. Hence the reason why I can't eat fruit and why I love mayonnaise sandwiches.

9. I once received a letter addressed "Weird Annie." And it wasn't meant in a good way.

10. Most kids like to sing silly songs. I used to walk around our block in Philly, serenading neighbors with Air Supply and Phil Collins.

11. I sucked my thumb until I was nine.

12. I believed in Santa Claus until I was nine.

13. At my first and only Girl Scout troop meeting, the girl scouts beat me up.

14. I hate Disney World. I always have. As a kid, when my family would go, I stayed with my grandparents. I thought it was stupid.

15. I don't like animals. They get on my nerves. They annoy me worse than people who call themselves weird. But I'm vegan. I don't like them, and I don't eat them.

16. I always preferred Luke Skywalker to Han Solo.

17. When my grandfather died, it was because he'd fallen and couldn't get up. Just like the commercial, you know: "I've fallen, and I can't get up!" At thirteen, I thought this was the funniest thing and went around telling everyone and cracking up laughing. People were like: "I'm so sorry!" And I was like: "It's so great! Just like the commercial!"

18. As a kid growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I used to get so bored with my life that I prayed that Saddam Hussein would blow up my school, or someone would die, or my parents would get divorced-just so SOMETHING would happen!

19. My favorite Catholic saint is St. Lucy because she had her eyes gouged out.

20. I have two middle names.

21. Growing up, my best friends and I called ourselves the Beaconfingers.

22. My junior year in high school, I had six boyfriends at once.

23. I have played in bands called The Honkeys, Burned at the Steak, and Run It In Dry.

24. While in those bands, I wrote a song called "Do You Wanna Get Slapped, Motherfucker?"

25. I have an obsession with Buster Brown shoes. I wish they made Buster Brown shoes for adults.

26. My favorite places to write include closets and empty bathtubs.

27. I started teaching English to high school and college students in 2001. Since then, I've cancelled class once because I had trouble getting dressed. Okay, twice.

28. I once got stuck in an escalator at Barnes and Noble.

29. When I was little, I believed that celebrity endorsements were for real. Like they did commercials for free, because they really believed in certain products.

30. My idea of a fun Friday night is hanging out at the library and reading incredibly convoluted literary criticism of Romantic and Victorian period literature.

31. I check my horoscope religiously because I have a really hard time making up my mind.

32. I'm obsessed with Robin Hood movies.

33. I have no desire to get married or have kids and I'm almost thirty.

34. I once spent thirty dollars on a jar of miracle honey.

35. I used to teach a literature class down the hall from a morgue.

36. I hate going out on New Year's Eve.

37. I nearly killed one of my students on a flight of stairs.

38. I'd rather date a fat guy than a skinny guy.

39. When I'm having a bad day, I watch Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. It's cheaper than therapy, and doesn't leave you with a hangover.

40. I wrote my weirdness in a blog and posted it on the internet for all to see.