Today, I sent out my monthly curriculum list to the parents of the kids in my math class so they can see what their children will be learning. I usually end my e-mails with the phrase ‘math is power’. Now, 154 parents got an e-mail saying ‘meth is power’. FML
Should I keep this poster of Mikhail Baryshnikov? I bought it some years and years ago at a rummage sale at the Orthodox synagogue down the street. It was exciting because I’d never been in there, and it looked a lot like my house, oddly enough. It was the only thing I bought, and it’s in terrible condition. The image is printed on a piece of warped cardboard that doesn’t stay in its plastic frame.
I guess I should give it away, like the person who owned it before me, eh?
I’m trying to pack for the big move, and it’s so hard! This is really the big one, you know? I will never live here again. When I get back from China I will gather these boxes I’m packing and move into a shitty apartment somewhere. So it’s important to pack light… but some things I just don’t know if I should get rid of. Like Beanie Babies—will they ever be worth something? And old dolls—what if I have a daughter someday? I can save myself some money and give her my old ones. But not much money, and it’s a long ways away, if ever. Plus she would probably think they were gross and creepy, compared to whatever is popular 15 years from now. Ugh.
And curtains—I will always need curtains, so I packed those. And I’m packing my pillow cases but giving away my sheets because I will want a bigger bed, but I will always have pillows (so logical).
Everything has a memory attached to it that comes back when I see the thing. If I get rid of the thing I may never experience that particular memory again. Like a stuffed prairie dog I just put in the Salvo bag: I bought it at a book fair at Our Lady of Sorrows Elementary in 2nd grade, which was held in the library with the carpeted reading cubbies and the “mature” section for 4th graders only (my favorites from that shelf were One-Eyed Cat and Number the Stars). That school does not exist any more.
And when I went home, I got in trouble for spending my money on a toy instead of a book… heh.
There’s a quote out there about how writing without an audience is like drinking alone. Solitary imbition has virtues and drawbacks in the same way that a person’s weaknesses are the excessive expression of their greatest strengths.
I suppose the same could apply to writing.
There’s something about writing that makes the writer yearn for a reader. Even though I do like writing just to do it, to get it down, and to look at it as a thing and say, “I made that.”
Crazier still, I really hate a lot of writing, and writers. Sometimes I hear so-and-so wrote a book/play/poem and I feel like throwing up. Sometimes I can’t believe I do it, like I’m a little ashamed to be a part of that mess. (I feel separate from the mess, but I’m never sure if I am, of what makes someone a part of something.) But I love reading. I could read until my eyes fell out.
So here it is—however long the buzz lasts.
