thirty things to do before i'm thirty

I love the waiting: the night before Christmas, the last day of school, the interminable hours before a long-awaited date. These days before seem a celebration unto themselves, as important as the Main Event because they lay down a floor of silence upon which the new thing may gingerly step forth.

So perhaps it is natural that I have begun to think of myself as hovering on the edge of thirty, though I'm not yet even twenty-nine. I know I am edging closer and closer to a year that is defined by what it precedes. I want this to be a year of joy and life and creation.





And to that end, I've made a list of thirty things I'd like to do before I turn thirty, thirty things that represent the person that is being revealed in me, more warm and welcome to me than she was at twenty, though she is even now a stranger to me:

1. Take an art class.

2. Knit something I like enough to wear.

3. Publish something I’ve written.

4. See fall in Maine.

5. Apply to three graduate programs I like.

6. Take a road trip somewhere I’ve never been.

7. Find and make a great granola recipe.

8. Create art in a public space.

9. Read five books on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.

10. Act in a play.

11. Hold a dinner party in our backyard with candles in the trees.

12. Model nude for an art class.

13. Record a song.

14. Go on a picnic.

15. Kayak or canoe on the Charles River.

16. See the Northern Lights in Iceland.

17. Travel around Europe.

18. Sell two of my photographs.

19. Learn to reupholster chairs.

20. Leave encouraging messages in public places.

21. Paint a mural.

22. Kiss someone worth kissing.

23. Attend a writing conference.

24. Go camping.

25. Tattoo myself with a message I need to hear.

26. Write on my blog every day for a month.

27. Write real letters to seven friends.

28. Plant a garden.

29. Memorize two poems I would like to whisper in someone’s ear.

30. Do something that surprises even me.

.

diagnostic tests are my favorite

Class: Sophomore US History

Question:

• What do you already know about each of the following topics?
  

Answers:

• Northern pre-Civil War economy - came from clothes, and tea napkins
  
• World War I - Germans
  
• World War II - Germans
  
• Reconstruction - process US used to re-use Confederate States in the Union
  
• Civil Rights Movement - the stuff that dealt with the blacks
  
• World War II - Vietnam, bombed somewhere in the Bahamas
  

Question:

• How is the American government structured? Who is in charge of what functions? Explain in words or using a diagram.
  

Answer (exactly as written):

• The American government system is a demorancy. We Have Presdients, vice Presdinents, legislatives and sectorys. The Presdient is in charge of everything and the vice Presdient is incharge of everything that the Presdient is in charge of getting. the legislatives deal with the laws and taxets and other things. lastly the secterys help everyone keep track of there scedudle.
  

Clearly, there is work to be done here.

"where is my mind?"

I just wrote a comment on a student's paper.
I asked him if he'd run out of time or if he was confused about a concept.
Except I spelled it "thyme."

This type of error takes a special sort of stupor.

"your flowers will grow without you"

I work on Sundays. I know that strict biblical constructionists will censure me for this, and I suppose that's a thing I'm willing to accept. The problem of keeping Sundays holy is one of pragmatism: I cannot possibly get all my work done in five days, and I cannot maintain my sanity (nor any sort of efficiency) if I work on Saturday.

So I've worked most of this day, most of it at a coffee cafe, and a bit more of it at a soup cafe, and then the rest of it slouching on my newly made bed. And I'm not done. Not even close. But I'm calling it good for tonight.

I just got off the phone with Chelsea Meyers, the woman who took over my position at Whitko. Before I turned in my keys this July, I left her a note with as much information as I could about technology and professional hierarchy and newspapery troubleshooting. Why reinvent the proverbial wheel, right? I told her to email if ever she had questions. And she has. Several times. Questions on computer programs, questions on classroom motivation and management. Today, for the first time, she called me to clarify a few things.

 I think I was able to help her on the critical issue of photo resizing in InDesign, though I'm certain that she would have eventually figured it out on her own. She told me about the ten or so students who are still involved in the newspaper, some of whom I expected, though some of the diligent journalists of last year have opted not to continue with the paper. I cannot help but feel a twinge of guilt and pain at this. I cannot help but blame myself some. But things continue. Chelsea is exhausted, as all first year teachers are, but she's working out kinks. She is, most importantly, still publishing the paper. I had so worried -- selfishly -- that all my work would be for naught, and less selfishly, that the students' work would be so. 

It was a nice conversation. Pleasant.

And as I mopped our wood floors with Murphy's Oil, I listened to The Lovely Sparrows on my ipod, and I heard the following lyrics from their album Pulling Up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint:

"Please don't take this the wrong way --

You're just a ghost with a body...

And your flowers will grow without you,

Your flowers will grow without you."

And it's true, you know? Such a sweet delusion it is, that we're irreplaceable. Paradoxically, we are very much and not at all. 

I love Frederick Buechner's words:

Humanity is like a giant spiderweb. If you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling. As we move around this world as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference, or with hostility, toward the people we meet, we too are setting the great spider web a-tremble. The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked. No man is an island.

I vacillate between understanding my life as a fable of community and one of the solitary nomad, and perhaps my life as all others is neither and both. Dichotomies always break somewhere. Yet, if I were to choose, I do begin to feel that I'm more of the latter than the former. Though my arms and my thoughts yearn to be held, though I long to pour out of myself as an intellect and as a woman, does not each one enter and exit the world and walk around in it alone?

The lyrics of the song in some way accused me of self-importance and absolved me of some measure of guilt. I left Whitko because of a choice, not a moral imperative. Don't ascribe to me some sort of disinterested benevolence. But, to consciously mix metaphors, though I have and do set webs a-tremble, I also know that flowers bloom without my presence. They did in Japan. They did in Huntington. They do in South Whitley. And I know that in the end, we each of us must walk our own winding paths with whatever measure of grace we can muster - my students as well as me.

life in my life

I could tell you how many hours I've spent at school or preparing for it this week.

I could tell you how many students I've worked with individually after school and before school.

I could tell you about every relationship with a student that I've tried to cultivate this week.

But I want neither applause nor pity.

I could tell you how my sophomores nearly staged a coup this week when I didn't give them enough support for a writing assignment,

but I'd rather tell you about how the tide turned and we found a better space.

I could tell you how I nearly cried in Whole Foods Monday when I smelled the produce and realized there was no time for cooking,

but I'd rather tell you how my kind roommate washed my sheets for me and my coworkers buoyed me up with kind words.

Sometimes, for a day or two, I'd like to trade in my life for one that is slower, one in which I might bake more bread and write more poetry. Yet there is a hard-won polishing that comes from pushing the self to give more. I've never worked this hard. Never have I spilled myself out so wholly as I do now.

where I work

two dreams

Two nights ago I slept fitfully. I could partially blame this on the lovely black tea I drank late in the evening, but really, I think it was rooted in something else.

I dreamt that on the first day of school I was in charge of teaching fifth graders in the morning, a thing I'd not prepared for at all. I walked into the classroom completely clueless about how to use our time on day one. I found Meg, one of my real-life coworkers and asked her what I was supposed to teach the kids about World Lit. She looked at me with a flash of dismay, as in You didn't prepare for the first day of school?!? Then she gave me some sort of useful tip on how to decipher the textbook which I subsequently couldn't locate. I got back to the classroom and began getting some behavior problems from students, one girl in particular. Eventually, I had to pull her out of the classroom and march her down to the principal's office, stupidly leaving the rest of the class completely unsupervised. When I got back to the room I was surprised to find myself in the back of Bad Behavior Girl's father's SUV, listening in on a phone call between him and my principal. He was demanding my removal from the school. And who could blame him? What parent wants their child taught by an incompetent.

In contrast, one of my favorite dreams ever was one I had several years ago. In it, I was wandering around a Roman bath house. The place was dark and frightening. All the open spaces concealed something undefined but sinister. I stood against a wall, trying to be small, invisible. And then, this man found me, a man I cared for deeply. He stood in front of me, his face toward me and his back to the open spaces. He never touched me. Never said anything. He just stood there, with his back to the open spaces. I can't remember ever feeling so safe. I woke up weeping.

I suppose right now, on the brink of a new and challenging school year, I feel small and vulnerable again. I sometimes wish I didn't stand alone in it.