Totally outrageous

One of my favorite professors at OU was Dr. Jeremy Webster. Not only did he encourage us to call him by his nickname, Jem, which led to many a singalong in the office of the M.A.’s (as well as many a singalong over e-mail), but he showed me a way to legitimize my love for whores by combining it with the study of literature. In fact, I’d have to say that my love for whores was exponentially increased by one of the best classes ever taught at OU, “God and Sex in Literature,” a class Jem explained to us on the first day was going to be a lot more Sex than God. He also won our hearts by admitting to enjoying the view of the male undergrad butts when he walked around campus, and a moment that will be burned in my memory forever, “I don’t know what y’all’s porn is like, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen in our porn.”

Anyway, Jem has a blog that I subscribe to, where he features songs he likes and movie reviews of obscure films I didn’t know existed, as well as recaps of amazing trips he takes. He provides us with the Hottie of the Month, a new and exciting way to look at the movers and shakers of the 18th century. One of his more recent posts, though, was about his theme for the year. Instead of making some sort of New Year’s resolution or other such nonsense, Jem has decided to do the following:

“First off, it’s been really good having a theme for the year. It’s given me an immediate gauge to help me decide whether I’m going in the right direction or getting off track. All I have to do is ask myself two simple questions:

1. Is thinking about or doing X, Y, or Z living in the here and now? and
2. Is X, Y, or Z what I really want?”

I’m not going to lie to you: I obviously cried when I read his blog. Then I thought about it. Maybe I cried some more. I don’t remember. The point is that this plan makes sense. I feel like I’ve gotten off track, terribly off track, and I need to figure out when I got off track, how far off track I’ve gotten, and what I need to do to rectify the situation.

Once upon a time I wanted to be a writer. I seem to have given that up. Not just the wanting to be a writer as my Full Time Job, but the writing itself. I don’t even know what I’d want to write about if I sat down and wrote. I don’t even know what genre I’d like to write in. I do know that I watch John Green’s video blogs and I’m struck by several things:

1) John Green is totally on my list of 5 people I get to sleep with if the opportunity presents itself, even though I’m not sure I really want to waste any quality time I could spend with him on something as pointless as sex.

2) I lust over the bookshelves in the background of his video blog, and I lust over the fact he has a book on how to arrange a home library that he used to arrange the books on his bookshelves. (The Goat has promised we’ll have bookshelves like that, but I completely and totally believe that you can’t have books like him on bookshelves like his unless you’re a Real Writer.)

3) I have read his newest YA novel, Paper Towns, and I’m pretty sure I could do that. Back in that once upon a time when I wanted to be a writer, I really wanted to write YA lit. Reading Paper Towns made me stop and think about how I’ve never even tried to do something I think I could do.

4) If I ever get to be a real teacher, I would make sure to show John Green’s video blogs (and his brother’s, for that matter) to my class, because he’s interesting and funny and smart and dorky and a writer, and I would hope it’d entice them into reading and writing and being interesting, funny, smart, and dorky.

5) Why am I not being a writer? He’s a Real Writer, with books and a contract with a publishing house and whatnot, but he wasn’t always a Real Writer. At some point he was just a Writer, and before that a writer.

So I sort of want to follow Jem’s formula for the year, and I want to stop acting like everything in the world is conspiring to keep me from being a Writer. Or at least a writer. It’s hard, though. I keep hearing that I can’t quit school and student teaching because I’m so close to being done. I’ve actually been told that since my first semester at the Institution of My Choosing, and I’ve heard it so much it doesn’t mean anything anymore, even though now it’s true. True-er. I’m also having the “I can’t get anything done because I’m not taking any medication for the crazy and therefore every single little thing makes me distracted and stops me from actually working” disease. That’s a horrible disease, by the way, because I really can’t settle down and get school stuff done. I also can’t get anything non-school related done. I can literally  get stuck turning in a circle (it happened Sunday night), not sure which direction to go, because I can’t make a decision on what I need to do first. The sucky thing is that I can do non-essential, procrastinating things (i.e. play Diner Dash: Flo Through Time) for hours. I’m so stressed out and anxious and confused over what to do in order to get the right things done, and sometimes the only thing I can do is pick none of the things I need to. (That could be solved by trying to get some more drugs for the crazy, but the longer you don’t take the drugs for the crazy the less you want to because the more crazy you are, which can only make sense to those who either have the crazy or take drugs for the crazy.)

On my way home yesterday I planned my evening, which involved walking the dog and Wii Fit-ing it up, but I also included time for doing homework and writing lesson plans. But then the dog played with another dog and didn’t need a walk, I was initially too tired to Wii Fit it up, and then there was a presidential address and the dog threw up and needed cuddles (in the middle of my Wii Fit-ing it up). I did get my homework done, but as it was due last Thursday I’m not too sure it counts as me doing a good job. I haven’t talked to my mom in forever, because that’s at least an hour of my night, which I can’t foresee losing without getting all anxious and guilty, even if I don’t do anything worthwhile in place of it.

How am I supposed to fit trying to write in there?

(In case you’re wondering, I’m totally blogging illegally while at high school being a student teacher. But if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it. And people need me to blog. I can also blog in sections, or look up and pretend to be paying attention, or switch to real work if someone comes too close. I can’t foresee writing-writing in this situation, though, because I don’t write very well if I can’t just write.)

25 billion reasons why I don’t like Facebook

Everyone seems to be doing that inane “25 things you don’t know about me” meme on Facebook, and the annoying thing is that they’re tagging everyone on their “Friends” list to be “Included in this note.” I’ve been tagged about a dozen times now, and I’m not really sorry to admit that I haven’t read any of them. I love my friends, my real friends, my near and dear friends who are no longer so near and probably don’t consider me very dear because I’m not very good at the whole “being a good friend” thing, and I’d love to learn new things about them. I’m not exactly sure why it’s fun and entertaining to read about those things in list format, specifically a list of 25 things, but so it goes. I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon, mainly due to the fact I assume the reason people don’t know the 25 things on I’d put on my list is because they don’t want to know them. Or I don’t want them to know them.

(To be included on my list of 25 things if I ever make such a list: Multiple pronouns in the same sentence drive me crazy, especially when it sounds better to use them, but contextually it could possibly be confusing.)

I suppose the number one thing that would go on my list of 25 things you don’t know about me (“you” being some sort of mass personal pronoun meant to make everyone reading the list feel like they’re intimately involved with the person writing it) is that I have rheumatoid arthritis. I was diagnosed when I was 24 years old, but I became symptomatic when I was around 19. That means I spent five years having no idea why my body was seemed to be giving up, and my view on life changed a lot. When you think you’re going to be in a wheelchair before you’re 30, and you’re becoming so severely limited in how well your hands work at 21 that you’re pretty sure you’ll never be able to pick up a baby if you were to ever get around to having one, looking forward to the future isn’t as simple or as exciting as it should be.

There are a lot of things that are rolled up in my RA, things that don’t really need to be discussed right now, but the main thing is that I was diagnosed with a disease. A real, live disease, one that is permanent and debilitating. One that, if you’re lucky (and I am well aware of how extremely lucky I am), can be stabilized with medicine. Expensive medicine. Expensive medicine that has to be prescribed by expensive doctors, specialists, and has to be monitored through expensive things like frequent blood work and x-rays. I am lucky, I know I’m lucky, because my medicine was able to stop the progression of the disease and even reverse some of the damage that had already been done. I’m lucky because I have wonderful parents who have gone above and beyond to support me, keeping me on their insurance long after it was legal to do so, risking ridiculously large penalties if anyone ever does their research and sees that I’m not truly dependent, that my parents are really just beating the system so I’m not stuck on some crappy insurance plan with some enormous deductible (or, worse yet, student insurance) that doesn’t cover all the things that need to be covered for me to be healthy.

The thing about this disease, and the stuff needed to take care of me so I’m not being beat up by the disease, is that it has chained me down and forced me to make choices I would never have made if I was a healthy adult.

I wouldn’t have gone into the M.A.T. program. If for some strange reason I still did, I wouldn’t have stayed when I realized it wasn’t what I wanted.

(Even though this was prediagnosis and a long time ago) I would never have spent so much time with MS, hoping for him to decide he wanted to marry me, hoping I’d get a chance to start a family before I physically couldn’t.

I would never have decided it was so damn necessary to get married and have a family RIGHT NOW, which would have made most of the relationships in my life so much easier (both for my friends and my boyfriends).

I wouldn’t have come up with the crazy “I’ll get my M.A.T.!” plan, because it wouldn’t have mattered if I was on crappy student insurance (or no insurance at all).

I wouldn’t have pushed The Terrorist to make a commitment, to get engaged, because I wouldn’t have been adding up the years in my head and worrying about the time I wanted to spend married and settled before thinking about children.

(As a side note, something else in my list of 25 things you don’t know about me, I can’t just up and decide I’m ready to have kids. I have to carefully plan out the entire thing, because I take medicine I can’t take while pregnant, medicine I’ll have to have out of my system for a good bit of time before trying to get pregnant, and this is medicine that keeps me mobile and functioning. I also need to not only plan carefully for what is going to be going on in my life when I start that process, I have to make sure there’s money if I can’t work and good insurance that will be able to provide for the entire ordeal, like the good bit of draining gross fluid out of my knees I anticipate happening constantly. I have to make sure this goes into motion before I reach an age it could be difficult to get pregnant at, and an age where not taking the medicine could do worse and lasting damage to my body. Let’s not forget the added math if I might want to have more than one child, especially if I want to do something responsible and space them out appropriately.)

I wouldn’t worry that I’m moving too fast with the Goat. I probably wouldn’t be moving so fast, and therefore there’d be no worry. I wouldn’t keep thinking, “Oh my God, if he isn’t the one, I’m screwed.”

I would have up and quit when I realized nothing, absolutely nothing, about this student teaching experience is making me want to be a teacher.

I’d have submitted Ph.D. applications to try and get started in a program this coming fall.

I wouldn’t feel so guilty about saying all this or being upset by it, because I feel guilty about it all the time. There are so many people so much more worse off than I am, and they’re not as unhappy with their lives as I am. They aren’t letting their problems stop them.

I’d heal faster.

This is why I haven’t created a list of 25 things. They’d all be like this. And let’s be honest with each other: no one wants to know this.

And then there was a bright spot.

My mentor teacher had a table found and delivered to her room for me. I hate it, because it’s some sort of geometric shape I don’t appreciate, where one part is wider than the other, and it hurts my OCD sensibilities. But I have it, which is better than trying to work on a corner of a perfectly rectangular table covered with nonsense that I assume is just recycling waiting to be recycled. It got moved to the other side of the room from my little corner I was stuck in, and this wall had a junction box on it that suspiciously looked like it might be an internet box. I grabbed one of my many trusty ethernet cables lying around my apartment (and by “lying around my apartment” i mean “stored in a box labeled ‘cords’ and stacked neatly in my storage closet”) and, praying to multiple gods who might have some sort of interest in me being connected to the outside world while stuck in high school, I plugged it in. Hooray! Internet! Sure, Facebook is blocked and half the things you might come across when you search on Google are blocked, but I can check my e-mail and write in this blog and generally keep myself from crying while I spend my fifteen minute lunch regretting all the choices I made in my life that have led me to this point.

Now all I need to the ability to leave and go retrieve coffee from a nearby coffeeshop run by hippies that sells only fair trade coffee and My Person™ right nearby for adventures to buggies (also run by hippies) that sell burritos and former alleys turned into restaurant’s that serve delicious bagel sandwiches (again, made by hippies).

Never really thought I’d actually miss Athens…

Remember when I didn’t think I’d ever cut it as a teacher? I miss those days.

I probably haven’t mentioned it here, but this whole student teaching/becoming a real, live, grown-up high school English teacher isn’t turning out to be my cup of tea. Part of it stems from the fact that I’ve spent the past four, no, five years not knowing what the heck I was doing, making it up as I went, and doing my very own thing in my very own classroom. Sure, at the beginning I was scared out of my mind and wished upon every single star in the sky someone would tell me what I should (or, in my case, shouldn’t) be doing. I complained about the system and about the emphasis placed on college writing teachers to “change the world, one freshman at a time,” and I swore up and down freshmen composition courses that are left to the whims and whiles of the instructors aren’t really doing what freshmen composition courses are supposed to be doing: preparing students for four years of writing on the college level. I wanted to teach writing, to invite my students into discussions that challenged them by reading things that challenged them, and to get them to put themselves on paper, whether it was in a research paper about the use of steroids in baseball or in a personal essay about the experience of coming out. Sometimes what I wanted to happen in the classroom, what I planned and prepared and dreamed about, failed miserably. Sometimes the thing I figured out thirty seconds before I left the office (usually thanks to My Person™ telling me what she had done in her class, until she moved away and I had to ask Mitch, which wasn’t nearly as helpful or successful or even useful) went brilliantly. I often referred to myself as The Worst Teacher Ever™, but I didn’t often hate it. Rarely did I wish for different students (though I did spend a good part of my first year in the M.A. program wishing for a different book to teach from), and as much as grading papers sucks, there was something immensely satisfying about it.

Those days are gone.

I’m under the instruction and supervision of a mentor teacher and university supervisor. My university supervisor doesn’t really have any doubts about my teaching ability, and except for coming to Jesus every once in a while, she’s rather enjoyable. My mentor teacher isn’t the mentor teacher I feared. She hasn’t asked for formal, eight part lesson plans with stated objectives and the corresponding state standards done up in triplicate and submitted a week in advance, although that sort of behavior might have me just expire on the spot. She hasn’t told me I need to lose fifty pounds (I know that was an unreasonable fear, but I do need to lose fifty pounds, and I have this secret wish I’ll finally find someone to actually acknowledge this to my face) or dress better. Instead she’s scattered (I can’t find her desk for all the papers and folders and books and whatnot on top of it) and non-committal. She can’t provide me with reading schedules or lesson plans from her previous experiences teaching this course, and most of my “What have you done in the past with [insert piece of literature here]?” is met with “Um. Well, What would you do?” Whether it’s just her face or her demeanor or the fact she’s really too scattered to follow my line of thinking, those pop quizzes rarely end well for me. Instead my ideas, thrown out off the top of my head, are questioned further, critiqued, and handed back to me sliced, diced, and over salted. I know better than to walk into a classroom full of high school seniors completely unprepared, and I know that no matter how clear something is or how specific the requirements, there will be kids who need their hand held. Despite my experience, or, rather, because of it, I don’t have a bag of tricks to whip out when I come to a some new material. I believe that on some level, you just have to sit them down and make them talk about it, and sometimes you need to sit them down and make them write about it. There isn’t a reading guide for every book/story/poem/novel/play. There probably won’t be any at all in college. Not every single assignment has a rubric or a right answer. I can’t tell a student what to do if they don’t have ideas of their own. Teaching students to ask homogeneous questions, like the ones on study guides or graciously tucked in the margins of their text book in blue ink so they stand out, isn’t teaching them to think. It’s teaching them that there are right ways and wrong ways to look at a text or a movie or life, and that there are answers.

There aren’t always answers. Everything isn’t black and white. Reading and writing is about a whole hell of a lot more than comprehension.

I feel trapped. All the things I believe about writing and critical thinking, pedagogical things if you want to be all higher education about it, don’t seem to have a place in high school English language arts. I want to know what’s important to my students, what moves them, what they want to know about. I want to peak their interest, not by showing Batman Begins, but by getting them to think and feel and discuss texts that, even if they don’t realize it initially, are important to them. I want them to write, pages and pages and pages of writing, about themselves and the weather and their family and that asshole who won’t return their calls and what they’re reading and what they saw on TV last night and how they feel about what’s going on in the world and everything else. I want them to run out of letters they’ve written so much. I want ah-ha moments and complaints they’re being forced to do to much and failing grades and papers that have been revised ten times and finally get an “A.” I want them to know they can feel, that what they think and say is important, just as important as the Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament or whoever wrote the screenplay for Batman Begins.

The Goat suggested, if I decide to not be a teacher, that I could get a job at Ikea. Some people might say that I have a passion, and chucking it in the nearest recycle bin and going to work selling Swedish modular furniture would be a waste. I’m not sure that’s true, not only because Swedish modular funiture is amazing, but because it’s more than a little bit difficult to see what you want to do but not be able to do it because it’s just beyond the scope of what you’re supposed to do. This is why I stopped writing. I couldn’t stand working and feeling like I was supposed to say something, reach someone, when the opportunity to do that had passed me by, gotten just beyond my reach.

What would you do if you were me?

An inauguration AND a snow day?

(I wasn’t going to be able to watch the inauguration today, but then God shook out his dandruff on our little southernness (that can be a word, right?) and gave us the day off so we can watch. Guess God’s a democrat. Who knew.)

I very rarely proclaim my love for CNN, but I was very much in favor of them interrupting their live shot of the VIP platform and whatnot in order to show us the moving van sitting outside of the White House, with a few boxes stacked around it, waiting to be loaded.

I also need to proclaim my love, just like practically every other single person in the world, for Sasha and Melia Obama.

Clearly it’s just one of those days.

You may be thinking that my earlier post from today was just venting, and that’d once I got home, away from the crazy College of Ed faculty, and relaxed I’d realize I hadn’t made the worst decision in the world getting my M.A.T.

Have you met me?

I did accomplish almost everything on my to-do list, including (but not limited to) depositing the magic check I’m not sure I know why I got, mailing my mother the pants she accidentally sent to my address, dropping off the recycling, and wrapping My Person™’s Christmas present (to be mailed tomorrow, fingers crossed). Scratching things off my to-do list always makes me feel better, which is why I frequently add things to my list I’ve done but didn’t originally include, like washing the dishes. According to my Super New Year Cleaning Project™, I’m scheduled to vacuum today. We’ll see. I only have a little bit longer before I’d be going against my personal rules against nighttime vacuuming (which I only have until I get a house of my very own). I’d like to think I’m going to be more on the ball about things like my to-do list and my Super New Year Cleaning Project™, but the semester has yet to really start, and we all know my general apathy prevents me from doing things after they start to pile up. Hopelessly in over my head is a state of Zen in my tiny world.

To-do list aside, I’m still in a slight state of WHY THE HELL DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF? It seems to be a lingering malady. I’m trying to convince myself (at least I was while I was doing the dishes and folding my sheets) that if I hadn’t come to the institution of my choosing and taken on my M.A.T., I’d have never met the Goat. This should be comforting. I should look at all this nonsense and go, “Well, if I hadn’t gotten into the shit, I’d never have met the person I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” Perhaps it’s my hesitation to say, cross my heart and hope to die, that the Goat is It, and perhaps it’s my hesitation to say he’s the love of my life. My hesitation doesn’t mean those things aren’t true, because I believe they are, but I’m hesitant nonetheless. I’m hesitant especially when every day I see more clearly that I made a choice which wasn’t necessarily in my best interest. Perhaps it was physically (Yea! health insurance…if I get a job), and perhaps it was financially (Yea! money…if I get a job), but emotionally it’s been pretty hellacious. It’s hard to continue to live within a plan you set up for someone else. When I’m fed up and scream, fist shaking toward the sky, “Why did I do this?” I can’t look around and go, “Oh, I did this for me, so let’s see if we can find the good in it.” Instead I scream and shake my fist and curse myself for ever trying to make a life for anyone other than myself.

I can’t say the Goat isn’t supportive, because he’s wonderful and supportive and sweet and someone I love very much, but he doesn’t need me to do this. That might be frustrating, because if I could transfer this plan for a life to him and I, if I could just drop him down into the hole the Terrorist left, it’d all be easier. But he and I have to make different plans, new plans, plans for us. We have to figure out how to send me to get my Ph.D and where can we go that he’d still be able to have a job and where can we go to advance his career and does he want to go back to school and should we convert to Catholicism and no, I’m not going to live in some highrise apartment in some bustling metropolis somewhere even though he’d love it. I sit in hour upon hour of lectures in the “Internship Institute,” and I just want to scream that all of this is a culmination of the things I hated working on this degree. I want to come home and call the Terrorist up and go, “This sucks so much, and you better appreciate it because I’m doing it for you.” I want to say, “Oh, thank all that is good and holy this is almost over, and then we’ll be together and we can move forward, away from this time in our lives.” It’s not because I miss him or I want him back; it’s because this was a plan for us. A plan that is almost completed. A plan that now means nothing, because by itself this degree doesn’t make me happy, by itself teaching high school English isn’t my calling, by itself it’s something I concocted for a life that seems a million years ago.

I am glad it’s almost over, because I want to move on. I don’t want to be surrounded by memories, not just of the Terrorist and his presence down here, but of the bad times I went through, struggling to keep up with and make sense of something that I don’t feel is right for me. I don’t know if I can get back what I lost by doing this. That scares me, that I may have nailed my coffin shut trying to do the right thing. We all know how overwhelming my fear of death is. The status quo, living the rest of my life exactly the way my life is right now, at least career-wise, is almost as panic attack inducing as a few moments of introspection on what happens after the lights go out.

This is one of those times where people who haven’t lost their faith pray. Instead I feel pressure behind my eyes, and if I had the energy I’d shake my fist.

And I wonder why I’m always irritated.

Today is day two of the three day “Internship Institute” here at my good ‘ole college of choice, and it is turning out to be even worse than I imagined. I know, from my past classroom experiences here, that the faculty’s m.o. is fearmongering and preaching about the benefits of overpreparedness. They also like to regal us lowly students with tales from their days in front of the chalkboard, tales that all relate to the lesson at hand–no matter what the lesson at hand, there’s a humorous and personal tale to go along with it, which somehow improves our retention as well as reminding us once again that they are The Best Teachers Who Ever Taught™, and we are just beginning our journey toward becoming Teachers Who Were Taught By They Who Are The Best Teachers Who Ever Taught™. I personally believe all of this is bullshit, and I’d much rather return to the sink or swim method of learning to teach that was utilized in my M.A. program. A week of orientation, then BAM! Go have fun trying to figure it out and fucking up the lives of college freshmen in the process.

I realized today that all we’re really doing during this “Internship Institute” is getting one last cram session of everything we spent two (or in the case of the undergrads, four) years learning. It isn’t even a refresher sort of thing, a reminder of what we may have tucked away back in our brain and not looked at for a while. This is really just another class. We’re being lectured to, we’re squirming through call outs, and we’re being subjected to PowerPoints that we’ve been given the hand-outs to seconds before. It’s a joke, and more annoying is the fact it’s a joke wrapped in the fake smiles of the faculty who are SO excited for us as we’re about to embark on this journey toward becoming teachers–no, wait, Professional Educators. (Sorry. I forgot myself for a moment.) In between “I wish I could go back and be sitting where you are again” and crazy games of “Name the What If So I Can Solve It For You Using A Personal Anecdote From My Vast Experience As One Of The Best Teachers Ever™,” we sit and pretend to be paying attention, dressed to the nines in our professional attire, wishing we had been wiser in choosing a profession. Or maybe that’s just me.

I don’t see myself staying a teacher, because I think a lot of this is a crock. Most importantly, I think anyone who preaches how great it is to teach and how much they loved teaching and how they miss it every day is full of shit. Why would you leave the classroom and become a college professor if your heart and soul was with your eighth grade social studies students? I hate hearing about the higher calling, The Best Teachers Ever™’s excuse that they left the profession in order to train future teachers, because in my mind that’s just The Best Teachers Ever™ excuse to tell everyone else what they did that made them so great. I know that some of this is just me, and that I’m disillusioned by the crazy faculty in the College of Education since I don’t consider becoming a teacher to be my calling. I do regret some choices I’ve made, primarily that I gave up pursuing my M.F.A. because I was expecting a life with The Terrorist™, because in that one fell swoop I gave up writing period. Now that I’m being forced to become a Professional Educator, since there really are no more options now that I’m turning 30 in eight months and I need need need health insurance in order to be a functioning member of society, I look at the life I’m going to be leading with real dread. It isn’t that I don’t like teaching; I like being in the composition classroom, and if it’s possible for me to get my Ph.D. (something that looks less likely as the days go by), I’ll get it in composition and rhetoric and spend the rest of my days berating freshmen for their inability to create cohesive paragraphs.

The Proxy™ is here to cheer me up. I shall listen to her and worry about The Fatness™, which I’m assuming isn’t pregnancy.

Something wicked this way comes.

“Because Oz is not a static world, it can have a history and depth and richness that history gives” (Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum 54-55).

Since I can’t afford to run off and start my Ph.D. this fall, I’ve decided to try my hand at the slightly more affordable 100 Books in One Year challenge. If you do the math you see this averages out to two books per week, but English people aren’t very good at math (and I assume anyone who is taking up this challenge because they love to read is equally bad at math) and therefore this all seems very doable. I’m getting a very slow start due to the Goat visiting me in Cincy and having strep throat over Christmas, but now I have a whole glorious week of nothing in which I can catch up on my reading. I have a rather tall stack of books left over from last year I need to read, mainly books I didn’t finish for class and now feel I must read/finish our of guilt. But instead of tearing through those hanger-ons from 2008 and starting afresh, I’ve chosen to start with something that makes me ridiculously happy (and others ridiculously annoyed).

I have begun my umpteenth reading of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

For Christmas I was gifted much Oz stuff. The Goat gave me the CD of songs from the 1903 musical, which is something I have been lusting after on Amazon for almost a year. The Goat also gave me a fresh copy of Wicked, in hardback, to replace my teaching copy. My teaching copy is in sore shape, and while I love it to pieces (and it literally has been taped together because it is in several pieces), it’s hard to read something for pleasure that’s full of notes and markings and whatnot. My mom gave me an Elphaba “First Day at Shiz” Madame Alexander doll: I now have enough Oz stuff to go buy a shelf for displaying purposes (although it does scare me that I have suddenly become a collector of anything, nonetheless Oz things). Mom also gifted me a very pretty Barnes and Noble edition hardback combo Wicked and Son of a Witch, bound in leather. (I am a collector. Damn it.) The Goat bought me a Wicked: The Musical calendar earlier in December, and I’m pretty disgusted by how excited I am about all this Oz-y stuff taking over my bookshelf. (I even framed the postcard I stole from the OU library’s DVD of the 1910 The Wizard of Oz.)

Gregory Maguire released his third Oz book, A Lion Among Men, this fall. (This book bears the ominous tag The Wicked Years: Book 3, making me incredibly fearful that Maguire is going to really try and run with this whole Oz thing, destroying it even more than he already did when he wrote a sequel to Wicked, Son of a Witch, that I was not terribly fond of on my first read.) In honor of receiving the beautiful third book (the cover design is a return to the original one used for Wicked), I decided it was only right to reread the entire series (I just threw up a little in my mouth, typing that). Forget that I can almost recite Wicked or that my memories of Son of a Witch are centered around the few scenes of sexual abuse (I told you I wasn’t happy about it). A book about the Lion (note the capital “L,” indicating that the Lion is a sentient creature) and what happened to him after he was abused as an infant at the hands of a professor who believe creatures who couldn’t talk (non-sentient animals and Animals who hadn’t yet learned to speak) couldn’t feel pain is an interesting thing, even if I’m leery of Maguire trying to turn this into a franchise. I can’t wait to get to it, even though it means siting through the darkness that is most of Son of a Witch.

Rereading Wicked is a joy, though. I don’t much care of that makes me nuts, and I truly believe that Maguire wrote very well in this novel (even if his other novels indicate he has less talent than this novel credits him with having). I find myself wanting to stop reading and just be in Oz, especially during the Shiz chapters, and I’m of the opinion Maguire has created a very complete world (much like J.K. Rowling has created with Harry Potter). There are questions, many I’d like answered for the sake of how Maguire conceptualized things (like the Pleasure Faith), because there isn’t space in the novel for those things to be fully explored and perhaps they don’t really need to be more in depth than they are, but I still want to know. There are scenes that are questionable, especially the one that takes place at The Philosophy Club, and I can’t say I wouldn’t sit Maguire down and harangue him for that scene if I got the chance, but overall I find the novel a good read that makes the reader think. Even if it’s just thinking about whether or not the Wicked Witch of the West should really be given a pass, regardless of how she got where she ended up, the novel provokes thought. I like things that question the assumptions created by popular culture. I also like things that are involved. The less involved reader probably wouldn’t notice, but Maguire knew his Oz. He includes a lot of the variations on the original L. Frank Baum novel that have occurred over the years (the Ozma regent is Patorius, a character from the 1903 musical, assuming you even know who Ozma is or why there’d be an Ozma Regent), and he seeks to connect some of the more diverging concepts (the shoes in Wicked are bejewled and bewitched, and the angle of the light makes them shine different colors, silver and ruby being two of the many, but this definitely helps link the original shoes with the MGM shoes without taking a side in the debate). I taught the novel because of it’s inclusion of larger ideas, such as genocide, terrorism, familial bonds, racism, and education. On this reading I actually thought about the rubies in Quadling country (don’t you love that none of this makes any sense to you?) being representative of blood diamonds, and I’m looking forward to Son of a Witch (which spends some time dealing with military occupation of Quadling country) in order to see if this comparison pans out. Not that I’ll ever do anything will all this amazing knowledge and thought on Oz. I just keep it inside, spouting off about it at random times to the annoyance of my friends and family.

I could wax poetic on Wicked and most of Oz for days, but I think I shall go and soak in a hot bath and read. I’m about to start Boq’s section, meet Avaric, and wish Galinda wasn’t such of a bitch (although she ends up fat, so I guess she sort of gets hers in the end). And Yackle! I’m almost to that wonderful enigma, and once again I’ll question whether there is one Yackle or many. But I won’t bother you with that. At least not right now.

Surveys are for winners.

A survey. Because I said I was going to write at least one blog entry a week and I’m sort of too tired to think of anything good right now.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before? Went on real, honest-to-goodness “Getting to know you” dates.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don’t really remember my resolutions from last year, but I did make more impossible to accomplish ones for this year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? I pretend I’m still close to Jana, so Jana. But just under the wire for 2008.

4. Did anyone close to you die? No one close to me, but the Goat’s dad passed away at the end of December.

5. What places did you visit? There was a little bit of the beginning of year that I was in Ohio, then a little bit of time at the end of the year I was back in Ohio. Other than that, I visited nothing and went nowhere. Boo.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008? 40 less pounds of fat. And some things written down that are either academically or creatively pleasing.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? The end of spring semester, since I was changing pillz and sort of went a little nuts. Meeting the Goat in person for the first time in June, then reconnecting with him in late August. Other Goat-related dates from the fall. Meeting The Proxy™ and becoming friends because she wasn’t afraid to kick the shit out of our copier.

8. What was your biggest achievement(s) of the year? Doing super-well during my field experience. Meeting and beginning to date someone new (although it seems weird that I should consider that an achievement). Data entry for the surveys for the grant my boss and another professor are working on (this also seems weird to be considered an achievement, but if you had stared at the spreadsheet full of zeros and ones for as long as I did, you’d consider it a major achievement, too).

9. What was your biggest failure? My general apathy and disillusionment toward my current educational pursuits. I guess I didn’t fail at apathy and disillusionment, but I failed at working to my potential due to my apathy and disillusionment.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Sick in the head. The Crazy. The usual.

11. What was the best thing you bought? New tap shoes and ballet shoes.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? The Goat’s, because he is so very strong and came through some pretty tough stuff without too many scratches and dents. I’m terribly proud of him for being a good brother and a good son at a time where it might have been easier to handle things less gracefully. The Proxy’s, because we pulled together an entire dance recital in less than seventy-two hours, no thanks to K or J.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Mine. My mom’s at times. Coach’s, just because he made certain aspects of fall semester a living hell. K’s, because she really did The Proxy™ and I dirt, as well as her other instructors.

14. Where did most of your money go? Food. Crappy, crappy food.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Teaching dance. Can’t say that really worked out all that well, but I tried.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008? I can’t really think of one. Weird.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? Happier. b) thinner or fatter? Ridiculously fatter. Damn you, generic Seasonale. Damn you.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? School work.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? I wish I had been less depressed and more in tune to what was going on around me.

20. How did you spend Christmas last year? At home with mom and dad.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008? Yes.

22. What was your favorite TV program? House and How I Met Your Mother. Lost didn’t really do it for me, whether or not I can blame that on the writer’s strike I don’t know. Hopefully it’ll pick up this year.

23. What did you do for your birthday in 2008? Went to work where no one knew it was my birthday.

24. What was the best book you read? V.

25. Who was the best new person you met? The Proxy™, hands down. And the Goat’s pretty cool, too, I guess.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery? Sufjan Stevens.

27. What did you want and get? A good friend who has the same general outlook on life as I do, since Kansas is so far away and I can’t get to My Person™.

28. What did you want and not get? The Terrorist, but I’m over that.

29. What was your favorite film of this year? Tough. I’m not sure I had one. I did love Persepolis, though.

30. Did you make some new friends this year? Yes, wonderful new friends.

31.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Having been more productive and less angry about what I needed to be doing for school.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008? I don’t really have one, except I try to wear close that hide The Fatness™.

33. What kept you sane? Living vicariously through other people’s blogs on the internets, making fun of Sarah Palin, and The Proxy™.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Sarah Palin. Hands down.

35. What political issue stirred you the most? It was an election year, so I was involved in wanting a good president who wouldn’t suck. But Prop 8 sort of hurt my soul a little, especially after grading some terrifiying papers against gay marriage (and homosexuality in general).

36. Who did you miss? My Person™, the Terrorist, my OU friends.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008. If you feel what you’re pursuing isn’t right or isn’t going to make you happy, get out. Don’t stick it out because you feel like it’s what you’re supposed to do. You’ll only disappoint yourself by what you don’t accomplish due to your disillusionment and anger.

New Year’s resolutions for the incredibly unhip.

(So when did it become kosher to use NYE as an abbreviation for New Year’s Eve? Every time I see it in someone’s blog, I immediately think, “Did so-and-so go to New York City for the holiday?” then a beat passes and I’m all, “Oh, New Year’s Eve. I’m an idiot.” I will not be using that abbreviation here.)

In 2009 I will:

1. Wash my face and brush my teeth every night before I go to bed. (We’ll see how long this lasts. Last year I made it to February. I didn’t realize it, but I’m not a fan of dental hygiene or good skin care.)

2. Write in this blog at least once a week, make more video blogs with Kimberly, and keep some sort of record of the horrible experience that will be my internship. (And by “internship” I mean “student teaching,” for those of you who aren’t attending/didn’t attend institutions that feel teaching is “the profession that makes all other professions possible” and should be referred to in the same terms one would refer to a surgeon.)

3. Lose 40 pounds.

4. Find birth control that does not: (A) cause me to gain a million pounds, (B) make my skin turn against me, (C) turn me into a slightly more crazy version of my already legally certifiable self, or (D) have random periods that make me think I have some sort of unidentifiable disease of the uterus like a character on House. Said birth control should also stop the making of babies, but at this point that’s really the least of my birth control worries.

5. Maybe write something creative. Maybe.

6. Direct my relationship anxiety in a positive direction, or at least in a direction that will result in the smallest number of casualties.

7. Stop eating fast food. Eat Chick-fil-a only once a month. Drink sweet tea only once a week.

8. Keep the puppy brushed.

9. Finish growing my hair out so I can donate it to Locks of Love.

10. Buy a MacBook.