Half-Jew in Granite

Sundays Blues, Intensified

2011-11-20T08:22:00.000-05:00

I kept waking up last night to plot how I want to deal with the negative ratemyteacher comment, about which I've been obsessively blogging (online or in my head) for the past 18 hours. I've thought about taking a screen shot of the comment, transferring it to an overhead, and then discussing it with the class. (Oh, how I wish I had a computer projector and Smartboard so I could be done with the overhead.) I'd say something like, "In order to make this individual more comfortable, I am changing the class from this point forward. If I'm going to stop my 'teeny-bopper' antics, which I employ to try to draw you into conversation, please be aware that I will treat you the way my 35 year old self wants to treat you. I will expect you to come to class willing to respond on the spot. Maybe I should have had these expectations for you all semester, but honestly, after the first few classes, I knew you weren't up to it and I grew desperate to draw you into conversation." Most likely, I will not do this. No overhead. But I do think it will be nearly impossible for me to get through class without mentioning the RMT post.

I'm really down on teaching today.

In addition to being haunted by the ratemyteacher comment, I keep thinking about how discussing teaching strategies with my coworkers can be such a waste of time. The teachers who need to listen the most are so high on their own egos, that they refuse to consider that they need to make improvements. This makes me feel as though departments meetings and professional learning communities are a waste of time for a department comprised of many people who fancy themselves the second coming of Dead Poets Society's John Keating.

On Friday, I listened to a teacher, one so full of her/himself that s/he disregards the curriculum and writing instruction plan of our department, talk about what a great teacher s/he is. This teacher is big on encouraging students to find their individual voices. S/he interprets this as making all writing assignments personal essays. I believe in kids finding their voices, but we have the college essay unit for this. We also offer Creative Writing classes. Students in this teacher's class even write their junior research paper on an American author in the voice of the author. While this is an interesting writing assignment, it is not the required paper, which is supposed to be the students' first exposure to incorporating literary criticism. I also think that there is something to be said for making kids in our narcissistic culture put the focus on the literary work and its ideas rather than on themselves.

This teacher believes that s/he is superior to everyone in the department. S/he believes that the creativity of her/his lessons elevates him/her above the rest of us. I really want to confront this person, and say, "Please listen to me. I get your kids in my senior honors Humanities class, and they cannot write analytical essays. They cannot do the type of essays that will be required of them in college." This teacher believes that s/he is above lesson plans, above the dept. determined curriculum, and s/he refuses to acknowledge any weaknesses. (I'll acknowledge right here that I don't teach grammar and basic sentence construction the way that I should.) S/he also likes to do edgy public interviews with students during the first week of school in which s/he builds his/her cult following by showing how s/he can penetrate into the soul of each student in front of an audience. Most students love this teacher. It depresses me when I think about how many of them drink the Kool-Aid. Last week I heard a student in the literary magazine comparing this teacher to another teacher who teaches/has taught the same course. The other teacher is more reserved, less entertaining, but s/he is also a more thoughtful intellectual and a more responsible educator than this popular teacher. I tried to set the record straight about the merits of the less entertaining teacher without letting my true feelings about the more entertaining educator be known.

I'm somewhat friendly with the entertaining educator. I've thought about confronting her/him and being honest about how his/her choices affect students and the other teachers & courses in the department, but the more I get to know this individual, the more apparent it is that s/he would not really hear me.

It is only November, and I'm having the kind of feelings for my co-workers that I usually have in March or April. I contemplate escaping department meetings by physically harming myself. I ask myself, "If I make myself vomit or accidently run headfirst into a wall, can I escape this meeting, which always feels like a scene from a mental hospital movie, such as Girl, Interrupted? More and more, I am convinced that my fellow English teachers are all touched by some form of mental illness or some residual childhood trauma. I include myself in this category. I'm the depressed/anxious first born child of an alcoholic. I am also an addict. I put my emotional age at about 16 or 17 years old. Since first starting to enter the recovery process, I'm maturing slowly from the point when addictive behavior took over my life. I didn't start to grow up in a real sense until I was in my late 20s. I acknowledge that I probably went into this profession out of some misguided desire to save people. My subconscious was on the relentless hunt for a steady stream of attention and positive regard. I place myself among the mentally ill in the field of secondary education. The range of mental illness in my department seems to run from constant low-level depression to the delusional existence in another reality. The more sane I get, the more difficult it is to sit in a room that is 2/3s full of crazy people.

Teacher Metamorphosis

2011-11-19T18:24:00.002-05:00

My husband says that the previous post makes me sound insane. Yes, I think that is what 10.5 years of being a public school teacher will do.

In all seriousness, I'm ready to change the type of teacher that I am. Forces inside and outside the classroom make me realize that my natural inclinations are no longer successful. For this reason, I'm going to make the following changes:

• In the words of my boss at U Mass Amherst, a master of the custodial sciences, I will "work smarter, not harder." I'm not grading homework for juniors and seniors. I'll tell students that homework will prepare them for quizzes, test, and papers. Students often think that handing in homework assignments while failing to complete papers or study for tests will save their grades. I'm going to put my effort into planning lessons and responding to important assignments.

• The personal anecdotes are ending. I've used them to illustrate academic points in the past and have benefited from the positive impact that humor has on the classroom environment, but now it just seems to makes me vulnerable to the judgment of teenagers. Too many kids find it irksome, maybe justifiably so. I'm sick of the comments on ratemyteacher.com

• Since I've been off of facebook, I've been relieved to have more mental space for important activities and real friends. This decision has made me realize just how much of my emotional energy and mental space went to former students and how little I received in return. I think that it is better for me to just part ways with students after they graduate (or leave my class). If students want to reach out and contact me, I'll respond. Students graduate and like the idea of being facebook friends with teachers, but the interest ends quickly.

• The above also applies for my relationships (real and virtual) with most of my coworkers. I'm feeling more and more compelled to separate my work life from my real life. I want clear emotional boundaries. Yes, I have a few genuine friends at work, but I'm ready to distinguish between the genuine friends and the workplace friendships of convenience.

• I'm not going to spend more than 10 hours per week outside of school on grading and preparation. I'm going to teach smarter, not harder. The school board and administration can't cut my prep time in half and expect me turn myself into a self-sacrificing teat of uncompensated maternal concern who martyrs her personal life for her students.

Another Reason Why This Semester Can't End Soon Enough

2011-11-19T17:12:00.000-05:00

The following was just posted about me on ratemyteacher.com:

She's an okay person, she shares too much about her personal life and her obsessions with celebrities. She's not a teenager anymore and needs to get over that fact. She should act like her own age and not be so teeny-bopper. She's overly dramatic with most everything she does, and she shares too many things about other students.

I know this is from someone in my Humanities class. I'm certain that it is a female student. I have it narrowed down to three candidates. I honestly believe that it is someone for whom I wrote a college recommendation. . . .someone for whom I stayed up past midnight trying to spin academic mediocrity into gold. When I die, I'm going to use the special powers given to me in exchange for my physical life to find every little bastard who wrote nasty shit about me on ratemyteacher.com, and I'm going to haunt those fuckers until they go insane. . .and then I'm going to go on review sites for people in their professions and write the most scathing shit for the whole world to read.

Time to Quit or Start to Revel in Being Subversive

2011-10-31T23:20:00.001-04:00

Between the stress of knowing that my prep time will be cut in half next year and articles like this from the New York Times, I feel so down about the state of public education. There are times I wish I could escape from it -- both financially and emotionally -- but that isn't a possibility right now. . . and it's not something I want as long as Humanities still exists. Sometimes I think that I am getting so depressed and angry about how meaningless and burdensome public education is getting for creative educators that I feel I should quit . .. or I should just start to revel in being subversive? What kind of meaningful teaching can I get away with if I shut my door and pretend to do test prep? A friend once told me that being a public school teacher gives me to the opportunity to "be in the belly of the beast." Maybe it's time for me to embrace my rage and start writing the guide for subversive public school teachers.

I've been told that I'm a good teacher -- by students, parents, the US Government (in the form of an award), but I have to admit that if I had known all the bullshit involved in being a public school teacher when I was 22 years old, I probably would have chosen something else. But now I'm 35. I'm locked in, as I said above, both financially and emotionally. I feel like I'm someone who got knocked up too young. Yes, I love the baby, but if I could do it all over again, I'd pick another path. I want to say that the school board member whose two kids I had in class -- the school board member who is so enthusiastic about cutting my prep time in half.

I often love what goes on when I'm teaching. There's still magic there, although less and less of it the more kids get brainwashed by technology (Seriously, kids are becoming less human. . . and people don't seem to care, but that's a whole other blog post). . . so yes, I still love teaching, but I'm sick of the stress; the limits on creativity; the lack of respect from parents, kids, administrators, school board members, news commentators, politicians, and the general public. I'm sick of being blamed for the results of poor parenting and a damaged/damaging culture.

People want to know why smart young people don't want to teach. I used to be a smart young person -- National Merit Scholar, prestigious high school summer program, sweet internships in college and graduate school, and a degree from a top 25 liberal arts school. What kind of smart young person roots his/her life in the kind of professional environment that is described in the article mentioned above? I honestly know very few smart people who came of age professionally during NCLB who have stayed with this job longer than 5 years.

Dancing: Zumba, Ballet, and Belly Dancing

2011-10-21T12:12:00.004-04:00

I've recently tried to overcome the alienation I feel from my body by going back to dancing. I take Zumba, ballet, and belly dancing. Zumba is a fitness class that incorporates many types of dance. It raises my heart rate and allows me to trot out long-dormant dance technique in a room that is mostly filled with non-dancers. If I can look beyond how my body looks to how I carry my body when I dance, it is often an invigorating self-esteem booster. Ballet and belly dancing are my real challenges. They are classes in which technique really matters. I took ballet classes almost continuously from the age of 5 until I was 19. My relationship with ballet became complicated when I realized the following: 1. I wasn't good enough to become a professional dancer -- both physically and mentally. My mind can't learn combinations quickly enough. I'm not skilled at the more athletic aspects of dance. Although, I can do the artistic, theatrical parts, but that just leaves me with the potential of being a really good mime. And who wants that? 2. I didn't have a ballerina body and would never have a ballerina body.

Despite the complexity of my relationship with ballet, I still love it. I love the discipline of it. I love the kinds of movement it requires -- the grace and symmetry. I love how expressive it it. I'm 50 - 60 pounds heavier than when I was my dancing self. It's difficult to confront how the extra weight and lack of activity over the years have affected my body as a tool of self-expression. However, I am encouraged by the miracle of muscle memory. There are some things that my body remembers -- some movements that it seems to crave.

Belly Dancing: I've wanted to take up belly dancing for years. When I danced, I worried the differences with ballet would negatively affect my ballet technique. Now that my ballet technique has been ravaged by time and neglect, I don't mind throwing a completely different vocabulary of movement into the mix. Belly dancing is similar to ballet in the following ways: the upright carriage/posture, the subtlety of hand and arm movements, the isolation and focus on particular movements and body parts, the expressiveness of the dancing, and the sense that every aspect of the dance connects to an aesthetic that has a long tradition.

The major differences (the ones that give my body a "brain cramp") have to do with the parts of parts of the body responsible for the movement. Ballet is very core focused. The core of belly dancing appears (to this person who has only taken six classes) to be the thighs and the butt. Other differences include how in belly dancing the knees are not straightened and the body often appears to be curved rather than ramrod straight. In order to perform some many of the movement in belly dancing, I have to let go of shame I have about certain parts of my body. One has to let the abs. relax in order to do a hip shimmy. It was really hard for me to get used to seeing my abdominal fat jiggle. My mind struggles to understand that jiggling is a goal. The whole-body movements in belly dancing don't appear to be as dynamic -- the athleticism seems to be primarily small scale.

Body Hair, Modesty, and Belly Dancing: Part I

2011-10-16T16:35:00.008-04:00

There is a three-way conversation going on in my mind lately among three life decisions, which are apparently contradictory. The three major forces in this discussion are my long-held belief in not shaving (which I've often violated for social convention), my recent attraction to modesty of dress, and my reunion with dance (one of the loves of my life). I'm trying to think/write my way to uncovering a thread of personal philosophy that links the three.

This is an initial post -- a collection of disjointed thoughts.

• After I got married, I felt compelled to dress more modestly. Not because the rabbis are the boss of me, but because there are aspects of the philosophies of modesty that are out there that appeal to me. I don't conform to Orthodox standards but I tend (with one exception that I'll write about later) to avoid showing cleavage, wearing sleeveless shirts, and skirts above the knee. (I wear various head-coverings, but that is for the reason that a man will wear a kippah rather than for the reason that an Orthodox woman will cover her hair). I think that this is in resistance to the commodification of women. I just hate the idea that a whole world that unquestioningly buys the concept of women as objects gets to see my body and decide how much it is worth.

• Since high school, I've experienced serious feminist resistance to the idea that women should make their bodies hairless. I equate it with the male desire to control women by making their bodies like those of little girls. That being said, I do think that this presence of hair makes once bare, prepubescent body parts, look more adult and therefore the sight of them becomes a more intimate exchange. When I think about the hairy armpits of the trendy coffee shop of my college town, I don't feel repulsed by the hair as much as I wish I didn't have to be drawn into that kind intimate physical knowledge/exchange with someone serving me my mocha and hummus plate.

• I've started dancing again after many years. I tried to bring my ideas of modesty into the dance studio, but it is just too damn hot in there. I also find myself wanting a more complete view of my body in the mirror. I know that other people in my dance classes are repulsed by my armpits, and the people-pleaser part of me cares about this a bit, but I seem to care more about being true to my beliefs. I dance to transcend. When I am wearing dance clothes, I think I feel much more naked than other dancers. I actually like this. It raises the stakes of the activity. Dancing brings me a sense of peace and transcendence that I rarely feel elsewhere. I like the almost mikveh-like feel of my dancing class near-nudity. (A mikveh is a ritual bath. I go to this one in Newton, MA.)

• As much as I believe in modesty and mystery as ways of resisting commodification, I do think that there is something to be said about acceptance of various body types through familiarity with naked or nearly naked bodies, especially in an artistic setting. In art, there seems to be more attention brought to the gaze. This extra attention makes it feel like the most fitting situation to be exposed to the naked or nearly naked.

• I started taking belly dancing about a month and a half ago. I find myself intrigued by the idea that a form of dance that so many consider erotic has such a code of modesty about it. Best line from my belly dancing teacher: "In belly dancing we don't show our goodies."

Why I Left Facebook and am Back to Blogging or How Facebook Became the Booze of my 30s

2011-10-16T14:39:00.017-04:00

As I launch into writing this, I want you to know that I am aware that I seem like a stereotype from a Woody Allen movie. . .

About a week ago, I found myself in an unexpected confrontation with one of the most difficult time periods in my past. This gave me a case of the crazies that had me calling my therapist's emergency beeper for the second time in the whole 8 years that I've been seeing her. She returned my call, talked me down, and we agreed that I could survive until my previously scheduled appointment the following day.

The next day: People say that they want smart therapists whom they can respect. . .One thinks, "I am such an intelligent and complicated individual, it will take someone really smart to fix me." Usually you want a smart therapist until s/he clearly identifies the core of your much beloved neurosis (that potato sack that you've been carrying around like your most beloved baby for most of your adult life) and lays down the law. After 8 years of listening to me, my therapist asked me if I really want to get beyond my problems and grow up. When I assured that that is what I want most in the entire world, then she told me that I have to get off facebook. Then I started to cry and claim that one can't have a life without facebook.

The last time I reacted like that to the loss of a socializing tool, I was confronting the reality of having to quit drinking.

This is what my wise therapist told me: I use facebook as a way of clinging to the past. I keep having to relive the trauma of past events because I'm addicted to the idea that I have connections with people from my past . . and most of those people don't care about me. Facebook has skewed my concept of friendship. I am relationship/people hoarder. I am basically as bad as those people on A&E's Hoarders, who can't let go of possessions so they end up with mounds of trash covered in rat shit. (I'm paraphrasing here.) She also added that it fuels my addiction to attention and approval. I had twenty-four hours to get off of it (and google +). . . and I wasn't allowed to do one of those swan song status updates. She knew how much I'd get off on keeping track of who begged me to stay. I had to pick no more than 20 people and send them messages saying that I was leaving. Then I had to email her and let her know that I had done it.

So I have been off of facebook (and google +) for six days. . .I felt intensely lonely for the first few days. I've been trying to exchange meaningful emails with my "real" friends, especially the people who know everything about me and still care about me. I've been tempted by co-workers saying how much they miss my status updates.

That temptation is why I am coming back to my much-neglected blog. I'm starting to warm up the prospect of having freedom from my past. I do miss sharing articles and videos that I like. I realize that blogging is not a far leap from the narcissism of facebook, but it does keep me away from looking up ex-boyfriends and former friends. It protects me from being lulled into believing that my former students and most of my coworkers are genuine friends. They may be part of my community, but do they really count as friends?

Changes to the Blog: Last year after Natalie Munroe, a Pennsylvania teacher and blogger, was suspended for critical comments she made about her school and students, I limited this blog to invitation-only readers. I've decided to open the blog up again. I will try to keep Natalie Munroe's experience in mind when I post, but I think it is cowardly of me to hide (especially because I don't think that Murnoe did anything wrong). In addition, hiding doesn't make sense when I reflect on the latest batch of poems that I sent out for publication.

Preparing to Blog in Weekday Writerly Solitude

2011-07-20T17:44:00.006-04:00

I stepped up the security on my personal blog out of professional paranoia and then promptly forgot about the blog while I started to drown in graduate work for my MFA program.

I think I will be updating more frequently because 1. I'm finished with the MFA and no longer have a 45 min. commute to work. 2. at the end of August my husband will be living in Burlington, VT during the week (for the next SEVERAL years) to pursue a graduate degree in abstract/pure mathematics. I will live in a small town in southwestern NH where I teach, so that I can be close to my friends, Jewish community, work community, and yoga & meditation center world. I'm somewhat panicked with impending sadness because I actually really enjoy my husband's company. He's the only person I can stand being around for more than a few hours. I'll probably work harder on this blog in an effort to record the details of my life for him. (Even though I know that he will not read it that often. This will probably end up as a spouse as muse or imaginary friend situation.) Yes, we'll talk on the phone and skype, but there is a big part of me that is more comfortable communicating through writing. I will probably go old school and send him letters and postcards. We had a marriage counselor who was very excited about the electrifying effect this cycle of separation and reunion will have on our relationship.

The best spin I can put on this situation is that I'll be getting back some of that writerly solitude that I used to love when I was single. . . used to love some of the time . . the rest of the time, I was too addicted to chasing romance to value what I had. I guess the timing of this is good. I'm fresh out of my MFA program. I have many individual poems to find homes for and a book-length manuscript to submit to contests and open calls at publishing houses. At my graduation residency, I met with a poetry editor who made me feel good about my work and the chance of getting it published. Lots of time alone means that I can focus on developing the self-motivated writing habits that I always wished I had. The question is "Can I produce without monthly packets and mentor feedback?"

I will be turning 35 at the end of September. The choices that I'm making seem more and more real. Alex and I are choosing our creative/intellectual fulfillment over having kids. Since there isn't going to be anyone to say Kaddish for me, I'll have to produce some pretty fucking amazing poetry to make my life worth it. I'm growing to like that sense of urgency -- the heightened stakes.

I used to want to be a rockstar in all the genres, but then I threw myself into poetry and felt the exhilaration of how impossible the genre seems. I love the condensed power of it. The sense of presence and the physicality of breath. The pain of chiseling away at extra words or details to get to the essence of the image. I try so hard to be a practicing Jew and often it feels forced, but poetry, even at its hardest, doesn't feel like such a struggle. Poetry is my true religion. When I live my life in my writerly groove, I feel as though I'm experiencing every moment for poetry's sake.

While Alex is getting his PhD, I'll be immersed in little blocks of monasticism -- days in which after work, I prepare food and eat in silence. Write and then sleep alone. I'm scared, but I'm also a bit excited. I like the idea of being able to wrap myself in solitude for a bit. Especially after working at a job that forces a level of extroversion that is less comfortable than when I started teaching 10 years ago.

Two Half-Jews in Granite

2010-12-29T17:22:00.001-05:00

This is a story of two half-Jews from the Granite State who first got to know each other in a Jewish-American literature taught by a gentile Italian Communist amid the cornfields of Ohio.

Being a New Hampshire Jew is a unique Jewish experience. Being a half-Jew is not a unique experience, but it does have a way of separating one from "full" Jews and introducing an irreversible hybridity to one's identity. If you are a half-Jew from New Hampshire, you are far, far beyond the Pale of typical Jewish experience, often beyond unique to freakishly isolated (in a Jewish sense). I spent many years wishing that I could have that unbroken line to the Pale of Settlement --that western area of Russia to which Catherine the Great sent all the Russian Jews. I wanted to be straight from the Pale, not from beyond the Pale.

When I was in college, I met a guy who was a half Jew from NH. We had grown up 30 minutes from each other and had never met. I spent several hours of sophomore year gazing adoringly at his picture in the freshmen facebook (long before facebook.com ever existed). I don't know if my friends started calling him "Jewish Adonis" or if I did. Now it has been shortened to J.A. J.A. and I had a Jewish-American literature class together. I didn't know much about him except that he was a half-Jew from NH and that we were both seemed to be grappling with the fact that in the eyes of New Hampshire-ites, we are very Jewish, but at Oberlin college with its large Jewish population of very Jewy Jews, we were not that Jewish. At least I had the matrilineal membership ticket. JA just had his "semitic good looks" (to quote Lisa Simpson's words of adoration for her Jewish substitute teacher) and his Jewish last name. I felt drawn toward him because I could see that he was taking this class as a way of reaching out to his Jewish identity just as I was. I also noticed as the world of Jewish Oberlin was pushing him away from any association with Judaism or Jewishness, he was grounding himself elsewhere. I was doing just the opposite -- making the move away from wanting to be Unitarian Universalist minister and throwing myself into Jewish studies courses. It was fascinating to watch this attractive stranger, who shares my background, start to locate himself in the universal progressive world of environmentalism and art rather than in the specificity-laden world of Judaism.

To win J.A. would have been a validation of my strange identity. It would be like two wrongs making a right, two half-Jews making a whole Jew -- a Jew who is Jewishly jacked-up, yet complete . My crush on J.A. allowed me to break off my flailing, long-distance relationship with a high school boyfriend. I finally finagled a coffee date with J.A. -- only to come on too strong and be rejected. We maintained a kind of friendship/acquaintance-ship. I got a serious boyfriend for the last half of college, although this didn't stop me from gazing at the freshmen facebook and sighing wistfully about my inability to maintain my cool and snag this model of northern New England Jewish hybridity for myself.

Once JA and I graduated from Oberlin, we made it a practice of getting together during the Christmas holiday break to prepare ourselves for immersion in NH and in our families. These get-togethers were important to me because I was at U Mass Amherst, which seemed so far away from Oberlin, and J.A. was a little scrap of Oberlin to which I could cling. I enjoyed his Oberlin-ness, but I also enjoyed his odd blend of New Hampshire-ness and secular Jewishness. The New Hampshire-ness is present in the form of a simple, streamlined, practical sense of environmental conservation -- environmentalism without the self-satisfied, New-Agey privilege of our more urban-reared peers. (Maybe this is just his Capricorn nature, but my NH pride attributes it to J.A.'s NH roots.) J.A. has absorbed his Jewish father's concerns with bringing about social justice and change. His father writes books about public education that are actually inspiring. (I still hold this opinion after 9.5 years of teaching with all the cranky disillusionment that that brings.) J.A. has no idea how Jewy he is.

This holiday break marks the 11th anniversary of a drunken make-out session that resulted from our mini-half-jew-in-granite summit. During college our fragile friendship would not have survived this. But grad. school was a different story. I was bouncing between two relationships and three fling-like things during this time period, so I was able to maintain a zen-like detachment. All these years later, I don't regret it. I just wish that I could remember more of it and that I hadn't vomited so much. I value my friendship with J.A. I'm glad that he and my husband get along. I appreciate that he understands why I feel so drawn to rural beauty of NH and doesn't judge me for ending up in the state in which I was raised. I'd like to undo the alienation from Judaism that Oberlin inflicted on him by showing him just how Jewish his core values are.

I still hold out hope that he will allow his family land in upstate New York to be used for some progressive, rural Jewish co-op. Too bad that J.A. says his co-op days are over.

Trying to Get Back at It

2010-11-01T17:17:00.000-04:00

I've been away because I've been busy with my MFA program, teaching, binging on HBO and AMC box sets. I've also considered deleting this blog after having my first emotional entanglement with a genuine psychopath. I wanted to block any possible routes of cyber-contact. I've tangoed with the schizophrenics, the narcissists, the histrionics, but I don't think that I've ever had such close contact with a textbook psychopath.

I was thinking of starting a separate blog to wrestle with my food and eating issues, but then it just seemed like too much work. This feels like my home base even though it is often neglected. I thought about the food blog because I'm willing to admit that I definite have some emotional issues woven into my process of eating. I thought maybe if I wrote about food and eating, then I would bring a kind of mindfulness to it that I bring to other subjects. I know that I'm not a conscious eater. I eat quickly, frantically, usually in front of the computer or in the car. I dive into the experience of binging rather than the single bite of a particular food. I wonder if writing about foods that are healthy for me will help me fall in love with them. If I contemplate them, consciously experience them, maybe I'll be able to get beyond the loss of foods that I use as mind and emotional altering substances. I did an elimination diet about a year ago and discovered that I have sensitivities to gluten, dairy, caffeine, nightshades, and possibly, unfermented soy. These restriction added to sugar and carb addiction and a desire to be a vegan leave me with a near macrobiotic diet that makes me throw my hands in the air and push my face into the carb trough.

Today: today I ate two apples, a handful of almond slivers, 4 handfuls of halloween candy, vegetarian sandwich (provolone cheese, wheat bulkie, mustard, mayo, tomatoes, lettuce, onion, hot peppers, and olives) and a grande decaf soy mocha. The only things that I ate that was not harmful for me were the two apples. They were granny smith apples. Their tartness is the only thing that I remember. Everything was consumed in a blur. I'm sick from a lingering virus, feeling too tired to put the energy into prepping food. This morning I hoped that I would feel bad enough not to want to eat more than the apples. I'm contemplating miso soup for dinner, but the kitchen is a mess. The messiness of our kitchen is often something that prevents me from cooking. I know I need to have consider a clean kitchen as part of my food sobriety plan.

My coworkers know that I'm always setting new food rules for myself and failing to follow them. It's embarrassing. I want freedom from my obsession with food. My obsession with buying food and eating it in private. I'm trying to figure out what food is to me. I read Geneen Roth's Women, Food, and God about food addiction. I disagreed with some of it. I don't think that a food addict, especially one that is an alcoholic or from a family of alcoholics, can eat sugar and simple carbohydrates in moderation, but I do think that her emphasis on mindfulness needs to be part of my definition of abstinence. I know I'm dragging my feet on getting a sponsor and following my food plan. I'm not quite willing to give up this mode of comforting myself. I'm hoping that I have the strength to ask someone at the Thursday OA meeting to be my sponsor.

I worry that this is too confessional. . . too diary-like. . . not entertaining enough for a blog. But maybe it's my own narcissism that makes me feel more motivated to write to a possible audience, but I know I need to do it. There is something that makes me thing that writing may end up being one of my ways out of this.

Twangy Libran Misery

2010-01-26T19:44:00.000-05:00

I want to write a sad country song about being libra who is surprised by her own struggle with being married. I always assumed that I would be good at being married because libra is the sign of partnership. Today I figured out why I've been angry for the past year and a half. I started to screech it to the surface of conciousness while working on the Nautilus machines with my friend Amy at the gym. This is not a divorce announcement blog post. This is just a snapshot of me realizing that just because two people are smart and loving, doesn't mean that they know how to function as adults in a partnership. We have a shit ton of work to do.

Captain's Log: Humanities Honors Day 1

2010-01-26T08:06:00.000-05:00

I'm toying with the idea of keeping track of what I do in my classes on this blog. I realize that this could be very boring for anyone who actually reads this blog, so feel free to skip anything that starts with Captain's Log.

Humanities Honors, day 1, first day of class and first day of the introductory unit
block 1: I've decided that we're going to hit the ground running. We're in the computer lab right now. Students are working on an assignment that I call "First Thoughts." Here are the directions:

Please type one paragraph on each of the concepts listed below. What are your thoughts on the topic? What does it mean to you and why?

Please single space and use a readable 12 point font. Your work will be shared with your classmates anonymously. Make sure that each entry is contained on the same page (that a paragraph doesn’t spill over onto the next page). It is okay to have more than one entry on a page if the entries are complete. Retype the title of the entry before you start writing your paragraphs.

Ethics
Nature
Sacred space
Reality
Love
Justice
Beauty
The inner journey
Death
Human frailty
Art
Law
Evil
Good

ASSIGNMENT PURPOSE: to have students consider what they already know and to have them start thinking critically about the sources of their individual beliefs. I'm going to create a booklet of the responses (arranged by theme), and we will revisit their thoughts at the start of each unit. They can also use this booklet as a jumping off point for the class blog.

I also distributed the following:

• the prospectus, which we will go over in class tomorrow

• a "Welcome to Humanities" sheet that asks them for their experiences and familiarity with painting, sculpture, poetry, theater, mythology, religion, philosophy, architecture, music, and dance. They are also asked, "What, if anything is unique about the human mind?" and "Why do human beings create art ?"

• a sheet the refreshes their memories on the definitions of symbol and metaphor and asks them to "find an image or object (or create one) that represents an aspect of your inner (emotional, abstract, intangible) world. Bring it to school tomorrow."

(I'll explain more about what we do with this on the day of the in-class activity.)

• an assignment sheet for the "Find an Artist. . . " project

I ask students to find a visual artist (someone who is deeply involved in painting, sculpture, drawing, or photography). This person doesn't have to a professional, but creating art should be of major importance in his/her life. Students are supposed to interview the artist and ask the following:

1. Describe how you create a work of art? What is your process?
2. How do you look at other works of art?
3. Do you think that your way of looking at art differs from that of the non-artist? Explain your answer.
4. How do you want your art to be experienced?
5. Do you think of the person who may be looking at your art when you are creating it? Explain your answer.
6. What compels you to create?
7. What makes a work of art endure through time?

They will share these interviews on Friday and link what we learn to the course readings.

Here's What We're Doing in Humanities This Semester

2010-01-25T18:44:00.000-05:00

This is the plan. . . let's see how close we get. (I'm not going to bother adding the format details that got lost in the cut and paste process.)

UNITS OF STUDY (The order may vary.)
I am aware that most of the readings were written by men. Women’s voices will be provided in the supplementary materials. I encourage you to keep gender in mind as we study these texts.

Introductory Unit
• reading selections by Leonard Shlain, David Abram, John Bowker, Karen Armstrong, Ellen Dissanayake, Simon Blackburn, and Carl Jung that explore ritual, myth, language, storytelling, writing, art, and philosophy
• introductory readings on the study of the Humanities in textbooks by Sporre and Witt
• How Art Made the World: “Once Upon a Time”
• Introduction to the biblical book of Genesis and tales from Greek mythology (as told by Kerenyi, Greek tragedians, Ovid, and contemporary poets), which will be the foundational texts for the course

Nature, Human Beings, and Sacred Space
• National Geographic’s Australia’s Aborigines
• How Art Made the World: “The Birth of Imagination” & “Second Nature”
• Selected readings on environmental philosophy
• The Tempest by William Shakespeare
• from The Essays: “Of Cannibals” by Michel de Montaigne
• selections of nature poetry from a variety of cultures
• clip from Art of the Western World on cathedrals
• clip from The Power of Myth on cathedrals
• video and slides of Lascaux
• readings on cave paintings, cathedrals, temples, and mosques in Stokstad’s Art History

Love and Beauty
• How Art Made the World: “More Human than Human”
• readings on sculpture in Stokstad’s Art History
• Plato’s The Symposium
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• love poetry: The Song of Songs, ancient Egyptian love poetry, love lyrics by Sappho, Sufi love poetry , sonnets by Shakespeare, love poems by Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browing. and more
• more literature on love: excerpt from The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, from The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus, from The Romance of Tristan and Iseult by Beroul, and Equitan by Marie de France
• All the Mornings of the World, directed by Alain Corneau
• The Power of Myth on “Love and the Goddess”
• The Shape of Things, directed by Neil LaBute

Ethics, Law, Power, and Human Frailty
• The Hebrew Bible’s “TheTen Commandments,” “The Holiness Code, ” and selections form the writings of the prophets
• The Buddhist Precepts
• a selection of philosophical readings on ethics
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Crimes and Misdemeanors, directed by Woody Allen
• Lysistrata by Aristophanes
• selections from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
• A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
• revisiting Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Christian New Testament’s “The Sermon on the Mount”
• scenes from Frontline’s Jesus to Christ
• excerpts from the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
• How Art Made the World: “Art and Power”

The Inner Journey and the Meaning of (Human) Reality
• readings from the Hebrew Bible
• The Power of Myth: The Hero’s Journey
• Waking Life, directed by Richard Linklater
• Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” and “The Death of Socrates”
• excerpts from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• The Book of Job
• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• "Night Journey" -- The story of Oedipus danced by Martha Graham
• selections from Dante’s The Divine Comedy
• selections from John Milton’s Paradise Lost
• I [Heart] Huckabees, directed by David O. Russell
• readings on the Buddha
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• selected philosophical readings
• readings by Albert Camus and/or Jean-Paul Sartre
• How Art Made the World: “Seeing the Invisible “ and “The Face of Death”

Anything to Get Back into It

2010-01-20T12:51:00.000-05:00

I've decided that I'm going to write anything that comes to mind in order to get back into blog writing.

• On Monday, 1/18/10, the husband of one of my co-workers died in a car accident. He died while I was making the nerve-wracking drive home from Maine in a snowstorm. I can't stop thinking about it for a number of reasons: he was only 41 years old; he and his wife (my friend) had just celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary two days before; the year I spent driving on the narrow curves of Route 2 East every weekend, even through snowstorms, to visit Alex; their two children (ages 8 and 10), wondering how they'll even be able to fathom the loss. Alex and I talked about what arrangements we would want if we died suddenly. I feel most Jewish when dealing with issues of death. I can't bring myself to be cremated or cremate my husband. The Jew in me wants to rot into the soil. Ideally, I would want to be buried in a eco-burial park, but until that kind of thing hits New Hampshire, I want to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Laconia where my grandparents are buried. It shocked me to hear myself saying that. I usually hate Laconia.

• I was at the winter residency for the Stonecoast MFA program. I loved being immersed in a group of childfree women. I didn't realize how great this is until I got home. I loved having conversation with other women that didn't revolve around child-rearing.

• While I was away at the residency, I talked a lot about my teaching life. I was a little sad to not be at school to teach Oedipus, Job, and Hamlet. I missed the intellectually-engaging and creative aspects of my job. I didn't miss trying to force disinterested kids to learn. I didn't miss banging my head against the wall of our idiotic and destructive culture. I didn't miss being a prison guard. I did miss many of my students. I also realized that my identity as a teacher is a central part of my self-concept. My plan is to eventually spend my time teaching people who actually want to learn.

• For the first time in my life, I prayed "Jewishly" every day for 10 days straight. It started to enjoy and get anxiously- protective of the experience. I'm still trying to figure out how I can bring that experience into my current life.

• The davening did nothing to make me believe in a personal God. I'm more agnostic than I've ever been. I pray to get beyond myself.

• I'm thinking of doing my third semester project on the mythologizing of collective history in Jewish-American poetry or the renewal of aspects of traditional Jewish liturgy through poetry. I'm in search of poems about the Exodus from Egypt. In this search, I keep running into Kaddish-influenced poems, so now I've started to keep a file for those.

• I met an MFA student who is my dad's age and has a PhD in systematic theology. He mentioned Paul Tillich in a workshop, and that set me off into near-orgasmic yelps of pleasure and enthusiasm. I threw myself on him (intellectually, not sexually) and then remembered how good studying theology was for my poetry while I was at Oberlin. I realized how much I love trying to transfer theological concepts into poetry with its sense of multi-dimensionality and embodiment.

New Year's Resolution: Project Friendship

2009-12-26T18:12:00.000-05:00

I want to be a better friend in 2010. For some of my friendships, this means being a better listener. For other friendships, this means loving my friends by not poisoning them with my toxic negativity (work friends, this means you.). For some of my friendships, especially my friendships with men, this means guarding boundaries as a sign of respect to my friend, my husband, and to me.

I'm one of those dysfunctional narcissists who needs a manual on friendship. I often have no idea of what's appropriate. I often can't accurately assess the suckiness of my behavior as a friend. I've been called out at least three times on how my own self-absorption affects other people. Two of these reality check confrontations were initiated by Scorpios. . . brilliant, intense, female scorpios. . . . just imagine how scathing the honesty was.

In 2010, I will try to do the following:

• remember birthdays and do more than just write on the birthday person's facebook wall

• maintain proper boundaries with my straight male friends, especially the ones with whom I have a history of sexual dalliance . . . . now that my therapist has clarified those boundaries for me using pretty harsh language. . . I honestly, honestly didn't know that I shouldn't be discussing sex the way I do . . . with most people . . . most of the time.

• listen to other people's stories without having to one-up with my own story

• avoid dragging my friends into my gossipy underworld

• only burden my friends with my negativity when I really need their support

• be responsible in the intimacy that I cultivate. . . .If I know that I'm not willing to be available to a certain extent, then I will not nurture an intimacy that suggests otherwise.

• be more vigilant in applying mussar study to my friendships

Jumble of Jewish Thoughts

2009-12-10T11:55:00.000-05:00

• I was reading about Yehuda Amichai today. A passage spoke of how he had so internalized the prayer of his orthodox upbringing that incorporating it into his poetry was something that took no effort. This made me reflect on my own Jewishness. Have I lived as a practicing Jew long enough for any of that to flow naturally into my poetry? Or is that "Jewish" voice that others hear in my poems just my half-Baptist outsider voice? I am feeling very much like a Jew of my own invention today. . very disconnected from Jewish culture.

• My rabbi and I are studying mussar and Emmanuel Levinas. We were talking about how Levinas' ethics rest on the acknowledgment of the fundamental differences between individuals (acceptance of the Other status) rather than on the similarities. Levinas didn't believe that ethics should have to rest on commonality, rather ethics should be rooted in the fact that we are all unfathomable to one another. I asked her how this would translate into politics, specifically Israel/Palestine. If Levinas suggests that we should put the interests of this Other first, what does this look like between states or peoples?

• I want a hevrutah (study partner). I was on the road to having a great one, but then complications arose that screwed it up. My almost-hevrutah was great for me because we both want to dig into the text with our full intellects. We both have unusual Jewish backgrounds and are not fluent in Hebrew, but we could apply analysis skills from other disciplines to our study. We were an equal paring and had similar goals for ourselves as Jews. My Torah study experiences in the past have been unsatisfying because my lack of Jewish education seemed to make my partners feel as though they couldn't really engage me as an intelligent person or my study partner wasn't willing or able to really dig into the text. It was too much work for me to engage the other person. It felt like an extension of my high school teaching. I don't know if my almost-hevrutah will ever want to study with me again. He has very good reasons for avoiding me for the rest of his life. I feel as a sense of despair when I contemplate the following: 1. the near impossibility of finding a serious study partner in NH 2. what it will be like to study with someone who is smart, but with whom I don't mesh as well I did with almost-hevrutah. I'm planning on going to the National Havurah Institute again this summer. Maybe I'll find someone there. The loss of almost-hevrutah has made it seem essential that I at least try taking online courses through Hebrew College.

• Yesterday was a snow day, and my husband and I were sitting in a coffee shop near our apartment. The snow catapulted our already ridiculously quaint college town into even greater heights of quaintness. The following conversation was motivated by the conflict I feel between the part of me that loves living in rural New England and the part of me that feels starved for Jewish learning and culture.

Esh: "I wish we could start and live on a rural Jewish co-housing property. Not a commune, or one big house, but small houses on one piece of property. . .so that I can have my solitude and my sense of community at the same time."

Husband: "So you want to live in a shtetl?"

Esh: "Couldn't we call it a kibbutz-of- the-less-communal variety?"

Husband: "No, it sounds like a shtetl. Are you going to have a pogrom day?

Despite my scorpio husband's comments, I still like the idea of having some kind of living arrangement that allows me to live in rural New England and still have a minyan, torah study partners, and a community with whom to celebrate shabbat and holidays without having to drive at least 25 minutes.

• Chanukah: I like the fire. We just acquired our fifth menorah. It was my husband's paternal grandparents' menorah. It has some pretty bad ass Lions of Judah on it. I'm stresed about the food -- starchy, deep-friend. . . makes me want to go into a carb coma with bags of soon-to-be-fried potatoes (and accompanying nightshade joint pain) and doughnuts. I'm thinking of trying to make vegan sweet potato latkes with applesauce and soy sour cream.

• Mussar and the Twelve Steps

I've been trying to create my own spiritually-based recovery plan that incorporates practices that have helped me in the past. I'm hoping that a combination of approaches with bring me more holistic relief. This week I tried to match each of the middot to the most appropriate step of the Twelve Steps (based on those of Alcoholics Anonymous). I want to incorporate the chakras next. . . I know how flaky that sounds.

middot (blending the lists of Alan Morinis and Rabbi Ira Stone) : humility, patience, gratitude, compassion, order, equanimity, honor, simplicty, enthusiasm, silence, generosity, truth, moderation, loving-kindness, responsibility, trust, faith, decisiveness, cleanliness, righteousness, frugality, diligence, calmness, and separation.

The 12 Steps
Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable

humility, decisiveness

Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

faith, surrender, decisiveness

Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God

patience, calmness, trust, faith, equanimity, separation

Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves

truth, responsibility, diligence

Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs

truth, humility, separation, honor, righteousness

Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character

faith, humility, decisiveness

Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings

humility, faith, trust

Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
truth, loving-kindness, responsibility, diligence

Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
righteousness, responsibility, diligence

Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
diligence, honor, truth, responsibility, righteousness

Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out

silence, equanimity, humility, patience, faith, trust

Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

loving-kindness, generosity, compassion, gratitude, enthusiasm, honor

Modesty and Mind-Rubbing Lust

2009-12-08T11:57:00.000-05:00

I started wearing a kippah every day in August 2008. Shortly after starting to wear a kippah, I started to extend my definition of headcovering to hats and scarves so that I would have more options (and in situations when I didn’t want to announce my Jewishness to the outside world. . .usually times when I was being a “bad Jew”) Wearing a scarf makes people think that I’m orthodox. This used to bother me because I started wearing a kippah for the same reason that men wear a kippah (as a sign of humility before G-d), not for the reason that women cover their hair (as an act of modesty), but then something weird started to happen. I started to enjoy the fact that my husband is the only person who sees me with hair that is free from some token of Jewish observance. Coming to appreciate this has been the latest installment in the story of how this lustful nerd has learned to value her marriage.

Even though I’ve dressed like a Vermont housewife for years, I’ve always been a creature of somewhat out of control desires. Marriage has made this tendency all the more apparent. If someone evokes intellectual passion in me, I’m overtaken by the desire to possess him/her. This is doesn’t mean that I don’t love my husband. It just means that I’ve fantasized about being the queen bee of a polygamous hive, so I can satisfy all my desires within this one lifetime. I love my husband. We share the same ethical values, the same politics, the same philosophies of everyday life, and the same desire to live a more embodied, mindful existence. We love to learn and create. I feel an ease with him that I don’t feel with any other human being.

BUT we do not share intellectual interests. There are some areas of overlap – subjects that we want to learn to together, such as foreign languages, certain philosophers, and ecology – but for the most part the subjects that make each of us ecstatic are inaccessible to the other. He doesn’t want to wander in poetry and theology, and I don’t have the ability to understand and appreciate the pure mathematics that enchants him. We support each other in these pursuits, but that intellectual fire that burns for each of us is cold and invisible to the other. I love my husband enough to accept that I may be left alone to burn with my own intellectual fire. I’ve had to learn to watch the connections I form with people to whom I’m intellectually attracted. This becomes difficult because intelligence and creativity turn me on, and I’m capable of being attracted to both men and women. A seminar of people with vibrant intellects does more for me than any kind of pornography, peep show, or exotic dance ever could. This makes a Master of Fine Arts program a den of temptation for the newly married nerd . . . at her sexual peak . . . with a compulsive need to use anything pleasurable to numb emotional pain and escape reality.

Until I got married, I didn’t realize that a marriage is something that needs to be protected. I didn’t realize that intimacy is fragile. It frustrates me that in order to have the marriage I want, I have to resist the endorphin rush I get from intellectual and creative exchange with others (with whom there might be some electricity of mutual attraction). . . all because my sexuality is so tied to the intellectual for me. In addition to staying away from booze, caffeine, sugar, compulsive book buying and a host of other pleasurable, yet destructive things, I have to be careful of how I conduct myself A friend of mine suggested that I seek out friends who are either completely straight women or completely gay men as intellectual partners. She suggested this out of nowhere. I never told her that I was struggling to keep appropriate boundaries with someone who has the sexiest mind that I’ve encountered in a long time. I guess it has been obvious to everyone around me that learning and conversation are part of my elaborate, highly-energized, perhaps compulsive, mating dance – a mating dance that leads to intense (short-lived) connections that are often fueled by dopamine-induced fantasies.

Lately, I’ve been forced to confront the fact that I’ve hurt many people in my years of nerdy, mind-rubbing lust. I’ve compromised intimacy with partners (who only provide me with oxytocin rushes – that hormone of bonding and intimacy. . . the hormone of nursing babies) for people who make me high with intellectual lust. I’ve been emotionally unfaithful in every serious relationship that I’ve had. I never considered this infidelity because it never (or hardly ever) materialized in any kind of sexual transgression. I’ve also hurt my brilliant crushes by leading them into an intimacy into which I wasn’t willing to commit myself through a “real” relationship. Once I’ve hurt these people, they have no interest in having a friendship with me.

Sooooo. . what the hell does this have to do with headcoverings? I’ve started to become attracted to the concept of tznuit (modesty). As I continue my education, writing life, and career, I will meet attractive people who share my intellectual interests. It is easy for me to have a great conversation or read an amazing poem and want to pursue a fantasy life with the person who has nourished my brain. Tznuit interests me because it brings my attention to my body and the reality of my physical existence. It creates a clear boundary between what I share with my husband and what I share with everyone else (including people I find fetching on multiple levels). I will never let the rabbis have the last word in defining modesty for me. I’m not covering up to my clavicles and down to my elbows. I’ll write about my own definition of tznuit in a future post. Much of it is rooted in a conversation about armpit hair on baristas at The Feve in Oberlin, OH.

Tznuit forces me to confront the reality of my married status. It creates a protective fence around the intimacy of my marriage, by grounding me in a tangible, concrete, physical fact: no matter how close I may feel to people who turn me on with striking imagery and sharp analysis of theological documents, we do not share an intimacy that gives them access to my body. I'm hoping that being more mindful of modesty improves both my marriage and my friendships and that I can start to treat my husband, my friends, and myself with more respect.

Where Miniature Skateboards Will Take You

2009-12-02T08:32:00.001-05:00

I have a student who compulsively plays with miniature (finger) skateboards while humming Johnny Cash tunes to himself. He doesn't do any English work.

I just received a notice that he is suspended for five days for being in possession of three razor blades, four knives (one with a seven inch long blade), several types of pills, and $72 stolen from a teacher wallet.

To think that just days before I said, "If you're going to hum like that, do you think you can hum "Folsom Prison Blues" for me?"

So a bunch of Jews sit in a circle. . .

2009-12-01T16:28:00.000-05:00

So a bunch of Jews sit in a circle because they are young Jewish "leaders" or have been deemed so by the committee that hands out Everett Fellowships for the National Havurah Institute. In August of 2007 I was one of those young Jews, although on the older, yet less experienced end of the spectrum of young Jewishness.

We had to answer the the following question as an ice breaker:

Who are your people?

Some people said politically-minded Jews, some said young children, some said converts.

I was one of the first to go, and I remember saying, "Addicts are my people. . . and half-Jews. . . but definitely addicts. . . Yup. . those are definitely 'my people.'' . . . (At this point, try to imagine my small, carnival freak hands making air quotation marks.) I felt bad ass, like a survivor, but also humble, and incredibly free.

Two years ago I still thought of myself as an addict and still felt as though twelve step programs had saved my life. . . and then I decided that I had Judaism. . and that twelve step programs are cults. . . and that with thousands of years of self-rectifying-atonement-teshuvah tradition, who needs to hang around with a bunch of losers who like to wallow in the camaraderie of shared fucked-up-ness.

In order to avoid sounding like the LiveJournal of one of my students, I'll skip all the details. . . but this is basically where I am (almost as bad off as I was when I started Program 5 years ago): I'm a recovering alcoholic who obsesses about how many drops of bitters she can put in tonic water before she drinks the whole bottle of bitters; I'm a compulsive procrastinator and time debtor; I'm a compulsive spender and money debtor; I'm a compulsive eater and food addict; I'm addicted to attention and love and the people who once gave, but now withhold those things. I'm ready to admit that my life is unmanageable in that anything that triggers the pleasure center of my brain becomes something to which I cling in order to avoid feelings that spring from a source that I don't quite understand.

So after my therapist put her head in her hands and begged me to go back to 12 step meetings, I'm now trying to piece together some recovery program of meditation, mussar study, prayer, yoga & chakra work, Step work, Jewish practice, and meetings.

I'm at point where I know my life is unmanageable, but I'm still battling the arguments of the past 2 years that I carefully constructed against 12 Step programs.

. . . but I also want out of the addict's narcissism tunnel.

2 Brief Thoughts

2009-11-30T21:53:00.000-05:00

1. I know that I've been remiss in keeping up with my goal of writing about each week's parsha. I've been reading. . . just not writing. One thing that fascinates me about the patriarchs and matriarchs is how they show that direct presence of G-d in one's life doesn't keep one from being plagued and driven nearly crazy by fear, anger, and sorrow. If they can be so screwed up and they have the hand of G-d touching their lives directly, then that gives a bit of leeway to those of us who only catch fleeting glimpses of something transcendent. . . .whose most hopeful days are ones light with agnosticism.

2. I'm reading The Spectacular Difference: The Selected Poems of Zelda, trans. by Marcia Falk. Zelda was an Israeli poet -- an orthodox woman with a mystical bent. I spent years dismissing her poetry because it's in a lot of prayer books, and for some reason, the editors of prayer books seem to revere some pretty lame poetry. (The Reconstructionists are ridiculously smitten with Mary Oliver.) I'm really loving Zelda. There's a friend of mine who slipped out of my life. .. he would appreciate her. I want to elbow my way through the vast cyber-silence and say, "Read this. Read this. You'd love it." This is the best I can do.

Parshat Noach. . . We Know I Sympathize with Biblical Drunks so Let's Move on to the Tower of Babel

2009-10-23T12:56:00.000-04:00

I'm working on finishing a poem about Noah (my favorite drunk) so I don't want to give away my fire by writing about it here. . . .

so the Tower of Babel gets my attention this week.

Genesis 11: 1 - 9 (JPS translation)
1 Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. . . 3 They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard." — Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. — 4 And they said, "Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world." 5 The Lord came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, 6 and the Lord said, "If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. 7 Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another's speech." 8 Thus the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The common language of human beings is destroyed when they attempt to transcend by asserting their egos rather than using their common language (the gift that is take for granted) for achieving the greater depth of living that comes with moving deeply into the experiences and feelings of others (as conveyed by language). They miss out on that ego transcendence that comes with the empathy that is cultivated by listening to stories of others. Maybe we lost our common language so that we would feel the frustration of that thwarted desire to connect and communicate with others. But maybe the only way we can appreciate that connection and transcendence through contact and communication is to have to work for it -- to have to struggle to build it.

Maybe it's because I'm hormonal and starting the dip into seasonal affective disorder, but this story reminds of my attempts to be able to communicate with my father. We both speak English but seem to experience two different universes. I'm a Libra . . . all air, thoughts, and endless contemplation. My father is a Taurus. .. a doer rather than a thinker, internalizer of feelings that serve no purpose, a person who feels frustration with useless speculation. . . I've worked hard as an adult to be able to connect to my father through conversation. I have to struggle to converse with him in a way that is the opposite of the air-fire electricity of conversation with my Sagittarius mother or the air-air ease of communication with my Aquarius sister. Whenever my father and I connect in conversation, which happens more frequently as I get older, I feel as though a miracle has a occurred. I spent decades thinking that when I was a baby I was thrown from the Tower and landed far away from him, and that another language slipped into my mind and shaped my experiences. . . and that he and I grew up together resenting our difficult communication that was evidence of a time when conversation must have happened more easily.

Backtracking to B'reishit

2009-10-23T11:42:00.000-04:00

"The Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being" Genesis: 2:7 (JPS translation)

During the Human Beings and Nature unit in Humanities, we talked about the creation story in Genesis and how the absence of animal ancestry in this creation story could affect how life-long readers of this story identify with nature -- how they view their place in the natural world. That conversation took place a couple of weeks ago.

I thought about it again because I've been pretty fixated on the dust mentioned in Genesis 2:7 -- the dust from which G-d made human beings. (This is one of those times when I feel extremely frustrated with my lack of Hebrew.) I've been so intrigued that I'm almost certain that a poem may be brewing. The constitution of dust fascinates me. Dust is comprised of plant pollen, human skin, textile and paper fibers, and soil (which is made up of organic matter and minerals). The dust from which G-d created humans wouldn't have the human skin and the textile and paper fibers. So much of the dust we encounter on a daily basis is human skin or tiny, tiny pieces of some kind of humanness. (I know I'm heading into the realm of the disgusting.) The presence of dust in Eden indicates cycles of life already underway as soon at plants and creatures were created -- the shedding of cells, cellular death, organic waste, a kind of compost of rebirth. It was a dust of life, but not of human life. Humans may not have an whole, living animal ancestor, but we are made from minute fragments of non-human organic matter. We are so focused on the breath of G-d that animates us in a traditional sense that we ignore the dynamic world of the dust that formed our first body.

Bland " Back in the Saddle" Post -- Aesthetics in Humanities

2009-10-22T14:20:00.000-04:00

I want to get back in the habit of writing because I seemed to be more excited about the things that excite me when I knew I would be writing about them.

This is the boring return post that is written by a teacher who is very tired and dispirited by the cumulative effects of her teaching day. . . except for her Humanities class.

We're in the Beauty unit in Humanities. On Tuesday, I had students read the entry on "aesthetics" from The Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion. They had to select four of the thinkers listed (one from each of the chronological subcategories that I delineated) and paraphrase the summary of his/her philosophy and then write an explanation of why that philosophy appealed to them. This activity continued on Wednesday with students finding a total of eight examples of pieces of art work that they consider beautiful from volumes I & II of Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History. For each of the four philosophers chosen on Tues., students had to select one piece of art from volume I and one piece of art from volume II, describe each piece of art (content, style, and method of creation) and then explain how it does or does not conform to the philosopher’s definition of beauty. They were surprisingly into it.

This activity made them receptive to reading Plato's "The Love of Beauty" from Symposium. Since it is a mid-level class, I photocopied a passage on the work from Sparknotes.com to help the reading comprehension along. Since they had some background knowledge, they were less intimidated and able to jump into the close reading of the text. We had a spirited discussion about the beauty of art vs. the beauty of science today.

Tomorrow we will continue to discuss Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Then we'll move onto some more in-depth, chronological, art history work while continuing to read at least 3 more pieces of philosophy from Philosophies of Art & Beauty, edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns.. I'll use their preferences from Tuesday's class as a guide because I want to get them hooked on philosophy. One of my most enthusiastic students in this mid-level class is really falling for Kant, and that makes me happy.

I Would Rather Give Birth to Myself

2008-11-18T15:16:00.000-05:00

Alex and I have decided to embrace our childfree status. We’re going to check-in with each other every year to see where we stand on the subject. Right now I feel almost giddy with the possibilities for my life. I have a track record of going by society’s timelines in my quest for approval. I regret acting on the feeling that I had to get a Masters with certification, then get a job, so that I would prepared to have kids. According to the timeline that we established a couple of years ago, we should begin conception attempts next year. . . . the big glitch in this plan is that we don’t want kids. I read a lot of childfree choice books about 3.5 to 4 years ago (before I re-met Alex), and then I was so taken with him . . .. and he seemed to want kids . . .so I talked myself into it again. He’s revealed that in the past he just assumed that he would have kids, but he doesn’t feel the strong desire to do so. His experience of constant exhaustion during this first year of teaching has made him realize that he has little tolerance for sleeplessness and loss of his free time. In the past few years, I’ve lived my life in a state of panicked crankiness about everything that I have to get done before the seemingly inevitable handing over of my life. I feel a new sense of peace at the thought of my life being my own – a life in which I write, teach, dance, and spend time with Alex. It feels so liberating to acknowledge that what I’ve always wanted is a good marriage. That has been (and is) so much more important to me than having kids. I think that my birth ruined my parents’ partnership for the following 22 years until my mother’s cancer scared my father into being an attentive partner. I don’t want the kind of marriage that my parents had – tension, anger, no time together, separate lives in the same house. My mother was a good mother. It was clear that we were her priority. It is only since I’ve become an adult with ambivalent feelings about motherhood that I’ve thought about what it must have been like for my father to be pushed to the back of the line. I also know that I’m too much my father’s daughter in the resentment toward parenthood and impossible expectations for a child that I would hold.

Sunday Morning Pilgrimage to the Mikvah

2008-10-20T13:16:00.000-04:00

This past Sunday I immersed in a mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) in Newton, MA. I'm tired and inarticulate right now, but I want to start a post anyway. I started becoming interested in the practice of immersion at the completion of menstruation when I was in college. I had never heard of it before. I was interested in a very secretive way because I knew it was weird for a half-Jew from a barely practicing family to be in to something so orthodox. Maybe it's because I grew up surrounded by water. Maybe it's because I've had a complicated relationship with my often irregular menstrual cycle. Family purity laws also seemed a way to get that little bit of solitary monastic life that I've always wanted. For years I wondered if this practice could fit into my progressive, non-orthodox, New Hampshire Jew life.

Then I witnessed a conversion at Mayyim Chayyim in Newton -- beautiful facilities (clean, well-stocked with toiletries, 80 degree water), a progressive educational facility, and amazing mikvah guides. This place made regular immersion for progressive Jews seem like an attractive possibility, so Alex and I talked about what role the mikvah would play in our marriage. We discussed the specific of how we would deal with both natural fertility awareness and niddah. We budgeted the $36 per month and planned to go post-Havdalah clubbing in Boston that would be followed by a Sunday immersion. Since I've decided to free myself from hormonal birth control, we're easing our way toward Natural Fertility Awareness, we needed define our own guidelines for blending the two practices. I give male-dominated Jewish law has a voice, but as a woman, I feel as though I can't let it dictate my practice. . . since I've found peace with this, I'm much more comfortable with my own justifications for taking on certain Jewish practices.

We didn't go clubbing this weekend. Alex had a long D&D campaign. I was visiting friends. We drove out to Newton -- caffeinated and chatting excitedly about our Saturdays. The actual experience of immersion moved me in a way than was unexpected. I felt peace and compassion for myself concerning a lot of issues that seem to be piling up -- the self-hatred I feel about my weight, my deep ambivalence about the possibility of motherhood, my struggle to be more mindful in order to slowly pry myself away from my compulsive behaviors, and the unexpected loneliness that has come with just getting married to someone who has just become consumed with a new career. As I walked down the steps into the mikvah, I started off being very conscious of the heaviness of my belly and that my thighs rub together. I worried about the blotches of acne that seem to crop up in random places on my body. I was scared that I would screw up the blessing. But once I immersed, I felt like I was crawling back into a womb of sorts, getting a do-over, going back to something primal -- before ego development and cultural imprinting. It felt good to be in my body and honor the cycles of my body, and my body felt sacred and seemed at though it would remain that way even if I decide not to have a baby. Alex stood outside the pool and listened to my immersion and recitation of blessings. I was grateful to bask in his company after a week alone with myself. I also appreciated the sense that there was something new that was added to our relationship. Whenever people asked how married life is, I could only respond, "We lived together for two years. It is not as though some great secret part of ourselves has been unveiled." To me, it is as though the mikvah is marking our married life.

I was so grateful to feel at home in this ritual. In the back of my mind, I had prepared myself to feel disappointed and alienated -- as though I had failed at appropriating something that is not really my own. The only strange part of the excursion was afterward while wearing my kippah in Allston at the Deluxe Town Diner. . . . but urban kippah-wearing will be the subject of another post.

Baby? Yes or No? Later? Never?

2008-10-14T09:59:00.000-04:00

After spending a year on this blog going back and forth about whether I want to get an MFA in poetry, I finally decided that I'm going to try to do it regardless of the cost. . . .so now that that question has been settled, my neurotic brain has moved onto the next big gut-wrenching question: Do I really want to have a kid?

There are things I like about the idea of having a child: seeing my genetic material combined with my husband's, the desire to have the physical experience of being pregnant and giving birth, being able to run my own child development experiment, the thought of taking a child to cool museums, reading books to a kid, having family dance parties with the kid.

Then there's my resistance to handing my life over. My husband is a first year teacher. I'm an eighth year teacher. We are exhausted people who don't get that much time with each other. I'm resistant to sacrificing our time alone. I'm fiercely protective of my private time. The thought of making my goals, desire, and needs secondary makes me feel sad and trapped. I feel like I have to work hard enough to combat my own depression, anxiety, and addictive personality. . . I can't imagine being responsible for another person. As I watch (what seems like) everyone around me give their lives over to parenting, instead of feeling a deep yearning to join that club, I'm most often relieved that that is not my life and then scared that that is what my future holds.

After talking with lots of people (including my ever-patient therapist), I'm starting to realize that I can't have everything. I can't be the partner I want to be to my husband, be a mother, be a teacher, and be a writer. I have at to make some choices. I've lived my life stalked by a crippling fear of possible future regrets. People have said to me have a child now and put off the serious writing until the child is older because the regret of not having a child will be overwhelming. . . . but writing is so much a part of who am I and what is necessary for my happiness that I can't do that.

I can say that right now if someone said me, "Get pregnant this year or you can never have a kid," I would choose not to get pregnant.

But I worry that I'll regret it later and be sad about it the rest of my life. I worry that I'm withholding something from my husband that he will suddenly want very badly in the next ten years. . . even though he seems neutral about it now.

I'm sometimes worry that there is something wrong with me because I don't seem to have that visceral, consuming desire to have a baby that has compelled women around me to have one.

time, money, charity, and tithing (cont.)

2008-09-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

Alex and I looked at our finances and decided that instead of jumping into giving 10%, that we're going to work our way up to increasing the amount that we give. We're starting at 2.5% of our net income. This looks pathetic in comparison to my Baptist cousins who give 10% of their gross income, but we're not biblical literalists, and there are other practices and commandments that we're starting to incorporate in our life. I'm drawn toward giving 10% of my allowance or any money that I make on the side (that which I think of as MY money).

I've also been thinking about time and money. How much is my time worth and do I factor that into my ideas about charity? What is my hourly wage and how much of my labor do I give for free? Is this labor a charitable contribution? Is it giving too much and not taking care of myself of my family to give 10% and also do lots of work for free.

My thoughts around this dance around admiration for the faith of my tithing cousins, a desire to change the world through tzedakah, the ideas expressed in Your Money Or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and the patient stability of my husband -- a person who is not nearly the spastic freak that I am.

SUBJECT: Jewish Headcovering

2008-09-11T20:16:00.000-04:00

After two years of discussion, contemplation, meetings with rabbis, and email exchanges with Jewish friends, I started wearing a kippah everyday. I started on the first workshop day for my school district. I emailed my principal an email with the subject line "Jewish headcovering," which was forward to the A-Team (all the vice-principals). My attraction to everyday kippah-wearing started in high school. I always felt as though I shouldn't do it until my Jewish practice was perfect. . . I guess by perfect I thought 'flawless by egalitarian orthodox/orthopraxis standards.' Then I started to worry that people would think that I was covering my head out of modesty rather than wearing wearing a kippah out of humility before God. I'm not concerned with what effect my accidentally dred-locking bed head has on the spiritually-devote Jewish men around me. After my bat mitzvah I decided that I would defend my less-than-perfect Judaism, my increasingly observant progressive Judaism, by adopting this mitzvah to which I have such a strong attraction. I also hoped/still hope that it will bring about an natural elevation in my level of observance.

So here's a list of random observations about the experience so far:

• My students are over it and rank the kippot in order of attractiveness.
• When I don't keep Shabbat, I tend to feel ashamed and wear a scarf so that nobody recognizes the scarf as Jewish.
• My Jewish mother is not a fan of the scarf. She thinks it is a sign of orthodoxy.
• My female rabbi wore a kippah until she lived in Israel and now she can't bear to wear one all the time.
• Wearing it makes me feel better about not being in a position to be a professional Jew (grad school or rabbinical school)
• I have to question if I like the attention it gets me in this small town. Now my 16 year old nosering is mainstream. . . is this the shocking equivalent of this decade?
• Sometimes I don't like the attention.
• I think I would feel more uncomfortable wearing it in a city.
• If we have a kid, it's going to have some gender confusion. . . Mommy wears this male ritual garb and daddy doesn't.
• I'm starting to get used to it . . .even in the heat of my 90 degree classroom.
• I've cut down on my gossiping because I feel bad doing it with the kippah on. . . at least cut down on it in the copy room.
• Some of my kippot are more hat-like. Because I wear long skirts, I think that some of my colleagues think that I'm modern orthodox. This amuses me because the same thing happened when I was in college.
• I feel more insecure about what I don't know about Judaism.
• Someone asked me a Hebrew language question yesterday. . . yes, that was painful.
• I do feel as though it makes me more mindful.

Back to Blogging and Spending

2008-09-02T10:34:00.000-04:00

I am back. . . and now I'm married, living in another college town, wearing a kippah every day, no longer a vegan, and no longer a member of any twelve step recovery groups. I will try to get around to writing about all of these things.

Lately, I've been thinking about money. The two major money topics have been school debt and tithing.

My husband and I have a combined school debt of almost $70,000. . . and I want to do another masters. I vacillate between wanting to be fiscally responsible and not wanting to die without having pursued the project of honing my skills and challenging myself. This is something I want. . . but I also want to be able to have a house. . eventually. I've been swinging back and forth about this for years. I spent a lot of time on my honeymoon thinking about it. . . all those people with their Breadloaf t-shirts.

I've been thinking about tithing of the vegan philosopher Peter Singer, the National Havurah Institute's socially concious Jews, and my Evangelical Baptist relatives. I read an article (I'm too lazy to find it and link it) in which Singer talks about the ethics of choosing to give 10% of one's income to charity. Many of my Baptist relatives tithe, and while they point to the Bible, they also talk about how it enriches their relationship to God. . . and once I get over my prejudices against their brand of Christianity, I discover that what they have to say is insightful and moving.

My tithing family members are encouraging me to jump right in. My practical husband (who is also an atheist) says let's start with 5%. I want to jump right in because I'm an all-or-nothing addictive person . . and I also find that kind of leap of faith to be enticing.

I will admit that I want tithing to help cure my tendency to spend addictively. I tend to spend money with the idea that this purchase will enable this project and this project will bring me happiness. I like the idea of shifting the source of my creativity from my efforts (my way of bendin the universe through spending) to mindfulness and a connection with a higher power.

Part I: The Sanctity and Responsibility of Animal Skin

2008-03-16T19:43:00.000-04:00

I'm going to get myself some animal skin tefillin. I decided to sit with this decision for a few weeks before writing about it. This is a partial response. I've had a surprising number of friends ask about it.

Here are my reasons/rationalizations for violating veganism for tefillin:

1. I'm so drawn toward the practice that I feel as though I can't ignore it. I feel like my Jewish prayer is incomplete without it. I'm a child of interfaith marriage who grew up in NH. . . it's rare that I so naturally desire something that is so traditionally Jewish without questioning my right to it that I can't ignore this.

2. I've talked to my rabbi and she informed me that somebody eats the cow. . . for some reason this makes me feel better. My fiance and I talked about tefillin in the context of giving up hope in a vegan planet and living our own values to the best of our ability. This is probably a HUGE rationalization, but I think that there will always be Jews who believe in eating meat. . .this makes me feel less guilty about harvesting their by-products. I know that there are organic farming Jews in my part of the world (SW New Hampshire and VT), whom I respect, who believe in responsible consumption and compassionate ritual slaughter.

3. I've really started to accept parchment Torah scrolls . . .I don't know if the lost life adds to the sanctity or a part of me has concocted a story about parchment being more durable/eco than . . .say . . hemp . . .

4. I think that ritual object animal consumption . . especially when the object can be passed down. . .is different from making that consumption part of your daily routine.

5. My animal rights record is slippery in other areas. . . I'm definitely against animal testing on cosmetics, but tend to waver on life saving medical testing practiced in humane conditions. When it comes down to it, I will place human beings above animals as long as the animals are treated with respect.

6. I can't seem to find viable vegan replacement materials with which I am capable of working. I also can't find anyone who can carve tefillin boxes for me for a reasonable price.

I'll let these ideas sit out in the cyberspace for a bit and then see how my libran scales of indecision are swinging in a day or two.

A Vegetarian's Tango with Leather and/or the Search for Vegan Tefillin

2008-02-21T22:20:00.000-05:00

I feel drawn to the practice of wrapping tefillin. . . .really drawn. . . the kind of drawn that my New Age friends would call a past life calling. I have a hard time letting the idea go.

The complicating factor is that I'm a vegan. I became an ovo-lacto vegetarian when I was 14. I've been a vegan for two and half years. I do have some left over wool. There's some second-hand leather jewelry that I inherited. I don't maintain the level of super-ethical vegan purity that Alex maintains. He will not eat anything that could have white sugar in it because white sugar is processed with charred animal bones. A year ago, he said that he would try to carve me some vegan tefillin. Now Alex is willing to admit that he doesn't have the time or the skill to carve the tefillin boxes we imagined (inspired by someone else's vision that we found online). We've talked about it, and he feels as though he could be comfortable with second-hand tefillin in our home. Sometimes I feel resigned and eager to get my second-hand . . . but then I do a search on "vegan tefillin" and I realize that there are a surprising number of people who are interested in vegan tefillin. We don't care if it is halakhically correct. We just feel a need to perform the ritual. These die-hard vegans resist the second-hand tefillin option.

This attraction to tefillin has been an interesting challenge to my vegetarianism. I find myself more accepting of long-lasting ritual objects that are made from animal products. I don't believe that the suffering of animals should be worked into the systems of our everyday lives. I won't eat animal products (unless my health or the health of a potential child is at risk). I don't want to support factory farming, but I don't know if I would as quick as I would have been in the past to say that Torah scrolls should not be made of parchment.

I've also learned more about my relationship to halakhah. I'm attracted to rituals, but I don't feel bound to halakhah. My own conscience and personal beliefs have more sway. That's not a perspective I consciously established for myself. Maybe it is because I didn't grow up feeling bound to Jewish law. My desire to wrap tefillin is a desire to use a ritual action to express what is within me. It is not out of a desire to live halakhically because of a belief in something divine behind Jewish law. When I follow halakha it is because it is a mindful action that seems to best suit what my soul is struggling to express. (On an intellectual level, I can enthusiastically believe and make arguments about history, continuity, and living sacred tests, but that's not my deepest motivation.) My vegetarianism comes from somewhere deep inside. It is a part of me that is one of the first authentically "me" parts of who I am. I am much more propelled by that kind of intuition. I realize that my desire to take on this acts of ritual observance may be offensive to traditionally halakhic Jews.

Tonight I continued my internet searching on the topic of tefillin. I also emailed my rabbi and asked her the following:

1. Is it possible to get second-hand tefillin? Is so, where?
2. Are cows killed for tefillin used for food?

I'm sure that I'll write more about this in the future.

Controlled Anger as a Classroom Management Technique

2008-02-11T12:52:00.000-05:00

One of my cooperating teachers for my student teaching was a former 60s radical who was the zen center of calm. He never yelled and never became angry. I always thought I wanted to be like him, but then during my first year of teaching I discovered how successful the purity of my anger (controlled, but fierce anger) can be in managing a class. I'm a short woman with a ready, silly laugh who can also project her voice loudly and deeply and with a dauntingly firm tone that some people may consider to be angry. Sometimes this is theater. Sometimes it's grounded in my gut. I'm still trying to determine whether this is a problem. I know that many experts would say that it is. I'm aware that my anger may make students from homes with a lot of anger uncomfortable. . . but I also think that there is something valuable in letting students know that I care about what I do and I care about how these precious, all too rapidly disappearing moments of our lives are spent. I try not to remember my anger. Grudges against students are rare for me.

I will not tolerate disrespect. Am I using that as an excuse to vent frustration in a way that makes me feel powerful? Should I be like that mythical samurai who refuses to draw his sword when spit upon because his actions will be motivated by anger rather than the dispassionate upholding of principle?

Lately I've been irritated enough with students who are capable of paying attention and listening and choose not to that I will walk away if they ask a question that I answered while they were talking. I can be a cold, cold woman. I'm sensitive to preexisting conditions that may impair attention and situational emotional distress that may be present. . . but the jolly student who talks through my instructions is not going to get a response from me when he wants the individualized recap.

It is this type of situation that makes me really consider if I want to spend the rest of my life this way.

I'm trying to cultivate compassion and patience in regard to my students, but I honestly think that compassion for all the students (including the workers) means shutting down the pesky slackers who are a burden on us all.

I don't regret the times that I've sternly shut down the homophobes in my classes. My anger shows those who are threatened that I care about them and that I'm committed to their rights and protection.

Does an instructor's anger or irritation at student laziness or rudeness have a place in the classroom?

Underground Activity

2008-02-11T12:29:00.000-05:00

My darling students taught me how to block the firewall on the school internet. Let the blogging during seatwork commence once more. I've missed being able to type some kind of record of what I'm doing in class. It made me excited about my day.

I need this.

Right now I'm feeling grumpy about teaching. This is what happens when you spend too much time on your college's alumni search site. I don't know if I'm bored because I'm depressed or bored because I'm tired of this. Maybe I'm just a princess who resents working in general.

GRRRRRRR. I'm in slump.

At lunch my friend told me about the phenomenon of stone babies. . . fetuses that calcify within the mother to protect from health threat of decomposing fetal tissue. After lunch I looked at photos online.

I feel like I have a couple of stone baby poems lurking inside. Pieces that should have been written before the vitality was gone.

The bell is about to ring. Back to work.

Xanax, Oxy, Cosmic Eggs, Divine Vomit, and 72-Hour Mental Lockdown

2008-02-07T21:45:00.000-05:00

As I write this I am listening to Pride and Prejudice (BBC/A&E), waiting for my post-night school snack to finish cooking, and trying to think of a topic. . . I'm starting to feel the dullness of over-booked exhaustion. I feel guilty about not having any really pulled-together thoughts.

This might be pre-bat mitzvah anxiety or just ridiculous enthusiasm for my first round of teaching Mythology, but I'm finding myself liking the stories of other cultures (Hindu, Greek, Sioux, Huron, etc.) so much more than those of my own . . .

. . .but the stories I seem to like the best lately involve celebrities. I'm ashamed to say that I have quite a bad addiction to people.com. Now that I know how Heath Ledger died, I think that I need to detox myself and suffer through withdrawal from celebrity gossip. I felt justified in being interested in poor, dear, beautiful Mr. Ledger for two reasons: 1. I'll always think that his performance in Brokeback Mountain is devastatingly perfect. 2. Since my family has suffered through its own drug-related death within the past year, I feel sickened and fascinated by any unintentional drug overdose/interaction-related death -- people thought to be sleeping who are found dead, ambulances, police officers, medical examiners, autopsies, and anxiously-awaited toxicology reports.

I started to realize that my addiction was too much when I felt slimy and disgusted with myself for my interest in the trainwreck that is Britney Spears. Laughing at the mentally ill is now striking me as as bad as laughing at the mentally challenged.

I haven't written a poem in over a month yet I've probably spent hours and hours reading people.com and searching for the dirtiest tidbits of life stories on wikipedia.org.

Emo-Shit and Sweet Flicks

2008-01-24T21:32:00.000-05:00

I know that I haven't written anything interesting for a long time.There are two reasons: 1. My school has decided the blogspot is a banned site 2. I'm in the midst of the what is usually the most hectic time of year for a teacher on block scheduling – the semester switchover. My first semester students finished today. I have my first adult education class tonight. I get a new batch of regular high school students on Monday. I'm also teaching two sections of a class that I've never
taught before: Mythology.

(Forgive the complete lack of a smooth transition. . .)

My adult education/alternative diploma course is on short stories that are the basis for films. I originally took the job because I need themoney for my wedding. As I stated collecting stories I became excited by the thought of teaching these stories through their film versions .. .and teaching them in an environment where the students were thereby choice. (I'm currently writing this post in a word document that I will cut and paste into an email and then cut and paste into my blog.)
As I write this, my 16 spanking new students are reading CornellWoolrich's "Rear Window." They've been silent for almost an hour. Then they'll take a cigarette break. This will be followed by watching parts of Hitchock's Rear Window and talking about characterization and point of view.

This week was made even more crazy because I had some work due for an outside curriculum project. I'm writing lesson plans for a committee that is putting educational material together for a choral piece that is based on interviews with Holocaust survivors. The composer wanted curriculum that would inspire students to create their own art. I tried to find a way to create curriculum that would foster an appreciation for Eastern European Jewish culture and lead students tocreating authentic pieces based own their own experiences. . . .not pretend-to-be-a- Holocaust-survivor poser emo-shit. These plans were not appreciated by the committee. Here are abbreviated versions of a few of them. . . . . ooops. . . .I take that back . . .that could get me in a lot of trouble. Basically, I like what I did but it was not what the committee was looking for . . . .grrrr. . .I'm being stubborn and uncooperative. I don't play well with others when it comes to things I care about.

My b at mitzvah is starting to stress me out. It's in five months and I feel as though I will not be ready.

I'm exhausted . . . and I still have to clean up the cat pee that I just discovered pooled on the plastic shower curtain that covers our couch.

A Short, Deep Thought on Mitt Romney

2008-01-15T21:25:00.000-05:00

He is like Ronald Reagan but with decades more of evil, coherent thought in front of him.

Food and Body Image

2008-01-09T18:28:00.000-05:00

This is going to be semi-incoherent. . .school kicked me hard today. . but I feel as though I have to write something since it has been so long.

I've been thinking a lot about food . . .my relationship with food. I know I use it to medicate myself, but I also think that I conflate the following issues: addictive use of food for emotional numbing + hatred for my body (obsession with appearance as a source of self-worth) + a dangerous lack of exercise. I'm trying to separate relief from an with obsession with using food to comfort myself from the idea that of healthful eating will change my much-hated body.

Today a co-worker said the following to me, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm surprised that given the way you eat, you are not the size of my pinky finger."

I've had medical professionals who are surprised by my overweight status when I give them an honest account of what I eat. They say . . .(and I know) that I don't exercise enough, but given my diet(even taking into consideration my exercise deficiency) . . . I shouldn't weigh what I do.

I've been tested and I don't have a thyroid problem. I'm a vegan. I don't drink alcohol. I haven't had white flour pasta, a white russian, a donut, a gin and tonic, or a Snickers Bar in three years.

I think for my own sake, I need to stop thinking that a healthy diet or exercise will make me thin. For some reason, my body seems to have parked itself at this zaftig plateau. I don't want to stop being a vegan. I don't want to give up grains.

This is turning into a whiny, desperate rant, but here it goes. . . I don't want to feel guilty for eating a sugar free vegan muffin. I'm sick of looking at myself in pictures and feeling ill because of how wide I am. I'm sick of people in my overeating support group thinking that I haven't work "the Steps" because I'm not at a "healthy weight." I want to be able to eat food, taste food, and enjoy food and not feel guilty because it is thought that overweight people should be ashamed of eating.

To be the honest, preparing for my upcoming wedding has stirred up so many food and body image issues that I wish I had never signed on to get prettied up and wear the white dress in front of 150 people. For the first time since I quit dancing, I actually thought about taking a weight loss supplement (diet pills) so I could be gorgeously skinny for my wedding. I feel like I'm dealing with an evil trio of substance addiction (food) + self-hatred (growing addiction to fantasies of a skinny version of myself)+ depression/inactivity/disassociation from my physical existence.

Here comes the bride in all her fucked-up glory.

Fun with Personality Tests

2007-12-18T14:16:00.000-05:00

This is how I spent my last 30 minutes at work. This is the sort of thing that I never thought I would put on a blog.

Myers-Briggs & Enneagram

Extroverted (E) 56.76% Introverted (I) 43.24%
Intuitive (N) 63.89% Sensing (S) 36.11%
Thinking (T) 50% Feeling (F) 50%
Perceiving (P) 53.33% Judging (J) 46.67%

Your type is: ENFP

ENFP - "Journalist". Uncanny sense of the motivations of others. Life is an exciting drama. 8.1% of total population.

Your type is: ENTP

ENTP - "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative. 3.2% of the total population.

Enneagram Test Results

The Enneagram is a personality system which divides the entire human personality into nine behavioral tendencies, this is your score on each...

Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||| 50%
Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||| 46%
Type 3 Image Awareness |||||||||||||| 60%
Type 4 Sensitivity |||||||||||||| 60%
Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||| 46%
Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||||||||||| 73%
Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||| 46%
Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||| 46%
Type 9 Calmness |||||||||| 40%

type score type behavior motivation
6 22 I must be secure and safe to be happy.
3 18 I must be impressive and attractive to be happy.
4 18 I must avoid painful feelings to be happy.
1 15 I must be perfect and good to be happy.

Freud Inventory Test Results

Oral (dependence) |||||||||||| 50%
Anal (self control) |||||||||||| 43%
Phallic (sexuality) |||||||||||||||||| 73%
Latency (learning) |||||||||||||||| 70%
Genital (productivity) |||||||||||||||| 63%

Oral: you appear to have a good balance of independence and interdependence knowing when to accept help and when to do things on your own.

Anal: you appear to have a good balance of self control and spontaneity, order and chaos, variety and selectivity.

Phallic: you appear to have issues with controlling your sexual desires and possibly fidelity.

Latency: you appear to be afraid or averse to present or future real world responsibilities, this will only make your inevitable transition more difficult, so learn to deal with the real world.

Genital: you appear to have a progressive and openminded outlook on life unbeholden to regressive forces like traditional authority and convention.

Brain Lateralization Test Results

Right Brain |||||||||||| 50%
Left Brain |||||||||||| 48%
*results won't usually add up to 100% as this test measures each side seperately

Left brain dominant individuals are more orderly, literal, articulate, and to the point. They are good at understanding directions and anything that is explicit and logical. They can have trouble comprehending emotions and abstract concepts, they can feel lost when things are not clear, doubting anything that is not stated and proven.

Right brain dominant individuals are more visual and intuitive. They are better at summarizing multiple points, picking up on what's not said, visualizing things, and making things up. They can lack attention to detail, directness, organization, and the ability to explain their ideas verbally, leaving them unable to communicate effectively.

Overall you appear to have fairly Equal Hemispheres

Career Inventory Test Results

Extroversion ||||||||||||||||||||| 66%
Emotional Stability ||||||||||||||| 50%
Orderliness ||||||||||||||| 50%
Altruism |||||||||||| 36%
Inquisitiveness ||||||||||||||||||||| 66%

You are an Inventor, possible professions include - systems designer, venture capitalist, actor, journalist, investment broker, real estate agent, real estate developer, strategic planner, political manager, politician, special projects developer, literary agent, restaurant/bar owner, technical trainer, diversity manager, art director, personnel systems developer, computer analyst, logistics consultant, outplacement consultant, advertising creative director, radio/TV talk show host.

NOTE HOW LOW THE ALTRUISM SCORE IS. . . THAT'S WHAT SEVERAL YEARS WORKING IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL DO FOR YOU.

I should also note that I am a sun & moon Libra (on the cusp with Virgo) with a rising sign in Cancer and mars and venus in libra, and my mercury in Virgo.

Snowshoeing at the Chesterfield Gorge

2007-12-16T16:24:00.000-05:00

I just came back from snowshoeing around the Chesterfield Gorge. It was breathtaking. I was the first person to walk there after this storm. When it isn't snowed-in, the Chesterfield Gorge is usually crawling with tourists during the day and locals meeting up for illicit sex at night. I think it's beautiful even when it's overpopulated by humans, but it feels like fresh, untouched territory after snow.

I decided that I wanted to go as Alex was getting ready to leave for work. During the winter the Sunday Blues are intensified by my Seasonal Affective Disorder. Ten years ago, I would have that thought SAD wasn't real. . .but now I have the official psychiatrist's diagnosis and a big ass sun lamp. I've been feeling really down lately. . . overwhelmed by the very tangible weight of being unable to be happy, then feeling bad about being a burden on Alex. All I want to do is cry, sleep, and constantly binge on carbs.

I felt elevated by the beauty of the snow and trees and held inside the peaceful quiet -- my breathing, the crunch of pressing down the snow, bird songs, the running water of the brook, which was hushed by a crust of ice. I stood on a bridge over the brook and recited prayers.

I also had pleasant memories of someone I used to love who does not wish to speak to me anymore. I'm such a compulsive approval seeker that I can't stand it when people reject me (even after break-ups). I resent people who refuse to be on friendly terms with me.

I have snapshot memories/associations of all the people with whom I used to be close (even if things ended badly). Here's the random list of things that I associate with lost loves:

the Cure, wool sweaters off of hippie carts, On the Waterfront, golf courses, the Grateful Dead, red quilts, avant garde jazz, liberation theology, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, Chicago Art Institute, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, The Montague Book Mill,Kenneth Rexroth, Kilbourn Pond, Paul Simon's Graceland. . .

. . and snowshoeing. . .I will always think of this now distant person snowshoeing across a pond. It was nice to feel a sense of gratitude and kinship with him rather than resentment or hurt.

Alex and I crossed paths as I was leaving the gorge and he was leaving for work (late after digging out his car). I was so happy to see him and so grateful that I'm with him. It was nice to be able to appreciate where I've been and where I am now.

Short, Incoherent Thoughts on Embodied Learning

2007-12-14T10:45:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about the connection between emotions and the body, and the role of the body in learning and in writing.

Here's a list of what has been feeding these thoughts: my concern that talking therapy isn't doing that much for me and that the emotions are locked in my body (hello chakras); yoga club and the powerful experience of doing yoga in school/my workplace; memories of my long-lost dancing self and how writing seemed easier then; and long circuitous root of wanting to study poetry/bibliotherapy in order to put the emotions to best use in the writing and reading process (not for therapy as much as to harness the emotions to help students be better readers and writers) and then realizing that bodies, emotions, intellectual learning, and artistic creation are not the distinct entities that I thought they were.

I've been really angsty the last few days. . .I feel like something is breaking open for me in my conception of how education should work. All the separate side projects (nature writing, free movement and writing, fostering empathy through literature, use of myth in creating new works) are starting to come together in my mind in a way that I can't quite articulate yet.

I find myself wanting to know about the science of mind-body connection, about the mind and language, about the place of body awareness and movement in learning.

I want to bring it all together for myself, but also so I can achieve something as a teacher that is meaningful, successful (knowledge & skills acquisition), and real beyond isolated arena of the English classroom.

This week I've found myself doing internet searches on yoga in the public schools, the actual educational theories behind Waldorf education, somatic therapy/education, dance/movement therapy, and embodied cognition.

I'm experiencing one of those dramatic shifts of perception that is difficult to explain to those around me. I feel like I'm close to breaking through my frustration (or at least a major cause of my frustration) with teaching.

I realize that I probably sound a tad wackadoodle.

10 of Pentacles, The Wheel of Fortune (reversed), 8 Pentacles

2007-12-11T11:42:00.000-05:00

I got my first deck of tarot cards at the end of November in 1996. It never occurs to me to do readings for other people. I use it as a kind of meditation to slow down and assess where I am on a subconscious level at that moment. Now that I'm sitting down to write about it. . .it's hard to explain what draws me to it. The cards attracted me in the beginning because they cover the whole spectrum of human experience. The major arcana are powerful, but I also find it interesting that there are entire suits that didn't show up on my radar until the tarot card deck made me realize that they are vital aspects of existence. The wands, which represent action in the world, were underrepresented in my readings. I resented the existence of the penacles (money, physical existence) in the deck until just recently when I started trying to confront financial reality and the highly charged nature of my relationship with money.

I line my tarot card readings up reading chapters of the Tao Te Ching -- an idea that I got from Magical Tarot, Mystical Tao: Unlocking the Hidden Power of the Tarot Using the Ancient Secrets of the Tao Te Ching by Diane Morgan. Morgan lines each card of the Tarot up with a passage from the Tao Te Ching. I took my Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching and taped in pictures of the corresponding, individual cards of the woodcut Light and Shadow Tarot and the Osho Zen Tarot. Everyday I do a three card reading with my Osho Zen cards. (I'm trying to learn that deck.) I place the cards by my computer at school, so I can think about them during the day. Then I go home and copy the appropriate Tao Te Ching passages into my journal from the Mitchell version and the Sam Hamill translation (so I can a more accurate idea of what is being said).

I do longer readings (Celtic Cross) reading with my trusty Light and Shadow cards (the ones bought 11 years ago) every weekend. I keep the readings in a binder. I consult references, the Tao Te Ching, and free-write on that reading.

The readings feel accurate on a gut level. I know that one could easily say that I'm groping for them to be accurate, but there are times in my life when I get the same cards over and over again. The cards will also reinforce one another.

They make me feel like my experiences are part of a larger story. I'm an over-intellectualizing air sign, as well as a member of a family where I didn't feel as though I could express all of my emotions without getting yelled at, so the cards help me acknowledge the feelings that I try to dismiss with my intellect

The Continuing Saga of the MFA

2007-12-05T07:48:00.001-05:00

Last week the poet Janaka Stucky came to talk to my Creative Writing class. His visit started another 24 hour period of wanting an MFA. I wrote the dramatic emails to Alex saying that the MFA had reappeared on my desire radar and made the announcement at lunch. This weekend I was sitting in Brewbakers reading Anna Akhmatova, who is really rocking my world. In addition to my hot date with Akhmatova, I had printed out information on low residency MFA programs. When I saw that it is recommended that one spend at least 25 hours a week working on one's MFA writing and studies, I started wondering what would happen if I carved 25 hours out of my week for writing without the degree. What would happen if I treated my writing like a second job? Do I need a program to get me to do this? This is something that I should have started doing in seventh grade.

This was the week that I really understood . . .really, really. . . that choices have to be made. . . and that I can't do everything that I want to do all at once. I am a victim of the "disease of more" . . . more food, more money, more plans, more hobbies.

I spent the first four or five years that I was teaching getting drawn into and really involved in activist work -- gay rights in education, teachers' union work, and peace activism. Now I feel as though I clock my time as an activist by being a public school teacher -- writing thought-provoking curriculum, guiding student exploration, and facilitating discussions. My first years of teaching made me so depressed about the state of the world that I felt as though it was self-indulgent to write poetry while the world was falling apart. Up until this weekend it was very hard for me to admit that my own writing is more important to me than outwardly focused do-gooding. Yes, I need do-gooding in my life. I can't imagine leaving my job. I play the game "Would I leave this job if I won the lottery?" At this point, I wouldn't. Although, sometimes I think that I would leave it if we went to year-round school or I lost the ability to write and teach my own curriculum and lessons. I care about the importance of the decisions that I make. I want the spiritual experience of service, but I also want. . . crave. . .desperately need the spiritual experience of writing poetry.

I am making an effort to keep my teaching within school hours. I no longer want my life filled with the 24/7 duties of being the bride of this high school.

I also have other commitments that I need to reevalute as I look at my schedule and try to carve out 25 hours for writing. I teach religious school, write curriculum for the Cohen Holocaust Center, advise the literary magazine and the yoga club, do hospice volunteering, and next semester I'm teaching an alternative diploma, night school course on short stories that have been made into films.

I would love to have the money to spend getting the individual attention that I would receive in a low residencey MFA program. . .but sometimes I think that the feeing urgency to get the degree is really just a desperation to get out of confronting the reality of choices and priorities. It is easier to say that I'm not available to teach religious school if I'm in a program.

2.5 - 5 years to single car family greatness

2007-11-27T10:42:00.000-05:00

Becoming a car-lite, single car family is now one of my big goals. I'm sick of the worries of having a car. I need some mysterious part fixed on my second-hand, 2002 Ford Focus death trap. I have two years until I pay it off. It completely stresses me out.

I live in Spofford right now, and although it is only a little only 5.3 miles to work, those 5.3 miles include the dangerous stretch of road known as Chesterfield Hill. I'm scared to bike on Chesterfield Hill with trucks whizzing past me at 60 MPH . . especially in the dark.

My house is 7.32 miles from the middle of downtown.

Here are my goals while I'm in Spofford:

1. train at the gym to be physically capable of getting to work from my house
2. keep track of how often I use my car and try to reduce my car usage

Then I want to get out of Spofford and move to Keene. I want a house that is within 2 - 3 miles of the high school and synagogue. I want my family to have one car (of the more environmentally-responsible variety) that we can share and use infrequently.

I'm attracted to the prospect of a simplified life. Right now I spend a lot of time driving around after school -- going from meeting to meeting and activity to activity. I'm really starting to burn out on it. I want my home to be the central hub of my activity, not just a place where I sleep and dump my stuff in between missions.

I find myself nostalgic for the that six month period when I was was carless for health reasons. I felt more grounded in my life.

Stirrings of My Inner Domestic Goddess

2007-11-20T19:57:00.000-05:00

After herding monkeys all day. . . trying to awe/tranquilize them with David Sedaris, Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors," and a war-glorifying Eric Stoltz flick. . . and then herding my little kosher monkeys for an hour while we shot down the Patriarchs, I came home to bond with my two new favorite appliances: my latte/hot chocolate maker and my Japanese spiral slicer.

I used the spiral slicer for the first time. . .OMG. . .it was a crazy good time. . . piles and piles of turnip, beet, and zucchini spirals. I put the spirals in boiling water for a bit, added dulse flakes, and then chick pea miso after I removed it from the heat. It was like eating noodle soup. When my flour days ended (or were supposed to end), so did my days of guilt-free consumption of noodles.

Then I bonded with the appliance that is going to save me from a major sugar addiction relapse and financial ruin at the hands of Starbucks. I have a major Starbucks decaf. venti soy latte problem. I'm such a junkie that I spent $40 last month on lattes. I'm ashamed that they know me. I think I go there because they supersize, and they use sweetened vanilla soymilk. I've been using my new milk steamer friend to make steamed soy and almond milk concoctions with stevia, cinnamon or maple oil, and sometimes Teeccino (the amazing coffee substitute).

According to ratemyteacher.com

2007-11-15T14:35:00.000-05:00

I am "not bad not good. doesn't teach but expects us to learn. it's enjoyable to sit in her class and talk, but when she judges her students so hard for their writing, it isn't fair when she didn't even tell us what we were doing to begin with. i don't need to know about her personal life, her sisters eating disorder or what is going on with her rabi."

The Icarus Part of Me and the Sun Part of Me

2007-11-14T12:14:00.001-05:00

In Humanities the random startup activity for our study of Greek mythology is a free association activity in which I list the traits of the major gods and goddesses without the accompanying names and the students have to brainstorm a list of times when they’ve embodied each of these traits. Then they pick the cluster of traits that with the greatest resonance. I then reveal which gods go with which traits. I later use the results of this in assigning them individual god/goddess projects.

We then watch Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and read some Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. Okay. . . I know that my friends who are getting Ph.D’s in religion are probably puking at the mention of Joseph Campbell. I think of him as more of a thinker, than a scholar. He is an idea man and sometimes goes a bit too far in forcing an interpretation of myths to support his ideas. Yes, he has a sketchy methodology, but he does have interesting things to say about what it means to be human and what role storytelling plays in that.

I start the unit by looking at Campbell’s statements:

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”

“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.”

We use Waking Life to expand our discussion of symbolism, which started the first week of school, to include Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious. We try to uncover the metaphorical meanings of myths by treating the myths like dreams and rewriting them in dream analysis language. In dream analysis language, every part of the dream is recast as a part of oneself.

Here’s an example of a recorded dream:

It’s raining so hard that I can’t tell what time it is. My father
comes to wake me up. He tries to hit me over the head with a
cast iron frying pan.

Here’s that dream translated into dream language. In dream language every component of the dream is seen as an aspect of the self.

I have the rain part of me rain so hard that the me part of me
(the part of myself that I recognize) can’t tell what time it is.
The father part of me comes to wake up the me part of me.
The father part of me tries to hit the me part of me over the
head part of me with the cast iron frying pan part of me.

We then talk about the metaphorical meaning of the dream is and what inner conflict is represented by the dream. What is the rain part of me? What is the father part of me? What is the head part of me? What is the frying pan part of me?

We then translate Greek myths into dream language. Here’s a brief example.

Icarus put on the wax wings, and Daedalus warns him about
the heat of the sun. Icarus ignores what Daedalus says and flies
too close to the sun. His wax wings melt, and he fell into the sea.

Below is the dream language version.

The Icarus part of me puts on the wax wings part of me, and the
Daedalus part of me warns the Icarus part of me about the heat
part of me of the sun part of me. The Icarus part of me ignores
what the Daedalus part of me says and flies too close to the
sun part of me. The wax wings part of me of the Icarus part of
me melts, and the Icarus part of me falls into the sea part of me.

What part of the self is represented by Icarus? What part of the self is represented by Daedalus? The wings? The heat? The sun? The sea?

One Torah Service, Two Reasons to Chuck Candy

2007-11-14T10:05:00.000-05:00

I met with the rabbi yesterday to talk about my bat mitzvah and wedding. (There was also a bonus component of the conversation about circumcision, which I found helpful.)

I found out that my wedding is scheduled for a minor fast day. . . we are all going to ignore it, including the rabbi.

The bat mitzvah and Aufruf are happening during the same Torah service because our wedding is going to be three weeks after the bat mitzvah. The Aufruf is the ceremony in which the groom (traditionally) and bride (Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative) are called up for an aliyah (reading of the Torah). So instead of people chucking candy at just me because I’ve become a woman, they will be chucking candy at both Alex and me. I’m glad that these two events can be combined because it makes less of a nuisance for people who might want to be at both the bat mitzvah and the Aufruf.

I want to write six poems to be read during service for my Bat Mitzvah. The kids are supposed to find six poems, which cover topics such as love, salvation, and tikkun olam. I want to write my own. This goal charges me up and makes me want to get out of the writing funk that I’ve been in for the past few weeks.

Soul-Saving Monologues: My History with Prayer

2007-11-13T12:13:00.000-05:00

My Baptist grandmother taught me to pray. We were instructed for years to follow a format. Each letter of the word “pray” offered a hint. First, Praise. Second, Repent. Third, Ask, and finally something that began with Y that I could never remember so I never did, which I know is Yield (handing over one’s life to G-d’s will). When I was a kid, I would skip the forgotten yielding and spend extra time sucking up to the divinity in the hopes of getting what I wanted. I have never been a kneeler. I’ve always curled up in bed, as if trying to hide from the world.

When I was in early elementary school, I tried to wash my sister’s hair with a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, which was owned by my Baptist grandmother. I wasn’t as concerned about my mother’s anger at the prospect of trying to the get the gunk out of my sister’s hair as I was terrified that my grandmother would disown me. I remember being sent to my room and praying and praying for a couple of hours for G-d to refill the container of glue. I was devastated when it didn’t happen. This along with dinosaurs and the prospect of Jews being in Hell provided the foundation for my first crisis of faith.

Later, I developed an intellectual problem with the idea of petitionary prayer. 1. Why would a higher power care about my petty concern? Is It listening to and responding to the prayers of the billions of people who are suffering? 2. It goes against the philosophy that every experience can serve a useful purpose. It creates a lack of openness to what is. 3. As I make a fool of myself by involving myself in personal or petitionary prayer, I will feel not just foolish, but even more alone, as the realization dawns that there is nothing out there that cares about or is receptive to this kind of communication.

Then I started to think of blessing and prayer as exercises in cultivating awareness and a theatrical exercise signifying belonging in the Jewish community. Prayer wasn't about talking to G-d; it was a communal experience of storytelling and the declaration of values.

Then I hit a rock bottom with my compulsions and found myself in support groups where I was encouraged (strongly, strongly encouraged/forced) to pray. At this point, I would have done anything that was suggested. I decided to pray with the idea that the psychological act of surrender would create a shift in my orientation toward the universe and that this would help with an ego overhaul. So back to the personal, petitionary prayer I went, following a formula that was the same as the one that my grandmother had given me. I also discovered the comfort in memorized prayers written by other people. For me the experience is similar to memorizing and reciting a monologue that really captures the secret feelings that you hold. When I was involved in theater, I liked the experience of reciting a monologue or being in a scene and thinking that these words could be my own. In a state of desperation I memorized the Serenity Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. I still say these prayers at least twice a day. . .even though I sometimes feel weird (and guilty) about enjoying these Christian prayers so much. I also like the chants for the Buddhist practice of Metta (loving-kindness) meditation. In Metta meditation you chant wishes for peace and well-being for yourself, then expand your concern outward to those you love, then to those for whom you have neutral feelings, and then for those whom you dislike. I try to do Metta meditation for people whom I resent.

I’ve been frustrated lately because my relationship to Jewish prayer is developing so slowly. The Shema is becoming gut instinct, but the other prayers seem distant. I think it is because I’m praying in a language that I don’t know. When I read them outside of the prayer service, I’ll think that that they are beautiful and moving, but that act of reading doesn’t feel like praying; it feels like reading. I’m struggling to fit my own recitation of Jewish prayers into my daily life. I want traditional Jewish prayer to be something that I love, and I’m disappointed in myself that I don’t rush to it.

This summer at the National Havurah Institute, I took a course on hitbodedut -- unstructured, spontaneous individual prayer that was originally taught by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. I first heard about hitbodedut in a class on Jewish Ethics, Ecstasy, and Holiness class with Miles Krassen when I was a sophomore in college. I wasn’t as interested in it as I would be in the Jewish meditation techniques discussed in the Jewish Mysticism course that I took the following semester. During the hitobodedut class at the NHI, I would go off and actually talk to G-d. . . . not just in my head, but actually talking (out loud). This was a powerful experience. I feel like I can’t really talk about it without sounding like a wacked-out cheeseball. Right now, at a time when the darkness drives me inside at 4:30 pm, that experience feels far away.

I'm trying to create a spiritual prayer practice that involves silence, chanting, personal conversations with G-d, and recitation of traditional Jewish prayers.

Mamma's Love

2007-11-08T18:12:00.000-05:00

Today was craptacular. I spilled coffee all down my right breast, which was covered in a light blue sweater. My students noticed the large dreadlock that I can't seem to work out of my hair. I weigh more than I've ever had. I'm paranoid that all the soy I eat is making me fat, which seems worse than the cancer or alzheimers it could give me. I came home and I couldn't find Nicholas Chauncy, my temperamental, vengeful urinator of a second-hand Himalayan. I imagined him dead and was getting frantic when I heard him purring behind the prison gate that used to successfully block him from the family bed. It took him a year to learn how to climb the gate. Every few months he'll urinate on us as we sleep so we have to lock him in the stairwell/hallway where we can sleep peacefully because we can't hear his persistent, mournful cries.

I love this cat, and he loves Alex. . . LOVES Alex. . . and thinks that he is married to Alex. At my best, I'm the back burner cheap replacement. At my worst, I am an interloper to bite and piss on. Whenever I get up from the bed or couch the cat takes my place next to Alex and acts put out when I move him. This doesn't bother me. It has solved the problem of what would happen to the cat if I died. Alex has promised me (several times) that he will keep Nicholas Chauncy if anything happens to me.

Nicholas (AKA Chicken Noodle, Nicolai, the Czar, Little Nico, Mamma's Love, Baby Nunu, Schnook, Totoro) is the first pet of my adult life. I've stayed in our abusive relationship because when he is sweet, he is very sweet. He hugs. He nose licks. He perches on our shoulders like a parrot or a mink stole. He like to be in our company, but doesn't beg for our attention. I wish I could say that this is my natural mode of operation.

We're going to make a 'zine for our wedding instead of a traditional program. Nicholas is going to be a contributor.

The Delayed Anger of a Peace-Loving Libra

2007-11-07T19:23:00.001-05:00

Lately I've been experiencing outbursts of delayed anger. I usually try to cope with something that bothers me by wrestling with it intellectually -- talking my way around it, explaining it, trying to theorize. I think that I've dealt with it. All I want to do is deal with it, especially when I feel as though there is no intellectual backing behind my feelings of anger. Then something will trigger me and I'll explode. I feel like I'm experiencing pure anger frequently for the first time in my life. . . but there is something really bumbling about the way it is happening: wrong times and wrong places.

I've been told that my anger is frightening. I'm not usually a screamer in these situations, but I think those on the receiving end feel screamed at. I'm freakishly intense. I speak quickly in a sharp tone that is accompanied by reinforcing gesticulation that leaves no room for response. I've been described as being capable of a "Holy War Rage." Whenever this happens to me, I feel both ashamed of myself and fascinated by it. It's like an out of body experience. I'm a sun-moon Libra. I love peace, connection, partnership and harmonizing. I'm not comfortable when I feel anger that cannot be tempered or dissipated by my mind. In the wake of my past few explosions, I've felt an exhilarating sense of liberation followed by shame upon reflection.

As uncomfortable as I am with these recent experiences of anger, I feel like I'm at some important turning point. I'm recognizing feelings that I've never acknowledged. I feel a power and a sense of caring for myself that I've never had before. I don't want to be a hurtful, wackadoodle bitch, but I feel like this is a phase that I need to ride out.

My biggest fear is what will happen to my friendships during this phase. Friend breakups make me feel ill. I'm still reeling from a friend divorce that happened a few years ago. I'm haunted by a few lost friends who rebuff my attempts at reconciliation. Friendship scares me now so much more than it used to . . I'm scared of investing myself in something that can just end. .. something that doesn't have ties of blood or law. I have a morbid curiosity about who will want to be my friend as more pieces of my authentic self rise to the surface -- as I sacrifice peace and calm for honesty and authentic experience.

Sometimes I fear that after I've alienated all my friends --as my family members are absorbed on their own journeys and are emotionally unavailable -- that only Alex will be left, and then what will I do if anything happens to him. That's when I surrender to becoming a crazy, crazy cat lady.

Yoga Club: Phase 1 of the Revolution

2007-11-05T19:12:00.000-05:00

I'm procrastinating.

The highlight of my day was the informational for the yoga club that I'm starting at school with a yoga teacher friend. Twenty-two students showed up. That's about twenty more than I expected. There were four boys there. That what super-shocking. There was a nice spread of grade levels. I had the kids fill out an info. sheet. One of the questions asked whether the student felt comfortable with teachers attending sessions. Our chill group of future yoginis and yogis is allowing teachers to attend. There will be at least four of us.

I'm writing a grant for yoga mats.

Bringing yoga and meditation to kids who can't afford lessons is becoming an obsession of mine.

Phase 2 of the Revolution: getting healthy, locally grown foods in our cafeteria

c'est la vie!

2007-11-05T10:25:00.001-05:00

In the past month I’ve been bludgeoned repeatedly with the phrase, “c’est la vie!” It has been everywhere -- in coffee shops, between bitchy teenage girls, in the teachers’ lounge, in blog comments, in short stories I’ve been reading. I was talking about it with a friend this morning, and we determined that even though in French it means “That’s life!” or “Such is life!” . . . what it really means is "Something shitty just happened to you . . and I don’t give a rat’s ass. . . and I’m smirking on the inside."

When Alex failed in his attempt to get into the Math GRE on standby, the worst thing I could have said would have been, “C’est la vie!” It would have meant: “Such is life. . .such is life for you, you fucking loser.”

I like to imagine hearing all the tragedies at school (coworkers and students) . . and just throwing my hands in the air and saying, “C’est la vie!” in a fake French accent. It’s like saying I’m too sophisticated to drop my pants and shit on you, so even though I don’t speak French, I’ll verbally excrete my disgust with you all over you and your sorrow.

Giving Up Greatness

2007-11-05T08:52:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking about what kind of life that I want and realizing that I yearn so much more for sanity , peace, and awareness than that greatness that I always thought I wanted. I want to feel at home in my body. I want to feel open and at peace with the present moment and not controlled by my compulsive behaviors (eating, spending money, email checking, internet surfing, fantasizing/day dreaming, approval seeking, involvement in the lives of my addicted family members . . .so far drinking is the only compulsion that has been lifted. Alex was drinking wine this weekend and I only felt a few twinges of desire and self-pity.) I want to have a meaningful practice of Judaism. I want to dance. I want to write poetry. I want to know the names of the plants and animals in my life. I want a healthy relationship with food. I want to be a good friend.

I’ve realized that I’m not a scholar. I want to know the workings of the world in order to increase my appreciation of it and deepen my relationship with it. I have a hunger for learning. I see it as a spiritual practice, but I have an aversion to academia . . maybe because it is a world comprised of such a tiny, tiny percentage of the world’s population.

One day I woke up and realized that most of my friends are thoughtful, intellectual generalists who work with people -- teachers, social workers, and nurses -- rather than scholars. I envy the intellectual challenge and institutional stamp of approval that the newly minted Ph.Ds around me have. I also envy their freedom from any obligation to the downtrodden. Sometimes I think that putting the desire to help other people above that satisfaction of one’s own needs is a sign of mental illness. Will this desire to help people who often don’t want my help evaporate after several more years of yoga, meditation, and reflection? Lately, I’ve been working to balance my desire to be challenged with my desire to aid in repairing the world. Whenever I feel envious of people I know from college with PhDs, I have to remind myself that there is a part of me that wants what I have.

Maybe this is the buzz of the soy chai latte talking, but I want live among people of different backgrounds. Teaching gives this to me. Lately I’ve felt as though I want to dive deeply into the basics of life: food, death, bodies, birth, and the natural world around me. I don’t want to go off and live in a world where I can pretend that whole segments of the population don’t exist.

I get exasperated with people who study “the people” and their culture(s) in graduate programs but have no contact with the actual people themselves. I admire the desire to raise awareness of the workings of our culture and economies, but I think that academics who really are serious about raising awareness make sure that somehow that they or their work (if they don’t have the skills to communicate with people of different backgrounds) gets to the general population.

What do I want for teachers?

My closest friends at school are teachers with secret artistic lives: two poets, a spoken word performer/fiction writer, and a dancer. I want us to be able to have time to do our creative work, so that we can teach from a place of vital experience. I would love an inexpensive way to learn with other teachers who take their own learning, creative work, and teaching seriously. I would like to be able get together with other English teachers (either live or virtually) and discuss what we teach from the perspective of intellectuals, artists, teachers, and students.

MFA, no MFA, MFA, no MFA, MFA, no MFA. . . .

2007-11-02T14:39:00.000-04:00

I want to be a better poet. Do I need an MFA to do that? I'm not willing to give up my job and do a regular MFA program so there's no chance of tuition wavers for TAing or anything like that. I keep changing my mind about whether I want to do a low residency program when I'm in my early 40s. Today I had the thought. . . . hmmmmm. . . $30,000. . . that means more loans. . . .that means having to work more to pay off my loans. . . that means less time for writing. I'm far . . . so far away . . really, really freaking far away from paying off my existing loans, which totaled $35,000 ($18,000 from Oberlin + $17,000 from U Mass for the completely useless MEd degree). My throat tightens when I think about Alex's debt from undergrad alone.

I'm leaning away from the ol' MFA now.

On this day when every potenially articulate particle of my being has been sapped by emotionally handicapped teenagers, corrupt administrators, and Babel-like stacks of grading, I think what I need is time. . . time to bask in poems. . .time to observe and free associate. . . time to write. I'm old enough to know where to go to find new and inspiring writers to read. Sometimes I wish I had more poets in my universe who can give me feedback, but I already know that I'm too dependent on others . . . this was confirmed by a 15 page astrological report that I had done in 2000 when I was looking for guidance from the stars about what I should do with my life.

I'll probably write more on this. . . but now I need to get out of this building and see my hospice client, who has an MFA in painting.

12:12 am and I'm Ridiculously Happy!!!

2007-10-29T00:11:00.000-04:00

I just spent a few hours writhing in bed listening to the Red Sox. I almost puked when they lost their 4 - 1 lead.

I called my mom after the last out to make sure that she was up.

I'm not going to be able to sleep for at least a couple of hours. . . and I need to get up early to grade.

Revised AAAARGH!

2007-10-26T13:24:00.000-04:00

Okay. . . I've just had some guava kombucha tea, and the goodness of the mother strands has put me in a slighly better mood.

Today wasn't completely rotten.

Five Good Things:

1. reading aloud in English 9F
2. discussion about the motivation of using science to justify mythologies and theologies in Humanities
3. observing nonfiction workshop groups
4. a conversation with a red-headed devil with a charming smile, a two-semester torturer of yours truly, who called me a "fucking cunt" last week, about how he wants to stay in school
5. half the kids in 9F actually completing the work rather than just being jackasses.

AAAARGH!!!

2007-10-26T12:10:00.000-04:00

I hate my job right now. I'm sick of teaching kids who have no interest in being here. I'm tired, bored, overwhelmed with work, and cranky. . . so cranky that I feel ugly inside and out.

Our culture is rotten. These kids needs a wilderness retreat bootcamp or some other ass-kicking situation.

I wish I had a trust fund.

I wish I had done things differently in college.

This job is sucking the life out of me.

I know that I'm whining.

Shabbat cannot come soon enough.

My Personal Scorpio Turns 30

2007-10-25T09:36:00.000-04:00

My personal scorpio is turning 30 today. I saw all sides of him this week as we argued about our future plans: emotional depth that splits the heart open, passion, and a brilliant cruelty that is painful to behold. The scorpio stockpiles the sharp observations and then delivers the fatal blow when s/he has had enough. It’s not like the impromptu, thoughtless verbal attack of the sagittarius. I have one of the rare scorpios. I think that his scorpion sharpness is tempered by his life experiences, as well as his moon in aries, ascendant in pisces, and venus in libra. Yes, I researched all of so I had some sort of protection as I was falling in love with him. Before we re-met, when I found him online, I actually thought twice about contacting him when I saw that he’s a scorpio. During our first round of friendship in ‘92 - ‘93, I wasn’t the astrology freak that I am today. (An exboyfriend actually once said to me, “Shut up, Star Girl.") I now know why the first round of my friendship with Alex ended. When a scorpio is done, a scorpio is done. In the past few years I’ve learned that it is easy for the scorpio to cut ties and walk away. I shudder when I look at Alex and remember the coldness of our last conversation in ‘93. I was a approval-seeking, shallow libra trying to collect admirers. Alex eventually saw through me. . . and became icy. . .so icy. . . before becoming silent. Alex is the kindest person I know. . . seriously. . . sweet, unassuming, good . . and not in a stupid, naive way, but in a way that only people who have been sculpted by loss and sorrow can be. . BUT. . .I will always be aware of his capacity for sharp scorpion cruelty. I don’t enjoy verbal rumbles with my juggling, dungeon master, mathematician. I know he would be even more dangerous if he gave up veganism and started eating meat. I think that being vegan makes him more peaceful and gentle.

For his birthday I gave him the following: art lessons, a Devendra Banhart CD, a homemade card, a slice of vegan chocolate cake, and complete surrender (within reason) to his project of getting a PhD in abstract mathematics. The last item was a shock to him because as of our last conversation on the subject. I was being bitter, resentful, and controlling about just a Masters degree. . . but then I had a breakdown at work about the whole thing (yelling, crying, and almost throwing a jar of peanut butter at a know-it-all colleague), and then I signed out of work to go home and cry, pray, meditate and turn it over to the tarot cards.

Here’s the plan: We are going to try to stay within “the radius,” so that I can keep a job that I love. Alex is going to apply to U Mass, Dartmouth, Worcester Polytech., Brandeis, Tufts, and maybe a couple other Boston schools. If he goes to Dartmouth, then we’ll move to Alstead, NH. If he goes to WPI, we move to Winchendon, MA. If he goes to U Mass, we stay in Spofford. If he goes to a Boston school, then we live apart during the week. I’ll live in Spofford, and he’ll live with his parents. We’ll live together on weekends. We just need to be living together by the time we have a baby. If he doesn’t get into any school, then he’ll try to get a job teaching high school math and try to get certified through alternative certification or get a MS with certification through WPI.

On the Post-Game Glow, Student-Teacher Relationships, and Foul Balls

2007-10-22T19:15:00.001-04:00

My enthusiasm for the Red Sox victory last night was a major point of bonding with my second block, primarily male, comprehensive-level Humanities class. Many of the students were surprised that I cared. They tried to be supportive of my radio-listening by saying, "That's cool, Esh. Real old school." We chatted a little bit about the difference between watching it on TV (with the moronic commentators and the swirling, pop-up bits of stats, history, and trivia) and listening to it (with moments of blindness and a freaky reliance on commentators' well-known voices). The baseball talk fit in well with our tea time, a senior privilege. I love this class. It is with this class that I am most myself, but am also much more vigilant about boundaries. Different teachers have different lines. I'm sure that to some teachers my boundaries may appear weak or shockingly non-existent, especially as I'm teaching The Red Tent by Anita Diamant and drawing diagrams of menstrual cups and circumcision rites on the board.

Teaching high school is tricky. Much trickier than they tell you in education programs. The issue of boundaries is complicated even more by teaching in the small town in which you live. So much of being a high school teacher is being a role model or an adult connection in a time of alienation from parents, that it is hard, maybe even undesirable to refuse to let who you are in the 'outside world' leak into the classroom. This attempt to balance being 'real' and being professional becomes a particularly treacherous juggling act for people who are from families with weak boundaries. Many teachers come from alcoholic families. The hero children (usually the first borns in alcoholic families) in particular want to save the public school children of the world, just as they tried to save their families. The problem for many ACOAs is that they have been conducting themselves like adults for their whole lives, but emotionally they're stunted and have no idea of what's normal and appropriate.

I spent the first 4 -5 years of my teaching career terrified about boundaries and what I perceived as my lack of instinctive knowledge of boundaries. I live in a small town. I need to be comfortable with seeing my students at synagogue, at the grocery store, at the pharmacy (having them fetch my prescriptions), at the office building that houses my therapist, while I'm waiting at Planned Parenthood for an appointment, in the homes of my friends, and at Passover Seders. (I quit drinking two and half years ago after I got inappropriately tipsy . . . okay. . let's be honest. . DRUNK. . . at a seder attended by two students and their families.) The one apartment that Alex and I could find that fit all of our criteria (after several weeks of searching) is in the home of a former student. My time working at the Upward Bound Program at Keene State College further complicated my notions of boundaries. Former students only have to be out of the program for two years before they can apply to be staff members. I've seen my relationship with former UB students shift from friendly authority to complete equality in a matter of a couple of years.

Over the years I've developed certain rules: 1. I don't say anything that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying in front of parents 2. I only share the emotionally heavy major events of my life that I feel would be of use for my students. When my brother-in-law died suddenly at the age of 32, I was open with my students about the cause of his death because I thought that they needed to hear about it. 3. I only get coffee with students after they graduate. 4. I don't have facebook friends who have not graduated, and I'm always aware that my online profiles are public (parents and younger siblings). 5. I'm guarded about what type of friendship I have with students after they graduate. We all know that I am not comfortable with hearing about their wild college adventures. I do have former students from my first two years of teaching who are (or almost are) 'real' friends,but it now takes much longer than that for those type of friendships to develop. 6. I tell students right away that I'm not comfortable being the only person to whom they feel comfortable talking, and I always remind them that although I care, I am part of the system.

Trying to Stay Awake for Baseball in the Absence of a TV

2007-10-21T21:37:00.000-04:00

This is one of those times when I curse not having TV. I could listen to the Red Sox & Indians game on the radio, but for some reason the thought of that makes me feel heavy with a sad nostalgia for my dead grandparents. I'm already feeling the Sunday blues enough as it is. I also rescheduled my Friday afternoon hospice visit for early Sunday evening. . . that has left me a little sad. So here I sit and write, checking the play-by-play scores on SI.com and debating whether to curl up in bed listening to the radio.

Okay. . . I'm a closet baseball fan. I purposely try to keep myself ignorant of current team members and what's going on so that I don't get as hooked as I've been in the past. I'll tell myself that it is all corporate bullshit -- tied to shallow escapism and consumerism -- but that doesn't work. I'm always more invested in the Boston Red Sox than I want to be. This series with the Cleveland Indians brings about an epic clashing of worlds for me. I associate the Indians with my college years and with the people with whom I worked in the dining halls at Oberlin. I remember many times (particularly Sunday mornings while listening to gospel music) when the permanent, full time dining services employees (Cleveland Indians Fans all) and I would commiserate about it was like to be emotionally-tied to heartbreaking losers.

Baseball is epic; it's tragic and exhilarating. Fate seems to unroll painfully slowly at times. Then there are flashes of action that can leave the fan stunned and heartbroken or believing in divine intervention.

I secretly like baseball, and I live in a town with a an annual pumpkin festival.
I don't think that I have any chance of being the hipster that I wanted to be at age 16. Maybe I should forget about the game and listen to Depeche Mode's Violator.

Niddah + NFA = 10 Day Sex Window/Month . . . What's a woman at her sexual peak to do?

2007-10-17T09:34:00.000-04:00

Since college I’ve been fascinated with the laws of Niddah -- abstaining from physical contact with one’s spouse during menstruation and for a period of time after until immersion in a ritual bath. I’m attracted to the idea of how the periods of separation and reunion would affect my relationship. This is one of several practice that I contemplate taking on after my bat mitzvah and wedding.

A major element of the attraction to these laws is the immersion in the ritual bath, the mikvah. For a few years after my seizure, I didn’t want to burden my friends with my drowning risk (which was small but frightening) , so I went years without swimming in my favorite pond. I missed the complete immersion -- being surrounded completely by water, every inch of hair covered, and the stillness. Then I became interested in Natural Fertility Awareness (NFA) , partly due to a fear of hormonal forms of birth control because my mother had a bout with breast cancer that might have been caused by her menopause hormone treatment. I also thought that they might exacerbate my depression. My fear of pregnancy led me to use barrier methods in conjunction with NFA, which requires one to examine discharge, the cervix, and body temperature. I also started to learn about how how my cycle affects my moods and the degree to which I’m extroverted or introverted. After a while, I started to get a good idea of how hormone fluctuations affect my writing process and how to take advantage of that. Recurrent infections and a fear of unwanted pregnancy in the the most financially poor and baby-yearning time of my life brought me back to the Pill. In a year if I should get pregnant, it will not be a disaster. I hope to go back to a practice of NFA that is unaided by barrier methods. Here’s the problem:

NFA has the couple abstaining from intercourse during ovulation and the time before and after. Niddah has the couple abstaining during menstruation (which is dictated to be at least five days) and for seven days following. By the time Niddah allows the couple to have sex, NFA is warning against it because the laws of Niddah deliver the practitioners right to the woman’s fertile time. If I were to practice both during this time when I don’t want to get pregnant, then our sex life would be seriously stunted. Niddah and NFA (for birth control) together would leave us with only ten days a month in which we could have sex.

So what am I to do? Where am I with Niddah?

I refuse to interpret menstruation as a sign of “uncleanness.” I see it as a mark of transition. Menstruation for me means my body has missed its opportunity to be pregnant -- either by my choosing, or maybe someday to my frustration. It also marks a turning inward for me. If I had to pick a time to focus on myself and abstain from sex, menstruation would be it. I do have a problem with a male-dictated system telling me how long I menstruate. I also have a problem with being told that Alex’s state of purity is affected by sleeping in the same bed with me. If we ever did move to separate beds for part of the month, it would be so that I could have a some time to re-experience sleeping in a twin bed that is half-filled with books and notebooks, which is something that I did and loved for a long time before I began to love sleeping with Alex more.

I want my cycle back. I look forward to getting off hormone-based birth control, but I also know that I don’t want a child for two to three years, and we are currently planning on only having one child. What do I do? If we choose to practice Niddah, then we’ll count days based upon my own cycle. I’m not comfortable with the sexualization of every part of my body and every act of affection, but I think that I’m willing to explore the traditional guidelines in this area. . . just for the benefit of the explosive reclamation of intimacy at the separation’s end. Since my tahara training, I’ve been interested in purification/marking transitions through water. I want the experience of the mikvah, but I don’t want to reject my own body’s cycle. There is a progressive mikvah in Newton, MA. I’m wrestling with the question of whether I can go there to immerse after I menstruate while choosing to have my body dictate the period of separation that Alex and I take.

I have a whole other entry to write at some point about how exclusionary Judaism can be to single people, especially single women. I sometimes think about what I would do if I were single. If I were single, I would use the mikvah to mark my own cycle. It would be one practice in a series of practices that brings my attention and love to my body’s cycles. It would have nothing to do with maintaining the purity of a male partner.

Little Jews, Little Jews, Come Out and Play

2007-10-11T08:16:00.000-04:00

I am a religious school teacher. When you live in a town with a tiny Jewish population, you get to experience the adventure of doing things for which most people would say you are unqualified. I guess I'm sort of qualified in that I have an undergrad religion major with lots of credits in Jewish Studies and I am a teacher who has worked with middle school aged students. But I didn't really have a Jewish childhood, and I never went to Hebrew School. For two years, I would wake up on Sunday mornings and teach Jewish Life (a blend of Jewish values, Jewish history, observance, philosophy, and improv. theater). Alex and I became adept at leaving NYC or Boston in the wee hours of the morning so that I could be in Keene by 9:00 am to teach. Then I decided to reclaim my weekends, so now I teach Tuesday school. I work with the 5th and 6th graders doing Torah study.

Tues. 10/9 was the first day. I was dreading it. I was cursing the poverty that makes this a financial necessity. I spent the afternoon crunching numbers in my head to figure out how I could afford to escape from this job next year. I was really questioning how much I enjoy it until I got there and was actually with the kids.

There are seven kids in the class, but only five were there. Some of these kids are the siblings of kids I've had in previous years. Here are the players: a coltish, blonde track star with two sweetly geeky older brothers. (She cracked up when I asked whether her brothers run track); the adopted Chinese daughter of a single mother. (She is a charming pen-stealer who will share her bat mitzvah with her mother, who never had one); an intensely focused girl who skipped a grade and reminds me of Ione Skye in "Say Anything" . . . . She will grow up to be "a brain in the body of a game show hostess"; a very blond boy who is peaceful and so chilled out that I can see him selling grilled cheese sandwiches out the back of a volks wagon bus at music festivals; and then the sister of my favorite student from the past. Her brother wrote an ethical will in the voice of his dog. Tiny, elven, and hilarious . . . this girl just delights me. I want to take her to cocktail parties.

We talked about the sins of humans as seen in Beresheet and whether G-d should have created human beings. They debated the issue. We talked about the end of Beresheet in which it is said that G-d regrets having created human beings when he sees how evil humans had become in the generation of Noah. I had the kids make lists of the things about humans that would make them regret creating humans if they were G-d.

Then there was a b'nai mitzvot meeting. I had to attend for two reasons: 1. so parents could meet me as a the teacher 2. because my students and I are going to become adults around the same time. . . 13 . . 31. . .what's the difference?

Overall, they seem to be a great bunch of kids. I only had to employ teacher voice a couple of times.

Chagall's Jesus is One of My Favorite Jews

2007-10-08T20:13:00.000-04:00

For weeks I've wanted to write a poem about Chagall's White Crucifixion. A trip to Chicago isn't complete for me without stopping to stare at it in its home at the Chicago Art Institute.

I'm understanding my writing process more as time goes by. I've been free-writing on the painting for months (maybe years if I count what I've unintentionally written). I never know where these long incubating poems will go. Usually some other part of my life (something I had considered previously unconnected) will link itself to the selected subject of the poem. This time it was the two trainings in tahara and the work of the Chevra Kaddisha (the Jewish burial society) that I've done in the past six months.

I'm going to try to take a personal day in the next month or two in an attempt to send out some poetry for publication. I'm normally paranoid and skittish about putting my poetry on my blog. But I figured that this one seemed odd enough that I wanted to throw it out there for feedback.

White Crucifixion at the Art Institute

My bashert Yehoshua
was crucified on a snowy afternoon
in Chicago amid squalls
coming in off the lake,
the holy white of the desert,
and the Pale of Settlement.

The ribs of the shul provided wood
for the cross, and the search for nails
in the coffin-maker's shop yielded none.

Picasso's nudes covered themselves,
and Modigliani's almond-eyed mistress
tried to look away while the apples
of Valtat's "Nature morte" melted
into their name.

Smooth is the brow
of this butter-colored mashiach,
between worlds and uttering
blessings over the setting sun:

Blessed are the converts
who were not saved by smudges
of ash between their eyes.

Blessed are the babies
who tried not to cry
as they breathed through flannel.

Blessed are the meek who threw themselves
into electric fences after being chased
by German shepherds.

Blessed are the arms of the wandering Jew,
who carries the torah scroll,
small and gray, in a landscape
as white as heaven or Antarctica,
which is beautifully simple
in its absence of Jews.

Blessed are those trees of life
strung with nigguns
that rise and fall like dragonflies,
wordless and searching.

This is my savior
with the Shekinah's flames
licking his toes
as the other two criminals
have disappeared
into the pogrom's flames

This is my savior
with the linen turban drooping
soon to reveal a black velvet yarmulke.

Above him are my savior's saviors:
who try to ignore the Romans and Cossacks
as they dance and clap hands
to the clicking heels of smart Nazi boots,

who wonder what you do with hands
that cannot end suffering.

This is what your mashiach knows at moonrise
as he smiles at the loving hands
that can shroud his body:

The blood that has fallen
on the shawl of the Magdelane
will have to be buried with me

and I know that the water
that has gathered around my clavicles
is as pure as my soul

and my women and the refugees
will weep the twenty-four quarts
of water for tahara

How easily the blood takes to the white wool
of the tallith that rests a palm's width
below his navel, tied around his hips.

It will be all over when it is wrapped
around his shoulders with one fringe clipped
so as never to be used again under the Bethlehem sun
or in the woods of Lithuania.

He sighs to try to soften his heart
to those who worship crooked-limbed spiders
and his sigh lifts the corner of modest Miriam's scarf,
her body fresh and pure from the ritual bath.

No, it was not as it is written,
he did not say, "Why hast thou forsaken me?"
But rather, "Let God's name be made great in the world.
May it be blessed and praised and glorified."

And we responded, "Amen."

written by Esh on October 8, 2007

The Requiem That Never Ends: Someone Please Tell Me How to Scatter Ashes in Cyber Space and Walk Away Forever

2007-10-07T19:03:00.000-04:00

I once read an article in which Katha Pollitt referred to herself as a "webstalker." I am a webstalker. I long for my dating life circa. 1992 when all I could do to connect with an ex. was to read old love letters and stare at his family's phone number as it appeared in the white pages.

My webstalking began when I was a sophomore in college ('96 - '97). It has gotten worse each year with the birth of each social networking website and as age has increased the accomplishments and web presence of all my lost loves.

Webstalking has brought once lost friends into my life. It helped fate deliver my fiance to me via friendster.com. He was a long lost friend for whom I had been searching for years in order to apologize for the bitchiness of my sixteenth year.

I am most tormented by the internet presence of the people who resist/resent/and are perhaps repulsed my libran charms and my attempts at reconciliation. I remain connected to these people through spider webs of blogs and friend listings and through lists of email addresses on mass emails. I can't look at pictures of my friend's baby without being tempted by the presence of a former friend's words and thoughts. In a similar way it is hard not to click on the picture of the former lover, who will not speak to me, when I try to catch up on the catalogues of superficial events in our mutual friends' lives as listed on facebook.

My favorite mental health professional and I have talked about the self-destructive nature of my attempts to ingest more information about these people. She says that the webstalking creates the false sense of a connection where there is none.

Brain lust draws me to their websites and their blogs. I look for glimpses of what I loved about the person. I'm aware that the time that I spend webstalking takes away from my own growth and evolution. My peace-loving libran self might also use visits to the websites as a way of forcing itself to confront the chilly reality that reconciliation is not always possible.

What does it mean to say goodbye to people in this time of cyberspace when google can promise small moments of comfort and satisfaction at 2 am? Some people have pornography and others have blogspot, facebook, friendster, and myspace. Some people spend quality time with their pornographic internet friends and then dream of 17 year old, Asian lesbians washing cars. I google and then dream of reconciliation on a Brooklyn street with a college friend and conversations at the Brattleboro Coop salad bar with an old boyfriend.

Beginning My First Rumble with Halakhah

2007-10-07T17:32:00.000-04:00

I've been drawn toward greater halakhic observance lately. Maybe it is because I see it as an exercise in mindfulness and a way of using ritual to enliven myths of great communal and individual meaning. I know that I will never believe in the divine perfection of Jewish law and I question the right of the rabbis to speak for me as a woman. . .but I do find myself resistant to the idea of a completely post-halakhic Judaism. I think that that I can follow Jewish law if I see it as a way of linking myself to the past's quest for holiness (which includes some flawed interpretations). I also think that halakhah could be legitimate for me if women and queer people were accepted into the process of interpretation.

I intend to start wrestling with halakhah this week. I found an article written by the late Tikva Frymer-Kensky that has rocked my week. She presents a vision of halakah that is spiritually moving and completely acceptable to me as a women . . .and one that is probably more in line with the tradition of halakhah than many orthodox Jews would like to admit.

I've also been influenced by an email exchange with a professor from Oberlin who was raised modern orthodox and whose relationship to halakhah was transformed by feminism. She has given me a great reading list.

I've been thinking about two women whom I encountered at the National Havurah Institute: a friend who is making the transition into modern orthodox observance and Leah Lax, a writer who joined a hasidic community in her teen years, had seven children, then left the community, and is now an out lesbian who has written a memoir of her experiences.

My experience in spiritually-based, addiction recovery programs has brought my attention to the practice of surrendering my will and putting boundaries around those aspects of life that can be abused and used for self-destructive purposes. I refuse to follow laws that I feel go against the principles of pursuing justice, being Holy, and loving one's neighbor has oneself, which are supposed to be the foundations for halakhah, but what would be my reason for violating other laws. How much of that violation would come from the compulsions that guide my life? For example, I might be able to whole-heartedly support the Conservative movement's acceptance of using a car to get to services, but what reasons can I have for the use of money or the use of some electronic devices (TV, internet, etc.) other than my attempts to feed compulsions that try to draw my scared little self out of the present moment.

I have learned in addiction recovery that when I'm in that desperately frightened mode of addiction in which my will's only goal is to protect myself from the pain of of the moment, I cannot trust that will. Until I have built a relationship with a higher power, it is best for me surrender to the collective wisdom of the group (to an outsider I can see how that this might seem cult-like, but I believe a good group eventually guides you in developing your relationship with a higher power and a healthy intuition). My experience with addiction and compulsive behaviors have drawn me toward a life that uses the boundaries of Jewish law to infuse everyday life with mindfulness/holiness.

My Week in Fragments

2007-10-03T13:18:00.000-04:00

my fifteen year old student dies of a brain tumor. . . .find out over email. . . cry at my desk. . . unexpected because I saw it coming. . . emergency meeting this morning. . . .boy , who was orphaned by cancer (each parent), gets hit by a car and is at Dartmouth Hitchcock in critical condition with brain injuries. . . grades due Tuesday. . . the internet parent portal has already brought forth four complaints.. . .adulthood feels elusive. . .but Hebrew reading getting better. . . Gilgamesh and Enkidu loving each other like women and Enkidu just threw the Bull of Heaven’s thigh at Ishtar. . . kids drawing wanted posters of each other in ninth grade English (no sex or drug-related crimes). . .my hair gleams because I chose to sleep rather than shower this morning. . . 11:20 pm. . . . a baby seems too heavy. . . Where will we put it? Under one of the piles of laundry? In a drawer filled with the cat’s cedar chip litter? . . . no Boston grad. school for Alex. . . at least none without tears and resentment from me.

A Kosher Baptist Until Age 10

2007-09-27T13:52:00.000-04:00

Even today my mother and father seemed united in their avoidance of established religion. I can now tell that my father is someone who does not like to be told what to do and that he runs from any conversation that smacks of judgment. He is also so much the poster-child for adult ADHD that I don’t see how he could find spiritual grounding in a sanctuary that requires sitting in one place. His parents might have kept him a practicing Baptist if they had sent him to Africa with missionaries when he was twelve to build huts and irrigation systems. My mother isn’t a cocktail party small talk sort of person, which probably explains her alienation from the Reform Judaism scene of the 1950s. My mother also doesn’t like to be told what to do or to whom she should be writing out checks for synagogue dues.

Both sets of grandparents lived in my hometown of Laconia, NH (population 15,000). My mother’s parents were Jewish. My grandmother grew up in my hometown and experienced a strange mix of orthodox practices and blatant assimilation (Christmas = being a good American). My grandfather seems to be from a poorer, more recently emigrated immigrant stock. He grew up in the slums of Manchester, NH where there was a larger Jewish population, and he appears (from his journals and my memories) to have been more recently embedded in Eastern European culture. However, I do have memories of both of them speaking Yiddish. My grandparents met because the Jewish community of Manchester would ship young Jews northward to provide a Jewish dating pool for Jews in the central part of the state. My grandfather voices strong identification with his Jewish identity in his journals, but felt that the religious aspects of that identity were of “Old World.” My mother remembers boredom at Hebrew school. My uncle had a bar mitzvah in which he memorized his Torah portion without learning to read Hebrew. Overall, their experience with Judaism seems very similar to that of many Baby Boomers. My mother likes expressions of Jewish wisdom manifested in the form of New Age Self-Help books. Both of my parents still embrace the universalizing tendencies of the ‘70s.

My father’s family is Evangelical Baptist -- evangelical in that they feel compelled to witness to their experience and bring people to Christ, and fundamentalist in that they read the Bible literally and turn to it for guidance in every aspect of their lives. My father rebelled during his teenage years. As an outsider, I consider some of this rebellion justified and life preserving and some of it to be self-destructive.

So I was raised with parents whose attitudes ranged from indifference to occasional hostility toward organized religion. My Jewish grandparents just wanted to feed us, read to us, help us develop our artistic sides, and spoil us. Providing us with spumoni ice cream, vats of spaghetti and meatballs, and BLTS with extra mayo slathered on the bacon seemed more important than making us highly observant Jews with a deep commitment to the local Jewish community. My Baptist grandparents were the only people who seemed invested in our religious upbringing. The Baptist church was free. Bible classes with my Baptist grandmother were free. Baptist summer camp was free or next to nothing. My religious upbringing consisted of the following: Baptist outside the home on a regular basis; Jewish during storytime with Jewish family members, at school, while watcing “Fiddler on the Roof,” during Chanukah, Purim, and Passover, and whenever famous Jews were on the news or in movie credits; and at home we belonged to the churches of the Time Out Pub (where we could throw peanut shells on the floor) and Fraggle Rock.

This is why I feel like I have the street cred. to criticize fundamentalist Christianity. (Don’t worry, I’ll eventually express my objections to all fundamentalist religions.) Fundamentalist relatives email me about what I have written about fundamentalist Christianity in a previous post. Part of me hesitates to write about this on this blog, but then I realize consideration for my Jewishness and my family has never stopped my relatives from expressing their views. While my father and one of his sisters understand some of my issues with fundamentalism, they cannot understand the added layer of pain and anger that comes with being a Jew (not through consistent religious practice or complete cultural immersion, but through having a Jewish mother and dearly-loved Jewish relatives) and being bombarded with the anti-Jewish propaganda of the New Testament.

Eventually, I became aware of how fundamentalist Christianity is inherently anti-Jewish. Imagine what it is like to grow up one of the only Jewish kids in school (sometime the only one) and to have the Jews of the Bible be your only Jewish friends. Being exposed to the Jews of the New Testament through the lens of fundamentalism made me like a very special sort of devil.

I was in the fourth grade when my Jewish grandfather died. When my Baptist relatives refused to say that my Jewish grandfather was in heaven, I knew that I was done with that religion. My sister and I (and eventually my parents and Jewish grandmother) were all swept away from the funeral for a Baptist family reunion. My sister and I are still angry about the noticeably absent reassurances about the state of our grandfather’s soul and the lack of sensitivity to Jewish death ritual. They couldn’t say what they don’t believe, and to this day, I find it chilling when I consider all the amazing people they have condemned to Hell in their minds. If I had been born into a more moderate extended family, one affirming of difference, then I would probably be a Unitarian minister right now. . .maybe even UCC. Without the Evangelical Baptists, I would not have embarked on trying to work my way back to Judaism.

Thus begins the litany of complaints. . .

• True fundamentalist Christians are incapable of appreciating other religions. They are theologically mandated to believe that their way is the only way. Interfaith dialogue with fundamentalist Christians is frustrating because it is clear that other spiritual paths are not viewed as valid. I often get the strong sense that there is lurking condescension and a lack of affirmation of other ways to G-dwhen I talk to my relatives .

• They think they own the Bible. Religious progressives do love the Bible, but because we don’t read it the way that they do, we’re unfaithful. I personally think that the fundamentalist reading of the Bible overlooks vital inner meanings and emotionally resonant metaphors. I know that my reading of the Bible is not consider valid to my Baptist relatives, and I honestly feel either sorry for them for how limiting their reading is or angry at them when they try to foist their reading on others.

• Missionaries: It’s one thing to provide much needed services in foreign countries; It’s better to bring about justice that helps people provide those things in their own ways to their own communities. It’s just another thing (and I believe the wrong thing) to try to erase cultures in order to win souls for your cause. It’s the fundamentalist imperial mission, and I find it unsettling.

• Separation of Church and State: This keeps me up at night. Fundamentalist Christians are trying to take back this nation for Christ. They are trying to hijack my uterus even though my religion does not follow the same beliefs as theirs about abortion. This is often done slyly through fetal rights legislation. Stem Cell research. . denial of global warming. . . public money for private religious schools (vouchers). .. prayer in school . . restrictions on the rights of LGTB people, and . . . .

• Creationism in Schools: If we’re going to start teaching religious mythologies about the beginning of life on this planet, then we need to give equal voice to all the religious traditions.

If my family is representative of the religious right as a voting block, then people need to be scared. I’m from smart, hardworking, unified stock. They believe that what they are doing if for the best. Progressives need to wake up. Unify and vote. If we having another election where the right wins because of religious conservatives, then I’m seriously considering moving to another country.

• I trust and belief in my inner knowledge of the Great (all permeating and transcending) Love and the interconnectedness of all beings. I feel that all G-d wants is for us to be present and to be compassionate. I believe that these things because I feel them within me in those rare moments of overcoming my ego. To me, these feelings and the resulting attitudes and actions are more important than the exact words of the Bible. I believe that this wisdom can be found in other sacred texts. I will say straight out that the perspective of fundamentalists on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people is just WRONG. I believe that the homophobia of the religious right is a SIN. The Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany first attacked the rights of individuals to marry whom they please. The religious fundamentalists need to acknowledge the company that they keep in this matter.

I don’t hate my father’s family. I appreciate the talents of my individual family members. I get along with them by becoming more dedicated to the practice of being present with people as they at that moment. When conversing with my individual family members, I try not to jump out of the moment by thinking about how my beliefs and actions might be deemed to "sinful" or misguided by the other person. Even though I am not a scriptural fundamentalist, I know that I can be uncompromising in some of my beliefs. But I will always be aware that because I am a Jew, I will not belong. I know that my mother, sister, fiancé, future in-laws, and future child will not be completely accepted because we don’t share their experience of faith. I sometimes worry about the seating of gays, Jews, radical progressives, and Baptists at my wedding. I’m choosing to invite all the members of my father’s side of the family because they are my family, and I do care about them even though they often anger and frustrate me.

I also believe that we cannot give up on the possibility of interfaith dialogue because the world needs it. I need to believe that our concern for other human beings provides some common ground, as does our desire for peace and a meaningful life in which one is awake to the sacred.

Birthday Bitch

2007-09-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

I turned 31 yesterday. I am an equinox baby , often trying to celebrate myself at the same time I’m struggling with the atonement of the Days of Awe. My birthday was miserable this year (only three birthday cards: one from my grandmother, one from Upward Bound, and one from Alex that was unaccompanied by a present). I felt immature and whiny, as though there would never be enough love, affection, appreciation, etc. to feed me. It all started the day before my birthday when I tumbled out of Yom Kippur with an illegal vegan cupcake with mint frosting, which I consumed angrily and at warp speed while Alex was in the bathroom at the tea house. One minute I’m leading a discussion for ten to fourteen year olds at the synagogue about repentance and amends, and then I find myself just an hour shy of sundown deciding to skip hearing the shofar in order to torture the love of my life with an enraged silence that was laced with tears.

This birthday was marked from the beginning. My sister selected my birthday as the day to scatter her husband’s ashes. He died suddenly at the end of May. I’ve known since the end of August that my birthday weekend would consist of party-time Yom Kippur followed by this much too delayed festival of awkward grieving (shared by people with a growing dislike of each other). A couple of days before the 23rd, I received word that the memorial service would be postponed because there had been a sudden, tragic death in my brother-in-law’s family. Guilt plagued me for a day or two because I had been relentlessly complaining about the scheduling of this event and was reveling in my anger for the apology from my family that never came.

I’ve been thinking about the necessity and possibility of change lately. . . how much I need to believe that I can be transformed, released from everything about me with which I cannot live. I know that that also means that I have to let go of those “positive” aspects of my life story to which I cling.

Kol Nidre resonated to such an extent that I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach. I never realized how much it applied to me. I would always read the note in the Reconstructionist prayerbook about how Kaplan tried to remove it from the service because of the incongruity of starting anew with the assumption that vows will be broken (or something along those lines), and I would agree with him. I would quietly condemn my sentimental, irrational forebears. Now I realize that my word is flimsy, and that escape portal of vow annulment applies to me. It seems as though I am not even capable of keeping a vow anymore. Maybe I am selfish, but what upsets me the most is the fact that I can’t keep promises to myself.

Sometimes I worry that this life is just going to be year after year of watching myself do the same things over and over again. . . and not feeling as though I have enough life to improve the situation.

I want spiritual surrender so badly, but sometimes I feel like I can’t even get out of my bed for it.

Maybe I can’t hand things over because the divine plan for me might be a lot less glamorous than the one that I want for myself. What if G-d doesn’t think that that the best thing for me is to be recognized for achievements? What if I’m supposed to find peace through gratitude and humility? I suppose that I have to be twisted down onto my knees enough so that I really want that.

Ummmmm. . .I guess this is an example of the whiny entry that I said I would try to avoid writing.

Poetry Rumble

2007-09-20T13:26:00.000-04:00

I was in love with them when the spontaneous snapping in Beatnik style started. First block Creative Writing. We were watching a PG13 (teacher modified) version of SlamNation, the documentary about the national poetry slam competition. I use it as part of the voice sub-unit of the poetry unit. I looked up from grading to see the whole class snapping after an exceptionally entertaining performance. This kind of student reaction tempers my hostility toward slam/spoken word poetry.

This experience with slam poetry is an intersection of topics from my three classes. In Humanities we’ve been discussion the effect of the written language on storytelling and the role that physical place in the storytelling of nonliterate cultures. It has me thinking about storytelling, place, and communal telling of stories. During day 1 of Rosh Hashanah, I was thinking about the ritual of public reading of Torah -- a ritualized reading in a public place with a specified minimum number of people (minyan). Just because we’re a People of the Book doesn’t mean that we’re just a collection of solitary readers. The Torah is not a novel that is read while one hides in the coat closet from other people.

I also thought about the live presence of the Slam poet in presenting his/her material -- that identification of a particular speaker with the poem and the infusion of that person’s identity voice, appearance, and gestures into the meaning/experience of the poem. My English 9 Foundations Repeater class (low-level 9th grade English for students who failed it the first time) is not interested in the stories that we read. They will listen to stories told in person and rush to tell their own stories. I’m thinking about tape recording their own stories, and having them identify the elements of stories within. I might transcribe them and we will write in the details of the physical telling that cannot be seen on the page.

I start every semester of Creative Writing with the poetry unit because it allows us to focus on description, voice, and punctuation on the small scale. Poetry is my thing. . .my passion. . my place in the universe. Part of depression for me is marked by the feeling that there are no poems within me. I have my own strong ideas about what poetry is. I believe that poetry arises out of concentration and observation, and that it approaches the world with a clarity of vision and perception that brings awareness to all aspects of life in this world.

I’ve been mesmerized by the poetry of Jane Hirshfield for over ten years. Hirshfield spent several years living in a Buddhist monastery. My deep admiration for her work brought me to mindfulness meditation practice and convinced me that that practice is as necessary to the creation of poetry as ingesting the work of master poets. When I read Hirshfield’s work, I have to open myself up to stillness and use that stillness to become receptive to the manifesting spirit in that which she is observing. In the poetry I like, there is often a disappearance of the speaker into the object and what is left is the subtle presence of the speaker through his/her lens of observation. Poetry and theology are connected for me in that a good poem creates an experience of ego dissolution such as what is described in Martin Buber’s I and Thou.

I often have a difficult time thinking of spoken word poetry as poetry. I think of it more as a performative art. It is very rare that I believe that the written text of slam poetry stands on its own. These poems often need that infusion of performance. I value spoken word poetry when I think of it as performance art. I envy the performance abilities of the best spoken word poets. One thing I really enjoy about SlamNation is how many of the competing poets are teachers. I like to imagine what that kind of performative ability would bring to my teaching.

In my mind, for spoken word poetry to be poetry in the contemporary sense, it needs to possess a clarity of observation and precision and freshness of language that lends it a viable existence off stage. Sometimes I consider the plays of Shakespeare to be the ultimate in spoken word poetry. They’re meant to be performed, but each play is full of passages that can stand alone. Left alone on the page, many spoken word pieces are flat, lifeless, riddled with clichés, lacking any enduring sense of observation beyond quips referring to pop culture.

I resent spoken word poets when they “slam” traditional poets with their more reserved reading styles. I think of the poetry that I like to be that poetry to which one turns in moments of solitude. That sense of solitary revelation is carried into the lecture hall or church as people listen to in silence. At a traditional poetry reading, you’re with a group of people but you’re turning within yourself just waiting to be devastated by the images and language. I love the chill and paralysis that is experienced by a room full of individuals who are moved and rattled by a poem -- dozens of implosions in a contained place.

I do love the sense of embodiment with performance poetry. Both sides of the brain are used to create and experience performance poetry. Just as the right hemisphere of the brain brings understanding of the tones of the voice, facial expressions, and gestures, the left hemisphere is working its tool of language. But isn’t it just storytelling? Is it poetry? What makes performance poetry different from storytelling? Isn’t it just storytelling with a time limit?

This brings up questions about the definition of poetry. Does poetry need to be able to be vocalized? Can it be visual? Is it still poetry if the poet has the words disintegrate on the page until they cannot be articulated? Is it only then poetry in that it coaxes the attempt to articulate out of the reader (only to have it fail)? Beyond the spoken word, does the existence of poetry on the page (as a visual symbol) make it cross the line into the visual? Is there a silent world of visual poetry?

Remember that Bet has a belly button.

2007-09-18T15:30:00.000-04:00

I don’t remember any Spanish from high school. I’ve never been to a Spanish speaking country. Except for a smattering of words, all I remember about Spanish was that learning it was harder than I wanted it to be. Since I brought with me to a college an aversion to anything too anxiety-inducing, and later acquired the desire to fiercely protect my afternoon nap and arboretum wandering time from subjects that required structured, daily study, I never studied a foreign language in college. Since I left college, I like to write lists of the languages that I would like to learn in my imaginary spare time: biblical Hebrew, modern Hebrew, Aramaic of various types, German, Yiddish, Spanish, Latin, Ladino, Sanskrit, Greek and Arabic (and Italian when I’m in love with Dante . . .and French when I’m having a confused romantic entanglement with Proust . . . and Russian when I’m in recovery with Dostoevsky).

I started trying to decode and vocalize the Hebrew of the siddur when I was with college. We’re talking recognizing letters and making corresponding sounds with some fluency, but no knowledge of what the hell I was saying. I remember a lot of happy farm animals frolicking among look-alike letters. I would stare at the page while trying desperately not to attract attention to myself on the social hotspot of A-level at Oberlin College’s Mudd library. The process was so frustrating that I made no more serious attempts until I decided that I wanted to quit teaching and study Jewish-American literature from the perspective of Jewish literary tradition. I became obsessed with planning how I would learn Hebrew: native speaking tutors, and then an Ulpan, and then harvesting some organs to satisfy the creditors, and then living abroad. It was in the middle of this frenzy of planning that I had a grand mal seizure in a grocery store one day after a faculty meeting. All of a sudden clinging to my health insurance became more important to me than learning Hebrew.

I now have another tutor who is helping me prepare for my bat mitzvah. She is patient. . . much more than patient; saintly is more like it. I like to collect flashcards, rather than practice reading with fluency. I’m trying to teach myself grammar from textbooks. I’ve been told that my vowel pronunciation is off. I’m frustrated because I feel as though I am making that sounds that I’m supposed to be making. (I’ve also figured out that my chanting voice painful, so I’m starting voice lessons next month.) I want to take the leisurely route to understanding what I’m saying, when as time goes by, it becomes clear that I don’t have that luxury. I’m starting to see her point. Public humiliation in front of my community is not something I want to experience. I don’t think that people will just overlook the short comings of the thirty-one year old whom they have been paying to get their kids enthused about Judaism.

The more I stumble on just trying to fluently produce sounds and read aloud, the more amazed I am at the miracle of how I learned to read when I was a small child. This experience has changed my teaching. I have more sympathy students who have reading problems or learning disabilities and those who are learning English as a second language. I know why they hate school. I understand the resentment they feel when this inability to read undermines other intelligences that might be present. Whenever I feel like an illiterate Jew, I want to drag people to my apartment so they can see my Judaica collection. I want to say, “Flip through this book. See the underlinings. See the insightful comments.”

In Humanities last week we were talking about the development of various written languages and the advent of alphabetic writing. As we were talking about the aleph-bet, I really felt like ingesting that piece of cultural heritage and identity through my mind, and regretted that it would probably not be ingrained into my muscle fibers and embodied memory. The conversation was based on a selection from The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram about how the development of written language affected the human relationship with nature -- how it removed the necessity of an actual place from the act of storytelling and story-listening. Abram talked about the residual imagistic elements that can be seen in the aleph-bet that are not seen in the purely phonetic Greek alphabet. Ever time I struggle with Hebrew, it feels like time spent with something ancient. Even though it is a language that has been modernized/revitalized, I’m enchanted on a basic level just by the shapes of the letters; they seem so old that their forms are burned into time. Here’s something old, yet vital that carries the shapes and imprint of language’s evolution. This might be a strange way to put it, but I feel like I’ve just discovered an ancient lady bug with records of thousands of spring-times speckled across her back; I’m completely fascinated and walk around with it perched on my finger in the center of my line of vision.

Where do I go from here? 1. I’ll do what I need to do for the bat mitzvah -- make the appropriate sounds that go with the appropriate symbols. .try to make it sound like a language . . and try to pick up some meaning along the way. 2. tutors and classes. 3. summer abroad after I hit the bump in the salary schedule 4. teaching exchange or sabbatical?

Plight of the Libran Schoolteacher

2007-09-17T14:52:00.000-04:00

One of the hardest thing about teaching has been the shift in my intellectual energies. My focus is almost exclusively on how to convey information. I miss being a student. I miss the challenge of being pushed in conversation. . . . being riled up by ideas. . . the brain lust I feel for smart people who smash my universe open with their insight. I get this about two to three times a year from my seniors, but that doesn’t feel like enough. I sometimes get angry with myself for wasting the opportunity to see what kind of student I could have been.

If you don’t get some kind of intellectual buzz off how people learn, how cultures affect learning, the work of an educational practitioner, then teaching high school is going to be a sad, drawn-out, intellectual death for you.

In my ideal teaching life I would be given time to write (so that I can teach Creative Writing with some authenticity) and time to study (so that I can remember what it is like to research, develop ideas, and write a paper from my own experience). I have a list of certifications and trainings that I think would make me my ideal teacher. I want reading specialist certification, an MFA in poetry, Yoga Kids teen certification, and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction certification from U Mass Worcester, and courses in biblio and poetry therapy. I want to be able to take at least a course every year in my subject matter (creative writing, literature, philosophy, art history, religion, theater, mythology) and one course in an education-related course (reading, special education, gifted education, social justice education). I want to take anthropology (ethnography) and psychology courses. I want to learn Latin and German (among other languages). I want to know how language works and how we experience metaphor. I want these things for my own growth (to keep me hooked in the profession) as much as I think it would help my students.

Now that I’m less than a week from age 31 (on the brink of marriage with someone for whom serious graduate work is becoming a real possibility), I can’t help but reassess my whole path now that I’m confronted by wedding plans, house buying plans, baby plans, etc. Why didn’t I go to grad. school (hard-core academic grad school) when I had the chance? Why did I choose the M.Ed.(practicum- based, thesis-free) program that I chose to do?

1. I was depressed, had trouble focusing, and just didn’t have it in me to be the kind of student that I knew I needed to be. Who knows where 20 mg of Celexa a day could have brought me if I has started it ten to fifteen years ago?

2. I judged academia to be an escape from reality, a place where people who want to loll about in completely intellectual work can pretend that their work is going to affect the rest of the world. I wanted ‘to help people.” I’m now wondering if I’ll start to lose faith in that motivation as I become less codependent.

3. low self-esteem and paralyzing fear of failure

4. an inability to focus on what I would want to study (I think this scattered interest in everything helps my poetry. . . my next degree will probably be an MFA in poetry. . .followed by a menopausal MA in Jewish Studies)

5. foreign language fear . .(get ready for future stories about my adventures in Hebrew).

I’m trying to be more mindful about how I really feel about my job. How often do I “check out" -- want to flee to writing my own poetry , writing email, or web surfing -- when I should be wandering around providing one-on-one instruction? Should I struggle to be mindful and engaged or should I take this difficultly as a sign that I am bored and wasting my life?

Reasons to Leave

1. The seeming impossibility of reaching my intellectual potential in this job.

2. There’s not enough time for my own writing.

3. The work never ends, and sometimes that work is boring and brings on a dumbening.

4. People don’t respect public school teachers, and I have to read about how lazy I am in the paper every night.

5. I’m sick of the pressure to be a role model. I can’t be the shocking, edgy, obscene freak that I want to be.

6. The money is horrible. . . horrible despite the requirement of a Masters degree and various certifications. . .horrible in that it dictates major life choices like how many children to have. . .horrible in that it is a vow of poverty without the peace and spiritual glow

7. No Child Left Behind and high stakes testing

8. Knowing that I’m wasting students time with legislated bullshit that is meaningless.

9. I’m not fit for mainstream education, but can’t bring myself to go to an alternative private school. I want kids dealing with writer’s block by dancing wildly before sitting down to write.

10. It’s depressing. I get to watch us destroy the world one warped child at a time.

11. those days when I resent the Proles (Orwell’s 1984) for just being happy being Proles. . .screw ‘em. I should just be happy and just let them rot

12. I feel as though I don’t have the patience to make up for major educational deprivation that some students have experienced. I don’t know if I can hold out for the revolution to come . . and these kids will be lost by then and on their way to making more lost babies.

13. So many kids don’t want to be here, that I would rather teach then when they are in prison and choosing to be in class.

14. I’m sick of parents who would rather blame me than put energy into raising their own children.

Reasons I Stay

1. My incredible debt load requires a steady income.

2. Continuing contract is comfortable and safe. It would take some work for them to fire me. I have a sweet classroom. I teach what I want of what’s available

3. I can’t bear the disappointment of confronting the fact that my romantic notions about public education and democracy are just bullshit. To quit public education is to surrender to a world that is painful to accept.

4. I get to think about my subject matter . .even if it’s not in the ways that are most I have gotten to know it better by teaching it.

5. health and dental insurance -- Did you know that a grand mal seizure in a grocery store can cause at least $3000 of medical bills?

6. I like being part of this community.

7. I don’t have to worry about my money being “dirty” money. . and I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, process anything bought or sold, or process anything bought or sold (lifted from "Say Anything")

8. It matters in that every decision that I make is a political one. . . because I have the power in my classroom and I represent “the Man.”

9. I think people are interesting, and I get exposure to many different kinds of people.

10. I’ve met some wonderful, inspiring people who have become good friends.

11. The security is good for a worry-free maternity leave in a few years.

12. If I’m willing to accept financial ruin, I can do something that enriches me in the summers.

13. I like to write curricula.

14. I like to see what happens to my curricula when they are in a classroom.

15. I enjoy the theater of classroom teaching.

16. Sometimes I enjoy the challenge of the strong reactions that various types of people bring out in me. I learn a lot about myself.

17. Leaving would mean moving, and I like this part of the world. This job allows me to stay in this area without taking an even crappier job.

18. I can’t bring myself to look for work in a private school. My class consciousness can’t take it and I lose my class warrior street cred.

19. the rhythm of the school year

20. when a risky lesson plan works and I can see students are actually experiencing realization on a deep level

21. The Proles are consumers. The Proles can be voters. The Proles can destroy or redeem the world.

22. The world needs more readers.

23. Public schools need to be protected from the military, corporations, and religious fundamentalists and I’m angry enough at all three of those groups to really enjoy rumbling with them

24. My district pays for some college courses and can be conned into paying for some workshops that are not lethal.

25. when my students make me mix CDs

26. I have tremendous respect for the people who were there for me at my craptacular high school. I want to achieve that capacity for compassion and the spiritual endurance for that kind of service.

First Entry Ever!!!! Why am I doing this?

2007-09-16T22:05:00.000-04:00

It's late. I'll be brief. I always thought that blogs were narcissistic, then my friends started writing them and I found myself reading them eagerly. I'm also an English teacher who has lost the ability to write anything in prose to be read by others. Yes, I write poetry. I write lists of my interests for online social networks. I write journal entries. . . . long stockpiles of fragments of fear and self-loathing. I'm going to try to spare people that nonsense. I have a therapist, support groups, and a big fat journal just waiting for notes from my innerchild to be scribbled with my non-dominant hand.

I want to be able to express my thoughts to an audience of imaginary friends.

Here are my latest obsessions:

What does it mean to be a Jew if you live in a rural area without a minyan handy every day?
What does it mean for an adult to choose to become a bat mitzvah?
What does halakah mean to me? Why follow these laws if I don't believe that they were spouted from the mouth of G-d?
Public education -- the real vs. the ideal -- my love-hate relationship with my job in a NH public school
the spiritual journey and challenges being a teacher
the mishmash of spiritual practices that it takes to keep my compulsions and depression at bay
Since writing severed us from nature long ago, can it now be used to reunite us with nature?