Bloggin

Tagged: 8 Facts About Me


 

Tagged is a good way to fill blog space when you are tired of being introspective on a meaningful level. The latest version of the game comes from a blogger who thinks I am “condescending”. Which I have been known to be, but not lately. Since she did tag all her readers, and not just the ones she likes, I guess I am safe to play. Here are the rules:

 

 

1. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves. (Are there 8 facts left that I haven’t shared?)

2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their eight random facts. (Do or do not, and feel free to use the comment space here if you don’t have a blog yourself.)

3. Players should tag eight other people and notify them they have been tagged. (No pressure. This isn’t one of those chain letters. No evil will befall those who dislike this type of “homework”.)

Fact number one: When I was eight my two possible future career choices, as I saw them, were playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Roman Catholic priesthood. No one had told me yet that being “just a girl” was going to be a problem. I gave up the priest idea after spending the entire fifth grade hounding the nuns at school to let me take altar-boy training. The parish priests after explaining themselves into exasperation after the good sisters gave up finally sent me to talk with the missionary monks who came a fundraising every spring. They couldn’t convince my gender had a thing to do with being turned down either, but since I knew that having a heart to heart with the Pope wasn’t in the cards, I crossed priest off the list. Professional ballplayer got scratched in the eighth grade when girls were told that they had to play softball or nothing at all. I choose nothing in much the same way I choose nothing over the abomination that was known as six on six basketball. 

Fact two: My first car was the sweetest little green two door ’72 Dodge Dart. When I googled up a photo of it for the boys in my second hour last year, they were quite impressed because apparently it is a “muscle” car. Although, I nearly totaled in early in my driving days, and my father complained that it never drove the same after, it was fast, could hold up to eight of my friends and cornered well when playing car-tag.

 

Fact three: I get motion sick so easily that I can’t even sit on a swing at the park for more than a few minutes at a time. The bookmobile can be iffy  too when I am tired. It’s that bad.

 

Fact four: I am a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I never missed a episode. Will thought it was an incredibly weird thing for a school teacher to be watching a teen show, but I loved the snarky dialogue and the ethical and moral questions it brought up through its themes. I even tired to write fan fiction for it once. I was/am that lame.

 

Fact five: I have no favorite color. When asked, I make one up.

 

Fact six: I am a vocal chameleon. If I spend too much time somewhere, I pick up the accent. My family lives in Northeast Iowa and have that hard, flat Midwestern tone. I have a rather southern drawl because I lived in either southeastern or south central Iowa since I was 18, and the people there might as well all live in Missouri with their twangs. I am already starting to show signs of loosing my drawl for a somewhat Canadian accent as my vowels are shifting. 

 

Fact seven: I have always wanted to learn to dance. Really dance. Like ballet. I took a semester’s worth of ballet in college and liked it a lot, but all the other girls were thin and swan-like and I was….um…..larger. Probably more goose-like. I am toying with the idea of belly dancing now, but I would really like to take ballet if I could find a place around here that teaches adults. I am sure I was a dancer in one of my more recent past lives.

 

Fact eight: I listen to songs (sometimes whole CD’s) I like repeatedly when I first get them. Currently I am playing Hollywood by Collective Soul to death on my iPod. It drove Will crazy when I did this. I actually thought I was the only one who did this until I met Rob, who does this too. Weird, eh?

 

Okay, so there are eight facts, and I have a blog entry for Saturday on Friday night. Which is good because tomorrow Rob is removing half of the back of the house to install a new landing. That should be fun. And I likely won’t have time to write (which fact nine is becoming a must for me everyday).

 

So, do blog or comment. Or not. It’s all good.

Ten Good Books



One of the first widow blogs I ever read is the work of a fellow educator in Illinois. It was Rob who pointed her link out to me and urged me to take a look. At this early point in my serious attempt to write, via my own blog, I was writing in a vacuum, more or less. Interested really in my own endeavors and not comparing my work to anyone else’s. However, for growth to be achieved, one must start measuring themselves against others. Marsha’s blog was and continues to be an excellent yardstick. 

The other day I read another of her “tagged” pieces. Blog tag is a bit of a game where another blogger will assign you a writing task and after you have completed and posted it, you assign or “tag” someone else. The tag topic was ten books that have influenced your life. She didn’t tag me specifically, but her readers in general. After a bit of thought, I took up the challenge. And it is a challenge. I was a voracious reader from my earliest years. Until Will’s illness, I continued with a minimum book a week habit. I am not sure where my love of books and reading came from. I am really the only reader in my family and though I was given plenty of encouragement by my parents, who struggled to keep me in printed material, that I became a bookworm at all is a mystery. Although I am still suffering from the widow’s peculiar inability to finish a book, I still read. The matter is shorter now, but I still read daily. 

I found it difficult to cull ten choices from all the books I have ever read. I found as I thought about different titles that books have largely been of the moment for me. Profound at the time but in retrospect, not of long lasting significance. So, in no particular order, here are my ten books:

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh – I was probably a little old for this book when I first read it. I was in the fifth grade at the Church of the Resurrection Grade School. My friend, Lisa, who is now a radiologist, gave me her copy to read because the title character, Harriet, reminded her of me. I could see why immediately. Harriet carried a spiral notebook that she used to write down her thoughts and observations about life and the people around her. She wanted to be a writer and had been told that writers need to be able to observe life and in effect, mimic it somehow through the written word. I too was nearly as a compulsive scribbler as I was a reader. Like Harriet, I had a notebook that I carried about, writing stories, poems and journaling madly about the world around me. I journaled daily until I was in my late twenties, but I don’t have a single one of those journals today even though I toted them from home to college and through  succession of apartments. I destroyed them all one weekend, deciding that the last thing I would ever want was for someone decades hence to sit down and read them out of context. Occasionally I regret that. The novel though validated me. I didn’t know anyone who wrote, and after I met Harriet, I didn’t feel so alone.

The World According to Garp by John Irving. I think this was the first novel I read based on the strength of a review. Today I often seek out novels I have read about in newspapers, magazines or on the web, but this particular book marks the very first time I did that. I was eighteen and weeks away from leaving for college. It is definitely one of those “books of the moment”. I still have the exact copy I bought from the Walden’s Bookstore in my hometown’s dinky little mall. When I leaf through it now, I recognize it as a literary version of a Top 40 hit. I don’t think it has stood up, but at the time I had never read anything like it. The offbeat characters and situations allowed me to see just how far an author could push the boundaries of belief suspension and still tell a viable story. The one thing that stuck with me from the novel was the “under-toad”. Garp’s younger son, Walt, mispronounces the term “undertow” which is a current that can catch ocean swimmers unaware and sweep them out from the shore. Garp comes to view the under-toad as a symbol of unexpected tragedy and something to be guarded against. I have never even seen the ocean, let alone swam in it, but the the under-toad is a concept that has stuck with me since I read that book. Another reason it still resonates is that John Irving came to campus that same fall and did reading from his next novel, The Cider House Rules. It was the first time I had ever listened to another writer talk about his work and the process.

I’m Grieving as Fast as I Can by Linda Feinberg. I read numerous books on grief and grieving the summer after Will died. Partly because I thought I was supposed to do this. Apparently though it is not required. The other reason I sought out this type of material was that I felt so alone. Freakishly so. I didn’t know any widows even remotely close to my own age. No one seemed to know how to talk to me, and I had no way to communicate my sorrow or needs to anyone else. Of all the books I read, this one was the one that most spoke to me and likely formed my rather militant stance on the grieving process. I came to the conclusion that grief and its manifestations were as individual as a finger print. While we all have fingers, however the prints on mine are different from everyone else’s. There was no right or wrong, though I have discovered since there are degrees of intensity and variations in timetables. This book was the least clinical and preachy. It provided the most concrete examples and was the least condescending. It drips with common sense. Common sense, Rob likes to say, is not so common.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. My favorite book really. One I have read countless times. It made history a story. I have loved historical fiction, and even non-fiction historical tomes,  ever since. If I hadn’t been an English teacher, I would have taught history. History is rich and the most amazing thing about it is that it really happened. The characters were real people. The situations and places existed. The book is often criticized for its racism, but I am one who believes you cannot judge people or works of the past by today’s standards. Novels, like historical events, have to be seen within the context of their times. We can learn from history, but we can’t change it. It is what it was.

The Stand by Stephen King. In my high school days, I was a Stephen King fanatic. I read everything he wrote. I thought he was a brilliant story teller and writer. Yes, I was studying his style. Even then it was hard for me to read and not absorb lessons about writing. I have since come to regard King as a writer who cannot end his stories. Some of the weakest endings ever written were written by him, and The Stand is no exception. The story-line moves like gangbusters until the nuclear explosion destroys evil, and Las Vegas, about a hundred or more pages from the end of the book. It flounders after that. I still admire King’s ability to create characters and make them seem as real as the guy who lives next door, and his ability to craft dialogue is enviable. He has an ear, and this leads me to my next pick.

Night Shift by Stephen King. It was the first book of his I ever read, and it was the first book of short stories I had read that made me appreciate the beauty and power of the genre. I think perhaps that I am more suited for this type of writing than novel writing, though I plan to try the latter this fall, but I had never considered it an important type of literature until I read this collection. 

Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I was assigned this book as part of my seminar class for my masters. I had read about it and even seen an interview with the author, but hadn’t been interested in reading it. It was an easy read. She has a light, flowing style that is important for a researcher who wants to reach the masses beyond her field. The book was about the difficulties of living paycheck to paycheck as a minimum wage earner in the United States. None of the information was new to me. I had been a teacher too long to not know how the majority of Americans live. The practices of service industry employers continues to shock me however, and it really made me start to question my role as an educator in this process. I came to believe that I was as much a part of the problem as I was a part of the solution. It was one of the many pieces in the puzzle that was slowly prompting me to the realization that I was going to have to devise a plan for a career change.

Freedom Writers by Erin Gruwell. Seldom have I read such a poorly organized, marginally written piece of self-aggrandizing crap. But, the thing that truly irritated me about this book was the fact that nothing this girl did was new. I knew many teachers who had employed nearly all of the “tricks’ that she used. I had a computer lab myself back in the early nineties and knew firsthand what a difference computer access can make in the teaching of writing. What most teachers don’t have are the contacts this girl obviously did coming from a background which she skillfully plays down. I don’t doubt that her students, and that school, were lucky to have her for the time they did, but I have problems with idea that she invented any wheels and with the fact that she is yet another “dabbler”. Someone who puts four or five years in the trenches and then bounces off to make a “real living” do something else. Real teachers, in my opinion, are in it for a longer haul despite the hard work and personal drain on them. This book taught me true appreciation of those I worked with or had worked with who are real teachers.

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. I am including this one despite the fact that I haven’t finished it. It was Rob who introduced me to Palahniuk. As a matter of fact some of our earliest correspondence centered, almost disastrously, around the fact that I reminded him of a character from another of Palahniuk’s novels. As with most things I read now, I appreciate the writing and pay close attention to what the author does to facilitate the story. Palahniuk has a choppy style. Short sentences. Incomplete sentences. I felt a kinship. One of the things I always told my students when we would study grammar was that it was okay to break grammar rules as long as you knew that you were doing it. It’s called voice. I appreciate Chuck Palahniuk for showing me that a good writer stays true to his own personal voice and style.

So here is my list. Now, tag! You’re it.

TMI



Maybe it’s my astrological birthright or the fact that I was raised by a Gemini in a matriarchal Irish family or that whole Catholic confession thing. It could be my once daily devotion to Oprah (back in her plump days) or just my natural tendency towards self-revelation once I like a person (and I am fond of all my dear readers), but truth be told, I am not one for holding back. When I feel that something needs to be said or that information should be shared, I do. My husband has adapted well for a Virgo. His blinking is nearly unnoticeable now, and he hides his cringing like a man.  His only request today was that I please not discuss yeast infections, and so I won’t. But, even when I am certain I have pushed all the boundaries to their outermost limits, I amaze myself with the discovery that there are frontiers for me yet to boldly go beyond.

Sex is a topic where, except for the fact that I can’t say “clitoris” out loud, I am fairly well-versed and unflappable. There are a multitude of reasons for this too. The first one is one that is familiar to all women old enough to have had their first gynecological exam. I have listened to men, my husbands actually – then and now, whine and wince about digital rectal exams as though they were some sort of Bush Administration sanctioned torture (and they may be, can’t rule anything out there). No matter how often I pointed out, then and now, that this is a routine part of a woman’s yearly exam, it doesn’t seem to sink in that it is really no big deal. At least men are not required to “spread ‘em” while lying near naked in a very well-lit exam room both legs up in stirrups no less. I wonder if men and their doctors chat while said exam is being performed? My last exam I was telling my doctor, Collette, all about Rob and our courtship thus far. She was fascinated and had all sorts of questions. You would have thought we were girlfriends out for coffee but for the speculum, the swabbing, and fingers in places that you don’t normally let your girlfriends put them. Unless you happen to really be “girlfriends”. In which case you aren’t likely to be talking about men. As a middle school and then high school teacher, you learn to be direct and James Bond cool when the out of the blue sex query comes your way. And they do more often than you would realize. At the high school level where I last taught the questions were always of the reproductive variety. Like “how many weeks after a girl misses her period do you know if she is pregnant or not?” or “is it a bad thing to be 4 weeks late?” Just the facts ma’am, because the Webster’s dictionary definition will set you free. For me personally, going through infertility treatments and then pregnancy and childbirth freed me of any remaining constraints were my own bodily functions are concerned (okay, except for the “clitoris” thing).  Over lunch earlier, I basically drove my poor husband from the table with my musings on vaginal issues. He is a strong man but even he has his fleeing point. I ran right past that today. 

I know that when blogging I can be too forthright. Not that it stops me. I have written before that real writers can’t be afraid to cross boundaries. Writing needs to be fearlessly revelatory. How can you write about something you don’t know, and how can you know something if you don’t allow yourself to run the gamut? Although I try not to reveal information that might be sensitive to another person, the truth is that everything I read, see, hear or think about is fair game. This includes people. 

You would never know by reading me that I am, or used to be anyway, quite shy. Debilitatingly so. I had to force myself to go out to social events or raise my hand in class or later contribute to meetings in my workplace. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to say or even how to say it most times, but that like the writer I think I was practically born, I needed time to edit my thoughts before setting them free on the air. In conversation there is no time for this, which might account a bit for my TMI-ishness as well. 

There are secrets of course. Confidences that I don’t breach. I have never told my husband’s whole story but for bits and pieces because I don’t feel right exposing him when he clearly wasn’t in control of himself. I have shared the things that touched me most directly or that I felt someone might benefit from reading about, but there is more that I likely will never reveal. Though I write about Rob to an extent that might bore people, the things I share are just our day to day life and how we deal with newly married life as widowed people. I do occasionally use other blogs or posts from the widow board as jump offs, relating them to my own experiences, but this is no different really than my responses to current events, magazine articles or books that I have read. I guess that unless someone cringes visibly or slowly begins to back away, I will likely remain blissfully unaware of my tendency to reveal too much too tactlessly and on I will write. Fearlessly and without apology.