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Epiphanies are the Hump Day Hmmm


Last week it was 1976 with side trips to 1992 and 1974. My political awakening, understanding and jading. Politics, though it touches our lives in ways most of us barely acknowledge if we realize it at all, are not what brings music to our soul or dance to our toes.

The summer of ’93 brought me back to writing via a pocket sized notebook I took along to New York City. I was staying with a friend, Lisa J, who was in one of what turned out to be three different internships. I think it was surgery that time because she was doing a lot of needlepoint. I remember being a tad disappointed when she didn’t settle on pathology because I thought it would be cool to have a medical examiner for a friend.

Her apartment was one of those renovated old buildings/warehouses in Brooklyn with a doorman. It was within walking distance of the subway station. She instructed me in its use during a day trip to Manhattan. We went to the Battery and took the ferry out to Ellis and Liberty Islands. Someday I would love to go back to Ellis and just sit and write. There is the start of a story waiting there for me, I think. I have no interest in Liberty. That surf pounding last scene in Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston curses the American goddess has turned the statue into something I will forever identify as creepy and apocalyptic.

I wrote and wrote and then went home and taught writing to 8th graders, who were frankly not much of an outlet. I have never truly enjoyed teaching writing to children when it went beyond the building blocks. Most of them – like most adults – suck when pushed to be creative. Competency can be taught but flair and the ability to tell a story? Not so much.

It was the next year that I wrote my first novella. The same one that I am slowly transforming into a novel right now. The inspiration came from a week long seminar my SisFriend and I took at Grinnell over the summer. I can’t remember the instructor’s name anymore. Morris Something or perhaps that was reversed. He was very – different.

I had taken the seminar before through my school districts AEA. It was a quick way to rack up credits towards re-certification. The first year had been a Thomas Jefferson scholar named Clay Jenkinson. He gave lectures while in character. That was a bit freaky.

He was cute though – that rumpled, long haired professor thing – and all the middle-aged women at the seminar damn near broke each others bones to sit with him at supper in the dining hall every evening.

I was invited to eat with him once after I mentioned that I didn’t care for the characterization of Ophelia in Hamlet. I have always found her “mad” scene after the death of her father to be over the top. I may have also admitted to thinking that Hamlet is one of the most selfish characters I have ever read. An opinion I still hold.

Getting back to Morris then, he had us write a short story based on an illustration taken from the Chris Van Allsburgh book, The Mystery of Harris Burdick. Interestingly I used that same book as story starters for my students.

So I wrote a novella. I had people read it for the purpose of feedback. I revised it many times and it was one of the pieces I submitted to the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.

And I got rejected. The end.

I just didn’t have the self-confidence to write and put it out there. This despite the fact that I took creative writing courses over the summers before and after that where I received quite a bit of praise and admonishments to try and publish.

Jump ahead with me to 2006 and masters seminar. I tossed out my written presentation on a whim as I listened to the presenter ahead of me and, riffing off her, totally winged it. The guy who gave his thesis presentation after me was toast. Poor guy. But one thing came out of that presentation that I should have seen coming and yet it caught me a bit off guard when I heard myself close with “…I had thought that obtaining a masters would renew my interest in education and instead it has shown me that what I am meant to be is a writer.”

Epiphanies. They aren’t angels’ bells on a Capra-esque pine, but they jingle just as sweetly.

I Think I Am Making Friends


Friends? That’s probably a slight overstatement. What I have are friendly acquaintances.

What makes me think so?

Well, today at the grocery I was engaged in a conversation by a woman who works there whose daughter goes to the same elementary school as BabyD. She inquired about Baby’s level of excitement about grade one as school begins again next week.

BabyD is a bit apprehensive and torn honestly and so this woman – whose name I can’t remember – chatted about little ones pre-school jitters for a bit before I had to push on for the checkout and a massage appointment.

This is on the heels of a weight-lifter at my gym who is also in my current yoga class. We have been chit-chatting and yesterday she waves to me from her car as BabyD and I were headed home and she was obviously heading inside to work out.

And then there was Darlene, who remembered me from my first yoga class and is in the class with me now. We chatted about our yoga schedule for the fall and a weekly yoga strength training class that I am taking and she is considering.

Since I don’t really remember how I made friends outside the workplace (well, okay, mostly I didn’t*), I am not sure if I am on the path to new friends or not.

I do know that it isn’t all that horrible to know people well enough to carry on a conversation here and there.

 

*That’s not entirely true. I wasn’t that much of a loser. 

Say Goodbye to Self Control


In honor of the Democratic Convention, I am breaking my No POTUS rule to remind everyone (and by everyone I mean women) why Obama should be elected this coming November.

The Bush Administration has decided to unilaterally redefine what constitutes an abortion based on religious tenets rather than accepted medical/scientific fact. The unilateral part shouldn’t surprise anyone. When hasn’t the Bush Administration pandered and subverted in its own best interests?

What should alarm us, even those of us with sincere religious beliefs, is that the definition is so broad that it will effectively bar women from obtaining prescription birth control and will have a profoundly negative effect on research into a variety of health issues from infertility to stem cell therapy to cancer.

I have thought all along that the Pro-Lifers’ real target was the denial of birth control to as many women of child bearing age as possible. The conservative right cannot hope to force us back to the never existed at all hey-day of Reagan’s imaginary America if women are able to control their own reproductive processes.

It’s all about shoving the horse back through a closed barn door, people. It won’t be pretty. And don’t think for a minute that a McCain regime will roll any of this back.

The right in the U.S. are all about stripping women of any and all rights we have gained since the early 1970’s, and McCain especially is hoping that women aren’t looking up his real voting but instead are blinding by his ad campaign. The man is not a maverick. He is a slave to his party and its base – ultra conservatives – and a religious right so fanatical that Islamic jihadists could learn things from them.

Freedom is at stake this election but not in Iraq, ladies.