We've Moved

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Overheard in My Apartment

Me to C: "You're so French in your outrage."

Later:

C in front of the bathroom mirror: "I'm a Budweiser Olympian."

And:

"I just want to keep sticking Q-tips in my ears, twenty-four/sevs."

Pairing Wine with Cereal

I just stumbled into the kitchen after having for cereal for dinner. “I’m having a glass of wine,” I announced, to cleanse myself of the sadness of eating cereal for dinner. It wasn’t even the cereal I LIKE.

(“So you’re just giving up and having cereal?” I’d asked C sadly. “Well, I could sit here with you for 45 minutes talking about how we don’t have any food in the house, debate ordering takeout, and THEN decide to have cereal, at 9:30,” he answered. “How is it that I went to the grocery store 17 times in the last three weeks and we have no food?” I moaned, staring at the open refrigerator: a container of old leftover brown rice, a package of flour tortillas, and various plastic-wrapped halves of aging vegetables stared back at me in reproach.)

“You are?” C asked, clearing his throat.

“Oh, sorry, baby, I just couldn’t imagine you wanted wine with that,” I backpedaled, assuming he’d turn his nose at such an affront to the ritual of wine consumption.

“Lover? Love of my life? Uh, dearest domestic partner?” he said sweetly. I was still talking. “ ‘Hey, baby, do you want to share a glass of wine with me?’ ” he said pointedly.

“Oh, yeah, sorry. Do you?” I asked.

I poured us both the last of the bottle (about five sips each) and placed C’s glass next to his glowing computer screen as our living room grew slowly darker with the twilight. “To Barack Obama,” I murmured.

“To Barack Obama,” he whispered, eyes glued to a blog, gently lifting his glass.

It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Meezy, or, YourSpace

I checked my inbox this morning and found this message: “New message from IT AINT Ez3y b3!N M33zy b@by on MySpace.” Translation: “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Meezy [Me], Baby.” This is Buford Farrell’s user name on MySpace. In the 48 hours since I started writing this post, he has changed it to “TRYNA BE THIS GREAT IZ HARDER THAN IT LOOKS.” (I’m secretly proud and thrilled that he used the correct homonym of “than.”) Buford Farrell, or Newford to distinguish him from the first Buford from September, or Feral Buford, because he has the loudest, most grandiose presence in the entire school, is our first out gay male student – pretty impressive for the first year we’re open.

He was writing because I’d asked him if he wanted to see “BASH’d: A Gay Rap Opera” with me and another student – I’d emailed the playwrights begging for free tickets, and they happily agreed to shell out three of them. But he took so long to get back to me that the plan fizzled. “Let me know your schedule,” I’d written. “Well my weekends are just shoping partys n tha beach...that can all be canceled...” he wrote back breezily, a month later.

I continue to be puzzled by the things my students categorize as urgent or totally inconsequential. [Ed. Note: These are broad generalizations that do not include the kids who are Eerily On Top of Everything, even more than I am.] Urgent: text messages from people in the same building, or even across the room. Whatevs: homework. Urgent: whoever is about to enter the building during first period. Whatevs: free tickets to see plays with teachers. Urgent: what time the period ends. Whatevs: what time the period begins. Urgent: another brand-new pair of sneakers. Whatevs: lunch.

Also, what is UP with their MySpace pages? I don’t even like MySpace, but it’s one of the only ways I keep in touch with former students at my old school. Go to my page, and it’s simple, with a white background. Go to Shawnice’s page, and it’s animated, with blinking contrasting colors, logos repeated everywhere, huge illegible graphics and gigantic pictures of famous people, the visual equivalent of a Motley Crue concert, if Motley Crue were a bunch of rappers, and then the page starts PLAYING MUSIC! By ITSELF!

They never use their own names as their user names. They choose long-winded, quasi-hieroglyphic, terrifically complicated turns of phrase that obviously have 27 meanings other than what I can discern. Maybe this is what my grandmother feels like when I refer to “the Internet.”

A few samples of user names currently employed by teenagers I know:
-! C0ULD B UR @DD!CT!0N !F U W@NN@ G3T H00K3D 0N M3” [I Could Be Your Addiction If You Wanna Get Hooked On Me]
- Slap iiT iin Mii FaCe ShOve iiT Down Mii ThroaT =) [Ed. Note: The smiley face is what gets me here. Yes, by the way, it IS what you’re thinking. I’m fairly worried this particular kid is hustling on Christopher Street.]
- BOYS HAVE COOTIES [Ed. Note: Totally!]

To their credit, some of my kids choose more uplifting user names, such as:
- In Life Sometimes You Have to Encourage Yourself
- In the process of Creating My own World
- ShAnIeCe:KeEpInG tHe PeAcE iNcReAsInG tHe LoVe
- 100% African Queen
- ___.[H i S]t 0 R Y
- Desidero essere il vostro tutto is sooo in love wit life!
- Nimsay-Guilty by design..& so damn beautiful...

Clever, clever. We didn't even have the Internet when I was in high school. Or, it was so new that nothing was on it yet.

Reason #287

C hates the overhead lights that come with the apartment (any apartment). HATES them. I turned the overhead on in the kitchen so I could mop with some accuracy, and this is what happened:

“I actually can’t imagine how people live in that kind of light. I mean—”

“You know what you are?”

“What?”

“Easily parodied.”

“Come on. I’m serious. It looks like a…like a giant space turd. A giant, floating iridescent space turd.”

“Now you’re just grandstanding.”

(Pause.)

“What’s with dinner?”

“What do you mean, what’s for dinner? You’ve been talking about what we’re having for dinner for the last six hours.”

“No, I said what’s WITH dinner.”

“I thought I was going to do laundry and you were cooking dinner. Aren’t you cooking dinner?”

“Well, I obviously can’t cook in there with that kind of light.”

Then, three hours later, from the bathroom:

“I cannot believe you can look at me with this hair.”

Highlights from Children

Highlights from "Letters to the Reader," the final assignment in a class I taught this semester on memoir:

"Dear Reader, As a writer, I discovered that I am a good writer."

"What was difficult about writing these stories is that I had to put alot of metaphords so people would like to read it and that was hard."

"Dear Reader, I think if I was determined I cold be a proffesional writter...What I discover about myself is that my material is very interesting. Sometimes when I have nothing to write about I just put sentences down, but sometimes theres no story."

This last one is from a student who wrote in her memoir, "I like to exchange gifts with my friends and family because I always give and receive the best gifts."

Know thyself!

Flashback

The first semester at Artists and Agitators staggered to the finish line today. I'd had the idea that my plucky memoirists, who've written some of the most arresting work I've seen in my (short) teaching career, would march in with fresh copies of their final drafts, stapled and ready to share in a sort of "reading gallery." I told them I'd copy and bind the memoirs into a book, along with their thoughtful written comments.

Sigh.

Nilda rubbed her eyes and squinted at me.

"My what?" she asked.

"Your final draft. Hello? The project we've been working on since September? Your MEMOIR?"

"I'm seriously confused right now," she said, and put her head down next to her bookbag, which belched crumpled sheets of paper. I whirled around and surveyed my students' faces.

"Who has their final draft today?"

"What's a draft? You mean, like, the chapters?" asks Ebony, who, like Nilda, has "lost" her glasses and squints like an old lady.

"What's...?" I sputter. "Wha-- Hello? Guys? YOUR MEMOIR? For your MEMOIR CLASS? That I've been teaching lo these five months? To you?"

"Don't even go there, Claire," says Rayelle, shaking her head. She is about to print her own final draft, nine pages of cutting, merciless brilliance. She is 13, cocky and difficult, miles ahead of everyone.

I deflate for a second, searching for the will to carry on. They've been furiously typing their 15-page memoirs--gorgeous stuff--for two weeks, marathon sessions before school, after school, during lunch, pleading with me to let them finish. Last night, nine of them read excerpts in front of an audience at our exhibition, scared, proud, exhilarated. Who were these bewildered urchins before me, their hair sticking out in every direction, drowning in puffy coats, crusty-eyed and sniffly?

Reason #279

"I did it again."

"What?"

"Spelled 'receive' wrong. It's an epidemic."