magnolia avenue

We've Moved

2008-11-26T15:56:00.000-08:00

These essays, and more, can be found at http://magnoliaavenue.wordpress.com/. Scoot!

Overheard in My Apartment

2008-08-12T19:31:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-29T17:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-01-26T14:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-15T17:17:00.001-08:00

"I did it again."

"What?"

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

Call a Detective

2008-01-04T20:06:00.000-08:00

2003

“Like, just call one? Do they still have detectives?” I picture Humphrey Bogart in a fedora, spinning to face me in a creaky wooden chair. I pull the phone book from a stuck drawer and haul it to the kitchen counter, where we sit on bar stools, intent. “Detective, detective,” I murmur, thumbing the pages, which are thin, like a Bible. There are three entries.

“What do I say?” I press.

“Tell them you’re looking for a missing person,” Janell says.

But my father isn’t missing, I think.

Once I was sure I saw him in California. I was walking to a bar, carrying a bag of take-out Chinese food, when I passed a coffeeshop where an enormous man sat poring over a tiny softbound dictionary. He had a huge head of auburn hair. The sun was setting; third-story fog swirled overhead. I felt haunted, as I usually do in San Francisco; it is the place where my parents were last together. One picture of him survives from my mother’s collection in a mildewing cardboard box: it is orangey, taken in the late 1970s. He’s looking down, as though through a cloud of pot smoke. His red hair snakes out; he has bulgy eyes and a big nose. This man looked like my father more uncannily than any of the hundreds of times I thought I had seen him, on subway platforms, in airports, in line at theme parks.

I passed by twice without going in, my skin crawling. I have to pee when I’m nervous.

Finally I went in. I marched up to him and said, “I’m sorry, but you look like someone I know. Is your name Steve?” He was alarmed, like an agoraphobic out for the first time in years.

“No,” he said.

Some people get hushed, apologetic, when I tell them I never met my father. They get conspiratorial: “We must find him,” whispered my co-worker Irena, a Lithuanian woman nearing retirement. Fatherlessness is common; I want to say it’s almost as common as divorce. Most of the people I knew in school—an expensive, tiny liberal arts college—knew both their parents, who were usually married. But the line cooks I’ve worked with, the postal clerks, the waitresses, the kids at my local high school, nod in agreement.

“Me neither,” says Ben, a cook, when I tell him. He’s dismissive, matter-of-fact, as he chops onions.

“How do you do that without crying?” I ask.

“Just used to it,” he says.

Janell hands me the phone and I dial the first number. It’s nine or 10 o’clock; we assume we’ll get an answering machine in an office. We are shocked when someone picks up.

“Hello?”

“Um,” I stammer, “is this a private detective service?”

“No,” says the person and swiftly hangs up. I check the date on the phone book: it’s three years old. The next number is disconnected. The final number yields another human voice. “I’m calling for a detective,” I say.

“I do investigation work for businesses,” he explains. “Not missing person stuff.”

The first time I felt like uncovering my father, I was 20. I bought a postcard in Vermont on the way back from seeing a friend. I wasn’t sure why I bought it: a close-up of a woman in the 1940s, wearing a pair of cat’s eye glasses, one lens thick with condensation. It was an advertisement for anti-fog lenses. I brought it home and tacked it to my wall, where, a week or so later, it dawned on me how much I looked like this woman. In fact, I had taken a Polaroid that summer of myself in a pair of cat’s eye glasses, with the same expression, staring into the California sun. This woman could be my grandmother, I thought. It seemed sad to me that there might be an old, or dead, woman somewhere, maybe in Massachusetts (my father was born in Boston), who didn’t know she had a 20-year-old granddaughter who looked just like her.

I started having dreams I met him. He and my mother would sit in a labyrinthine, blue-lit banquet hall at odd, stilted parties, not saying anything. In them, he was quiet and unremarkable, and I was relieved I didn’t have to mount some years-long search for someone who hardly seemed to exist.

I had no idea where to begin. I put it off as I finished college, toiled through an internship, and landed my first desk job. What was I going to do, walk into the Hall of Records and find his name? Hall of what records? Do those still exist? Isn’t everything on computers? Aren’t all official phone lines answered by automated recordings telling you everything but what you’re looking for? First, there was no way to prove I was his daughter, and little chance I’d be given access to any record belonging to him. Second, it’s not like the person you’re seeking is actually behind one of these doors, sitting in a file somewhere. I would see his name on a birth certificate, and then what?

The next day at work, I lock myself into a conference room with another phone number. I dial, and a polite male voice answers and says yes, this is a private detective service. I tell him what I’ve got: first, middle, and last name; approximate date of birth; presumed city of birth; an address and an employer from 1979. He tells me a basic search costs $300. What then? I ask. What if nothing turns up? He tells me there’s no guarantee they’ll find anything on the first try; the harder they look, the more it costs.

I don’t have $300. I haven’t paid off the car I bought from a friend; I have $16,000 in student loans. My salary barely covers rent, gas, and groceries. I thank him and hang up.

(Let Me Count the Ways)

2008-01-02T17:52:00.001-08:00

Reason #278:

"I don't think a man has ever squeezed more toothpaste out of a tube than I have here, with this one." --C, as he brushes his teeth

The Silver Polisher

2007-10-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

This is for Matthew, per his request: "AND SO I ASK YOU: have you been in the restaurant club?"

Winter 2004 (Philadelphia PA)

“What did you do with that plate?” barks the chef de cuisine. I don’t answer. I am holding the replacement salad in my hands, for the woman on table 87—Jack is asking about the first salad, the mistake. “Did you give it to the waitstaff?” he asks, appalled. The first salad—sliced pear, local, organically grown green apple, and grapes served with slices of St. Nectar, a nutty, semi-firm Gruyere-like goat cheese--is gone; six waiters and assorted buspeople bore down on it like a swarm, every morsel gone in thirty seconds.

I remembered how he had slammed another mistake salad, earlier in the evening—the dressing was supposed to be on the side, an oversight of the waiter who sent the order—down on the stainless steel line and threw it in the trash, glaring at us in warning.

“What?” he spits, “You think I should reward you for your mistakes?”

“Take the fuckin’ salad out!” shouts a chorus of line cooks.

Waiters know they aren’t high on the restaurant food chain. We are mediators, suspended between guest and kitchen; cooks and chefs act as though we were ordering all this food, were personally responsible for requesting dressing on the side, no potatoes but extra Tuscan kale, steaks medium rare-ish, more rare than medium but not exactly rare; customers balk at us when their steak is the wrong temperature, when they think the potatoes are over-salted, when they wonder why the trout is so “moist.” On the dining room floor, we are beatific, sweet-voiced, lilting, accommodating. When we push through the double doors of the kitchen with our feet, carrying armfuls of dirty dishes and empty martini glasses, we enter a jungle where the rules of civility are suspended.

“RUNNER!” shouts the expeditor, calling for someone to take food to the dining room. “I need two lamb and a risotto right now, or I’m dry-fucking you up the ass!” he says to the new young line cook.

“A guest wants to know if there’s parsley in the scallop entrée,” says a waiter to the expeditor.

“Why?” he says, intent, rhetorical.

“Because she’s allergic,” the waiter says.

“You should know if it has parsley,” the expeditor says before rattling off a new ticket: “Two lamb, one rib eye med rare, one mahi, three venison, ORDER FIRE!” The waiter waits.

“Is there parsley?” she asks.

“YES! There’s fucking parsley! Fucking WAITERS! Read the menu!” he screams. The entrée is new; the menu only specifies “caraway broth.”

What we say to the expeditor (we’re not allowed to directly engage the cooks on the line) is invariably repeated in sissy voices or turned weirdly sexual as soon as we re-enter the dining room, the world of the living. When we’re in the kitchen, on our narrow landing strip behind pantry, where we make coffee, brew espresso, steam milk, retrieve lemons, and refill butters, six at a time in a space the size of a toilet stall, we hear the cooks over the din. Isaiah has Turret’s syndrome; he fires a blue streak of “fucks” for every third word of his nonstop narrative. Jason, the grill man, tells Puerto Rican jokes. Ray, the Puerto Rican pantry kid, stays quiet. Isaiah tells the crew about the strip club he went to the night before. Casey, the sous chef, calls him a faggot and tells him to shut up.

“Jack,” I say evenly.

“What?” He whirls around.

“What do you recommend for the venison?”

“Medium rare, like everything else,” he snaps.

“Well, you recommend medium for the pork, so I wanted to make sure,” I say.

“Says who? Is that a direct quote?”

“Says management. Since we opened.”

“Management, who’s management?” He pauses. “Get out of my kitchen.”

At night, I walk the twenty blocks home. I give the evening’s highlights to my boyfriend over the phone. He is an architect; he is older than I am and works with grownups. “That’s so condescending,” he says, aghast, when I repeat whatever it was Jack said to me that night. I laugh.

Cooks, in my experience, relish their outlaw status, their lack of employability for anything but this, a line of work requiring air-traffic controller precision, Olympic inexhaustibility, and indifference to extreme heat and the occasional threat of severe bodily harm. As such, they are a rare phylum separate from the average population: sadist, adolescent, foul-mouthed workaholics with an eerie genius for making things you’d want to eat. They are immensely entitled. Their job is absolutely harder than mine. They assume I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I am probably a vegetarian, that I might look good naked, that I am liable to quit at a moment’s notice to pursue performance art or yoga instruction.

They want me to shut the fuck up. They want me to know the intricacies of French, Italian, and Pacific Rim cuisine and their New American “fusions,” to have psychic knowledge of every ingredient in Jason’s free-form broths, and to never, ever ask what’s in gremolata again. If I open my mouth, they hope I say something embarrassing so it can be repeated for the next half-hour, and they can remind me of it when we hit a lull and they have nothing to cook.

Once, in a fit of sincerity, I asked a pantry cook how, exactly, you were supposed to filet a bell pepper. “Ooooh, show me how you cut the bell peppers, Jeffrey!” they squealed for a month.

Interlude in C Sharp Minor

2007-09-25T19:09:00.000-07:00

This was in the morning, maybe last summer. I typed it immediately and, just two minutes ago, discovered that I saved it.

C: I hate days like this, because it’s unclear…what shoes to wear.
(Pause.)
C: It’s damp and gross. It’s…foul and fetid. It’s…hang on…I got another one in me…
(Longer pause.)
C: Do you have any stinky shoe spray?
Me: No.
C: I don’t think I can wear these without something to mitigate the stench.

This is from months ago:

[C is telling me about a link he sent me to a bunch of bloggers’ posts on an article in the Washington Post about No Child Left Behind. But when he says Post, I think he means the New York Post. Which would not report on No Child Left Behind.]

Me: Unless it was, like, ‘NCLB is Anna Nicole’s Baby Daddy.'

C: You could not…kidnap my penis, drive it across the country in the back of a Ford, and stick it within 20 feet of that woman’s vagina.

I loooooove this man. He is on an airplane to France right now. Sigh.

On Top of the World

2007-09-25T18:57:00.001-07:00

“Wait’ll you see this place,” J murmured as the elevator rumbled to the top floor. His nine-and-a-half-month-old son gazed at us from his hip. They were visiting from Munich, where J fled after a traumatic year in the Teaching Fellows.

The elevator landed with a thud, and he wrestled the apartment door open with one hand, revealing a skylit library with 12-foot ceilings and enormous potted plants. “Whoa,” we breathed, calculating how we would fit our lives into what turned out to be a generous foyer. “It keeps going,” J said as he strode down the hall. In the distance, I saw the kitchen and, across the room, a pool table. We turned left and came to another cavernous expanse, this one with a grand piano on a low stage. A winding staircase led to a bedroom and a home office, and the roof deck. “What do these people do for a living?” I asked. They were the parents of a friend of J’s wife. The husband was an elite computer genius. The wife had Alzheimer’s, and a caretaker lived with them.

“I’ve never seen a water tower this close up,” I whispered as we stepped onto the roof. “It looks like a silo.” We could see the clock tower on the Con Ed building, the Metronome furiously counting up and down, the red neon sign for the W Hotel, the verdant tops of the trees in Union Square Park, and hundreds of lives in Tungsten-lit windows from here to the East River. You could see everything. You could breathe, stretch your arms out, throw your head back. The city’s density was charming from here: perched above the beehive, you couldn’t help admiring its busy, throbbing bustle.

J handed the baby to his wife, and he set to playing with her hair. They told us that in Germany, the government paid them monthly now that they had an infant, and they lived in an enormous apartment in a neighborhood J’s wife, R, described as “the Beverly Hills of Munich.” It would cost “four or five thousand dollars in New York,” they said, but they pay only $1300 (R translated for us from the Euros). “And it’s quiet there,” they told us. “There are actually signs on the recycling bins outside saying don’t recycle after a certain hour ‘because the noise makes your neighbors sick.’ Even the subway to work is silent.”

I’d never seen J so ebullient or satisfied. “He used to come home white as a sheet,” R remembered of his teaching days. He worked in a school not far from mine. One day, he was warned by a student not take his usual route to the subway, “because, you know, ‘bang bang,’ Mr. J,” the kid said. Another time, a 13-year-old showed him his gun when J cut him off at the turnstile. I suppose that could have happened to me—Bed Stuy is just as dangerous as Bushwick, right?—but it didn’t. I heard the principal has lawsuits against him for reckless endangerment, for locking the school doors against students when they were running for their lives. My school was famous for its high test scores, and our principal stood on the corner every day to intimidate the guys who tried to recruit our students into the Bloods.

Up in the sky over Union Square, you think, ‘I could raise 10 kids in a space like this—life would be so easy if it were like this.’ This, in fact, is precisely what you imagined when you were 17 and longed for the city from the shag-carpeted floor of your suburban bedroom. And then you remember, according to the article you just read in the City section, that, since 2001, the price of housing in New York has grown at five times the rate of people’s incomes. You remember that the city’s shrinking middle class is no longer entitled to their piece of the Upper West Side or Harlem or Park Slope or even Fort Greene or Whitestone or Washington Heights, that blue-collar workers and middle-income earners have been leaving the city in droves.

You remember that the days of pulling your immigrant self, your wrong-side-of-the-tracks self, your plucky, ambitious self, up by the bootstraps and saving up to buy a place to raise your kids in, might be over in this town. No one does it these days without ample help from relatives or a job in finance.

C has been muttering the following all week since running across the figures in the Times: “In the investment baking industry, the average weekly salary is $8500. AVERAGE. WEEKLY. Across all other private sector industries, the average weekly salary is $850.” (No kidding, see for yourself: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/business/01bankers.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

J and R can plainly see it, and they moved to Munich.

(Which is not the whole story, it never is, but you see what I mean.)

C and I continually commit ourselves to the city. It’s a practice, committing to its many, quick tongues; its generous light behind looming structures; its striving and gaiety and frank appraisal; its street art and brick and cornices and unforgiving shopkeepers. But more and more, I wonder if that’s all outdated pastiche now, and the gleaming new glass condos, the triple mint this and “redefining luxury” that, the trust funded gallery assistants and hired drivers and bottle service and the endless, over-honed catering to the very rich, if the deregulated rents and the big box retailers that ate up the avenues, the near-extinction of local shoe repairmen and stationers, are the future. Do you ever feel like you missed the party, like it all went to shit right before you got there?

Holler at My Teachers

2007-09-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

I keep Googling them, and nothing comes up.

Hear this: All Ye Amazing Teachers I Had the Luck to Encounter as a Youngster:

You know who you are. Your names are below. If you exist, I have this to say: THANK YOU for being a brilliant teacher. For taking this job seriously. For being a comfort and inspiration when I stare at a sea of blank 14-year-old faces, wondering what the hell I'm going to say next, wondering who I think I am trying to teach somebody something. Thank you for your honesty and flair, your humor and patience, your idiosyncrasies. For telling it like it is, for treating me like an adult, for teaching me that to let someone know you're listening you have to look at their eyes, that to curse was unimaginative, that you have to project all the way to the back of the auditorium when you sing. You are stuck in my mind, my craw, my heart; unforgettable, true.

Mr. Martin (4th Grade: Alvin Dunn Elementary)
Bruce Altschuler (6th Grade: Alvin Dunn Elementary)
Mr. Rogers & Ms. Orahzda (Directors of the Alvin Dunn Elementary Chorus)
Nancy Cunningham (a.k.a. Elizabeth Ashworth?) (7th Grade Humanities: San Marcos Junior High School)
Mr. Smith (8th Grade American History: San Marcos Junior High School)
Mary Jane Vierra (8th Grade Communication Arts: San Marcos Junior High School)
Vicki Behrends (Drama: San Marcos High School)
Jerry Franklin (Western Civ: San Marcos High School)
Madame Heyman-Hogue (French: La Costa Canyon High School)
Ms. Afzali (P.E.: La Costa Canyon High School)

I would add Barbara Dagman (AP English Literature: La Costa Canyon High School), but she already knows it; we're friends and colleagues now, can you imagine?

And P.S., Denise Lehr (AP English Language: La Costa Canyon High School)? If you're listening, I'm sorry I was such a pain in the pretentious ass. I think you had us your first or second year, and we were so snotty. YOU TAUGHT ME HOW TO LOOK AT AN AUTHOR'S CRAFT. You taught me close reading with that excerpt from The Scarlet Letter, and I never looked at literature the same again. Also, you were so organized, and you did it by hand! And I loved that you had us journaling in the mornings. Your class was one of my favorites, and I was too self-obsessed to let on. Forgive me.

Safe

2007-07-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

We were watching The Year of Magical Thinking on West 45th. Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion (sort of) was talking about her daughter Quintana, who was in an induced coma. I had always told her I’d keep her safe, she repeated. Safe. It was a thread running through the whole play: she kept the home fire burning, she had it under control, she would make them live, her dead husband and her gravely ill daughter, through the force of her will and her persistence—they would be safe.

I sat in my theater seat. Your safety isn’t the same as mine, I thought.

In her essays and books, she tells us in the details: the Corvette, the dinners at Morton’s, the Westlake School for Girls, flying to Honolulu just to write a screenplay, the Bohemian Club, the minute, intimate knowledge of what china patterns convey what message about one’s upbringing in certain Orange County circles: this is her milieu. Her themes are universal: power, history, justice, death—but her social stratum is rare, specific, and not mine.

I’m not judging this writer—whose work I love—for being wealthy. But we seek ourselves in other people’s stories. I do. This is what I hear in her story: the wild injustice of loss, the power of will and memory… and the strange, distant trappings of a luxurious life.

When she describes how she keeps Quintana safe, it involves speaking with teams of the best doctors in the city, some of whom she’s known for years. When her condition worsens, Quintana is flown via Medi-Vac from Los Angeles to another specialist in New York. Redgrave recreates the scene in the plane: she describes holding Quintana’s red suede Prada bag in her lap, her jewelry, her watch. She always weaves this layer of material detail; her story is always in the details.

They get sick like you and me, but this writer and her family do not live, or die, like you and me. When they die, their obituaries run in the New York and Los Angeles Times, and they are mourned and interred in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. You get the sense that it isn’t just that Didion and her husband were successful writers; you imagine that it was always this way. One doesn’t live on a bluff in Malibu and drive a Corvette so early in one’s married life just by writing Run, River, a successful novel, but not one of stratospheric consequence.

She never marvels. She mentions the names of restaurants, the brands of shirts, the neighborhoods, the streets, as though they were everyone’s names, like Formica or Levi’s or Elm.

It isn’t a revelation that Joan Didion is wealthy, or that any author or famous person is wealthy. I live in Manhattan, across the street from a building full of tacky apartments (if you ask me, which, maybe you didn’t) that happen to be worth more than two million dollars, and that’s starting with the one-bedrooms. Wealth is everywhere in this town. Wealth sits next to you, looms down from the billboard, stands across the street in stilettos, swishes right past you.

Vanessa Redgrave’s gorgeous, radiant face practically touches you with her lively eyes, her urgent cadences—It will happen to you, she actually says. Didion’s matter-of-fact, even prose insists nothing is unusual. Her purported point is never the detail—the restaurant, the china pattern, the maker—but she mentions them relentlessly. Sometimes, they are part of the pleasure of the litanous rhythm of her writing.

Yes, my husband will die one day, but I am not like her.

I don’t begrudge her the details—I like her work too much—but I was struck, watching Vanessa Redgrave, a more generous persona than Didion—that when she says safe and home, she and her daughter don’t worry over the things I am obsessed by: why do I feel like cleaning my mother’s house every time I go home? Does my mother have enough money to retire on? What will happen if she gets old and sick and feeble—who’s going to pay for it? How am I going to afford an apartment in this town, at $1580 per square foot? What if I don’t want to move to Bay Ridge, what if I want to live in the West Village, where Calvin Trillin could afford a down payment on a townhouse as a newlywed reporter, sixty years ago? How am I ever going to make enough money to feed my children, who don’t even exist yet?

It’s nothing new that New York pushes you to the edge of sustenance—what would pass for comfortably middle class in another city becomes barely scraping along here. In Through the Children’s Gate, Adam Gopnik writes that in New York, real wealth doesn’t buy you “luxury, twisting staircases, panoramic windows”—it buys you a “normal” home with “kitchens that look like kitchens” and “bedrooms that look like bedrooms.” A couple with Master’s degrees and Decent Salaries (one a schoolteacher, the other an architect), who pass for yuppies on the street in their $300 designer glasses and Diesel jeans and Camper shoes, who live around the corner from the Chelsea galleries, split the rent for a 400-square-foot studio and cannot fathom putting together the $140,000 down payment it would take to buy a one-bedroom apartment nearby. One that, with a little drywall and cleverness, we could raise two children in.

I grew up in a flimsy two-story apartment that eventually grew mushrooms out of the ceiling, raised on my mother’s postal clerk salary in California, which was commensurate, at the time, with a teacher’s salary. I imagined we were “middle class”—“lower middle class” if I was going to get technical. But not poor, like my classmates whose parents didn’t have green cards and washed dishes and picked oranges for a living, who sold tamales door to door on the weekends, who lived with their ten brothers and sisters in two-bedroom apartments with their abuelas. By this measure, we are rich.

Maybe Joan Didion is just an accurate chronicler, a faithful ethnographer, of her class. I said I didn’t begrudge her the details. It’s so simple: maybe I begrudge her all those comforts—from here, they look so good: a house in Malibu, never having to look at the total on the dinner check, real living rooms and bedrooms in Manhattan. Simple, predictable: I want the greener grass. It seems so callow when I’m talking about a story of losing your husband and your daughter. But if she didn’t mention it all the time, maybe I wouldn’t notice it.

Come on already

2007-04-22T18:52:00.000-07:00

Dawn and Stirling staggered down the hill to us from the Earth Day thing in Central Park. Nika was perched near Stirling's shoulders in a backpack baby carrier, woozy under her hat. "Ugh," said Dawn, "It's Babypallooza up there." When Nika wakes up, she grimaces exactly the way Stirling does when he finds something distasteful; my mother said babies look like their fathers for the first nine months to make sure they stick around. Every time I see Nika, I have a new favorite thing about her: today, it was her big-eyed, rapt attention to grown-up talk as we yammered over her head. No, wait. It was when she tried to eat grass.

We were telling them about Tuesday night, when we met Ben at a restaurant on the Lower East Side to toast his first day at The Nation. "He said you were meeting at eight," Dawn said incredulously. "I know--it may as well have been midnight," I agreed. It was lovely--swilling wine in a French restaurant and making a thousand toasts--but the next morning, when I crawled out of bed at five-thirty, I felt like I'd been hit by the A train. The whole day, I was so tired I could feel it in my teeth. "Yeah, I can't do school nights, dude," I said.

"You guys already act like parents," Dawn said for the 12th time. "Just pop a baby out already!"

She has a point.

Oliver, Part I: Stirrings

2007-02-14T16:24:00.000-08:00

He had an old person's name; he didn't look like a teenager. We met at church 13 years ago, when I was in eighth grade and he in ninth. His hair was long and fine; he had wide, flushed, radiant cheeks and green eyes. His two comrades, Mike and Jesse, were tall, willowy, and widely admired by brainy, rebellious teenage girls.

Ollie had an appetite for a kind of worship-love that was epic and enduring: when we became friends, he was shattered, as he often would be, over the gentle rejection of a pretty girl. They wanted to be his friend; they wanted to make out with Mike and Jesse. They were not always brainy or rebellious, but to him, they were magnificent, luminescent, floating just above the ground. Ilona, Saskia, Larissa, Cat...the loveliest names, like wind chimes.

Our friendship was sealed one night when he lay his head in my lap and moaned softly over the first one. The affliction was familiar: I loved distant people the same too-hard way.

They were in a band together: Oliver was a jazz pianist, a guitarist, and a reedy, pitch-perfect singer. Jesse loved his bass almost more than his girlfriends, and thrashed at it with sinewy abandon, and Mike sang a pretty, haunting harmony and played guitar.

The first months of our friendship, I was dumbstruck that there could be smart boys with weird tastes, who didn't skateboard or play sports, who were both nerdy and cocky at once. We talked on the phone forever. We were avid poets, drawers, alt rock enthusiasts, and vaguely into whatever underground political movements our parents and teachers had flirted with and mentioned in passing: communism, socialism, the "New Left," peaceniks, Dadaism. We didn't know what we were talking about, but we thought it might help us lift off from the banality of our adjacent suburbs.

Whenever Oliver discovered he liked something, he became its prophet. He became territorial but evangelical. This is how I came to like "A Coney Island of the Mind" and Walt Whitman and the Ween album "Chocolate and Cheese," but my affection for them was private, never to outdo Ollie's public declamations. I sat at the edge of his furious, ecstatic firelight, rapt for that first almost-year.

In Riverside Park (an old essay)

2007-01-25T04:17:00.000-08:00

“I lost my virginity to that man,” I tell my boyfriend, pointing to the snarling one in the foreground. Legs wide apart, hips jutting forward, chin down, Nathan, the lead singer, looks ravenous. I click the window closed on his laptop.

I fell in love with Nathan in Riverside Park. I was 19. Talk about ravenous! I was so stupefied that this college Marxist version of Mick Jagger was paying me the slightest attention that I projected years’ worth of accumulated fantasies onto him in a matter of weeks. He was smart. Not just smart, but well-read. His father was a professor. He’d read Freud in eighth grade, and kept a picture of him pinned on his wall next to the bed. He’d grown up on the Upper West Side and gone to Columbia Grammar. His house had walls of built-in bookcases. He was Jewish. His parents read the Times over breakfast. His little brother was a genius.

I grew up in a dilapidated stucco apartment in southern California with wall-to-wall carpeting. My mother, a postal worker, didn’t finish college. My cultural/spiritual background had more to do with Linda Goodman’s Love Signs and occasional inferences from my intuitive mother about numerology and “the universe.”

Nathan encapsulated everything I loved about the northeast: “seriousness,” “authenticity,” the way people, who were mostly, refreshingly, neither blond nor stoned, leveled their stodgy, literate gazes at you when they talked. I realize now this was only a narrow swath of privileged eastern demographic, based mostly on my exposure to college professors and their progeny, but it was so different from where I’d come from that I assumed everyone in the north Atlantic states wore tweed, knew from theorists and literature and bagels, listened to NPR, and drove Volvos. Nathan’s attention was confirmation I’d made the right choice moving 3,000 miles from home.

I printed dozens of photographs of us together, taken the weekends I went to visit him at Wesleyan, a two-hour bus ride away. They were lost years later in a fire that consumed the boxes I’d sent home after graduation.

Nathan combined his braininess with a swaggering rock-and-roll aesthetic: he was interviewed on his college radio station and referred to the “teen angst/fellatio dialectic” and described his music as “expressionist rock.” He actually swaggered when he walked, and wore square-toed Italian boots, tight pants, and little Calvin Klein t-shirts, which he neglected to launder, and I secretly loved the way they smelled, balled up in the corners of his unmade bed.

There was a moment, I believe, when he was in love with me, too. It was just before Thanksgiving; he’d clutched at me all night in my own twin bed before we drove to the city, whispering, “You’re so fucking wonderful.” He’d taken to calling on a regular basis at two a.m., and when I woke up the next morning, I was never sure if I’d dreamt the conversation. We were spending a night at his parents’ place in Westchester, and he was eager to introduce me to his mother, “who will love you,” he said. We got in after midnight, but I insisted we visit Manhattan, which I had only been to once.

He took me to Tom’s Restaurant, the one from Seinfeld, which thrilled me, though I knew enough not to admit it. We crossed Broadway and headed for Riverside Park. An actual rat flitted across my shoes, and I screamed.

It was eerily warm. It reminded me of home. I looked at him, framed in the hazy amber streetlamp glow, his forehead now, as always, faintly perspiring, forming curly tendrils at his hairline. I’d anticipated this feeling. This must be it, I thought: this wild, inexhaustible affection, this vague feeling of possession, of unimaginable privilege and luck, this coltish desire. “I think I love you,” I whispered. I don’t remember if I said it loud enough for him to hear; it sufficed that the moment passed at all. I knew I would keep it forever, that it didn’t matter if he loved me as much, or that it was all downhill from there.

We broke up over the phone in January, in a conversation that was so convoluted I had no idea what was said by the time we hung up. I was heartbroken for awhile. I never saw him again, except in weird coincidental run-ins, when we happened to move to the same Brooklyn neighborhood, or happened to work in the same building in Chelsea. I quit shortly after, for unrelated reasons, and left the city.

He still swaggers, apparently, from what I can tell in the band photo. A friend from college who lived in Brooklyn reported seeing him on the street: “He’s gained weight,” she said. His hair is thinner.

I like to think I know so much more now than I did at 19. But you can’t blame me. The night Nathan and I met—it was Halloween, and we were drunk, sitting on the steps of the dining commons at my school—he said something about his propensity for “dark, literary girls from California.” The idea that I could be construed this way—as “literary,” or “dark,” as part of classifiable, desirable genus after whom boys in bands pined—this, this was worth leaving home for.

Sightings

2007-01-14T08:48:00.000-08:00

C stood in front of the mirror last night after dinner, examining his naked middle. “I feel skinny, white, and fat,” he said.

We’d had dinner with M at a little place across Ninth Avenue and ate a transgressive banana bread dessert that defied prior notions of both banana bread and dessert.

I hadn’t seen M in years, and the last time I saw her, it had been years since the time before that.

We went to the same high school—“like The O.C.,” she explained to C, “or, actually, Bring it On." At the time, I called my classmates “nymphets.” I was convinced they were bred on a farm and shipped to our school: so startling was their uniformity, their finicky precision with tanning and exercising, their long, straight, blonde hair. Also, like robots or zombies, they lacked manners and empathy.

This is why I liked M. She had been friends with the blondes for years, but she had none of their haughtiness. She was sardonic and whip-smart and truly pretty, not like a glazed-over Seventeen model. She was classier than I was. She had better manners. She could read people and interactions with a medical acuity, sizing up comments and cryptic notes and someone’s father's embarrassing behavior in a way that explained it all for you, and I was grateful for her inadvertent primers on the strange, privileged resort world I stumbled into when I transferred to her school.

Then we graduated, and she went to Dartmouth and I to Hampshire. She emailed brief, pithy missives: uproarious, spot-on ethnographies of the blue-blood enclave she found herself in. I have always appreciated how M talks candidly, without pretense, about money and class. I thought she was classy because of her middle-class pedigree in a San Diegan suburb. Now we were both going to college with people from prestigious boarding schools, who had actual trust funds or famous parents. She was somehow more like them than I was, but she also waited tables while she studied. I was as grateful for her perspective as ever.

The truth is, M has always dazzled me. She is fierce and charismatic and invigorating. She’s quick, and I quicken to keep pace. But her dryness and sarcasm, charming as they are, belie what I am not qualified to name but will venture nonetheless is an abject fear of burdening someone else with her business. My grandmother is like that. Stiff upper lip Yankee. M convinces me in every gesture and remark that she is fine, in fact has never been better, even when she tells me she isn’t, when her eyes glisten and her voice quivers. It may be that I don’t actually know her very well, compared with her oldest friends or her sisters; why would she let me in, of all people? I was drawn to her invulnerability—the flourish of her armor—when we were 17. I was fascinated by what she could be working so hard to protect.

When I hear from her, I remember how much I like her. I think of how good it is to have vivacious, critical girlfriends who can discuss Lindsey Lohan and the politics of the death penalty with equal fervor and intelligence. Who appreciate good jeans and quality eye shadow and the thrill of a tall man who can cook, but only as deep, discerning, smart girls do. I still feel like I have something to learn from her. I think she can do anything.

I am sure that I romanticize her as much as I ever did, probably because I don't know her much better than I did in high school. She is still larger than life, than my life. Which I hope will fall away, over the years, as we grow older and old. We’re past the age when you see the world as a giant candy store of potential friends and lovers; I find that it is harder to make friends, or even deepen the friendships I have, now, since turning 25 and 26 and 27 and becoming domesticated (an indoor cat, so to speak). But the true things still loom, still float forward from the noisy storm on the periphery. Maybe my friendship with M will stay on, will transcend the typical vagaries, the ordinary busyness that keeps you from noticing what is worth tending. I like to think so.

How To Be a Better Teacher, or, I Suck

2006-11-13T17:05:00.000-08:00

I thought I was getting comfortable. Competent. If not great, at least better than last year. Slipping a little more gracefully into my role as Benevolent Dictator of the ELA fiefdom in Room 200. My school is a training ground for overlords: I don't like how Striver High does authority, discipline, pedagogy, collaboration, or community, but it's a million times better than many city schools. Even if teachers here rely on worksheets, textbooks, and threats more than I would like, it is a relatively peaceful, supportive, dedicated place to work. Henry was suspended today for saying "faggot" in my class. Where else does a kid catch such swift retribution for that ugly but commonplace act?

Then I started reading "The Differentiated Classroom" by Carol Ann Tomlinson today on the subway. I was being all responsible and doing my reading for class BEFORE the response paper was due, eschewing the New York Times Book Review (my standard Monday morning fare) for insight into how to teach diverse learners.

"In Mrs. Wilkerson's 8th grade English class," Tomlinson writes, "students often read novels around a common theme, such as courage or conflict resolution...Mrs. Wilkerson also varies journal prompts, sometimes assigning different prompts to different students. Often, she encourages students to select a prompt that interests them."

Sigh.

"In Mr. O'Reilly's 8th grade English class," Tomlinson writes, shaming Mrs. Wilkerson's counterpoint, the Bad Differentiated Instructor, "students read the same novels and have whole-class discussions on them. Students complete journal entries on their readings."

Sigh.

That's EXACTLY how I do it. And how everyone in our department does it.

Us: (Deep breath) We're reading "Ethan Frome."
Them: Noooooo!
Us: Yes.
Them: This is wack! I hate this book! I don't get it! This is borin'! I hate ELA!
Us: Read it anyway, young punks, or you'll fail the quiz/marking period/semester/Regents/high school/life. See you in tutoring. I'm calling your mother.

I suck.

I could tick off the dozen or so reasons WHY I suck without blaming myself, chief among them the utter lack of coordination or planning in our department, confirmed, for example, by the list of novels we were handed to teach that was cobbled together by our new chair the week before school started, with no input from us, or that faculty at SHS tend to favor Ferris Bueller-style lectures at the front of the room, followed by rote note-copying and multiple-choice exams. When I try anything more "student-centered," that seems to empower the kids and ask for their input, I'm suspiciously regarded as "lowering the standard." Like, What, you don't think our kids can handle the real stuff? (The "real stuff" being the longstanding pillars of old school-style education.) Recently I suggested coming up with an independent writing project with a student who'd been removed from my room for discipline reasons because he hadn't done a single assignment all semester. "No, he's fully capable of doing the regular work, like everyone else," snapped the department chair. I know he's capable, but he probably thinks it's boring and irrelevant. And I sort of agree.

Anyway, back to sucking. I am in a pedagogical rut without the breathing room or the time to design something better. Forget planning it with my colleagues; I'd be developing it on my own, and there's no way. For all the mediocre curriculum I plan, it takes an awful lot of maintenance. And I'm, like, dedicated or whatever: I tutor five or eight hours a week, have everyone's parents' numbers on speed dial, manage 35 kids for 80 minute-stretches like a champ, enliven our by-the-book lessons with theatrical panache, make connections with students...my old kids from last year (the year I REALLY didn't know what I was doing) wander in and tell me how much they miss my class, God bless them.

But I know it, I KNOW I suck, I can see it in their faces when we do ANOTHER quiz just to prove they read the book they hate that we're all reading that I didn't choose. I need a vision, man. 'Cause I could be awesome. But for now, I'm not. For real.

I'm Calling Your Mother

2006-11-02T04:03:00.000-08:00

In the waning hours of tutoring yesterday afternoon, Ms. Kamath beckoned me into the hallway, her face cloudy with disappointment. "I'm calling Denisha's mother tonight," she hissed. I nodded. "She's insane. She's being totally disruptive." I nodded again, and she looked at me expectantly. "Look at her. She's DANCING AROUND YOUR ROOM IN HER SOCKS." I turned around, and Denisha was, indeed, twirling around the room in her socks as Ryan and Ashantay tried to write the essays that were due four days ago. "Um, I think you should call her mother, too," Ms. Kamath added. Right-o.

I felt like tissue paper: transparent and prone to shredding. I'd spent the last two hours trying to wring proper five-paragraph essays from stubborn freshmen who swore they didn't know how to write a sentence. I'd blown up at Jackson (diagnosis: emotionally disturbed), who had banged a chair on a desk several times to get my attention as I tutored his classmate. I'd shooed Ashantay and Tyanna and Denisha out of the room to eat their fried chicken in the hallway, because the smell was making me gag. I observed that the classroom was at least as loud when this particular squad of four is present as when there are 35 kids in it. The cacophony was making my ears bleed. When a fourteen-year-old feels like she can't do something, she'll fight you to the death to prove it.

I walked back into the class and made a grave announcement. "You know," I began, surveying the room, "I've had to quiet you guys down way too many times this afternoon. I'm gonna have to...call your parents," I sighed. Denisha looked stricken. "Ms. Magnolia, you CAN'T call my mother. I'm gonna have to run away, and she'll be on the news for murdering me. I am so serious. You CANNOT call my mother." I looked at her, like, Seriously? "I'm mandated in my contract to call a hotline that goes to Albany if I believe any of my students is being abused," I explained. "No, no, you don't have to call a hotline," she said quickly. "Then what? What do you want? A second chance?" I asked, impatience mounting. "It's NOVEMBER. You've had your second, and your third, and your 27th chance. This is nonsense. You wrote the check, Denisha; now you've gotta cash it. This is on you. End of story." Ashantay groaned, "Oh, I'm gonna get a beatin'." "Ms. MAGNOLIA!" Denisha pleaded.

"I swear to God, I am gonna shut up for the rest of my life in your class," Ashantay announced. (If anyone is a longtime reader, Ashantay is the ninth grade, raw-state version of TJ, my favorite sahsaying 12th grader). I stared at him. "Can I have that in writing?" I said, pushing a piece of loose leaf toward him. "Are you serious?" "Dead serious." I PROMISE TO NOT TALK IN MS. MAGNOLIA'S CLASS UNLESS I AM CALLED ON, it read, signed, "Ashantay Davis-Hartford. 11/01/06." Denisha eagerly penned hers, including permission to call her mother immediately upon violation of the contract. (Like I need permission.)

"I have short-term memory," Ashantay said as he packed his things. I stifled a laugh at my desk. "I'm not gonna remember that tomorrow," he said. Which I figured. As they prepared to leave, they traded stories of the epic beatings they got from their mothers over various indiscretions over the years, usually for cursing out an elementary teacher. "Fathers should not beat their children, because then they would die," Ashantay observed. Once, he claims, he ran away for an afternoon to avoid his mother's war path, eventually finding a police officer and insisting he'd been kidnapped. I listened, fascinated, horrified.

"Do you think you'll beat your children?" I asked them. "No," said Denisha firmly. "I'm gonna slap my kids," said Ryan, demonstrating, "but that's not beatin' 'em." "I'm not havin' kids," declared Ashantay, which was oddly reassuring, because I have never met a child who seemed so dead set against empathy or sincerity. (Think Joan Crawford meets Truman Capote. Everything is a performance.)

Worried for the future, I remain,
Ms. Magnolia Avenue

PS: Update: Ashantay was silent and intent as a coroner today. He seemed serious, which I liked, but unlike himself, which I didn't. Denisha put a piece of Scotch tape over her mouth, which was creepy and thankfully didn't last.

Fire Anniversary

2006-09-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

Journal Entry
October 28, 2003
Northampton, MA

"The flower beds are still there," Mom tells me over the phone. I'm sitting in my roommate's ugly fluorescent kitchen with dim windows, the cord dangling across the table. A million miles from home. "And...the porch, 'cause it was made of brick." Her voice breaks a little. "And the chimney." My Aunt Judy was surprised, in fact, at how much was left. "Holly was hysterical," Mom says. Their whole block was obliterated. Half a million acres so far; 1,500 houses. It's headed for Julian, where Camp Marston sits in the middle of a forest of draught-stricken, bark beetle-infested timber.

"You kept telling me to send the boxes," she says. "Don't feel bad about that," I order, thinking, See? I told you to send them. "You couldn't have known," I insist. "Seven boxes are expensive to send 3,000 miles."

I think of the precise moment when each thing combusted--the death of each object, from curling edges of paper to flaming skeleton to pure flame to cinders.

Old journals, 1998-2002
Boxes of old photos dating from as far back as 1890
Letters
Files
That gigantic Larousse French-English dictionary
An autographed copy of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'
My senior yearbook
Prints from college photo classes (old boyfriend, trips to Boston, ex-girlfriend, house parties, etc., etc.)
Clothes, CDs, papers, notes, ephemera

There. That's the stuff.
Right now: you can see the sky from it, there's no roof; gnarled black trees cling to the smoking hills; I haven't seen it, but I know. My stuff is two square feet of ash. Aunt Judy's house is a smoldering black pile. Unrecognizable.

I can't speak to my aunt's loss, aside from the obvious. The enormous, life-altering obvious everything.

If you'll allow me a brief, indulgent mourning while it's still fresh: All the anguish and elation and obsessive archiving from four years of my life-things I was convinced would outlast me, would be mined by descendents or scholars--gone, never to be recovered, the molecules irrevocably changed. As I write this, I feel it being read--and relaize it's not that I'm psychic, it's just a habit. There's no permanence. Now my things don't feel like posessions; they feel like unruly birds on their way upward. The sun blinds me and I let them go.

Shred of October 2003

2006-09-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

Journal Entry
October 12, 2003
Northampton, MA

I like being on the inside, knowing the digestive system of something as tireless and puzzling as a restaurant, squatting on milk crates in the alley with fiftysomething war-tank waitresses. "You've got a friend who writes for the Boston Globe?" Krissy growls, peering at me over her bifocals. "Tell him I got a story for him," she says, launching into a detailed critique of the last Red Sox game. "He writes for the Ideas section, not Sports," I tell her. "I got IDEAS about BUNTS!" she snaps. She's off and running to Table Three before I can answer.

I Am Two Thousand Years Old

2006-09-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

At the suggestion of a friend, I gave my kids index cards and told them write two anonymous questions for me on them. The first had to be about school or English, and the second could be anything. We would discuss the appropriateness of questions before I answered them.

Very popular:
How old are you?
How long have you been teaching?
Do you have a boyfriend?
Do you have kids?

More than once:
Why did you decide to become a teacher?
Have you published any novels? Are your plays famous?
What was ninth grade like for you?
Were you a straight-A student?

Most intriguing:
Do you like African Americans?

The last one cracked me up. Well, cracked me up and moved me to my core. "Obviously, YES," I said. But obviously, there is more to both the question and the answer than that. I remembered Kevin from the first season of The Real World on that episode where he had a fight with Becky and called her a racist, and he said, "The black/white thing is always in effect." And I think that's true. I said, "There's some heavy, heavy history between black and white people in America. So I feel that," and they sort of groaned, like, here we go with the black/white thing. "But on a face-to-face basis, are you kidding? Of course I like black people." A sea of 30 black faces considered what I said. Chanel, mouthy and sharp in the front row, giggled and said, "So like, what if a BIG black guy was coming toward you? Would you be scared then?" I shook my head, like, Next question.

When I read the question, "What was ninth grade like for you?" I began, "Well, it was the fifties..." And they were like, "Are you SERIOUS? Yo, she's OLD!" And I was like, "Um, no, it was the NINETIES."

Indelible

2006-09-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

I was on the A train to Manhattan from Bed Stuy. At Hoyt-Schermerhorn, someone got on and started playing his ring tone over and over, at maximum volume. (It will never make sense to me why kids enjoy listening to the tinny, gravelly tones of music through the tiny speakers on cell phones or handheld DVD players. Walking around with a boombox I can understand. But this is like carrying around an old grammophone with a rusty needle.) I could see him from over my copy of the New Yorker: skinny, spry, defiant.

I watched him approach a woman in one of the seats facing the aisle. He gestured and panted and performed a strange, offensive theatrical routine--I tried not to watch, but whatever it was, it was nasty--until she got up and vacated the seat. He reminded me of the boys in the film "Kids." As soon as he sat down, his friend, a gangly tomboy, sat down next to him and punched him in the arm, like, Why you gotta be like that? I liked her instantly. I wondered why they were friends.

He was small, but he took up so much space: his language, his stacatto cadences, his limbs, the way he seemed to be careening in every direction. Everything announced him. He cursed and declared and argued and kept playing the ring tone. His friend, the tomboy, finally wrestled it from him and started playing her own ring tone. I bored my eyes into the New Yorker, praying they wouldn't notice me, even though I was facing them. I saw him engage one stranger, to disasterous results, and I reeled with the possibility that I might be next.

What would I say? Would I get up wordlessly, like the lady before me? No. I was fascinated by them. Mostly by her, but I could tell they were both sort of brilliant. They reminded me of the metalheads I hung out with in junior high: genius assholes, lazy and hellbent at once. I imagined winning them over, not buying his schtick, disarming him by paying close attention.

I thought, somebody is that kid's teacher. And I am lucky enough not to have anyone, really, who behaves like that in my class, and a school that basically doesn't admit anyone who does. Other schools, "zone schools" in NY parlance, have to take kids from the neighborhood. Thousands of students applied to our school, and we only took 50. I almost shook my head in disbelief. All my complaints about pedagogy, intention, collaboration, a colleagial community I can be proud of; at some schools, teaching is fought like a war. (And I don't mean the students so much as wrong-headed administrators and district personnel, the tyranny of budgets, and home lives that would scare the hair off a rat.)

Who was this kid? Who was his friend? I was appalled by how little consideration he showed for everyone around him. I wondered how he got that way. I could see the delicate line his friend walked, exasperated, disgusted, but maybe devoted to him anyway. Or something.

They never noticed me. I got off before the train sped up to midtown. I walked past the projects on my street, impossibly tall and efficient; past the luxury condo, all windows and aluminum; I walked into my nondescript brick building. I pushed through the door and saw a porter, the one with the beautiful smile, Windexing the inside door. He grinned and pulled the door open for me. The tiny lobby smelled faintly of floor-cleaner.

I stepped out of the elevator onto the seventh floor, carpeted and hushed. I remembered the dark, odorous hallway with creaky linoleum stairs in my old building in Brooklyn. The front door didn't lock. I thought of the photographs of the Ida B. Wells projects in Our America, an autobiography of two teenagers who grew up there, that I'm using in class next week, and how it didn't look like a place where people lived, but a place where you went to die. Until you saw pictures of children hanging out in shopping carts, laughing, being children.

I don't know where the boy and the girl from the train were from. I can't make any claims about them; I don't want to make them into archetypes; I don't know them. But I couldn't get them out of my head.

Class Dismissed

2006-08-30T06:58:00.000-07:00

I was at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street, staring up at an enormous billboard for Banana Republic. "That's CARLY!" I gasped. (FYI, names are changed where innocence must be protected.) "Who?" my boyfriend asks.

She was standing in a phalanx of nattily dressed models, looking intent and pouty, her arched eyebrows unmistakable, levitating above the crowds at Markt restaurant.

"Carly. Went to Hampshire. Rich," I murmmured, instantly regretting that I said "rich" before explaining who she actually was, as a person, a collaborator. "She worked on my thesis production. She's a photographer." And also, I thought, she is rich, her family is rich, like old Back Bay rich (or something), and effortlessly beautiful, and deeply talented, and a little flighty, and glibly entitled in a way I couldn't help resenting, secretly. She spent her time at Hampshire making endless art, and I imagined that never worrying about money freed one to make endless art. She appears still to be invested in such pursuits, likely for decent pay, since she's very good. But I always encountered a little bit of static with how...easy and gorgeous everything about her seemed. Charmed. Privileged. Even if she was poor, she'd still be six feet tall and willowy and full-lipped, and there is something about beauty that acts as currency. You can talk your way into any place with beauty; we humans are shallow, visual creatures, easily captivated.

Whenever I pass the ad--in the boutiques the ad promotes, on billboards before descending the stairs to the subway--I try not to look at it, but I always do. I think, Jesus, she's pretty. I think, You used to live with a bunch of irresponsible cokeheads in a disgusting apartment next door. I think, You used to ask me to buy "snackies" at the campus store before rehearsal because you had a candy addiction. I think, You never worried about money. I think, Everything you do is effortless.

Your world is utterly distinct from mine.

Is it?

I am endlessly hung up on class. I can't un-stitch it from someone's fabric. It's always there. But there's something unimaginative about stopping there, about ending the conversation there, about painting people into corners. I cringe when I think of someone doing that to me because I'm white. But I also wouldn't blame them.

The Paris of the Sierras

2006-08-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

Reno, NV

When I look out the window of our studio apartment in Manhattan, I can see a triangle of the Hudson River flanked by industrial brick buildings, a garage, water tanks, and the shapeless form of one of Frank Gehry's monstrosities on the West Side Highway. "We have so much sky over here," my boyfriend coos. He used to live on the second floor of a building in the East Village, and the sun would shine directly into his apartment for approximately one hour each morning.

In Reno, I stand on my aunt and uncle's porch. I can see 180 degrees in either direction: flat one-story roofs disappear into the slope of distant, golden hills covered in dry grass. The hills further out are purple and dim. An airplane overhead is so small it looks like ash.

Cities in Nevada were settled by prospectors who discovered a mother lode of silver in the hills of Virginia City. I never understood why anyone would make a city in a desert, but Reno, "the biggest little city in the world," is modest when you consider Las Vegas, "the most miscalculated, insatiable mistake this side of the Rocky Mountains."

Desperate for espresso, I walked this morning down Wells Avenue, a wide, deserted boulevard, to Starbucks, a mile away. It was across from the Ponderosa, home of the Wild Orchid Strip Club. The structures downtown are mostly gleaming stucco and concrete shooting into the pale, bottomless sky. Dancing lights, rotating marquees, and neon compete with a horizon of nothing. Signs announce prime rib dinners for $8.95, two tacos and a Budweiser for $1.50.

I'm tempted to dismiss a place where it is not uncommon to see sunburned people in their 80s pulling down levers on ringing slot machines over and over, nursing another drink, eyes vacant, mouths pursed, their cigarette ash growing dangerously longer and longer, as some kind of cultural wasteland. But the hotels and casinos here (and in Vegas) have drawn musicians, dancers, and theater people to steady work for decades. For a city with such empty sidewalks--another wasteland signifier--there is a surprisingly vibrant theater scene. There are cafes independent of Starbucks (I'm sitting in one), youth in rebellious outfits, a university, and numerous jazz and blues clubs. My uncle, a longtime professional musician, leads the Reno Big Band, a motley but highly capable crew, many of whom used to play in the Harrah's band, before it was dismantled in the early 90s. My aunt used to be Bill Harrah's executive secretary and tells proudly of how he said no to the mob, who offered him an unimaginable sum for control of his casino in the 70s.

"Reno is the Paris of the Sierras," my mother decided yesterday.

That said, casinos freak me out. They seem like the saddest places on earth. My cousin Licia, a blackjack dealer, described the old ladies she works with, who are in their 70s and still have to cocktail waitress because they gambled their wages and tips all these years. The relentless ringing, blippy noises, the cigarette smoke dryer than the desert air, the smelly carpet, the swiveling chairs and brass railings, the endless visual exclamation points in a giant vacuum of purpose...it seems like slow death.

I have to suspend my snobbiness, my finely-honed Manhattanite propensity for European urbanity and manageable grids of streets, my distaste for t-shirt stores, pawn shops, cars, televisions that no one turns off, lawns people have no business wasting water on because they live in a fucking desert, strip malls, parking lots, derelict motels as crack houses, rednecks--basically, as my friend michael said once, "the irony-free zone."

"That's why I never leave the island," my boyfriend explains quietly.

"C would sooner eat glass than go to something like this," I whispered to my mother last night, which is to say, I would sooner eat glass than go to something like this, but there we were: the parade of souped-up, tricked-out big rigs parading down the street for the annual classic car and truck bacchanal that is Reno's Hot August Nights. (Actually, it's more like sort-of-cool, windy August nights.) The parade, or "cruise," began with a monster truck leading the way. I think it was three stories high. Something about trucks that size scares me to my core; I think they're going to run me over. Endlessly revving engines remind me of the unemployed alcoholic fathers in my neighborhood who stood in the oil-stained car ports beneath the upstairs apartments and revved their engines all day long. My uncle (not the one in Reno), another nonverbal alcoholic, was also obsessed with cars. He took my mother's sister to drag races when they were married, at out-of-the-way tracks in east San Diego county, the Kentucky of southern California.

I gamely marveled at the chrome and the blinking lights and the fire coming out of the tail pipes and the "chopped tops" and the shiny engines and sexy bulbous curves of the machines driving down Virginia Street last night with Licia's husband, a self-proclaimed devotee of "anything on wheels." He can spot the make and model of a car from the sidewalk: "That's a '64 Bel Air, you can tell by the wind shield," he says. "The Corvettes look like bowling shoes," I note helpfully.

The cars and trucks were driven mostly by white men exiting middle age--the men known as "hot rods" when they went to high school in the 50s, like my uncle. Back then, they greased their hair and their arm muscles bulged out of their white undershirts like Marlon Brando. Now, they wear big white running shoes, knee-length shorts, and "Hot August Nights" t-shirts, their bellies protruding like pregnancies. The cars are driven in on trailers and unloaded once a year for this express purpose. Like all collecting, there is a pointlessness to it, magnified by the attendant devotion of its practitioners.

I feel like an anthropologist. Which isn't fair.

Passport to the provinces soon to expire,
I remain,
Ms. Magnolia Avenue

Fear Itself

2006-07-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

I am so AFRAID.

A brief list follows:

I am afraid of…
• Not transferring by September to the cool, progressive school in my neighborhood
• Stacks of hundreds of unread projects and essays that collect dust beneath my desk and drive my neat, spatially-obsessed boyfriend crazy
• Students who balk, disbelieve, doubt, or otherwise smirk at what we do in class
• The kids who never choose partners (and no one chooses them) during pair work
• Nasir, a dizzyingly intelligent, difficult, oppositional kid
• Sam, a stunningly disruptive, defiant kid with poor literacy
• The social ferocity of Lila, who prizes chatting above everything academic and takes EVERYTHING personally
• Planning a year of curriculum by myself
• The loneliness of working in a school where there is virtually no discourse about teaching
• The whines and moans of faculty re: students who are ‘lazy,’ ‘knuckleheaded,’ ‘pains in the ass,’ etc.
• Staying at work past sunset
• Forgetting what my boyfriend looks like
• Never having time to make food and subsisting on takeout Thai and pizza
• Never having time to run, swim, or take yoga
• Not having enough democracy in my classroom
• Designing projects the kids think are stupid
• Not assessing students well enough, thoroughly enough, fairly enough, quickly enough
• Falling behind, falling behind, falling behind
• Not being in close enough touch with over a hundred students’ parents
• The Homework Inbox
• Grading makeup work at the end of the marking period during the mad dash for a passing grade
• Perpetuating a system of oppressive education: grades, Regents, competitiveness, Old School teaching practices
• Not having time for fragile Ava, who always seems like she could stand to take a half hour talk to me all the horrible things she’s going through
• Not seeing signs of self-harm in Ava
• Facing off with Lavender, the most dismissive 15-year-old in Bed Stuy
• Teaching Harrison and Steven, who have profound learning disabilities—they were taken out of my class last year to go to the resource room
• Teaching classes of 30 or more when the most I had last year was 26, and usually it was 15 or 18
• Maintaining my Master’s coursework while I teach (one more year!)
• Keeping up my habit of feeling like a failure every day

There. I said it. Now maybe it won’t be all up in my dreams every night.

My Last Great Epistolary Episode

2006-07-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

Journal Entry
14 August 2004
Northampton, MA

Padding through the basement aisles of the Smith College Library in flip-flops. A centuries-old quiet and the comforting smell of paper. Sentences staying put in their vaults, humming, still. My grandmother took me to the library twice a week, twice a day. Her knit book bag had absurdly long straps, and it dragged on the floor when I carried it. When I was little, I didn’t mind her faraway quiet; I didn’t search out its pathology or origins, which were my origins.

I pulled a book of Martin Espada’s poetry off the shelf. A book I used to own and haven’t read in years, a book given me by an intense, predatory labor historian when we were in college. He also gave me a book of French pinup photography. I lost both of them in a fire.

I remembered what Sean, my manager’s boyfriend when I waited tables in Louisville, told me on a long car ride that consisted largely of his lengthy, caustic lecturing: “When people don’t want to read ‘old stuff,’ like Shakespeare, as a matter of taste, it usually means they’re too self-centered to read a language that doesn’t sound exactly the way they talk.”

I pulled a book of Sharon Olds’ poetry. I thought ‘The Dead and the Living’ might provide some insight into recalcitrant, mystery-holding old relatives.

I also got ‘Evidence of Things Unseen,’ because reading James Baldwin has lately become my closest approximation of going to church.

I checked my email and found I had a response from Jeremy Walton, Michael’s friend. It was long and immediate and thrilling. I responded in kind and included my address, because he’d offered to send a postcard (from Turkey). Thrilled. Thrilled to find a new potential letter-writer.

Only when I got in the car did I admit that nearly all of my great correspondences have also been--unconsciously, secretly, or blatantly--courtships. That I found Jeremy’s Friendster picture unequivocally attractive, despite the mustache and apparent propensity for dark sunglasses. That suddenly I had a feisty, coltish daydream rearing in a starting gate that contained months and years of exquisitely-texted letters, culminating in a grand, weighty love after the third or fourth year, when he finally came back from Istanbul.

On six sentences. I sent myself into orbit on six sentences. What the fuck is wrong with me?

What do I find so irresistible about far away and unavailable?

Have my parents and grandparents really been that unavailable? Weren’t they there all along? The important ones?

Have I been pining my whole life?

* * *

A few weeks ago, my mother called me at work. Eleven a.m. is the only time we can talk; with the time difference, she gets home from work when I’m going to bed.

“I’m worried you idealize me,” she said. Did she say ‘idealize?’ I don’t know if she would use a word like ‘idealize.’ I have trouble approximating her diction when I write, like when you can’t describe or picture the face of someone you see every day of your life.

“I’m worried you have this romantic view of me.”

“What do you mean?” I say in my nearly-silent phone voice as six people in cubicles around mine make appointments and book airline tickets and talk about spreadsheets.

“I don’t know if you ever dealt with the fact that my pot smoking meant I wasn’t really there for you a lot of the time.”

I’m quiet.

“No,” I say after a moment. “I processed it. I forgave you already.” Seven people send me emails, and they pop onto the screen. Hollis, whose desk is fewer than two yards from mine, writes, “Are you here today?” just wondering, tx!”

“I just don’t want you to blow up some day because you didn’t let yourself deal with it.”

I want to write everything, to eat everything, to be friends with everyone. If I were to unravel and go nuts one day, my lunacy might look like this: ravenous, covetous, with wide arms.

I Lost One

2006-06-08T03:50:00.000-07:00

This is what we know: Every human being is unfinished. Every one of us is in process, in motion, in medias res…The teacher who honors this defining incompleteness senses intuitively that to label a student is wrong in both senses of the word: it is immoral, and it is hopelessly stupid, wildly inaccurate.
--William Ayers, Teaching Toward Freedom (p40)

William Ayers writes with plain, perfect humanity about the ethical obligation of teachers to see their students as distinct human beings, universes unto themselves, in flux, infinitely capable. Ayers says later that there is “an antidote to all this foolishness”—the relentless labeling and dismissing and generalizing of students as “at-risk,” “behavior-disordered,” “reluctant readers,” etc.—but he warns that “it requires vigilance, effort, and consciousness.” I’ll say.

"We begin with a vow not to repeat the clichés that seem to cling to some students like barnacles, sharp and ugly" (p49).

I had a student. I say I had him because Mr. T removed him from my classroom after a complaint surfaced (during a random chat in the office) that I was spending most of my class time putting out the fires he set instead of teaching the other 20 students in the room. When I see Raivon now, our connection all but severed, he seems mean and far away. I notice how tiny he is in his baggy jeans, how huge he makes himself with his jagged laugh and defiant mouth.

Mr. T prides himself on protecting his teachers from things that make our jobs hard: crazy students, interference from the region or the Department of Ed, crazy parents. And "protecting his teachers" is his language, not mine: he is paternal almost to a fault. We're going to be one of the "Empowerment Schools" next year: "You're all mine," he said in a staff meeting. "Practice saying your name with my last name: Sylvie Tigerton. Lewis Tigerton. Ronnie Tigerton. We're all Tigertons now." It was supposed to be funny, but it was weird.

Raivon was one of the casualties suffered in the name of making my job easier. And I WAS relieved. I DID teach the remaining students more effectively. But as an educator, aren't I supposed to educate? There was something shady about just cutting Raivon off like that, like an infected appendage.

“All right,” Raivon would always say to me, looking for an exit, utterly dismissive, when I addressed his flagrant failure to turn in any of the work for my class. “Raivon!” I’d call when I saw him in the stairwell, even though I didn’t want to see him. “You gonna have that essay to me by Friday?” “All right,” he’d mutter contemptuously. “I don’t want to give you a failing grade,” I’d insist, “I know you can do this.” “All right,” he’d say again. I extended deadlines, offered makeup opportunities, called conferences, gave stern lectures and pep talks.

He never delivered. Sometimes there would be a glimmer of excitement, an urgency toward improvement. But it was always brief, always filled in with the hair-trigger temper and careening performances of the Raivon Show. “Raivon, return to your seat/spit out your gum/stop talking,” I’d say, trying to wrest attention back from his audience. He’d suck his teeth and spit his angry, nonverbal replies, as though I’d asked him to please remove his toenails.

I began spending more energy on students who didn’t seem to find me so oppressive. I didn’t stop Raivon in the halls anymore to follow up on whatever was preventing me from passing him. I grew exhausted by the relationship that was always about lack and complaint; Raivon had tired of it months ago.

There came a point when it looked like I’d never reap what I knew only crudely how to sow: I wanted Raivon’s cooperation in our teacher-student pact. You respect the space in this room while we’re in it together, and I help you understand what we’re doing. You give me what I ask for, and I reward you by letting you pass through this gate.

It was a primitive, faulty, but earnest version of what I hope to forge with students, but feel heartbreakingly far from this year: we respect each other and learn from each other. I do my best to guide you to understandings that will be useful to you for the rest of your life. I’ll be humble, but you will be humble, too. I’ll lead if you’ll lead. My judgment of your understanding will be transparent; your effort will be honest.

I closed my heart to Raivon. I felt betrayed. I was disgusted by his misogyny (he was suspended for sexual harassment), his childish, bottomless need for attention, his temper. He appalled me. When he left my classroom, I no longer felt responsible for him.

"We begin with a vow not to repeat the clichés that seem to cling to some students like barnacles, sharp and ugly." Raivon’s name was a bad word in the faculty lounge, connoting everything that made OUR jobs harder. “He’s insane,” our principal said before he took Raivon away. There was the sense from the staff that Raivon would eventually be cooled into submission; until then, you had to tighten the reins and grow calluses where you held them.

There were also allusions to his steep, myriad psychological problems--but only allusions. I didn't wonder if they were valid--obviously, the kid is troubled--but I wondered why they sounded so speculative. Why Mr. T didn't seem able to substantiate his armchair diagnoses, why he rambled poetic riffs on why Raivon was so crazy. Why wasn't there a principled, measured conversation about the sources of his behavior? Why was it easier to let the discussion end with, "The kid is nuts"? I didn't feel like I was in a position to do anything but listen and take my cue from the administrators. Striver High is the sort of place where I don't ever feel in a position to anything but listen and take my cue. My anti-intellectual, don't-rock-the-boat cue.

I gave up. I let him calcify into RAIVON, the name echoed outside the main office, the name on the suspension list, the list of Students In Danger of Not Progressing to the Next Grade, the shortlist of crazies. Erased the Raivon with careful handwriting and terrible spelling and an easy laugh, who must be holding onto a monstrous insecurity to swagger like he does, who is very angry with something or someone, but I don’t know who or what.

Girl Fight

2006-06-05T02:44:00.000-07:00

There had only been one fight at my school this year. We may be a public school in the hood made famous by Spike Lee and Chris Rock, but Striver High (to start using euphamisms) is so strict it's parochial: students are suspended if they curse, and everyone is afraid of Mr. Tigerton (the principal), a force of nature in suspenders and a tie.

So color me shocked when, from across the room, I hear Monica and Yvonne hissing at each other like angry cats. They've sat peacefully at different tables since my class began in January; Monica, for one, usually doesn't speak above a whisper. Yvonne has actually stopped me on the street to ask me about homework she's missing. But they were so angry I couldn't understand what they were saying; they were like fountains of hate showering sparks over the classroom.

Appalled, I ran between them (they were still in their seats). "THERE. IS. NO. FIGHTING. IN. MY. CLASSROOM!!" I bellowed, crouching, my face red, like a crazy person. I figured if I could become enough of a distraction, I might diffuse the drama. "OUT. Get out. Go to the office," I snarled to both of them.

Duh: Rule Number One of sending warring students to the office: Don't send them AT THE SAME TIME. They will only resume their spat outside in the hallway. Which Monica and Yvonne did immediately.

But there really isn't a lot of fighting at my school. And I adore these girls. I couldn't take the possibility of them physically harming each other, so, against the advice of my union (and common sense), I stood between them, repeating my command to go to the office. I may as well have been a sheet of tissue paper.

Luckily, when Monica tried to punch Yvonne, she only grazed my chin, and Yvonne's friends restrained her, so no one was hurt. I barely felt it. I continued my rant until both girls were in the office.

Girls are magnificent when they're angry: all hand gestures and rotating necks and tonal fluctuation, like birds in a war dance. In the office, with Mr. T, they quickly devolved into burbling, crying messes. Puffy-eyed and shaky, Monica tried explaining her side, but escalated into a tirade: "You are NASTY, Yvonne, you are a NASTY, MEAN GIRL," she said, with palpable hurt in her voice. Something about the culture of the school allowed them to let down their guard in that office: they were both so WOUNDED. Their pride puddled on the floor; their tears and honesty ran the show.

Later, I hugged them separately, saying, "I love each of you unconditionally." I gave them the lecture about turning the other cheek: "There will always, always be people who don't understand you. Do not engage them, because they aren't rational. You won't win. Don't even go there. This is not your best self; this is the worst part of you. Show the world the you we know and love. You are brilliant and kind: own it."

As a teacher, I say this kind of thing all the time. I stop kids I'm worried about in the hallway, or bend the ears of loiterers after school, giving impromptu lectures about honesty, kindness, responsibility, ambition, tolerance, all the stuff you imagine teachers breathe in and out instead of oxygen. I have no idea if it ever permeates the messy membrane between kids and adults; their identities, their moral compasses, are notoriously unstable. Sometimes they argue, but it is usually half-hearted and sloppy: "What if I don't think it's wrong to cheat, Ms. M?" "But I don't care about getting a 100." "When I say somehting's gay, I just mean it's stupid, I'm not saying anything about gay people." I say it and say it, like an insistent, broken record.

For some reason, Monica and Yvonne seemed to take it in, nodding sincerely, looking me in the eye. Maybe they were just worn out. Maybe they were listening. I hope I was reminding them about something they already knew.

The Gay Club

2006-05-27T06:15:00.000-07:00

TJ is special to me. Other teachers are horrified by his flaming, trophy-winning, light-up-belt-sporting, jheri-curl-rocking, unabashed queerness, his faggy inquisitive gaze, his refusal to believe civilian or mortal rules apply to him. But I secretly cherish his entitlement, the way he owns the hall when he sashays through it.

Mr. N couldn't get through to him yesterday, and I happened to be in the room (the class was in chaos, but Mr. N was preoccupied with getting TJ to return to his seat), and I just marched up to TJ and stared him down. "TJ," I said with low, ominous gravity. "Hi, Ms. Magnolia," he sing-songed. "TJ," I repeated. "But I don't want to sit down!" he whined. I gave him Teacher Look that was more withering than usual because it was the I Understand and Identify With You, But I Am Still Your Teacher, So Sit Your Ass Down Look. TJ returned to his seat. I'm like his gay para or something.

Once, he was lounging on top of the air conditioner by the window as Mr. N tried in vain to organize a tangle of A/V equipment, the class reaching the pitch of Madison Square Garden during a hockey game. I made a beeline for TJ, appalled at his lack of respect for the function of furniture. "TJ," I said like I was sizing up his evening gown, "this is not a GRECIAN BATH. You can't DRAPE YOURSELF on the AIR CONDITIONER like it's a CHAISE LONGUE. Get UP. Sit down in a CHAIR. Jesus." I presumed he had no idea what a Grecian bath or a chaise longue was, but he went wordlessly to his seat.

Last night, TJ helped me sell tickets at the door of the spring concert. During a lull, we stood chatting with D, a basketball player girl who came out in the eighth grade. I had a query: "So I was walking down Christopher Street yesterday," I said, "and I'd never seen so many queer black teenagers in my life. I was like, is there a conference or something? Is that where Harvey Milk High School is?" Naturally, they enlightened me. "Oh, that's just where we hang out," explained TJ. "We go the pier."

I marveled that there was a Gay Drag for the queer youth of New York City, just like there was in San Diego. But these kids can hop on a subway and be there in under an hour for two bucks; I had to scam rides or wait for hours at windy bus stops to get to mine. Cheers. NYC wins again.

She's Got X-Ray Vision, Man

2006-05-26T22:06:00.000-07:00

I was at a youth media workshop on Saturday at a gallery/workspace in Chelsea with a dozen of my best freshman writers. Ebullient, contrary L was multitasking as usual, talking a mile a minute as she wielded a sharp pair of scissors and cut sheets of stickers. "Ms. M knows I'm chewing gum or talking when she's not even looking," she said. My ears perked up. "She'll be, like, at the board, and without turning around, she'll be all, 'L, stop talking.'" "I know," agreed D. "You go to the bathroom and she didn't even see you put your gum in, and you come back, and she's all, 'D, spit it out.'" "She's got x-ray vision, man!" squealed adorable E, who writes a blog about his kitchen.

And I was sort of mortified, but it was one of the most satisfying affirmations I have ever received. I don't doubt my potential to inspire (note I said 'potential to,' not 'excessive evidence of'), my capacity to listen, or my rapport with my students. But to think I acquired a some kind of mother's hyper-sensitivity to the Unlawful Activities of a Child; it's like waking up with a superhero ability. I can spot gum-chewing from several yards away in my peripheral vision merely by reading the subtle movement of a teenage jaw!

Sometimes I see people on the street or in the subway chewing gum and I have to stop myself. "Cool it, M," I say to myself. "This is real life, where chewing gum is actually not a crime."

I Hate Technology in the Classroom, or, How My Latest Unit Totally Tanked

2006-05-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

"See, THIS is why I hate technology in the classroom," I muttered, furious as usual.

Lately I'm furious, especially in my second period class: poor freshmen! With fresh sticks of gum in their mouths, bleary and crusty-eyed from late-night Sconex sessions. "Good morning, you're late," I chant. "All right, folks! Mouths closed, pens down, eyes up here--K, spit OUT your gum, it is MAY for crying out loud, hello?--As I was saying..." All in one breath.

So there are two carts of laptops, supposedly Internet-ready, plugged in and ready to go. They take up 30% of available classroom space, which is dwindling in the crowded room. I TESTED them, even. These puppies are CHARGED. They are ready to facilitate my brilliant students' nascent zines, in this "guerilla media" unit, wherein they report on the real Bed Stuy, not the "Do or Die" of urban myth, but the actual stories of the people who live here.

"Ms. M, mine don't work," someone pipes up. "Ms. M, mine just turned off by itself." "Ms. M," says S, waving her arms wildly, "this one doesn't connect to the Internet!!" "Hold on," I say loudly, the voice of reason (stay calm!). "Do any of these connect to the Internet?" "No," they chorus. "Mine just turned off, too!" someone else says. "It said 'low battery!'" she cries. Charged, my ass.

And that was how I was reduced to a crumpled pile of Ms. M today, four periods in a row (I kept thinking I'd solve the problem by the next class, but no, sad clown, that is not what befalls you as you try and try to teach with technology--NEW PROBLEMS keep sprouting like fungi, but faster). I raised my hands to the heavens, crossed my eyes, cursed whoever thought it was such a great bloody idea to put computers in classrooms, and lowered myself to the floor in front of the whiteboard.

By 3:00, I was an embarrassment. "I mean, why do this project at all?" I heard myself ask. "Yeah!" agreed my students with chilling enthusiasm.

One could write many paragraphs discussing exactly HOW to use technology in the classroom, about how NECESSARY it is in this changing world, how critical it is to literacy, to reasoning, to research, to finding a job or a college. How important it is for teachers to feel empowered and competent with such technology, to be able to troubleshoot and solve problems with ethernet cards or firewall whatevers. How we need to have a culture of accountability and mutual respect in the room so students can work independently.

But my students never took typing. Keyboarding is arduous and time-consuming; thirty minutes leaves barely enough time to open a document. None of the laptops accepts CDs for saving work (newsflash), nor do any of them print, so I had to run around the room with a single USB drive, opening and saving every kid's piece. (Surely there is a printer attached to the cart, you say. Yes! There is! But it doesn't COMMUNICATE with the machines, despite the thicket of cords running from it to the laptops and back again.) My students also might be able to wield Treos and Sidekicks with considerable swagger, but "saving as" or "undoing" or formatting or using shortcuts or even trying to muddle through it when you're not sure, on a real computer, is daunting or impossible.

Try managing that train wreck while simultaneously managing the day-to-day order of your students, who by this late date, are furious they have to be in school at all. And frankly so am I. Did you feel the air outside today? Jesus.

The Late Late Show

2006-05-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

I'm one of a cluster of first-year teachers at my school who can be found late at night peering out from behind our desks, shouting into the hallway, "You're still HERE?" So it was tonight, though we have the succor of later and later sunsets, the alpenglow from the sides of old brownstones...no nagging fear of the long walk to the A train in the dark, as in December and February. One of my students, a plucky, quiet freshman with kind eyes, was jumped last week, and bears a long scar across his forehead, pink against his ruddy brown.

The new unit I'm teaching, the last one of the semester (17 instructional days and counting), urges students to become the media, to report on their hood from the inside. Today they shared the slogans they came up with as a refutation to the neighborhood's most enduring slogan, "Bed Stuy, Do or Die." L and S, two mouthy, self-possessed freshman girls, were excited about a t-shirt concept they came up with: on the front, it reads, "Bed Stuy Do or Die," in a red circle with a diagonal line through it; on the back, it says, "Bump What You Heard, in Bed Stuy We Stay Alive."

Sweet, nerdy G, who beelines to class head first before the bell rings and has a mild speech impediment, came up with, "Bedford Stuyvesant, a clean, nonviolent place to live." Not so much a slogan as a plea for understanding. G is more terse than nuanced, literal than ironic. He's like a drill bit: he bores through subtlety and goes straight to the point, dispensing utterly with pretense. I wonder if he has Asperger's.

I am planning this unit completely on the fly. I've been day to to day for weeks now, but not with anything this ambitious. The goal is ethnography, guerilla media, concrete artifacts with which to infiltrate the streets. The only thing keeping this from being completely beyond my reach is the insight and inspiration from this brilliant pair of women who are starting a youth media internship program with our school. They're the first people I've had conversations with in the building with any interest in progressive pedagogies or interrogating traditional power structures. It figures that they don't actually work there. "You could talk about whether graffiti is dirty or if it's art," said A yesterday as we scrawled eagerly across our notepads.

Then, a cold shower of sorts: the next day, I found myself in an empty classroom, planning lessons on my laptop. A half-dozen other teachers drifted in to eat Chinese food and gossip (None of us has our own room; there are twice as many teachers as classrooms). "I was too drunk this morning to make lunch," Ms. C said as she begged some General Tso's chicken off the music teacher. "You went out last night and didn't tell me?" accused N, a staff member who stays at school late every night, busy with things like watching Cypress Hill videos on the A/V equipment. "You're assuming she needs to go out to get that drunk," countered another.

Call me critical. Call me sensitive and fussy. Call me MORAL. Call me what you will, but--

Ew?

Is it too much to ask to want colleagues who don't think that's funny? MAYBE IN THIS LINE OF WORK, DON'T GET SHIT-FACED ON A SCHOOL NIGHT. Hello? Do we not teach children?

Another cold shower: my principal pulled me aside in the main office the other day (his impromptu conferences always seem whispered and conspiratorial). "What are you teaching now?" he asked. If our department had a curriculum map, or any kind of consensus on what to teach, he might not have to ask that question. But we don't, so I make it up as I go along, much to my chagrin. "Reporting on the neighborhood, youth media, that kind of thing," I said. "Okay, from here on out, cover any aspect of the U.S. History or Living Environment Regents that requires ELA skills. DBQ's, long passages, graph reading. You got me?" "Sure," I said. You got it, I thought with disappointment, wish I'd known that before throwing myself into this other thing.

It's not that I'm so against helping them with the Regents. I want them to pass with flying colors. It's that the principal, once again, is trying to put sprinkles on the frosting without baking the cake in the first place. It's that the English curriculum is so nebulous that it's perfectly reasonable to highjack it and harness the time for standardized test prep. Of course, the Regents require literacy skills. I will make that abundantly clear in the next two weeks. But HE ASSUMED THERE WAS NOTHING TOO IMPORTANT GOING ON IN MY ROOM TO DISPLACE. And he's sort of right.

Literacy at my school is not treated as the bedrock of a child's education. Which, call me biased, I think it is. And it can share that place with quantitative reasoning or whatever, but any way you slice it, reading and writing are Really Bloody Important. So important the DOE gives children two periods of it in middle school and ninth grade; some schools keep that arrangement until they graduate.

How many times has our entire department met to discuss curriculum? Fewer than five times, I think. Certainly fewer than 10. How many literacy coaches do we have? Zero. How many administrators do we have with an ELA background? One, and she is in the building until eight o'clock most nights dealing with the parents of suspended students because she is a dean of discipline and behavior. I know I can talk to her about lesson planning, but I'd have to interrupt whatever she's doing, and she is always busy, with good reason. My AP said he'd arrange for me to meet with someone from the region to help with planning--a freelance literacy coach, sort of. But all that is outside of the momentum of our days. I don't want to have to leave the building or meet with people on Saturdays. There is nothing built in that ensures a cohesive English program.

And that, friends, is why I'm trying to transfer. Not that I've gotten any bites yet.
(Fingers crossed.)
(Suggestions as to NYC schools worth looking into are ardently welcome.)

The Great Thumbs McTavish

2006-05-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

I'm all thumbs when it comes to this blogging thing. I still don't know how to link to something in a post, or how to edit my "blogroll." [If I did, I would link first to Sheila Callaghan's blog (http://www.sheilacallaghan.com/blog/), which I've lately become obsessed by, along with Overheard in New York (overheardinnewyork.com)]. (Sheila Callaghan is a playwright, a newly knighted New Dramatist, whose blog I found after weeks of searching for something written by a great writer that wasn't industry gossip or news or politics--like a personal zine. LiveJournal-ish but less journal-y, more like a continual, concise update of the view behind her uniquely compelling lens. Read it now.)

And I only just figured out how to read the comments people were posting! Apologies to anyone sitting there for more than a month, that must look so rude. It seemed natural to me that I was writing in a hidey-hole, read by no one, safe from praise or critique--but if I wanted to do that, I suppose I'd keep a locked diary, wouldn't I? This demands the best writing you can muster because there's an audience.

I'm going to be late for work if I don't tear my hands from this keyboard. I can hear Manhattan's birds and trucks and distant alarm clocks; no sun yet on this wet blanket morning. Reminds me of San Diego's June Gloom, my favorite weather pattern.

Resolving to get better at everything,
I remain,
Mlle. Ave. de la M. (is "magnolia" masculin ou feminine au francais??) (my french is so rusty it's been condemned.)

No, It's Just PMS

2006-05-11T17:26:00.000-07:00

After a Herculean suppression of mortified giggling and a debate over how to spell it, two of my students today finally scribbled the question they wanted to ask me on a piece of paper and bolted from the room. I opened up the folded wad on my desk and read it:

"Are you pregnant?"

At least they knew how to spell it.

"I won't be mad," I said to C, who was cowering in the office. "Just tell me why you asked. Is it something other students are talking about?" She nodded. We walked into the hallway.

"Is it because I have to pee all the time?" I wondered. "It's that," she and her accomplice admitted, but, apparently, "lately you've been wearing loose-fitting clothes," they observed. (I haven't bought new clothes since October; I wear the same three pairs of slacks and four Oxford shirts every single week without variation.)

"And you're real moody lately."

I explained that I have to pee all the time because of the relationship between my kidneys and my blood (which is mysterious, but certifiably medical in nature). I will probably always have to pee all the time. I pulled my shirt taut around my middle and demonstrated the utter lack of a prenatal bulge. "And the reason I'm pissy isn't because I'm PREGNANT, it's because so many of my students think they don't have to turn in HOMEWORK anymore!" I cried. "You would be moody, too!" Sheesh.

Can't a lady lose her patience with her errant students every once in a spring? I yell at them once, and suddenly I'm fucking pregnant. I am trying not to be appalled.

When I was in high school, I "observed" my teachers in the same way: that is, with the highly subjective, solipsistic, skewering scrutiny the teenage mind is famous for. My teachers were not human, certainly not when I was a freshman; they were cartoonish, hideous, an affront to my taste, looming and alien. They smelled funny, they had terrible hair, and they couldn't dress to save their lives.

We smelled like fruity body spray, cigarettes, junk food, chlorine, dirty-room-stink, drug store perfume, and pot smoke. We dyed our hair unnatural colors, left the stains on our foreheads, and let the roots grow for months. We bought our clothes in thrift stores and they fit terribly; we bought them in silly boutiques at the mall, and they fit terribly. Our BODIES fit terribly.

We took our spectacular self-consciousness and painted it all over the adults who made careers out of spending more time with us than our parents. We sprayed the place.

I taught my last class of the day at 2:30. This was before the pregnancy question. The girls were all at an assembly, so I had a class of eleven boys. I spent a significant portion of the period waiting for them to suppress their laughter; they held their faces, changed seats, stood outside; nothing worked. "I've got all day, guys," I said solemnly. "I'm good, Ms. M, I got it, I can listen now," one would say, and the boy across from him would erupt. What were they laughing at, you ask?

Someone farted.

Sinus Marner

2006-05-10T19:08:00.000-07:00

My by-product is small mountains of used Kleenex. I took a test in an allergist's office (he was appalling and brusque), wherein he injected my left arm with serums (sera?) containing, respectively, tree pollen, dust mites, and essence of grass, dog, and cockroach. Little mounds of red at regular intervals under my skin. I waited for ten minutes to see which would itch; those were what, it was discovered, I am allergic to. Where do you get essence of dog? Is that in a medical catalogue?

Ten minutes later: positive for all allergens except dog.

I am most allergic to spring. The world thaws and blooms, and my sinuses swell and tickle and spout fountains.

"Can you, um, do your best to throw these away?" C says politely, walking to the trash can with a wadded-up tissue he found between the couch cushions. When I blow my nose, it sounds like a poorly-tuned horn in a sort of bass/tenor pitch. Mornings, sardined on the A train between silent commuters, my giant, distended teacher's bag on my lap, folded magazine poised in front of my face, I pray I'll make it to Nostrand without having to blow my nose. It grosses people out. They don't say anything, but I can tell. The way I sound, it's like I'm doing it on purpose. Like when a big frat-type guy burps.

"I look like death, warmed over," I complain in the morning, examining my red-rimmed eyes in the mirror. I have the palest complexion at my 99% black school already, and now I'm red-eyed with dark blue circles underneath (a symptom of congestion); I'm an an Irish fucking corpse. "Maybe if you got rid of the sickle," C says helpfully as I leave the apartment.

Student of the Week

2006-05-09T15:16:00.000-07:00

"You sound like my mom," K says disgustedly, "Always sayin' my name, K, K, stop doin' this, stop doin' that." "K," I say calmly, again, "return to your seat." He sucks his teeth like a champion and slams his fist on the table, emphatically protesting my draconian regime of seat-sitting and keeping hands to oneself.

"Ms. M," say three girls at triangular ends of the room, "Ms. M, I need--can I go to the--can you--but I--read this--" All three at once. "K," I bellow, "spit out whatever is in your mouth and sit your butt in that seat!!" "Ms. M," the girls start again, C always urgently, plaintively whispering, J declaiming in her trademark staccato, like a bee-bee gun. "K, you have two choices," I growl. "Return to your seat or stand outside with Mr. H," the apoplectic gym teacher who does hall duty this period. "Ms. M," the girls continue, joined this time by a male voice: D, seven feet tall, all limbs, leaning back in his chair, defiantly chewing. "What're we 'posed to be doin'?" he demands indignantly.

There are directions on the board. I have repeated them twice. I asked two students to say them back to me. I asked the class, "Yeah?" and received several tired nods. Each student has a worksheet I designed--with careful attention to font size and clarity of phrasing--in front of them with the directions in plain sight.

"Yeah, what are we supposed to be doing?" two more echo.

K has returned to the vicinity of his seat by this time, but he isn't sitting. He is dancing and contorting his face for the rest of the class.

K has a raw score of about 30 in my class, 55 being failure (an F), 100 being total success (an A). Every marking period, his parents and I have another ritual: after several installments of "K needs to do his homework if he wants to pass this class," and "K needs to control his outbursts," I call to say, "K is failing this marking period."

His father screams, "K!!" I pull the phone away from my ear. "K! Get over here now! Why is Ms. M calling me to say you're failing her class??" I can hear K in the background, whining ineffectually. His father yells a lecture at him for five or ten straight minutes. He keeps me on the phone the entire time.

Later, in the principal's office, Mr. S, a deep-voiced grizzly bear of a man in suspenders and a tie, listens as I mention K's latest show. "And you know who else is in that class?" I say. "KC and A." His jaw drops and he guffaws. "It's like the nightmare trifecta. I spend the whole time putting out the fires they set, I can't teach anything." "They're insane, Ms. M," he confirms. Inside, I'm like, Huh? YOU THINK THEY'RE INSANE, TOO? "Nuts," I agree. "K is like...he's like the Three Faces of Eve. The Three Faces of K. But it's more than three. He's Olivia DeHaviland!" he cries.

He hunkers down. "They won't be in your class anymore," he says. Again, I think, Huh?

"We'll take them out. Give them a lesson to do with a supervisor, and leave it in Mr. A's mailbox. You won't be seeing them again."

It's like the principal's mafia. "We'll take care of him," I picture someone in a fedora saying under a pool of street light on a desolate highway in East New York.

Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Battery Seller?

2006-03-04T06:34:00.000-08:00

Subway ride home, five o'clock: I'm surreptitiously reading the New Yorker. A man in a knee-length down jacket and old shoes slips through the throng of commuters. "Excuse me, pardon me, sorry, excuse me," he says, making his way to the middle of the car. His purpose, his ceremonious tone, is like the one panhandlers use when they hold court between stops. I bury my nose in my magazine with reflexive, deferential embarrassment.

"I'm selling Duracell batteries," he declares with the flourish of a salesman from a movie in the 1940s. "Not Dinacell, not Puracell," he clarifies, "Duracell batteries, the one and only..." I peer through shoulders and handbags, but I can't see him. The only people I have seen sell batteries on the subway spoke the barest monotone English, traipsing downcast through the cars in a beeline for the door. "These are the best batteries on the market, and I am selling them for only one dollar...and I DELIVER these batteries right TO you..." he goes on, his announcer's voice soaring over the din. You would think he was selling encyclopedias. Fuller brushes.

The he pitches the batteries in perfect Spanish.

Then he does it again in French.

I remember reading about a homeless man in Riverside Park who had just died; when his family was contacted in Alabama, it was confirmed that he held a degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. When approached for assistance, he had angrily insisted he was fine, and went back to studiously rearranging the trash cans in his stretch of park.

People are laughing by this time, bewildered at why this man with such oratorical finesse is pushing batteries on a subway train, which is right up there with selling chiclets on the street in Mexico. Who is he? What has befallen him? Does anyone buy his batteries?

My stop comes, and the story is bookended by the closing doors; the Best Battery Seller That Ever Lived is whisked uptown, and I wonder where is home.

Once More, With Feeling

2006-02-27T14:52:00.000-08:00

I spent the first day back after that weird mid-February break in an existentialist funk. I itched for a community of teachers who collaborate more than complain, who have more time than between bites on a pitiful lunch break to commune. I like my colleagues. But my school doesn't make time for interaction between grown-ups, and it's easier to gossip when you only have 30 seconds.

Mr. W, another new teacher, stole five minutes after ninth period to chat. "Go home," he ordered when he found me in my classroom separating essays into piles. "But there's always more to do!" I pleaded. "You'll be the teacher who finds a way to spend her entire summer planning curriculum," he accused, noting that when he arrived this morning at 7:30, I had already been there for an hour. "Dude," I said, "I do that so I don't feel like a total asshole in front of my students every day. Not that it works," I admitted, and he nodded, like, duh. "But that's the problem," I declared. "I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm doing it by myself. In the dark. Gagged and blindfolded."

It's the same story, the same sad prayer I've been singing since September: I don't know what I'm doing, so I assume I'm doing it badly, and I live every day in fear that I'm ruining their education. When I say it out loud, it sounds so absurd and self-punitive. But what is education, if not a matter of life and death?

One moment, I am devoted to them, wiling to jump in front of trains for their literacy, attentive and reverent and fierce, teasing out their ideas and epiphanies, endlessly patient. I believe they'll transform in front of my eyes, immediately. The next, I'm laundry on the line, battered by the gales of their solipsistic whining, their stubborn resistance, their utter lack of perspective. They vanish into short attention span tunnels, and I'm weary with the effort to pull them back. They don't say what I want them to say. They don't buy what I'm selling. I point to the light, and they don't believe me. I'm supposed to call their parents, all the time, over and over, for the same thing: M isn't turning in his homework; he's so bright, it would be a shame to see him fail for this. Please make sure L comes to school on time. Please tell E to stop chewing gum in class.

This is my professional life, pleading with the parent of a fourteen-year-old to get her to spit out her gum.

Speaking of utter lacks of perspective: from here, up to my neck in it, I want to take a long hot shower and run for the hills. Naked, screaming.

Say Goodbye to the Nineties

2006-02-23T19:41:00.000-08:00

I was packing to leave my Brooklyn apartment for the new cohabitat in Manhattan. I don't have a lot of stuff to begin with, but I was down to the ruthless last stages of pack vs. throw out, and I came across a plastic bag (in a cupboard I can only reach with a ladder) containing every mix tape given me since 1998. Do people even have tape players anymore? I had one in my station wagon, which was 14 years old, but I sold the car when I moved to the city.

There was "Music for My Emotional Friends," from my elfin friend J, who became my compatriot one lonely winter in Louisville and took me in the next summer in exchange for weeding his garden, which I ruined. He had been doing impressions of a strange Turkish pen pal he had who left messages on his cell phone that went, "Hello J, I am Zana, I will talk to you late, emotional friend," in a monotone that betrayed his limited understanding of English. J had a dusty, esoteric record collection accumulated via intuition and yard sales, from which he lovingly made mix tapes during the violent summer rain storms Kentucky is famous for.

There was "Braille Dinosaur," from A, the youngest curmudgeon I ever lived with, who moved, eventually, to Louisville. It was a perfectly calibrated compendium of sing-along-able indie rock, my salvation the summer I was a postal worker. The industrial din of the machines was so loud I could belt songs at the top of my lungs and no one could hear me.

There was the electroclash mix from Cool A, 2002, when FischerSpooner and Adult. and Peaches and LadyTron were all the rage.

There was the Bob Dylan mix from JS, who I pined after for months.

"Nostalgia on Tape" was courtesy of D, made the night before she graduated, a year before me, and had the Velvet Underground, Sleater Kinney, Joni Mitchell, and a bunch of riot grrrl bands that sang her particular coming-of-age pathos.

There was "HotBlood," a beautiful hip-hop tapestry from a boy I had a fling with the week I turned 21, on vacation in San Francisco.

I threw them all away.

Tapes sound worse with time; their substance literally degrades after each playing. I wasn't sure what I was holding onto by stashing them in hard-to-reach closets. I'll keep the memory of the particular stretch of Route Nine in western Massachusetts that always reminds me of D and the Velvet Underground, the memory of feeling like Dancer in the Dark as I harmonized Built to Spill in front of a postal conveyor belt, the delight at receiving a mix tape from JS at all, which, admittedly, I rarely listened to. As I packed, I played the music (on a laptop) I loved to sing to when I was in college: the Magnetic Fields, Belle and Sebastian, Billy Bragg, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nada Surf, the Red House Painters. Bearing witness to the end of an era, the end of my plucky tenure as literary nomad, roommate, commuter. The end of sleeping alone, ever.

Back East (an essay)

2006-01-20T19:48:00.000-08:00

May 2004

“What was it like?” I demanded on quiet, interminable afternoons in my grandmother’s mobile home.

“Oh…” she said distractedly, “There was a tire swing at the side of the house…We had our milk delivered once a week and put it in the ice box.” She’d trail off. It was always the same answer, the tire swing, the milk, the ice box. My grandmother had migrated west from Binghamton, New York, in her twenties, and we were her native-born San Diegan descendants. I grew up with the nagging suspicion I was missing out on essential elements of a classical childhood, the kind reflected in my great aunt Nancy’s homemade Christmas cards, which I picked through obsessively on similarly quiet, sunlit afternoons, waiting for my mother to come home. My grandmother read mystery novels in the other room, and I dug through old photographs, memorizing faces, age progressions, and hairstyles, unable to distinguish between who was a blood relative and who was just a neighbor on a campout. I felt like an astronaut from the future coming to inspect the remnants of my family’s history a thousand years before. I knew I was related to these people, but I felt cosmically far from them.

* * *

Unlike the extravagant seasonal changes back east, the ones in California are slight and barely noticeable except to natives. A single deciduous tree lost its 20 leaves by Thanksgiving in front of our apartment each year. As a child, I prayed for snow when the morning temperature dipped below 45, as if the snow that would actually fall would cloak the slopes of the neighboring landfill enough to be able to sled down them.

My mother took me back east, to Whitney Point, the village near Binghamton where aunt Nancy lives, for the first time when I was 10. Certain details stand out: everyone smoked, even indoors. The food was different: freshly killed venison, a lot of mayonnaise. My cousins had accents: they flattened words like “Mom” and “coffee” when my side of the family carried them delicately in the middle of the mouth, with the non-inflection of television newscasters. A clothesline ran from Aunt Nancy’s kitchen to a pole in the yard, and you could manipulate it from inside using a pulley.

My cousins—there seemed to be hundreds—were loud and frank, even when it seemed impolite. They’d never met me, but were as brusque and familiar with me as they were with their own children. Their children—my second cousins—were less forgiving. It was clear they’d spent a decade's worth of lakeside campouts falling into an intimate, confident rhythm with one another. I learned years later they thought it was strange I spent so much time in the tent, reading.

I look at the pictures of that visit now—they’re in an album among dozens in aunt Nancy’s living room—and I scan eagerly for my face, for a flash of my brief, first insinuation into the tapestry. I was there for two weeks. At 10, I am mousy and not swift. Even my build is different from my lanky, sturdier cousins. My second cousin Julia, an incomprehensible 12, cocks her hip to one side, daring the camera. Elizabeth is holding something, searching. Lauren, on someone’s hip, knits her brows, ready to wail. John, never self-conscious, doesn’t notice that someone is taking a picture. The sun is setting; this moment belongs to them. I think of the old photographs, choreographed black-and-white pictures with all the children in a row, from oldest to youngest, the littlest ones kneeling in the grass with their hands on a ball.

Fourteen years later, the pictures from the campout have that bygone quality—the light, over the years, gone slanted and nostalgic, almost yellow. “Look at my mom’s hair,” someone says.

* * *

Weeks after returning home to San Diego, with its sea cliffs, freeway grids, and approaching fire season, I knew I’d been to a foreign country. A foreign countryside. It reared my grandparents, and their parents and cousins, and the ones before that, until you went all the way back to Scotland, England, Germany, and Holland, which was so distant as to barely register. It did not rear me. Not yet.

This was a place that managed, much longer than southern California, to retain its smallness, in corner grocery stores, smoky, unapologetic diners, and flat, nasal accents. Towns the length of a fading Main Street, announced only by a sign reading, “Thickly Settled.” Other signs bear obscure phrases like “Frost Heaves” or “Raise Plough Now.”

At 10, I noticed every detail with the precision of an anthropologist. I missed it terribly and cried and cried in the bunk bed I shared with no one.

* * *

When I moved east in 1998 and decided to stay, I did my grandmother’s journey in reverse. I’ve changed my orientation, taken on winter and black coffee and a propensity for discussing miserable weather at length. But secretly, it is still marvelous and strange, and so far, my eastern relatives show no signs of becoming ordinary.

“They weave their own wool,” I explain to friends. “They knit. They make quilts. They go bird watching. They built a barn.

“They built a barn,” I repeat. My family in California have taken lately to more adventurous culinary exploits, like roasted root vegetables and Yorkshire pudding at Christmas. They buy their sweaters at department stores. I have never known any of them to make a quilt; aunt Judy crocheted afghans in the 70s.

It isn’t how we do things in California: we are my grandmother’s children. We are sunny and polite where my eastern relatives are sardonic and cheerily confrontational. We make decisions based on the availability of parking, freeway traffic, and major sales, and they learned the pragmatism required to get groceries in a snowstorm, to bear half a year of totally indoor activity, of bleak, icy hillsides and the hideous fallout of a mid-March thaw. Southern California is where people vacation, whether it’s winter or summer, and growing up there gives you a languid, convenience-oriented outlook. Maybe it's just that I'm familiar with them, but my side of the family never makes me feel like I stumbled into a living issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

Aunt Nancy makes invitations for the Memorial Day picnic and talent show by hand. They think big: under her son Andy’s direction, 10 of us accompanied my cousin Rick and his daughter Tara this year as they sang “Summertime” by blowing into bottles filled to specified depths with water, all tuned perfectly with a pitch finder. Andy’s sister Marna makes a dozen scarves in a weekend; aunt Nancy spins her own wool from local sheep. Once, she made a hat by spinning the discarded dog hair from aunt Judy's collie.

My cousin Andy smokes in his mother’s living room in the winter, sitting on a short wooden stool, exhaling into the chimney.

There is also the barn. Six years in the making, it’s nearly complete; it houses the talent show and the mid-winter garlic party. (Cousin Johnny’s garlic is a local delicacy.) They salvaged the frame from a derelict barn in a neighboring town and built the rest from scratch. Marna made a book about it, compiling pictures and a narrative of its gradual progress; it's called “Come Along With John,” and it follows the rhyme and meter of “The House that Jack Built.”

There are few occasions, and little available land or resources, for barn-building, or barn-using, in San Diego. Barns were erected in the inland valleys a long time ago, when California was still wild, but the way the venture capitalists bought and carved up and cultivated the land guided the state’s trajectory in such a way that today, my native countryside is tidily sewn by close-together, flimsily built housing developments, tile-roofed outdoor malls, and their mile-wide parking lots.

It’s part of the reason I fled east. I can go to aunt Nancy’s on my own now—I don’t need a picnic or a major holiday or a cross-country trip to do it. I imagine this makes me more of a regular, makes time spent there less excruciating. I’m less likely to mourn the passing of its sweetness before it begins.

Last December, I drove four and a half hours, narrowly avoiding my first snowstorm, to Whitney Point for the annual tree-lighting ceremony. (The town is small enough that its tree-lighting has an audience of 60 people, 14 of whom belong to the junior high school marching band.) Marna joins us; she is here twice a month.

“I thought my family was going to curl up and die when I left for college,” she confides when I ask her why she didn’t settle further away than Albany. She is the second oldest of her brothers and sisters. As a teenager, she would hurry home from school to help her mother care for the babies.

The cousins are a flock, a rare species of bird that managed to flourish, unimpeded, on their own island. It’s hard not to feel left out. “Around here, you’ve got to speak up,” someone informed me years ago, jostling in a buffet line under a canopy. They are used to straining to be heard over the din and resourceful enough not to be fussy. In their presence, I hover at the sidelines, watching. I am still in the tent, reading, so to speak.

As the first snow falls, Marna and five cousins play Pinochle in the kitchen. Everyone is smoking. The overhead is bright enough to make your eyes water; the sun set eight hours ago. They howl with accusation and belly laughs and eat nuts from a can. They are not nostalgic; they have a million nights like this one. They don’t have the grievous suspicion that these moments are parceled out just so: gifts you have to notice before they’re lost.

I am in the next room, sharing the couch with Aunt Nancy as she mends my pea coat. I blink and remind myself that she knew my grandmother as a child. She was born in 1921, before Binghamton became a post-industrial ghost town. She lived in the house with the tire swing and the delivered milk. She is in all the photographs: lithe and red-mouthed in a pair of figure skates on a frozen pond; seated in the lamp light at her mother’s knee, watching her sew; cradling the first of nine babies, fresh-faced and a little scared, my Uncle Charlie standing behind her, his enormous hand delicately resting on her shoulder. People don’t live like she does anymore, not without irony or willful quirkiness. Her sons and daughters are handy and resourceful, but they have email addresses and give iPhoto slide shows.

The snow gets heavier outside; a log sputters in the fireplace. I feel the moment expiring; I commit it to memory with exacting detail; I picture telling it later. I want them to go on like this forever.

Actual "Actionability"

2006-01-20T03:50:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times today, re: Osama Bin Laden tape (ps, why is always a tape? wonders C; isn't that a little lo-fi? Is that to underscore the whole fundamentalist vs. Western libertine thing? Couldn't he Pod-cast it?):

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters that President Bush had been told about the tape on Thursday morning after an appearance in Virginia. Mr. McClellan said American intelligence agencies were trying to determine whether the tape provided clues about Al Qaeda's operations.

"If there is any actionable intelligence, we will act on it," Mr. McClellan said.

"We are winning," he said. "Clearly Al Qaeda and the terrorists are on the run, and that is why it is important that we do not let up, and do not stop, until the job is done."

And I thought my students had trouble articulating themselves. I mean, for fuck's sake. This man--and everyone else working in the Bush White House--talks and talks and talks, and NOTHING COMES OUT. His words turn to vapor the minute they hit the air.

What does this mean for, um, the American People? What does it mean that the folks in such visible, highly-compensated, diplomatic positions of global power DON'T SAY WHAT THEY MEAN? That they render language moot every time they open their mouths? Does it, like supply-side economics, have a trickle-down effect on the rest of us?

"Ms. M," my students say, gesturing, "I need help with the thingy-thing."
"The what?"
"The, um. The THINGY-thing. The, um. The--this," they say, pointing.
"What's that?"
"The THIRD PARAGRAPH."
"The conclusion?"
"Yeah," they say, rolling their eyes, like, Why didn't you say that in the first place if you knew what I meant?

"All right, what are the three kinds of narrators?" I ask during a review session.
"Um, the omunist," S says, spinning in a desk chair.
"The what?" I squeak.
"The omunist!" she says with more conviction. No one else seems to think she's mistaken.
"The OMNISCIENT narrator?" I say, writing it on the board.
"Yeah, that."
"Say it," I plead gently.
"Omunist."
My face crumples.
"Om...nih...shint," she says triumphantly. My head drops in gratitude. At least my students have the excuse of learning a new language. Scott McClellan has only the excuse that he's learning Doublespeak.

On a lighter note, don't get me started on the truncation of proper nouns to save time, like "Lex and Mad" for "Lexington and Madison Avenues." Are one or two syllables really so time-consuming?

Ambivalent with regard to hope in the future, I remain,
Ms. Mag Av

Better Living Through Verbs

2006-01-15T20:31:00.000-08:00

I used to fantasize about spending the summer living with a half-dozen friends in an airy clapboard house in a sleepy town somewhere in New England or upstate New York, where we'd all have incidental part-time jobs that we never went to, and we'd put old tea towels in the windows for curtains, and we'd spend afternoons on the huge, wide, screened-in porch drinking beer, half-naked, dozing, with Willa Cather novels folded on our laps as the sun barely moved.

I used to think it would be a nice life working behind the counter in an independent bookstore, the kind that had a cat napping in the window.

I used to think it would be great to spend a summer waiting tables on the Cape, or Fire Island, where my only responsibilities would be making cash and getting a tan.

I used to get crushes on nonverbal carpenters and line cooks and awkward tomboys in bands who made crafts. I fell almost in love once, six states away, with a rootless, Dumpster-diving ambient musician who rarely bathed and wrote me anguished typewritten letters on paper bags.

All of which is to say, again, that I seem to have become a Grown-up in the last 12 months.

I turned 25, already having fallen in love with a man 10 years older;

I got a job that entitles me to both a pension and a dizzying amount of authority; I can silence a teenager with a glance; I have developed peripheral radar that allows me to scold someone while facing the other direction.

My expenses are painstakingly transcribed in a series of spreadsheets; the first section I grab when we get the Sunday Times is Real Estate, even if a down payment is years and years away.

I wear the same pair of hip but sensible, not-cheap jeans every day; my sleek but sensible boots are waterproof and cost over $200; I turned down a free haircut from my best friend and paid for a professional one, and it's more classic than hip. Somewhere between mid-party costume changes at Hampshire and becoming a school teacher, I stopped performing my identity. It no longer seems important to affect the perfect balance of Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby, mid-century sailors, Dorian Gray, and the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night. Not that I was very good at it, anyway.

At work, I notice the students who stand out for their turned-up collars or distinctive corduroy jackets or matching green Chuck Taylors and polo shirts, the ones with locks or Afros, the ones who reinvent ghetto-fabulous by way of Angela Davis and indie rock and preppy 80s hip outfits, and I remember how fun it was to dress up.

But letting go of it seems to fall in line with everything else I've been loosening my grip on, from identity politics and first impressions to cute, impractical clothes. It's like I tell my students when they write essays: Write with the verbs, lose the adjectives. Write the action; don't slow down by describing it. Cut to the damn chase.

Do Over

2006-01-11T19:26:00.000-08:00

"So apparently Anthony Lane, who I'd always pictured as being, like, 65--"
"And gay--" I chimed in.
"And gay, and British," my boyfriend went on, "Get this. Apparently he's 38, and--"
"Get. The fuck. Out," I exhaled.
"I KNOW! He's this British wunderkind who, like, went to Oxford or whatever, and he's 38!"
"Ugh, Oxford," I said. "I'm doing my childhood over, I'm going to Oxford."

Speaking of the New Yorker, there is a story this week (beautifully titled "Prairie Fire," I'd insert a link here if I knew how to do that) about a genius child who committed suicide at 14 last year. "Profoundly gifted" was the phrase used by the psychologists in the article, who also claimed to be psychics; they were convinced he was an angel. So was his father: "Oh, Martin's very spiritually aligned," they said.

C was talking to me tonight about light years and the width of the Milky Way (one hundred thousand light years, which are six trillion years long), and my brain started to go all fuzzy. "That's how I know I'm not profoundly gifted," I tell him.
"That's how you know? Like otherwise you weren't sure?" he says.

I wonder, if my mom hadn't smoked pot while she was pregnant with me, maybe I would have been a genius. If I'd gone to Montessori school instead of California's public schools, which the state renders less fiscally important than prisons, maybe I'd be better at tapping into as-yet-unfathomed intellectual depths, or at least not procrastinate so much. Maybe if I'd gone to Columbia instead of Hampshire and had a more bracing exposure to the canon, my brain wouldn't go fuzzy so quickly. But if I wanted to go to Columbia, maybe I shouldn't have handwritten my personal essay in tiny letters right on the application, or spent my junior year writing poetry about eucalyptus trees and blowing off AP U.S. History.

Anyway, J says the Ivy League is overrated. "They care about their image, their bottom line, and keeping you and me out," she says witheringly, less than halfway through a program in education and mathematics at, ahem, Columbia.

Life is what, 80, 100 years long, and I'm wasting time wishing I'd gone to Oxford?

Thinking about the trillions of light years and stars makes C feel small in comparison, and he's relieved. Like Joan Didion says, quoting the Episcopal litany: as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, "which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away" (The Year of Magical Thinking, 189-90).

Yes.

Mountains and earthquakes are bigger than where you went to college, bigger than--let's just say the phrase "where you went to college" disintegrates when you consider mountains and earthquakes, like flowers pressed between pages of old books disintegrate when you try to handle them.

Most nights before bed, I try to shake the gripping fear that I'm ruining the education of forty-four ninth graders five days a week, mainly by remembering the smallness. Everything else--earthquakes, time, millions of humans, gravity, God, regret--are so big that my towering worry and I are rendered, thankfully, tiny as a dash of salt.

Patient with spring's slow trip north, I remain,
Ms. Magnolia Avenue

The Case Against Creative Teaching

2006-01-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

Confession number one:

Fourteen-year-olds don't like to hear me talk for more than two minutes at a time. I mean, would you?

Confession number two:

They also prefer, perplexingly, to copy notes from a chalk board (or in my case, a gleaming white dry erase board) over discussing interpretations of literature in their own words, with me or with each other. They like boundaries and clear expectations. They like to be told what to do; or, if they don't like it, they are used to it. Familiar is comfortable.

Third, most horrifying confession:

I like it when they're quietly, obediently, copying said notes. I like boundaries and clear expectations. I hate anarchy, especially teenage anarchy.

The remarkable thing about today is that I didn't feel like I'd been beaten against a reef. Was it because my lesson included only a quiz, note-copying, and listening to a recorded tape of the novel we're reading? Mostly I sat next to the tape player and looked alternately thoughtful/absorbed and fierce, as if to say, I dare you to fall asleep in my class. I dare you to look distracted. I dare you to chew gum, young gunslingers. But I said relatively little. I'd stop the tape occasionally to clarify Steinbeck's language and Depression-era idioms, but the quiz, the notes, and the book taught my students today. I just rode in the front and made sure we didn't careen off the road.

As an earnest student teacher all of six months ago, I recoiled at the thought of having students COPY NOTES. The horror! They should learn how to take notes from a spoken lecture, the way you're supposed to in college!

But you know, I tried that, and I've got two words for you: baby steps. It was chaos. They balked and snorted like a bunch of scared horses.

I retreated to the board notes method, employed by every other teacher in the building. I am offering a modest reward to the book or Master's class or opportune stairwell conversation that will teach me to bridge the gap between note-copying and real note-taking. Until then, I'll babysit the World's Most Boring Teacher trophy.

Sometimes I picture my class, and I compare it the memory of heady discussions of Marxist feminism and Anchee Min at my experimental college in the Berkshires. The gap between them seems the width of the universe.

Today's finest moment:
"What do you think he means when he says Curley's got 'yella jackets in his drawers?'" I ask the kids as we listen to Of Mice and Men.
"He's got condoms in his pocket!"
"He's got doo-doo in his pants!"
I shake my head. "Ever hear someone say they've got ants in their pants? Curley's itching for a fight."
I did an impression of Curley, stalking agitatedly down an aisle, my hands poised on imaginary pistols. Skyler laughed so hard she started crying and had to collect herself in the hallway.

Believing in the dignity of clowns, I remain,
Ms. Magnolia

Timeline

2006-01-09T18:14:00.000-08:00

I have not seen the following items for at least ninety days (years?):
Paralytic crushes
Pants held together with safety pins
The inside of a bar
The view from behind a waiter's service station
The A/C platform after midnight

I called Jim T, a friend from way, way back, in California--it had been over a year since we'd spoken last-- "Nooooo!" he let out in an awed whisper when he answered. "Yessssss!" I confirmed. We went back and forth like that for half a block. "I'm a TEACHER in BROOKLYN, can you imagine?" I said. "NO!" he cried again. In a voice made small with affection, he said, "I guess you're all grown up now."

It's been nearly a year since I left Philadelphia for New York; six months since I gave up waiting tables for teaching ninth graders; more than a year since I forfeited useless pining, coffeeshop gawking, and dates with my gay roommate for the hard-won, bone-deep satisfaction of an earth-bound, real-time relationship; and an almost half-decade since I came to New York in the first place as an apartment-hopping boozehound-cum-playwright about to wipe out her unimpressive checking account. (No disrespect to gay roommate dates.) ( R.I.P. gay roommate dates, since he moved to San Francisco six months ago, anyway.)

Even though I spend a disproportionate amount of time chronicling the ways I chafe against my job--and fantasizing about a career in academia--I can say with surety that these dilemmas are more redeeming than ones encountered in previous lives (jobs). More redeeming than the temperature of steak for an asshole on an expense account who won't tip. Than making the right number of copies for the board members. And don't tell the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, but also more redeeming than the dilemmas posed by professional dramaturgy, because the last time I checked, not only was public education something the rest of the world had heard of, but they actually pay me for it. (No disrespect to dramaturgs; they aren't to blame for a gutted NEA and an apocalypse of arts appreciation in this country.)

I have to get up in nine hours and try to explain point of view and foreshadowing in Of Mice and Men to forty-four ninth graders tomorrow. 'Night.

Grammatically resolute, I remain,
Ms. Magnolia Avenue

Tonight I Waited on Thurston Howell

2004-11-24T21:40:00.000-08:00

"Did you just seat me with Thurston Howell?" I asked the manager. We giggled. The man at table 10 had an English accent, a striped (like red, white, and blue) Oxford shirt under a tweed sport coat, and spread his arms across the table like a black jack dealer. "Tell us what's good," he trilled. I found out later he was an actor from Los Angeles. His name, though I won't repeat it here, was something similar to Thurston Howell, or Winthrop Westinghouse, or Damian Forrest or Tybalt Whitney. You get the idea.

Sexual tension with aforementioned manager ratcheting up a notch: I have very brief, mid-dining room fantasies while I'm carrying martinis about making out with him in the alley behind the coat room. "Ew, not," my roommate says, not understanding at all. Tonight, he came up beside me while I entered an order in the computer and lightly rubbed the small of my back, which became taut at that moment. Which, if I didn't think he was so hot, would so be against the law. But these digressions turn food-service hours into hot minutes. They are vital.

Besides, this is the best part. I don't want to ruin it by actually making out with him in the alley behind the coat room. Please.

Rheumatic Waitress Fever

2004-11-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

This was how it went: I'd approach a table carrying a tray of bottled water or beer or steak knives. I'd feel an attack coming on, swiftly place the tray on an empty table, smile tightly, apologetically, at the customers, and make a beeline for the wine closet, where I hoped they couldn't hear me hacking my brains out, involuntarily crying, my face sweaty, my nose running as though for its life. Wadding up cocktail napkins in my hands, dabbing my eyes (and eyeliner). "Are you okay?" a concerned co-worker would ask, peeking her head in. She'd flinch, without meaning to. "I'm fine," I garbled, sounding like Steven Tyler. I'd return to the table, where a couple waited expectantly, watching the head on their beer dwindle, the sparkling water go flat, as it sat on the other table. "Good evening," I'd murmur. "Have you decided on appetizers?"

I went home early. "I'm going to explode my lungs on a customer," I hissed to the manager at nine o'clock. "Don't seat me if you know what's good for you." (I made that last part up. I would never say that to a manager.) I was putting my receipts together, and found the one from a quadrangle of women ("Here's to the girls!" they toasted) seated in my section an hour before. "Look, Cindy," I said, showing the manager, who was also suffering from the Steven Tyler cough. She eyed the tip, which, at 20%, would have been about $40. It was $19.28. "We were so nice to them," she anguished. I served them special red zinfandel port, which doesn't even have a button on the computer; I served one woman the last two orders of stuffed calamari in the whole restaurant; I placed steak knives on the table BEFORE the steak came out. They were going to Hell.

Later, weary, at the bar while I waited for the bar manager to finish with my cash, I noticed the owner's handsome son several seats down. He looks like he was adopted from an island of Abercrombie & Fitch models; he looks nothing like his parents, who are slight and flaxen-haired. He dates the hostess, a pleasant twenty-two-year-old with the most amazing chest I've ever seen. She is sweet and genuine, but I hold a dim view of her talents as a hostess: she literally just stands there and looks pretty.

I wanted to turn to the owner's son and tell him his mother forgot to tip me on her last check; she owes me $12. For some reason, while I can hardly add or subtract, I have a nearly photographic memory for numbers; the $12 was for a $58 check from over a week ago. Of course, I did no such thing. I folded my money and left for the rainy bicycle ride home. Which, in a blurred, imagined London sort of way, ended up being beautiful.

Food Service/European Vacation

2004-10-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

Last night, at the restaurant where I work, the apoplectic sous chef was wearing glasses. I've never seen him wear glasses. He is, like nearly every chef I've worked with, arrogant, sensitive, volatile, and occasionally charming. As the expeditor, he wields more power with his orders and insults than even the executive chef, who stood last night fingering braised rabbit meat from the bone in a sort of Sunday haze, exhausted and focused. The sous chef's glasses were disorienting; they made him look like the sort of man I find attractive on the street: bookish, faggy, articulate. I resisted the urge to comment; complimenting a chef on his eyewear would be like laying my head down on his cutting board, pointing to my neck.

The braised rabbit didn't look as gruesome as I thought it would. "I wanted to make rabbit for a friend," the night manager told me, "but when I saw it in the case at the market, it looked like my skinned cat. I couldn't do it." I'm thinking, again, of becoming a vegetarian. But I haven't managed to really convert in the ten years since I considered it in the first place.

I made $14 in tips last night. I probably paid more in taxes for my hours than I earned in actual income. One of my tables, a tourist couple from the Netherlands, stuffed two dollars into my hand, saying, "That's for you. Put it toward your first trip to Europe."

My Mother the Post Office

2004-10-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

My mother and I talked till two a.m. "There's still a crack in my windshield," she told me. "Dude," I said, "just duct tape it." "I can't even afford duct tape," she said; "give me some for Christmas." "I can't afford duct tape, either, Mom," I said. "Steal some from your godfather," she advised. "Right," I said, "I'll give you duct tape and a couple joints in your Christmas stocking."

"I met Alita's son and his long-distance girlfriend," she told me. She and Alita work together at the post office. "He couldn't stop smiling. I think they might be one of those couples that hit it right the first time, you know?" I nodded, even though she couldn't see me. "And," she continued, "they're both the products of, you know, long marriages. I think those people might have a better idea. Of, like, relationships." My parents were never married; I've never met my father. "Awesome," I said, rolling my eyes.

One time? We were walking in downtown Amherst, Massachusetts, near where I went to college. And I was like, "Mom, your perfume smells gooood." "It should," she answered, "this shit's more expensive than drugs!"