Happy St. Patty's

The weekend before St. Patty's day, the new boyfriend and I took one of those awesome relationship steps when he started dropping the "L-word." I was on Cloud 9 the next three days until actual St. Patrick's Day, Wednesday, when Stretch called me from the ER to tell me he that he was in an accident on his bike.

Now, when you're with an athlete -- and I suppose this is true of all athletes, but it is definitely true of Ironmen -- you have to expect the occasional accident or injury, but my boyfriend is strong and smart and I trust him to take care of himself. Of course, that doesn't do much good when he's cycling down the road, minding his own business, and a pickup truck hits him from behind.

Dear Guy in the Truck: Why are you trying to ruin everything?

He assured me that he was fine, despite a few flesh wounds; I think that was the Morphine talking because when I got there the next day, he was bandaged up like a mummy and in significant pain. We spent the rest of the weekend cleaning wounds and changing bandages. He's totally worth it, but it wasn't very much fun for either of us, so for my sake, please watch where you're driving.

Valentine's Day Dilemnas

The first Valentine's Day with somebody new is always a bit of a relationship minefield. First of all, since people's reactions to the whole notion of Valentine's Day are so various, you never know whether you should go casual (and risk making your pookie feel neglected and unimportant) or go big (and convince him or her that you're needy/insecure/psycho). And even once you figure out what your plans are, something's bound to go terribly wrong and ruin them anyway.

My first boyfriend was bonkers about any excuse for a romantic occasion -- he wanted to celebrate every week for the first several months we dated and every month for the whole two years. Obviously, he made a huge to-do about Valentine's with fancy dinners and gifts he couldn't really afford. I broke up with him on Christmas Eve one year, and I think he was more upset about me ruining his romantic plans for Christmas than he was about us breaking up.

I presumed I would be spending the following Valentine's Day alone, but in fact, I met another young man just a couple of days before, and though we weren't yet dating, he happened to be at my house on February 14th when my charming ex decided to make an appearance for one of his big, romantic gestures. He was jogging up to the front door when he spotted the other guy through the living room window and changed his plans a bit -- he reached in his pocket, pulled out a watch I'd given him, smashed it against the front door, and stormed back to his car, where he sat parked at the curb for the next twenty minutes, either composing himself or waiting for me to come out and talk to him or both. Romantic, eh?

The following year, I was in Japan and my boyfriend was in the States, so for Valentine's Day, I was expecting a phone call. Apparently, he was one of those guys who doesn't like making a big deal of Valentine's because the phone call never came. When I did finally talk to him three or four days later, he told me there was some other girl who didn't live 7,000 miles away from him whom he had feelings for. Also very romantic.



So since then, I've been a little, well, cynical about Valentine's day. This year, as the 14th of February was looming on the horizon, I was trying to pick up cues from Stretch about his take on Valentine's Day. We'd only been dating a few months, and though things were going well, he had been very low-key about both my birthday and Christmas, so I was pretty sure that Valentine's Day wasn't going to be big on his list of priorities.


Luckily, I got a little help on this one from his cousin. We were down in Chicago visiting him in January, and he mentioned something about their Valentine's Day tradition, which they then explained to me -- a trip home to St. Louis and a Blues game with the boys.

So that cleared the question up for me. No romantic Valentine's Day plans this year. Whew!



But the story doesn't end there. A week or so later we were out having dinner with my sister, and I teasingly mentioned something about how I was going to be abandoned on Valentine's Day since the boyfriend was going to St. Louis.

"No, I'm not."

"You're not?"

"No, I'm staying here so I can take you out for Valentine's Day."

"... Why?"

"Because I want to."

"O."

So we left it at that for the night. This was not, after all, the first time Stretch had done something to surprise me.

I started to think about plans for the 14th, whether we should go out to dinner and where or whether I should cook or whether he'd want to cook... and while I was doing that, he was finding a ski resort and making reservations at a hotel up north. This from the guy who claims he's not romantic.

So we spent our first Valentine's Day on the snowy side of a mountain. Not everything went smoothly, of course. I took a few hard spills when Stretch convinced me to attack a black diamond, and he tragically lost his keys on the mountain, but despite the bruises and the inconvenience, I think I may have shaken the Valentine's Day curse. We spent all day skiing and got "suited up" for a nice dinner in the evening, and the following day we drove up to the bridge to see the straights all frozen over and have a hot breakfast in the UP before our long drive home. A pretty romantic Valentine's Day after all.

About Writing

People torture themselves in crazy, brutal, wonderful ways. I have a friend who recently rode a bicycle over 3,800 miles -- from Virginia Beach to Oregon -- just for the adventure of it. My roommate spent the last few months drinking an obscene number of protein shakes, tempting melanoma at the tanning salon, and lifting weights every night so that he could pull off a convincing Ultimate Warrior for Halloween. I also just met this guy who does Ironman triathlons; ergo, though awesome, he is also clearly insane.

My exquisite masochism is writing. It is through writing that I become utterly vulnerable. That Walter Wellesey Smith quote -- "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." -- that is writing for me. Bleeding. It is painful and draining and invasive. And yet I am irresistibly drawn to it. At three o'clock in the morning, I sit in bed and type things that no one will ever read, pieces that strip me and break me open and empty me out. And at six o'clock in the morning, I delete them for fear that someone, somewhere, someday might see them. Might see me, all broken and naked like that without even a cute pair of shoes on. Yikes.

At this point in my life, I typically write ten to fifteen pages a week. Of these, maybe 98% are a combination of lesson plans, essays for my MA classes, letters of recommendation, and work-related nonsense (like emails about who's teaching The Scarlet Letter when and who's driving whom to some up-coming conference). That leaves about one page out of fifty that I actually want to write and that gives me that delicious rush of intellectual adrenaline.

I got into teaching because I thought it would be an avenue for leading young people to this same passion -- for entrancing them with the magic of words, the powerful addiction of stories. In some ways, this has been true. My job is rich and rewarding. I love it. But I have felt, more so recently, that the greatest price of teaching writing is that I rarely have time or energy anymore to write.

But I am not old enough yet to have regrets, and since my birthday is coming soon, I am giving myself a present: time. For writing. And permission to be vulnerable.

As an example for you, dear reader, here is a piece I wrote (and recently polished but have never before published) about my first night in Japan:



------------------------------

The tatami bites lightly into my skin, etching uniform red grooves across my shoulder blades, along the uneven ridge of spine, and down the meat of my out-stretched legs. I lie long and wide, a little castrated Vitruvian, watching the beads of sweat well up on my bare stomach, glisten, quiver, and slip noiselessly to the floor. My ribs heave. Around my head, a riot of dark curls twists into a damp halo and slowly soaks the clean, tight straw. I strain to listen, hoping to catch the shuffle of a foot or the click of a chopstick through the paper-thin walls, but there is only a vast silence beneath the coursing of blood through my own ears, the swishing rhythm of my own breath.

My damp t-shirt and jeans, shed the moment I was alone, are tossed over the solitary chair in the corner. I thought at first of running them through the washing machine, but a quick glance at the dials discouraged me; not a word is in English. Of course, even if I knew how to turn the machine on, I have no detergent, no soap. I could get my clothes wetter but not cleaner. Instead I had stripped them off, thrown them over the chair, and gotten in the shower. The water rinsed away the sweat and dust I’d gathered on my two-hour trudge from the train station, but it did nothing to relieve the trembling in my limbs. Chilled and dripping, I stepped gingerly out into the living room and realized I had no towel, no clean or dry clothes. That was when I decided to lie down on the floor.



I’ve been here — on the living room floor — for over an hour. Maybe two. Dying rays of gold play furtively along the blades of rice grass outside the open window. It must be about eight o’clock. Maybe later. I don’t really know what time the sun sets in Kansai.

“Kansai,” I whisper the word aloud, half under my breath. “Kan - sa - iiii,” I stretch it so it covers my whole tongue. It certainly sounds far from home. “I live in Kansai, the western half of Honshu,” I chirp to myself, trying to force nonchalance into a phrase that still sounds like something I’m making up. The island name, Honshu, curdles and clumps in my mouth. I try to chop the “u” short like the Japanese do, but it keeps coming out “Hon - shooo” and I feel like a stupid gaijin, a foreigner, an outsider.

Which is exactly what I am, I suppose.



I stare at the ceiling and do some quick calculations. The company sent a Kiwi to pick me up at the train station this afternoon and show me to this apartment. My apartment, which doesn't yet feel like mine. Before arriving here, we had dropped off another new recruit and then gotten a bit lost, which I estimate doubled the distance we had to walk. The station is perhaps an hour east of here on foot. We passed a grocery store en-route, but it’s maybe forty-five minutes away, and I have to keep in mind that whatever I buy, I will have to carry forty-five minutes back. It’s possible that there is a closer grocery west of here, but it’s getting dark and everything in that direction is still undiscovered country. The chewy airline chicken breast was the last thing I ate. That was… sixteen, maybe eighteen hours ago. I should have asked the Kiwi to stop for food.

Suddenly my musings grind to a halt. The Kiwi. What was his name? I don’t remember. I try to replay the moment when he approached me outside the train station — khaki trousers, white shirt, open collar, loosened blue neck-tie. Cropped ginger hair. Green eyes? Grey? He must have introduced himself. I'll probably never see him again, but at the moment, he’s the only person I know in Japan. And I have no idea what his name is.

I force myself up onto my elbows. The last rays of sun stretch in through the window and glow red on my shins. I wonder if leaving the curtain open will be enough to wake me in the morning. Forty-five minutes to walk tomorrow for food. A few more to the train station and the city center where I should be able to buy a watch, laundry detergent, and a towel. Maybe twenty hours before my luggage and my futon should be delivered. Two and a half days until my company orientation in Osaka. One week before I start teaching. Seven thousand miles between me and anyone whose name I know. No plane ticket home.

I lie back down and fold my hands beneath my head. In the last twenty-four hours, I have severed myself from the realities of my life. I close my eyes and let exhaustion wash over me, drowning out the gnawing ache in my stomach. For the first time in my life, I am completely alone and utterly adrift.

The Crisp Freshness of Fall

(Did you miss me? Yeah. It turns out that juggling a full-time teaching career and two graduate courses whilst nursing an emaciated waif of a personal life doesn't leave much time or energy for blogging. Who knew?)



While the many perks of a three-month summer vacation cannot be exaggerated, I actually love the fall. Maybe this is true of everyone, or maybe it's just a sick, masochistic teacher thing, but in autumn when school starts back up, everything seems fresh and new and exciting to me. I don't know how people in other professions cope with having the same routine year after year. My job is a bit more like a kaleidoscope; even though many of the pieces remain the same -- the books, the room, my colleagues -- every fall we start a new year and I get a new group of students, a glorious spin of the kaleidoscope and a unique experience every time.

This year is no exception. In fact, this year's been quite surprising so far. As you may remember, last spring I boldly decided to hand off my apartment to a charmingly bohemian, tragically impoverished musician and his girlfriend (who sold sex toys) and move in with Jon and Jess -- two of the other young teachers in my building.

I find living with coworkers a fascinating and complex state of affairs; a delicate balance of the personal and the professional, of shared space and respect for privacy; a tragicomic exploration of the human experience ... kind of like college except with more disposable income. This was especially true during the summer when none of us were working and our days consisted of floating around in our friends' pools, pumping iron at the gym, watching Jon pitch, and hauling lots of empty beer bottles in for the deposit.

For the record, I consider this the perfect lifestyle.



But now that it's fall we have to earn our keep. My alarm blares at 5:15 and I'm off to another adventurous day shaping young minds.

Photo Blog: Lake Huron

In honor of my grandpa, who was a professional artist, we take a week out of our summer every year to go to the lake and work on our own art projects. There's no TV, no internet, no cell phone service, not even a shower -- just the fam, the lake, and the art.







My sister-in-law dyes yarn for one of her knitting projects. This batch is a U of M stripe -- blue, yellow, and white.



Who could say "no" to this face? Not me, which is why I'm an excellent aunt.



Brother matting and framing some of his photos.



For his project this year, Dad took this dragon image that Grandpa had embroidered into the cuff of his Navy uniform in the Philippines and stitched it onto a cap.



Nephew loves when his daddy doesn't have to go to work and gets to play all week instead.



Playing bubbles on the beach





Making a cuppa tea.