I'm curious about the origin of the handshake snap.

1. I have a UPS tracking number for the proofs for Terminal Humming. I am doing a bad job not being nervous and excited about it all. Excited is good. Nervous--not so good.

2. It has not been sunny here since Memorial Day weekend. May and June here are the SoCal version of February: people are overwrought because they want it to be summer, they go swimming without wetsuits even though it's 65 degrees and the water is even colder, they drive worse than usual.

3. Being a woman in a microbrewery or bottle-shop is very similar to being a woman at an avant-garde jazz show, although the former is, admittedly, a much more social environment.

4. I'm not a skillfull handshake snapper yet, but I've only just started to get practice. Whenever someone goes in for the handshake snap with me, I kind of want to yell "whitey" at them, or at least have some third observer yell it at the both of us.

Recent etc.

Recent visitors: Heather Hurwitz, Colin Smith, Lee Ann Brown, Julie Patton, Brian Kim Stefans
Recent readings: Colin Smith, Lee Ann Brown, Julie Patton, Brian Kim Stefans, Geoffrey Dyer
Recent food: stuffed artichokes, mixed berry spoon cake, grilled vegetable pizza
Recent exercise: running
Recent asana: handstand (as usual)
Recent news: my book will be out soon
Recent dreams: dragonflies and something about Nada and Gary having a big dryer in their apartment.

Hark, hark, the dogs do bark

But the caravan moves on.

Or else, the week just does.

Or else, time. Etc.

Seriously. Sunday.

If I ever get to teach a developmental English class where I am allowed significant control over what I teach, I won't require them to answer questions like "What are the different kinds of paragraph development? What are the six sub-categories of expositional paragraph development?" Instead, I'd have them write a lot of personal essays, and maybe do one final project that was kind of persuasive or argumentative.

This week, I graded 93 essays describing "someone" the students "know" (not my instructions). I always find grading this assignment heartbreaking, because the paragraphs typically demonstrate that the people writing them have, like all of us, very deep and profound feelings, but they don't have language to articulate them. Moreover, the curriculum of the class that I'm teaching (which, again, I didn't write and which totally sucks) doesn't give them language to articulate them, or even really talk about the difference between abstract and concrete. The _best_ students describe their wives, husbands, boyfriends, parents, grandparents, children, in the most abstract ways: "To know him, you must get to know him" or "her hair is of fragrances unknown." It pains me to read sentences like this.

I've often ranted about how lacking the language to articulate something abstract means that you don't understand your feelings. I half believe that, but I also know that there are ways of articulating feelings that are not verbal. So, the challenge for many people when they write is to articulate feelings in writing that they don't express in verbal ways. I read my student's paragraphs and think about all the young students I have who marry so early, and then divorce so early, and have children, too. I think about the arguments they have with their lovers and spouses--and how they don't seem to have language to articulate to themselves, let alone to someone else, how they are feeling. It freaks me out!

I remember saying to one of my best students at CSUSM: "Dump your boyfriend and move to LA." I'm sure that was inappropriate of me to say, but I had to--she was so intelligent and smart. However, I know she didn't dump her boyfriend and move to LA. She said she liked "the lifestyle" here. She lived in Temecula. What was it that she liked about living in Temecula? It certainly wasn't the beach. So what did she mean by "the lifestyle?"

When I was young, I got bad advice from my family and friends. My students are young, and they also get bad advice from their family and friends. But the advice they get is worse. Too many of them are married with children before they are 25. If you have no college degree and 2 kids and you are 25, your life is going to be hard. It makes me so angry. I want to slap their parents and friends and the newspapers and their teachers. I remember thinking some version of "why didn't someone tell me X?" all the time when I was 25. Why don't more people tell their students and children and friends "dump your boyfriend and move to (insert city name here) or "you don't have to get married" or "I think it's a great idea to get the fuck out of here" ?

Sunday

My hamstring is not completely healed, and it is frustrating. I hate it. I hate being injured. I hate the stock market. I hate cars. I hate wall to wall carpet and press board. I hate how yogis say "please be mindful of..." instead of "please don't..." I hate the fact that my hard drive is broken and shouldn't be and how nothing is made to last. I hate the dust that sticks to the screens. I hate my sensitive skin. I hate professionalism and I hate a lack of professionalism. I hate it when Lester bites me. I hate poems about dead pigs that use overly familiar feminized language to describe the dead pigs. I hate asthma. I hate Bank of America. I hate the bus schedule in North County. I hate how my nails break. I hate grading. I hate how some people think that having a specific kind of degree makes you a poet. I hate the average failure rate of students in online classes. I hate working for schools that treat students like customers. I hate how my fingers swell up after I run. I hate how I have a sore right ankle which is somehow connected to my f-ed up left hamstring. I hate how having a sophisticated critique and understanding of power and hierarchies doesn't mean that one has an emotionally sophisticated understanding of how power and hierarchies affect one personally and directly. I hate how people talk about how mellow the lifestyle is here without specifically mentioning anything other than the beach, even if they don't live anywhere near the beach and instead live in Valley Center or Burnt Mountain. I hate how women I don't even know say things to me about my apparently inevitable future family. I hate how the sun causes cancer and salt water causes rashes. I hate the plastic on the beach. I hate the dead seals after red tide, I hate all the crap on the roads: glass, rocks, hoses, rakes, pieces of furniture, blown tires, dead animals, shoes. I hate it when people abuse the carpool lane. I hate the reverse elitism of community college employment practices. I hate it how people throw all sorts of crap into the lagoons like bottles, cans, and plastic bags. I hate dog shit on the side walk and I hate people who are overly paranoid about dog shit. I hate home security systems and also thieves. I hate the fact that my employers never tell us if they're going to serve food at staff meetings but then surprise us with mediocre pizza that we all eat even though we've already eaten lunch. I hate how scratched up my glasses are. I hate putting things away. I hate Sunday afternoons.

The reading was fun

The reading was fun.

Tomorrow is Monday. Before I wrote "Monday" I wrote "Munday." I think I was thinking of "fun," and the general lack of it on Mondays (though I think Tuesday is actually a worse day than Monday). But hence the "mun" in the "Munday" I erased. I suppose "mun" could be "money," too.

The reading was fun.

I complain about the end of summer. I talk about birds, death, fish and feng shui.

1. It's the Sunday night of the Sunday night of the year. Mark might be blogging about this right now, only in a detailed way that is full of insight.

2. I hate being supervised. What I don't like about teaching online classes that supervisors just drop in whenever they want to make sure that you are responding and "facilitating" the class in the correct bureaucratic way. It reminds me of how most cubicle and office workspaces I've ever had have been designed to make it easy for people to look over my shoulder--back to the door, always.

3. One of the unidentifiable white ducks/swans at Buena Vista lagoon died--the one with the beak abnormality. They weren't Snow Geese or Ross' Geese. I'd been calling them "Farm Ducks" because they were completely white and their tail feathers were vertical in that farm duck way. On Thursday the bird that I think was male--the one with a weird lump in its beak--looked sick and weak. S/he didn't even make any kind of alert call when I stopped to look at it as I usually do. On Friday s/he was dead, lying sideways in the water. The other flew away or died or was killed elsewhere. I believe they were escaped farm ducks, or else ducks dropped off there, like people drop off at people's houses kittens sometimes.

4. I saw an Osprey on Thursday. It dove into the water with the classic Osprey stance--feet and head first.

5. Here are some medieval fish. People used to think that fish were uncountable. That is why water and fish are good Feng Shui. "There's always more fish in the sea," etc. Of course, this is not true.