Stall

I have not made the hair appointment yet.

I want to make aged Gouda biscotti with walnuts. I have no aged Gouda, though. Next week.

If I only had to eat aperitivi for the rest of my life, that would be ok.

Writing continues. Attempts at writing something on Tina Darragh's Opposable Dumbs.

I was behind on posting, but not on writing.

I posted more poems at See it Everywhere.

I think I am going to make this Eggplant and Lentil Stew with Pomegranate Molasses soon. I love stew, but stews aren't so great when the weather gets warmer. This is a summer stew!

Real Jobs

One of my current students found my myspace page last weekend, and friended me. Most of my students on myspace eventually do find me, so it wasn't unusual. However, after class today he asked, "so, your real job is as a writer?" I told him it was, and he didn't respond with the disbelief or obvious discomfort that other people sometimes have. This little exchange stands out because he concluded that my real job is as a writer, where as teaching is something I do "on the side." That isn't quite true, but it's the exact opposite of the conclusion that people usually come to, so I thought it was interesting.

List of my current jobs:

• Teaching English as a foreign language
• Teaching developmental English
• Tutoring people about writing
• Designing t-shirts
• Doing research for a marketing company
• Creating marketing materials & public relations materials for a local yoga studio
• Managing the web site of that same studio

List of my current writing, art, and editorial projects

• Diligently shopping my first book manuscript around to all the places people said I should, even though I'm pretty sure I already know how it will eventually be published.
• Editing my second manuscript. Getting ready to, yes, diligently send it around.
• Kind of putting together a third. I don't think the third is really a manuscript--the pieces are too disparate to make a coherent book.
• Writing my fourth manuscript.
• Still working on "Memory Lessons," a series of visual pieces.
• Thinking already about my contribution to the 2008 Dusie project, now that the 2007 one is complete and live.
• Little bits of an essay thinking about the concept of "The Gurlesque." I need to plan ahead so that I have something to say by the time the anthology edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg comes out from Saturnalia in 2009. I've been a slllooowwww critical writer recently.
• Little bits of a review on Lara Glenum's The Hounds of No, even though it's been reviewed. Maybe the review and the essay will be the same thing. Maybe I'll send them/it to Absent.
  

List of current yoga projects:

• Dropping back into urdhvadhanuasana from standing. Standing up from urdhvadhanuasana.
• Jumping up into handstand from two feet but with straight legs.
• More flexible hips, hamstrings, psoas, and quadriceps. So, that means a lot of hanumanasana and krounchasana.
• Learning and memorizing all the asanas named after birds. Krounchasana is the "heron pose--a very appropriate homage and counter balance to my bike rides around the lagoons.
  
  

Probably I am supposed to model qualities of "excellence" and "leadership."

I typed up a poem. I wish html rendered spacing better.

I'm grading. Oops, I mean I'm "providing feedback." I keep forgetting that I'm not actually a professor or a teacher, I'm a "facilitator."

The student who has missed four out of the past ten classes told the evaluators that my class moves too quickly, and the student who dropped down from the advanced class and never does the extra assignments I give him (and which he requests) said that the class moves too slow.

I bought my brother a gift membership to the Audubon Society. I can write that here since I know he doesn't read this blog.

I'm going to make tea.

Are we enjoying our task

For the most part, we are.

And I typed up and revised the first part of a new manuscript I'm working on this afternoon. That felt good.

And I felt nearly normal during yoga class this evening. Even during inversions.

Today was a better teaching day.

In my ESL class, we read what turned out to be a stringent Christian article about Christmas (it started out as being funny and light. Oops).

I grew up everywhere, but I spent several winters and Christian holiday seasons in Maine with snow and the hippie parents of all of my friends. I sang Christmas carols at Quaker meetings. I went ice skating all day and drank hot cider afterwards. And yes, my cheeks were rosy.

My ESL students gave informal informative (not persuasive) presentations, and we ate donuts and talked. We talked about possible connections between certain kinds of German dessert pastry things and donuts and the US Midwest. Today was the last day for three of my students. Two of them were only in my class for three weeks (but that's 3.5 hours every day, five days a week for three weeks). Still, they are creative, intelligent people, and the class always suffers when people like that head on their own way. The third student didn't show up--I was rather sad about it. He'd been my student off and on for more than seven months, and I wanted to give him a proper "ra ra good luck in community college" send off. Or at least I wanted to give him a donut. Oh well.

My students take up more than 50% of my time and account for more at least 50% of my livelihood. My creative work effects my life. I shouldn't even have to note that, but I'm noting it. I get annoyed by and jealous of my fellow writers who say that teaching has no effect on their writing. I don't / can't compartmentalize my life in that way. I spend more than half of my day talking to students, and that effects my life, and so that effects my writing.

I made a lasagna this evening. Yum. Mark heads off to DC on Tuesday, so we need to get all of our holiday celebrations in this weekend.

I am going to prepare lunch

I'm having trouble writing things. I wish that blogger wouldn't mess with my spacing. But that is not why I'm having trouble.

I've been consciously eating more fruit and vegetables this week. Fruit and vegetables with every meal and at least two fruit/vegetable snacks during the day.

Increasingly I'm writing in complete sentences. I want line breaks, so when I type up my drafts, I insert line breaks.

I think writing in my notebook is too slow and contemplative. If I try to write while sitting on my balcony, I usually end up writing about bird song and stuff. I love birds, but there are too many references to birds in post-avant writing. One must be careful about the use of animals in poems. I'm a sucker for lyric + birds, but sentimentalism makes me cringe because I am often sentimental about animals and baby animals. It's just a step from loving the cute fluffy bird to loving the cute fat baby and then the angelic mother baking a cake. Feeling sentimental about something is very close to thinking that it isn't important, or supposedly can't really be important in the real world.