Merry belated Christmas.
I'll be reading some or all of "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" at the 2008 CEA/PCEA conference in Pittsburgh this coming March. It'll be at the Omni William Penn--the same place where I stayed when I got sent down there for strike duty--it's a nice hotel.
In other news, we had a very nice Christmas down at Sue's sister's place in Bloomsburg. Molly learned how to say 'Yam' (Sue's sister is Aunt Yam and her husband is Uncle Spud). She also learned how to call kitties by saying "Meow." It's retardedly cute.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Morning Derail
I'm typing this with my laptop precariously balancing on one knee, while my daughter sleeps in my arms.
It's been a rough morning.
It's been a wonderful morning.
Let's start at about 2:36 AM. Molly starts crying--nightmare.
Sue gets up to rock her to sleep; no luck, brings her to bed with us, and Molly goes into "let me pick at your face and drill your nose with my razor finger, mama" mode. (Usually, I'd qualify all of that as a big long hyphenated word, but today, that sounds too complicated.)
So back to bed with her.
She cries.
We try to sleep despite the crying. All parents know that's a lie. In reality, the parents lay a room away from their crying child, eyes closed pretending to sleep and hoping the other will get up and care for the kid, or better yet, hoping the kid will just embrace the beautiful idea of sleep and, well, sleep through the night...maybe just once, but preferably every night.
So at 3:18, I get up, try to rock, and backrub Molly back into the land of sleeper crystals and whatever weird thing babies dream about.
Twice I make it to the door before tears.
At attempt 2, Sue offers Molly in bed with her part 2. By now it's 3:47, and since the alarm is going off in 13 minutes anyway, I relent, stay up, and head down to grade papers until my conscience clears me to maybe work on some fiction.
4:05 and Sue calls down; Molly drilled her nose good again (maybe I'm making that up for dramatic effect). Either way, Molly is standing in the bed when I fetch her.
So the routine begins. And this is the, my kid should be asleep, I want to be asleep, but the kid doesn't want to sleep, so let's do awake things routine.
1. diaper change. check.
2. food. She ate about 1/4 of a banana...so hunger wasn't the issue.
3. set up a sleeping nest in the living room--trick said child to sleep by having sleep be somewhere 'fun.' Check.
4. Let kid roam/play until the sleep demons take over....fail.
It's always the toughest when Molly continues crying when you've done everything you thought she needed. food, clean butt, not cold, has binky, George (her monkey, but not that Curious asshole--fuck him. I hate curious george. Molly's george is cute [for a monkey] and has a really weird outie belly button that's somewhat creepy and yet endearing.), place to sleep, and is eye-rubbing tired.
Change plans. We lay down together. This scares me. I'm still tired. I have the perpetual, sleep through everything important fear. I soldier through though. Stay awake, she doesn't. Score.
Wait...my reward is to grade bad revisions. Oh well, satisfying my concience. Grading begins at about 5ish.
During this time, Molly sleeps with a lot of restless in her. Butt in the air, creeping slowly off the nest until a face drag on the carpet is enough for me to try to intervene. But the best laid ideas are often dashed, right? My desire to help turns into a wakeup call, some more tears.
So we jump back to stage 4. Let her roam. She does this long enough for me to start grading again.
Then the cute starts. Her little tired self comes over to the couch and she lays her head on my keyboard, a feat that I'm still not sure how she pulled off, since I was sitting proper on the couch, meaning she had to kind of twist and stretch to get her head there. Either way, she ended up joining me on the couch in my arms, and I started to one-hand grade (I'm letting the kids submit essays electronically this semester, so I'm doing track changes).
As she nestles in, she grabs a shall laying over the couch and wraps it about her; I guess Sue's smell makes her more comfortable, and since she doesn't often sleep in my lap, I kind of stop grading.
This Molly sleeping in the lap thing is pretty common for Sue; they do it all the time, but I don't often get the honor of being a pillow, so I stop grading all together, and turn to her little body. Looking at her all curled into me, breathing smooth now, warm, wrapped in a shall, I have one of those great parenting moments. This is my daughter. She is tiny and beautiful and love and sleeping. Sleeping finally because I am her safe. I am her protection from whatever awful dream kept reoccuring tonight.
So my morning plans are somewhat derailed. I'm probably not going to check as many things off my checklist of overachievement. But instead I get something rare and wonderful. A small beauty, a moment worthy of reverie and experience.
So I'm going to stop writing now, and enjoy it for as long as I can.
It's been a rough morning.
It's been a wonderful morning.
Let's start at about 2:36 AM. Molly starts crying--nightmare.
Sue gets up to rock her to sleep; no luck, brings her to bed with us, and Molly goes into "let me pick at your face and drill your nose with my razor finger, mama" mode. (Usually, I'd qualify all of that as a big long hyphenated word, but today, that sounds too complicated.)
So back to bed with her.
She cries.
We try to sleep despite the crying. All parents know that's a lie. In reality, the parents lay a room away from their crying child, eyes closed pretending to sleep and hoping the other will get up and care for the kid, or better yet, hoping the kid will just embrace the beautiful idea of sleep and, well, sleep through the night...maybe just once, but preferably every night.
So at 3:18, I get up, try to rock, and backrub Molly back into the land of sleeper crystals and whatever weird thing babies dream about.
Twice I make it to the door before tears.
At attempt 2, Sue offers Molly in bed with her part 2. By now it's 3:47, and since the alarm is going off in 13 minutes anyway, I relent, stay up, and head down to grade papers until my conscience clears me to maybe work on some fiction.
4:05 and Sue calls down; Molly drilled her nose good again (maybe I'm making that up for dramatic effect). Either way, Molly is standing in the bed when I fetch her.
So the routine begins. And this is the, my kid should be asleep, I want to be asleep, but the kid doesn't want to sleep, so let's do awake things routine.
1. diaper change. check.
2. food. She ate about 1/4 of a banana...so hunger wasn't the issue.
3. set up a sleeping nest in the living room--trick said child to sleep by having sleep be somewhere 'fun.' Check.
4. Let kid roam/play until the sleep demons take over....fail.
It's always the toughest when Molly continues crying when you've done everything you thought she needed. food, clean butt, not cold, has binky, George (her monkey, but not that Curious asshole--fuck him. I hate curious george. Molly's george is cute [for a monkey] and has a really weird outie belly button that's somewhat creepy and yet endearing.), place to sleep, and is eye-rubbing tired.
Change plans. We lay down together. This scares me. I'm still tired. I have the perpetual, sleep through everything important fear. I soldier through though. Stay awake, she doesn't. Score.
Wait...my reward is to grade bad revisions. Oh well, satisfying my concience. Grading begins at about 5ish.
During this time, Molly sleeps with a lot of restless in her. Butt in the air, creeping slowly off the nest until a face drag on the carpet is enough for me to try to intervene. But the best laid ideas are often dashed, right? My desire to help turns into a wakeup call, some more tears.
So we jump back to stage 4. Let her roam. She does this long enough for me to start grading again.
Then the cute starts. Her little tired self comes over to the couch and she lays her head on my keyboard, a feat that I'm still not sure how she pulled off, since I was sitting proper on the couch, meaning she had to kind of twist and stretch to get her head there. Either way, she ended up joining me on the couch in my arms, and I started to one-hand grade (I'm letting the kids submit essays electronically this semester, so I'm doing track changes).
As she nestles in, she grabs a shall laying over the couch and wraps it about her; I guess Sue's smell makes her more comfortable, and since she doesn't often sleep in my lap, I kind of stop grading.
This Molly sleeping in the lap thing is pretty common for Sue; they do it all the time, but I don't often get the honor of being a pillow, so I stop grading all together, and turn to her little body. Looking at her all curled into me, breathing smooth now, warm, wrapped in a shall, I have one of those great parenting moments. This is my daughter. She is tiny and beautiful and love and sleeping. Sleeping finally because I am her safe. I am her protection from whatever awful dream kept reoccuring tonight.
So my morning plans are somewhat derailed. I'm probably not going to check as many things off my checklist of overachievement. But instead I get something rare and wonderful. A small beauty, a moment worthy of reverie and experience.
So I'm going to stop writing now, and enjoy it for as long as I can.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Goalsetting
So, when I graduated in May, I said, "Self, finish this damn novel in stories by the end of the year. k. thx. bye."
Well, I haven't been doing all that well at keeping up with promises to myself. It all has something to do with timeflow. You see, there are only 24 hours in a day, and well, I can't convince my body that less than 5-6 hours of sleep a night is a good idea (despite my efforts). Plus too, Molly is cuter than buttons, unicorns, rainbows, and the entire cast of Morning Musuimi (Why I'm remembering a fabricated j-pop band that I only vaguely knew about around the year 2000, right now, I don't know). In any event though, Parenting is definitely high on the "need to do list."
In fact, there are a lot of things on the need to do list. Observe:
So,
I said to my self, "self, stop whining and do something about doing something." And so, I've decided that the best way to try to finish a draft of Not an Autobiography by the end of the year is to sign up for NaNoWriMo with the goal to bang out the last three stories or so that I feel need to be in the book.
Feel free to laugh at my audacity, stupidity, and plain ole inadvoidable ability to take on way too much at once.
Well, I haven't been doing all that well at keeping up with promises to myself. It all has something to do with timeflow. You see, there are only 24 hours in a day, and well, I can't convince my body that less than 5-6 hours of sleep a night is a good idea (despite my efforts). Plus too, Molly is cuter than buttons, unicorns, rainbows, and the entire cast of Morning Musuimi (Why I'm remembering a fabricated j-pop band that I only vaguely knew about around the year 2000, right now, I don't know). In any event though, Parenting is definitely high on the "need to do list."
In fact, there are a lot of things on the need to do list. Observe:
- Parenting (this one is worth 10x all others)
- Teaching
- Prepping for teaching
- finding insurance (or Why the fuck do we not have national healthcare yet, you government assholes?)
- fixing our basement (painting, organizing, remodeling)
- Downstairs toilet is broken
- Grading papers
- Recording Molly's cuteness via cameras/camcorders
- Prepare proposals for the PCEA conference very soon (I think it's a 11/1 deadline)
- Read and prepare materials for the Warrior Poet Group (I'm due to start teaching Nabokov's Pale Fire here soon)
- Oh and writing.
So,
I said to my self, "self, stop whining and do something about doing something." And so, I've decided that the best way to try to finish a draft of Not an Autobiography by the end of the year is to sign up for NaNoWriMo with the goal to bang out the last three stories or so that I feel need to be in the book.
Feel free to laugh at my audacity, stupidity, and plain ole inadvoidable ability to take on way too much at once.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Deconstructing Happily Ever After Now in Print
On Wednesday, I finally received my contributor's copies of Human Voices, an anthology put together by the folks that run the Kentuckiana Metroversity contest. It has all of the winning and runner-up essays, stories, and poems from the 2008 contest. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a website for them, so I'm not sure how/if folks can get copies of it, but I'd be happy to shoot the story to anyone that wants to read it regardless. "Deconstructing Happily Ever After" took 1st place in the Graduate Fiction section.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
"Everything Ends" now in print
This week I received my contributor copies of A capella Zoo, Issue 1 where "Everything Ends" was recently published.
It's a very slick production, and looks to be a fantastic journal for us experimental types.
It's a very slick production, and looks to be a fantastic journal for us experimental types.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
A great sad blow to the world
On Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 we lost our dear friend, Judy Knapp. It's so easy for us to take life for granted, to spend too much time in front of the TV, to waste time, to let the days slip between our fingers. But Judy never did that. Judy was life. She, even on her worst days, had optimism that many of us don't have on our best. And she never settled for anything less than a life full of adventure, be it travel, books, or her willingness to try her hand at just about anything, Judy, of all the people I know, knew what it meant to be alive.
Her life force, her personality, and her drive inspired everyone around her. Her laugh infectious, her smile, contagious, Judy met everyone with child-like enthusiasm back with genuine interest. She always wanted to know about everything new and wonderful, but was there too when times were tough.
When I was small, Judy was my gum dispenser. She'd come over, and I'd race to her, pumping my little-kid legs as hard as I could, all the while chanting, “JudyJudyJudy!” When I got there, invariably my next plea was, “Do you have any gum?” Silly story, but when you're a little kid, gum is king. And growing up Judy continued to be a huge influence on me. She turned me on to reading and Edgar Allen Poe. She supported my writing, gave Sue and I countless vacation tips (and plenty of travel envy), and was a great friend and surrogate Aunt.
Judy's life spark was huge and bright. And never was it diminished by sickness. If anything, diabetes made her spark all the brighter, which is perhaps why her passing on Wednesday was so shocking to all of us. That bright ball of light and love, curiosity, intelligence, and laughter snapped away so sudden-quick. But it isn't gone. We have it now, all of us that have been touched by her wonderful soul. It's up to us to carry her spark now; it's up to us to remember all that is Judy and to never forget. We love you, Judy. And will miss you greatly.
“May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.” --Edward Abbey
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The failure of the 2008 Summer Olympics
As I sit here watching fireworks that fired off in a 12 hour offset, I'm thinking that the 2008 Olympics, the first summer games I've ever actively paid attention to pretty much sucked. It didn't suck because China was the host, or I felt that there was some form of preferential treatment/cheating going on (though that I dea has crept into my head), it's the fact that NBC did an abso-fucking-lutely horrible job covering the games.
From the opening ceremony to the torch's last moments, I've had the games on durning primetime nearly every night (background noise as we played with Molly, really), and during that time, I saw: a tiny bit of fencing, bicycling, swimming, biking, volleyball, diving, more swimming, more volleyball, more diving, gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more swimming, more volleyball, a bit of running, more volleyball, a moment of trampoline, more diving, more gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more volleyball, more volleyball.
In all, I'd say 80% of NBC's primetime coverage was volleyball. And I have no idea why this was decided as the penultimate sport to display. Sue and I were stunned at the beauty of the trampoline finals--why didn't we get to see more of that? And what about Judo? I didn't even see highlights of that. And Tae Kwon Do? All I saw was a brief highlight reel about the Cuban kicking a Ref in the head, on purpose--that should have been prime time front and center.
My wife's a former Junior Olympics medalist in discus. There wasn't any coverage for that--and an American took gold in Discus. Sue syas though that they never televise the non-running sports of track & field. That's sad.
I remember in the past there were special channels you could order for the games, so that you could see more things....Hell, I'd expect at least that NBC would devote most of the day to the games, but no. Daytime TV garbage reigns over Olympic awesomeness. Not only that, but it's sad that the games didn't start until Prime Time. We should have had 24/7 coverage with only breaks for the news. All the other shows are completely unnecessary. We only get the Olympics ever four years; why limit our experience even more?
The announcers also need to shut the hell up. Especially during the diving. That woman announcer, I don't remember her name, constantly criticized everything anyone did, and almost always under-scored the athletes' scores compared to the judges. These people are the world's best, I don't want to hear how they fucked up a tuck or left their feet straight. I wanted to be amazed by a prowress I'll never know. I don't need to hear nitpicky garbage from some announcer trying to fill the tv silence.
Commercials. I swear NBC orchistrated the Olympics footage to be actually less air time than commercial time. Seriously, they'd show two dives, cut to commercial. Show another dive, cut to commercial. I know commercials are quickly overruning our TV land, but they were especially bad during the Olympics.
So what did I like? The atheletes. Everyone who competed was fantastic. China did a great job hosting (although they really spent way too much money putting it all together (I hope they don't let their Olympic grounds fade into decripitude like Athens)).
Well Enough wining for me. Here's to hoping that London's Olympics get better coverage, less fucking volleyball and more diversity.
The good news is that now that the Olympics are over, I won't be watching anything except movies again. Ahh Netflix, you are my friend.
From the opening ceremony to the torch's last moments, I've had the games on durning primetime nearly every night (background noise as we played with Molly, really), and during that time, I saw: a tiny bit of fencing, bicycling, swimming, biking, volleyball, diving, more swimming, more volleyball, more diving, gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more swimming, more volleyball, a bit of running, more volleyball, a moment of trampoline, more diving, more gymnastics, more volleyball, more diving, more volleyball, more volleyball.
In all, I'd say 80% of NBC's primetime coverage was volleyball. And I have no idea why this was decided as the penultimate sport to display. Sue and I were stunned at the beauty of the trampoline finals--why didn't we get to see more of that? And what about Judo? I didn't even see highlights of that. And Tae Kwon Do? All I saw was a brief highlight reel about the Cuban kicking a Ref in the head, on purpose--that should have been prime time front and center.
My wife's a former Junior Olympics medalist in discus. There wasn't any coverage for that--and an American took gold in Discus. Sue syas though that they never televise the non-running sports of track & field. That's sad.
I remember in the past there were special channels you could order for the games, so that you could see more things....Hell, I'd expect at least that NBC would devote most of the day to the games, but no. Daytime TV garbage reigns over Olympic awesomeness. Not only that, but it's sad that the games didn't start until Prime Time. We should have had 24/7 coverage with only breaks for the news. All the other shows are completely unnecessary. We only get the Olympics ever four years; why limit our experience even more?
The announcers also need to shut the hell up. Especially during the diving. That woman announcer, I don't remember her name, constantly criticized everything anyone did, and almost always under-scored the athletes' scores compared to the judges. These people are the world's best, I don't want to hear how they fucked up a tuck or left their feet straight. I wanted to be amazed by a prowress I'll never know. I don't need to hear nitpicky garbage from some announcer trying to fill the tv silence.
Commercials. I swear NBC orchistrated the Olympics footage to be actually less air time than commercial time. Seriously, they'd show two dives, cut to commercial. Show another dive, cut to commercial. I know commercials are quickly overruning our TV land, but they were especially bad during the Olympics.
So what did I like? The atheletes. Everyone who competed was fantastic. China did a great job hosting (although they really spent way too much money putting it all together (I hope they don't let their Olympic grounds fade into decripitude like Athens)).
Well Enough wining for me. Here's to hoping that London's Olympics get better coverage, less fucking volleyball and more diversity.
The good news is that now that the Olympics are over, I won't be watching anything except movies again. Ahh Netflix, you are my friend.
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