"my parts, my title, and my perfect soul"

Insomnia strikes. I wear a mermaid-green satin eye mask and try to shut out glinting light and whirling thoughts. Tomorrow will be another long day if I don't get some ZZZZZZs. It's too lovely taking one spare moment for myself, though, and checking out the newly-revamped Lula website. I must get my hands on the fall copy...

Baaaaaack

I'm so sorry for my blog-cation. I have been way overwhelmed with the move and the new job. I just moved into my new apartment on Friday, and I'm still living surrounded by boxes and chaos, but overall I'd say I'm happy. I've been struggling a lot with feeling inadequate and being-- oddly-- the only woman in the English department. English was always a touchy-feely subject for me, whereas the other members of the department are rather no-nonsense, but I'm given the freedom to do what I like, for the most part. My kids are sweethearts. And now it's momentary rest time, before I begin planning like crazy again. PS, during my next unit for the 9th graders, I intend to show clips from both Amelie and Stranger than Fiction in the same day! Better than Bavarian sugar cookies, indeed...

update

Well, it looks like my dreams came true...just last week I was devastated and thinking I would never have a teaching job. Now I have a job that starts on MONDAY. I will be teaching grades 8-11 IB English and will be moving to Indianapolis in a few days! How things change. I'm so sad to leave my friends, but I'm excited for the school year and to meet my new students! It's going to be a big adjustment, though. I don't know a soul in Indy, don't have an apartment yet, and have to read 4 books before Monday...but I'm happy. Here's to possibility.

hopeful?

It's wearing thin...but it's still there.

In my dreams, when I think about my first day as a real teacher with my own classroom, I'm wearing this:

I'd teach The Lovely Bones and Tess of the D'Urbervilles and have my students hang photos of themselves reading their favorite books on the wall using string and clothespins. We would immerse ourselves in our texts prior to reading them, decorating the classroom with Corinthian pillars for studying mythology, learning the Charleston and reenacting a (virgin) speak-easy for The Great Gatsby. We would write everyday and have guest speakers about the value of writing in real life and how to adjust for purpose and audience. And I'd return home, exhausted and ready for ginger tea, to this:

"During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and-like so much we no longer need but can't give up-became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can't always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended."

after a day like today, sometimes I think I'm made of glass.

how do I not lose hope when my glass menagerie appears to be shattering, one piece at a time?

I just want to be doing what I was born to do, what makes me meaningful.

Hello gratitude

Ginger tea, The Nanny, the arrival of two free hardcover novels, complimentary coffee made just how I like it, SYTYCD marathon tomorrow, falling asleep to Enya, 9 o'clock warm breezes, new blog readers, the sound of champagne uncorking, quotes from The Wizard of Oz, beautiful photos and the hope for good tidings to come this week...(please please please)

dearest readers, I'm a big believer in the transformational power of thoughts. Wish on every star and the full moon for me that I get a teaching job in the next week or so! The uncertainty is starting to make me dizzy...and I'd really rather be on solid ground, so put your thoughts behind me and maybe we can move mountains, yes?

(photos from here)

"This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie The Graduate."

"Oh Scarecrow, I think I'll miss you most of all."

"This isn't real. You know what it is? It's St. Elmo's Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them... there was no fire. There wasn't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making up all of this. We're all going through this. It's our time at the edge."

"It's gotta happen, happen sometime, maybe this time I'll win."

in the end, only kindness matters

I'm feeling very inspired by these, as I recap by day of beauty before I go write a paper.

photos from the amazing blog kind over matter

Today I went to Eastern Market with my friend Caroline. I had waffles with fresh fruit and whipping cream and she had a savory crepe. I bought a photograph of Shakespeare and Company that I will hopefully (fingers crossed, fingers crossed) be able to put in my classroom this fall. We then journeyed to Capitol Hill Books, which may be heaven on earth. It felt like I'd fallen down the rabbit hole and it was filled floor to ceiling with books. I now have a reading list to last a while, plus I will receive the new A. S. Byatt and Sarah Waters novels in the mail shortly-- I love having friends in the book business!

I now own:

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Loving, Living, and Party Going by Henry Green

...and the decadent manifesto Against the Grain (A Rebours) by J. K. Huysmans. Did you know that this book was supposedly the destructive, toxic influence of a novel that swung Dorian Gray over to depravity?

We'll change the world some day

"I used to think we lived at the top of the world, when the world was just a subway map and the one-slash-nine climbed a dotted line to my place...Can you remind me of what it was like at the top of the world?"

~these marc chagall paintings make me feel like I'm at the top of the world~

I was sick and tired of everything, when I called you last night from Glasgow

I want to go...Glasgow is simply lovely. I should have known it would be-- it's featured in my favorite ABBA song, and it's the home of Camera Obscura.

From Octogenarian to Antiquarian

"It's way more than anti-modernism, this sort of deep spelunking into the past...It's not aspirational and it's not nostalgic. It's a fantasy world that is almost entirely a visual collage. It's a stitched-together, bricolage world, an alternative world."

The New York Times has done it again, except now I'm concerned that people will abandon their Crate & Barrel living room sets and stray toward the bric-a-brac, the whimsical, the handmade, the antique. Granted, I don't have any taxidermy, but that aesthetic is a bit dark for me. Mine is a bit more twee, a bit more Lula. A bit more like this:

And of course I then need a Sensitive-Poetic-Quirky-Lover-Man to accompany me to heights of aesthetic glory:

Who'd think of marryin' an octogenarian...

Um, Ciao Bella makes Key Lime and Graham Cracker gelato! And it's delicious. I also procured a Gerbera Daisy plant, white peaches, fusilli, spinach, and a red onion. It will be interesting to see what I can cook out of all of these items-- I'm thinking a spinach-white peach-tomato salad via here.

Is it just me, or does one of my favorite television characters of all time, Grandma Yetta from The Nanny, seriously resemble eccentric octogenarian Iris Apfel? Clearly both are my style icons.

Grandma Yetta

Iris Apfel

We're living in a powder keg and giving off a spark

And this would be why I have a massive crush on Josh Groban (and think that Ellen Degeneres is hilariously amazing):

And speaking of amazing...