The object of my affection

In honor of Stubb’s imminent return, a Significant Other Meme found on a friend’s Livejournal.

1. They are watching TV. What are they watching?

When the Super Bowl rolls around, he likes to go over to his parents’ house and watch it with his dad and a few family friends, so that’s what I think of.

2. You’re out to eat. What kind of dressing do they get on their salad?

He’s more likely to order the kind of salad (like Caesar) that has its own unique dressing, rather than the ubiquitous restaurant side salad.

3. What’s one food this person doesn’t like? What’s one food this person could not live without?

He doesn’t care for salmon.  As for “live without,” I’m not sure there is one–even speaking hyperbolically–but he certainly does enjoy a good steak.

4. You go out to the bar. He/she orders…

A Diet Coke, usually.  Occasionally a whiskey. 

5. What size shoe do they wear?

I’m guessing 13 wide.  Let me check…Hm.  The shoes he didn’t take the Stubbville are 11 and 10.5, so I am clearly off.  Obviously, I don’t buy his shoes.  Why would I?  But wide, definitely.  (I may have been thinking of the size he asks for when we go bowling?)

6. If this person were to collect anything, it would be…

Ha ha ha.  If? 

Stubb has a ginormous collection of books and paper memorabilia related to his subject field.  Seriously, it’s a “when we die, the Snork Maiden should donate this somewhere” kind of volume.

Jokes.

Friends.  He has a very small inner circle of close friends–actually, “circle” is a misnomer because what he really has is a few actual close friendships with people who aren’t necessarily friends with one another.  But in the course of his work he meets many people and the nature of their work is such that they stay in sporadic touch and often cross paths for years.  The more salient point, though, is that Stubb is a warm, intelligent and generous fellow.  He gets a lot of phone calls from people who want advice or need to tell him their troubles.  He’s far, far more gregarious than I am, although not one for large parties.  He has over 300 “friends” on Facebook, which I realize makes him no Tila Tequila, but for a fortyish man with no hobbies, that seems like a lot.

7. What is their favorite type of sandwich?

Lately, in Stubbville, he’s been going to a Cajun cafe that makes a good poorboy. 

8. This person could eat ______ everyday.

I’m not sure there is anything he likes that much.

9. Favorite cereal?

Shredded wheat?

10. This person wouldn’t be caught dead wearing?

A wifebeater?

11. Favorite sports team?

His hometown baseball team.

12. Who will he/she vote for?

Obama, naturellement.

13. What is their sign?

Gemini.

16. How many states has this person lived in?

Three if you count actual residence; if you count presence for a month or more for work, I think it’s seven.

17. What is his/her heritage?

Jewish mutt–Russian, Polish, Turkish, Spanish, Greek.

18. You bake them a cake for their birthday. What kind do you bake?

Yellow cake, chocolate frosting. 

19. The CD I would probably find in their vehicle is…

A book on CD.

20. What can you do that will guarantee a laugh from him/her?

My Oobi imitation.

21. Does he/she get along well with their family?

Yes.  It’s a great blessing.  They’re a good bunch.

22. If money wasn’t an option, I would buy him/her…

A trip to Italy so that he could see all the paintings, architecture, and sculpture he loved in art history class.

Uncommon women and others

Tenured Radical is calm, measured, incisive and smart as all hell.  She’d like to eat caribou steaks with Sarah Palin, but:

I think what is more important than whether the Palin nomination is good for women is that the Republican Party Platform, regardless of who is on the ticket, is not good for women. Women are more likely to be poor, homeless, uninsured, single parents, and caring for dependent relatives than men. As long as Republicans believe that they can campaign on “social issues” rather than “pocketbook issues” they can put the Virgin Mary on the ticket and “women” and “men” will vote Democrat in the fall.

Go ahead and read the whole post.

Another marvelous thing

(Click on any comic to enlarge.)

Lynn Johnston’s comic strip For Better or For Worse ends its 29-year storyline today, and I will miss it.  When I was an adolescent in the eighties, the strip didn’t resonate much with me, with its stories about Elizabeth’s babyhood, the devilment Michael got up to in school, Elly’s experience of motherhood, and John’s dental practice.  But I continued to read it, as one does if one reads the comic pages regularly, and as the kids grew up and ventured farther afield, the world of the strip kept expanding and the stories became more ambitious–and the characters became more and more complicated and compelling.  Lawrence came out to his friends and family, Grandma Marian and Farley the sheepdog died, Elizabeth moved to an Ojibwe village in northern Ontario…I could go on and list dozens of storylines.  One time, on a bet with my father-in-law, I listed over 100 recurring characters in the strip without looking at any of the books, and that was ten years ago–a lot of people have joined since then.

(As I got older, too, I found I appreciated the earlier strips more.  I remember finding a couple of the early collections next to my bed while staying in a friend’s parents’ house–on a trip to attend MLA, in fact–reading them and finding them not nearly as corny as I remembered.)

I know there’s been a lot of online snark about the strip, but any way you look at it, Johnston’s is an enormous achievement.  It’s very rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but it almost always hits the note of wry, resigned amusement that is part of life in families–and by “families” I mean communities as well, large, extended networks of relations and friends and people you have to deal with repeatedly even if you don’t like them: workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, as well as nuclear families.  And it created a persuasive alternate reality, as fiction does.  I loved it that at Elizabeth and Anthony’s wedding, Michael ushered to their seats people who had been important in Elizabeth’s life, like Gary and Vivian Crane, the teacher and nurse from Mtigwaki, but whom Michael had never met.  That’s what happens in life. 

I don’t know what the “newruns” will be like, in which Johnston returns to the beginning of her storyline and creates new comics.  I liked watching the development of her style over the years, and when I open the older collections (we have most of the strip in book form) I get the same frisson that you get when you look at old photographs of people you actually know–“Look how young Elly was!”  Even if they’re wonderful, the story is effectively over now.  I’m sure some papers will drop the strip to make space for something new.

And if they do, the strip they should pick up–and so should you–is Clear Blue Water, by Karen Montague-Reyes.  CBW is also a family strip, and the characters do age, as they did in FBOFW.  It’s about Eve and Manny, parents of five children: Owen, Ivy, Seth, and twins Iris and Maizy.  It is  laugh-out-loud funny a lot of the time, but it can also be tender (albeit spiked with wit) and serious.  Eve and Manny love each other and drive each other crazy; they love their children and are driven crazy by them as well.  It has elements of the fantastical, such as occasional visitations by random superheroes like “Politically Correct Guy,” “Easily Offended Man,” but it’s also down to earth and full of the ordinary, everyday complexity of people’s lives.  Check it out through this link to the strip on Yahoo! Comics.  And here are a few to get you started.

This is today’s strip.  Manny, who is Cuban-American (his Spanish-speaking mother, Caridad, and Eve don’t always get along), is politically more conservative than Eve, which can be a source of some tension in their home.  Eve, who is multiracial (African American, white, and Native American, if I remember correctly), is both more liberal and more religious.  See what I mean about the complexities of people’s lives?

Several years ago, Manny embarked on his lifelong dream of becoming a park ranger.  Eve worked at a series of stupid jobs to keep the family afloat while Manny was in training.  Now they seem to be doing better and she can spend more time on her art and writing–she seems to do a certain amount of freelance work, although it’s not always clear.

Their middle child, Seth, was diagnosed with autism while Eve was pregnant with the twins.

I was told there’d be cake

This week I had the first meeting of my New RU class.  It seems like a good group, and I enjoyed our work together.  It’s a small group, though–six students and me.  As anyone who’s ever taught one knows, very small classes can get a lot of work done, get to know one another quite well, and delve very deeply into the issues at hand.  They can also lose momentum frighteningly fast, especially in the middle of the term when there might be one or two people out sick and one or two others who are tired, coming down with something, or just underprepared.  Since this is a creative writing workshop, it will probably be as well for me to have a good writing exercise in my back pocket, so to speak, at all times, in case of low energy or–horrors!–not enough to talk about. 

It’s important for me to come in at high energy anyway, but with a small class it’s vital.  It’s also an evening class, so coming in with high energy takes some preparation.  Teaching high school means that I am awake no later than 6:30–and I’m usually up quite a bit earlier since I like those early morning hours for writing and grading.  So twelve hours later I’m not naturally champing at the bit to teach a three-hour class.  I have to eat a light but nourishing dinner; have a decent, if rough, plan for the class; and I pretty much have to have some coffee, too.  And I need to take a little time to sit and look over my notes and/or handouts and get myself psyched up. 

The class meets in a tall, narrow building on the NRU campus, in the smallest seminar room I have ever seen.  It’s got one of those blackboards with sliding panels filling up one wall, maybe about ten feet long; the opposite wall is solid brick, and the outside wall is maybe six feet wide, with three tall gun-slit windows.  The room is narrow, so instead of a seminar table we have four of those slender two-person tables pushed together.  (As I describe it, it sounds impossibly small.  Perhaps my rough guesses at measurements are way off.  I should take a tape measure next time.)

Which would all be fine except that the classroom next door is much larger and hosts a class during the same period of about forty boisterous evening students, and we’re pretty much jammed next to them right behind their blackboard.  They had quiet periods in which only one person was speaking at a time, but there were also bursts of chatter during group work and a huge amount of noise in the hallway at break time.  I went out during their break to ask them to tone it down, but groups kept leaving and arriving and I couldn’t both teach the class and stand at the door to hush people.  I can deal with the noise through the wall when they’re legitimately having class, but I will try to catch the other instructor before class next week and ask him to request consideration for the neighboring classes at break time.  I might also put a sign on our door.

(Did I mention that I think the boisterous class is high school teachers earning credits toward their master’s degrees?  I’m pretty sure, anyway.  The M.A.T. program is right down the hall.  And they sound as though they’re having way too good a time to be traditional graduate students.)

An rboc post

• Meetings have begun at Starfleet Academy.  Students return next week.
• I met my New RU class for the first time.
• I have lots to post about, but I don’t have much time to post.
• This is partly because I am staying at my sister’s to help her while she’s on low activity by doctor’s orders (she’s pregnant), so I don’t have access to my own computer.
• And I never, ever use my Starfleet Academy laptop to post to this blog.
• The Snork Maiden is with her grandparents in Vacationtown and seems to be having a nice time.  I went to a production of Romeo and Juliet with them all last night, but came promptly back.  (It’s a little far for such dashes, but I wanted to be there.)
• Stubb will be home in a few days.
• Hooray for that!
• Tomorrow: more faculty meetings!  So far, these meetings have been well run and quite productive.  I’m getting a better sense of a lot of people I’ve only met in passing before.  Also of certain interpersonal dynamics–always fascinating. 
• Now I’m going to grab my toilet kit and something to wear tomorrow (which ends with a bbq for students) and head back to my sister’s place.
• Hope to post more soon.

The curious sofa

The couch that was supposed to be delivered before I left for Stubbville did not, in fact, arrive (I could have used a phone call earlier in the delivery window, when it became apparent to the driver that there was no way it was happening that day, but whatever), so I rescheduled it for today.  Now that the Snork Maiden is home, the neighbor kids have descended to play with Legos again, so I’m sitting here waiting for the couch and contemplating a series of teaching-related tasks that need to be completed in the next 48 hours, before…

…we go away again.  Stubb’s folks are spending a week in a vacation area about two hours away, and the idea is that the Snork Maiden and I will go over there on Saturday and she’ll stay there next week with the cousins while I go back early early early Monday morning for various Starfleet Academy teacher-development activities as well as the first meeting of my New RU course.  With some luck, I’ll be able to spend some time with the family, too, but much depends on Starfleet Academy, my own energy levels, and traffic.  (Also on how smoothly things go for the Snork Maiden, who’s always a bit apprehensive about spending nights away from home and parents.)

So–time for a list!  Within the next 48 hours, I must:

• take delivery of the couch (or deal with whatever problem arises)
• attend a reception at New RU (and drop by office to sign contract)
• prepare first-day handouts for New RU: 1) original handout; 2) photocopies of examples; 3) reading for second class meeting
• finish my New RU syllabus
• cobble together opening remarks and a plan of action for the first class at RU
• attend an orientation for new teachers at Starfleet Academy
• complete and hand in paperwork for a health-insurance change
• get in touch, at least briefly, with two shamefully neglected friends (who don’t read this blog)  This will have to happen this week…
• update my “bird’s-eye view” curriculum plans for the year–a general sketching out of goals and assignments to be used at gradewide meetings Monday
• send two one overdue Writing Biz emails (technically, these could both wait until Monday, but I don’t expect to have time on Monday anyway)
• drop off books at the library and pick up a book on hold
• prepare myself and the Snork Maiden for the next trip (laundry, repack)
• Added: dig out my old Peanuts lunchbox that I promised to find for the Snork Maiden

Tasks being deferred until next week include:

• the writing of syllabi for my Starfleet Academy classes
• the planning of the first week or so of said classes
• putting away or otherwise dealing with miscellaneous items and recycling unearthed by the reorganization of my workspace last week

I keep oscillating between feelings of a) apprehension, unwillingness to work, and anxiety about the new school year and b) excitement, eagerness to meet all my new students, and ambition for this to be the best year ever.  Phase a) peaked last week, and right now I seem to be in a b) phase, so this is probably a good time to get started on the above.  Off I go!

The book of virtues

43 Folders is one of those blogs that tends to accumulate posts in my Google Reader–it’s a good blog, but when reading blogs, I’m not always in the self-improvement mode that I seem to feel it requires.  Whenever I dip into it, though, I find something good, as with this post on What Makes for a Good Blog?.  I don’t really have anything to say about it (thereby flouting items 4 and 8, among others), just wanted to pass it along.

The number of the beast

I can now see my rosters for the upcoming year at Starfleet Academy and for my fall New RU class, and so I’ve counted up my students and am pleased to see that my 9th-grade classes are a little smaller this year–15 or 16 per class, which is great.  (They hired another new teacher besides me, and one of the reasons for that was to push down class sizes a bit.)  There might be some shifting around, and my 11th-grade class is larger, but still, about 66 students seems pretty reasonable.  Certainly nothing like the 100-plus that many high-school teachers have.  And fewer than I had most semesters as a thinly-spread adjunct.

Oh, but wait: this is high school and I am supposed to know them all reasonably well.  And possibly recognize their parents. 

Russian Violets’ post on “Angst” reminded me of one thing I always do on the first day of class, which is perspire.  Even if the room is cool, my cheeks flush and I sweat–an involuntary physical response to being looked at by a bunch of strangers.  Like RV and her commenters, I’ve developed adaptations to the professional necessity of being looked at by strangers quite frequently, but still, I feel like a different teacher once I actually know the students a little bit.

Wisdom from the comics about 70’s music, 2

Wisdom from the comics about 70’s music, 1

Click to enlarge.