One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

In the past year and a half I’ve lost my paternal grandparents (I never knew my mother’s parents), my mother’s sister, and a close friend.  To say the least, it’s been a bit of a difficult year and a half.   Part of the reason I’ve been MIA is that with my grandmother’s death last week and my great Aunt being not well, I’ve been in a bit of a funk.  I’m hoping to get more motivated, but it’s a process.  I’m working on it.

I went to an all girls’ school from 6th through 12th grade, and while I spent quite a bit of time bitching and moaning about this school (most of my complaints centered around the 40 mile distance from my home), one thing I am incredibly grateful for is the fostering of female strength that I found at Immaculate Heart.

A large part of my education at Immaculate Heart was not simply a college preparatory curriculum, but an series of ideas about what I could do, and be. In the environment of a single sex education, I was able to move forward from being a painfully shy girl into a young woman who was not only encouraged to form and express my opinions but was expected to have and share them. I learned to not fear the “what if my opinion is wrong,” but to fear simply not being able to stand by my opinions.

In fact, one of my assignments as a sophomore in high school was to write a persuasive essay, something, I have learned many of my public school peers either never did, or didn’t begin working on until senior year.  While preparing this essay, we were expected to choose any topic and to research it properly. I chose something that I felt very passionately about at the time, the negative body image of women the media portrays.  It was one of the only essays I wrote in high school that I was truly proud of, and it was possibly my best grade on an essay.  I was pretty militant in my opinions and was able to rant for an entire paragraph about my hatred for the Spice Girls (I know, I was pretty easily riled up).

So, when I read this article on Jezebel in response to this blog entry by Madeleline M. Kunin, I was disappointed in the way girls are educated socially, especially in our high schools. I was also extremely grateful for the education I received.In addition, I was saddened that at the university level many women were still too unsure of their own abilities to form opinions that are vaild to even really participate in a classroom discussion.  In fact, I actually find myself somewhat disgusted. The fact that our education system is still failing women in this way is appalling.  A woman shouldn’t have to attend a single sex high school to gain the self esteem and confidence in her own thoughts that women who come from single sex educations have.  Why haven’t our curiculums changed to fix this problem?  What needs to happen so that we don’t end up with continuing generations of women who believe they aren’t “qualified” to be involved in politics because they’re afraid their opinions might be “wrong?”  Is the answer simply offering single sex education at a public school level?

This semester, I’m taking a class called Fiction to Film. For each weekend session we have a different novel and corresponding film to watch.  This weekend’s assignment is American Psycho.  The novel, written by Bret Easton Ellis, is, to say the very least, upsetting. It is sexually explicit and extremely violent.  The main character, Patrick Batemen has no redeeming qualities as far as I can see.  I understand that this is most likely the point.  That the character is supposed to be so unlikeable.  That the graphic violence, misogony and gluttony are all part of making the characters who they are.   However, compared to the novel, the film is almost humorous.  The violence is shown only in blood spatters and pooling, and for obvious reasons the sex scenes have been toned down considerably.  The music reminded me of old school horror films, slightly overly dramatic which made the film have an almost comical feel to it.

After our discussion in class, I had a bit more of an insight into the satirical nature of the novel, and while the whole thing still left me feeling sick to my stomach, Bret Easton Ellis is one hell of a writer.  Looking at the novel’s themes of identity and being a “somebody” vs a “nobody,” made the dialogue in class pretty interesting.  It also shed some new light for me on the novel, making it slightly less disgusting.

After starting this class, it got me thinking about all of the other novels I’ve read, and really enjoyed that have been turned into films.  In some, very rare, cases I’ve actually preferred the film to the novel.  Films like Atonement, where the novel felt excruciatingly slow moving, the film was able to cut through most of the exposition at the beginning to really get into the meat of the story.  Sense and Sesnsibility, which is probably my favorite Austen.  I was never a huge fan of Jane Austen’s actual writing, I’ve always found her a bit wordy and slightly tedious, but I always enjoyed the stories themselves, and I think Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson made a truly great adaptation.  One of the reason I enjoyed these films so much though, I think, is because while they are adapatations and some things were changed or left out, the films stayed very true to the stories, and the essence of the characters.  Other novels I’ve loved, and films I’ve enjoyed, like Circle of Friends, left me feeling slightly off kilter.  I really, really loved the film, however, the changing of the ending made me feel like the screenwriter and director made Benny go from a strong protagonist to one who is a big flubbery mess, willing to take Jack back for the sake of a neat and tidy ending.

I’m still here. Just been lazy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about M lately. I’ve been seeing him everywhere lately. But, logically, I know it isn’t really him, and usually upon second glance it’s just some guy who has the same color hair as M had, or a similar jaw line, or dimples where M had dimples. Usually it’s someone who really doesn’t look like M at all, but for a split second, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him. For a brief moment I thought, oh how clever of you, M, to play this trick on all of us. To pretend to have died. Maybe you just needed a break for a little bit. A chance to find yourself without all the baggage that comes along with a life. But, I know that isn’t true either, and while it saddens me to think that M is truly gone, forever, what hurts the most, and I think why I think about him so much, is not the fact that he took his own life. That is something I know we will never fully understand, and maybe it’s not for us to understand. I think what keeps him in my mind so much is that I feel like I never really got to say goodbye. I wasn’t able to go to the funeral, I didn’t get the chance to sit in the church with my friends and M’s family, I didn’t get the chance to cry with everyone and to be there to watch him put into the ground. It sounds morbid, I know, but there’s a certain sense of closure that comes along with the ritual of a funeral. A certain sense of finality that I don’t seem to have with M. Maybe, since I wasn’t there, since I didn’t see the casket, I didn’t watch it lowered into the ground, it seems unreal still. It seems like, if I think hard enough, that I can imagine that B didn’t really call me in August to tell me M was gone. It feels like I can just keep thinking that M is there, safe in San Diego still. Maybe it’s just that I keep hoping if I think that long enough, or wish hard enough, it will come true.

To say that I struggled with math is an understatment. When I was in second grade, I still couldn’t add or subtract without the aide of a number line.  Part of this was because I legitimately had a learning disability (that wouldn’t be discovered until I was a senior in high school), and part of this was because my teacher at the time felt I was a “good kid,” and not a problem, so she didn’t push me to give up my crutch.  My parents pulled me out of public school after that year and put me into Catholic school. I started third grade barely being able to add or subtract, with a class full of children who had already learned their times tables. I spent most of that school year at home, red faced and crying, desperately trying to catch up. Math never got any easier for me, and it wasn’t until this past semester at school that I had a teacher who seemed to truly grasp that to some people, Math is a foreign language.

Now, I work with elementary school aged children in an after school care facility which means I help the kids with their homework on a daily basis.  Today, one of the third grade girls, was still sitting in the back room, struggling through her math homework, when everyone else was finished and moving onto the activity of the day. So, I went back to the room and sat with her.  She was working on relatively simple division, problems like 75 divided by 5 or 39 divided by 3. While some people would be able to look at 39 divided by 3 and automatically know, by doing the math in their head, that the answer is 13, for other people it isn’t that easy.  None of the problems had a remainder, but for someone who does not do well with numbers, I could see exactly where the problem was.

So, I sat down, and had her write out the problems on a seperate sheet of paper and take it step by step. Instead of trying to figure out in her head how many times 3 went into 39 I had her think about how many times 3 goes into 3, then how many times 3 goes into 9.  Breaking it down for her really made a difference and  by the fourth problem she was smiling and said “When my teacher expalined to today, I didn’t get it, and everybody else in my class did, and they laughed at me…but now you explained it and it makes sense.  It only makes sense when you explain it.”  I explained to her how I always had a hard time with math, and that sometimes, all you need to do is break it into smaller steps. Then it doesn’t seem so hard.

I nearly cried. For real. The fact that I was able to help someone who was going through pretty much the exact problem I had gone through at her age made me feel pretty amazing.  It makes all the difficulty I had with some of the other kids this week seem worthwhile.

Pan-Roasted Salmon with Soy Ginger Glaze

I’ve never been a huge fan of fish in general.  I enjoy tuna salad every so often, I like tuna in various sushi dishes and I like shellfish like shrimp and lobster. I also used to operate under the impression that salmon was not only gross, but horribly expensive and difficult to cook.  I was wrong on both counts.  T and I buy a bag of frozen fillets which probably aren’t as tasty and fresh as say, sushi grade salmon, but it’s pretty good and realtively inexpensive.  Then, I found the above recipe on food.yahoo.com

We’ve made this dish twice now, and it is really good. The soy sauce adds just enough salt to the fish to make sure the salmon doesn’t taste fishy.  Tonight, we had the salmon with spinich and corn and it was yummy yummy. We’ve also had it with rice pilaf and asparagus.

So, if you’re fishphobic and want to try and get more fish in your diet, try this recipe.

Growing up, one of the first series of books I remember falling in love with was the Serendipity collection of books written by Stephen Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James. There’s something so beautifully whimsical about these books. They made me fall in love with books, and ultimately made me fall in love with stories and the idea of writing stories.

Now, I work with children in an after school care facility, and while I was helping some of the kids with homework today, I came across a copy of “Crickle -Crack” which I then HAD to sit and read while the kids worked quietly.

“Crickle-Crack” is a somewhat creepy story about a squriell named Squeekers who eats the buds from the Crickle Crack tree, which is forbidden.  The buds of the Crickle Crack tree are like a drug apparently because Squeekers gets majorly high and loses track of the whole day. He then rushes home, with some extra Crickle Crack buds in his pockets. He lies to his mother about where he’s been all day then eats more buds to stay awake to read his homework.  Basically he becomes addicted to these buds, and has a horrible reaction when he eats too many. Luckily with the love of his parents and support of his friends and neighbors he recovers and the elder critters in the wood burn the Crickle Crack tree to the ground.

I then tried to find any other copies of Stephen Cosgrove books in our tiny library section to no avail.

Part of me wants to buy a bunch of his books on amazon and just revel in the amazingness that is the Serendipity collection.

Fifteen years ago today, the Northridge Earthquake struck Southern California. I remember it vividly because we were living in Santa Clarita only a few miles from the epicenter at the time. I remember that I was staying at my friend Renee’s house that night. We were working on some kind of school project and having a sleepover. We were camped out in the living room with her sister and brother when at some point in the middle of the night we decided to move from our spot on the floor to the bunk beds in the room she shared with her sister. Lucky for us we did, because a huge framed piece of art flew from off the wall above the couch and onto the pile of blankets and pillows we’d been using as a mattress.

I remember mostly that it was terrifying not being able to see anything (the earthquake hit very early in the morning), the eerie silence, and the amount of damage that had been done to Renee’s family’s house. Also, not being able to reach my parents for hours was unsettling to say the least. Seeing doors pulled off hinges and the entire contents of my friend’s kitchen smashed to bits on the floor had me anxious about my own family’s house.

We got lucky, there was merely cosmetic damage done to our house. We needed to replace a retaining wall in our front yard, and one of the gas lines going into the hot water heater, but aside from that, and a few cracks in the walls around the house, and the shifting of widows we had no damage.

For weeks afterward though, we were trapped in the Santa Clarita Valley since the freeways had collapsed, crippling traffic coming into or going out of the valley. It was like my worst nightmare come true. Even though we had very rarely left the valley for much, the idea that we were stuck there, indefinitely made me want to pull out my hair. I was only in 5th grade, but already I was learning Santa Clarita was not a place I felt I belonged.

It’s hard to believe it’s been fifteen years. Most of the time, I don’t think about that morning at all. It’s simply a blip on the time line of my life. But when I really remember what it was like to be tossed around in bed, and see houses destroyed, I wonder if I could stand another big earthquake. Especially now that my parents live in another state. The idea of going through another quake of that size without my family close by is slightly terrifying.

I may be 26, but there are certain things I’d rather not experience with my family 400 miles away.

So, it’s now January 11th and I have yet to purchase a new weekly engagement calender. For the past four, maybe five years I’ve bought a new weekly engagement calender from Barnes and Noble, because they’re the only place I can find the kind of weekly calender I like. I need one page per week, with enough space to write notes to myself. So, today, I went over to The Grove to get my 2009 Weekly Engagement Calendar, only to find that the only theme they have left is Soldiers of the Civil War.

Seriously.

The ONLY weekly engagement calenders in the style that I like left at the Barnes and Nobel at The Grove, features images of Soldiers of the Civil War.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to look at depressing ass images of people who fought in the Civil War all year. I then when to Border’s to see if they had any calendars that would work. They had NOTHING. I mean, ok I get it, it’s now 2 weeks into the new year, but really?! NOTHING left?!

This is bullshit.