yankeedrawl

my life in fictional country music, part II

2009-07-07T00:39:00.005-04:00

"Drinking on Weeknights (Gloating)" by Jacked Up Truck

"No Work Pays No Money" by Union Shop

"You're Not Where I Want (But It's Not About Me)" by Jett James

"It's Not Secret, It's Strategy" by Four Large Hairy Men

who you invent

2008-07-25T22:41:00.002-04:00

The restlessness is the part of a new place that I loathe.

I get to reinvent myself, break habits, start new ones, and make a batch of new impressions.

Yet for a time, the relationships are awkward and superficial. I dog-paddle, trying to recall names while reading a person: is this someone with whom I want spend time?

Being careful costs me: I watch a lot of TV, read a bunch of books, and generally imagine that most everyone is having more fun than me. On another, of course, I know it isn't true. Not that I'm frustrated, but that everyone else's life is a parade of parties and esprit de corps.

Then again, it's a new city, new people. Maybe things are different here.

In any case, whine's over for this evening. Life moves ever faster. And there's a lot to be said for books.

maybe I'll break hearts and be as fast you

2006-09-18T19:29:00.000-04:00

Oh my, I haven't done this in a while. However, the voyeuristic gulf left by me leaving Facebook must be satiated.

My life, as described by fictional country songs:

"The Lady Is All Right (I Can Sometimes Pronounce A Soft 'S')" by Rufus Todd and Tractor-Trailers

"Blame (He Said, She Said)" by Estelle Jacobs and the Salt of the Earth

"I'm Confident In My Masculinity (Unlike Most Homophobic 15-Year-Olds)" by the Redneck Boyz

"Curt Weldon Is Batshit Crazy" by the Downshifting Truckers

you are aghast for all the wrong reasons

2005-12-20T20:49:00.000-05:00

For reasons that left you after the second margarita but you believe had something to do with being home for the holidays and at your parents' home, you met your ex at Chili's.

"....just blows me away. I was in the magazine rack at Barnes and Noble and thought I saw someone who looked like and immediately got shot of adrenaline..."

Your ex is in minute six of describing his current girlfriend. He knows he is being both boorish and an ass, but cannot help himself; he is truly smitten.

"She is so smart. Like, hella smart. She was a finalist for the Rhodes and the Marshall."

You wince. Hella? This is the guy who introduced you to Toby Keith.

"Our first day, we did nothing but talk. I didn't even worry about kissing her. It was like, I knew it was going to happen anyway--why rush it? I mean, she told me about the Palestinian right of return. She spent a summer organizing participating in sit-ins before the Israeli army bulldozed villages. Kinda strange for a Catholic girl from Kansas, but there you go..."

A red flag rises in your mind. This girl supports the Palestinian right of return? That would obliterate Israel! What's the point of having a Jewish state run by Muslims? What kind of slut would believe this crap? You begin to voice your objection, but your ex changes the subject.

"And she likes sports! Like, loves them! She has season tickets for the Yankees. She's so devoted that she moved to a cheaper apartment in the Bronx so she could save enough money to buy the tickets. Closer to the stadium, too."

You are furious. What kind of whore roots for both the Yankees and supports the Palestinian right of return? That's like serving Coke and Pepsi at the same party! Like an incumbent running as the anti-Washington candidate! Like buying a copy of The Nation at Wal-Mart! The cognitive dissonance gives you a headache.

You look at your ex, searching for a trace of comprehension in his apologetic, beaming face. You'd hit him if you loved him a little less.

You decide to say nothig and empty the margarita pitcher in your glass and ask the waiter for the check. You realize this is sending a message that he'll misinterpret, forcing an awkward phone call regarding his boorish, ass-like behavior. You decide this is an acceptable outcome; after all, the Yankees?

to see in all directions at the same time

2005-09-15T22:13:00.000-04:00

For the curious...

I love my kids.

At this point in the year, I think I am learning more from them than vise versa.

Don't look down now, but perhaps the walls can be leaped.

I moved North to avoid heat (among other reasons). When's that gonna happen, huh? I'm talking to you, Hurricane Ophelia.

I wonder if some dudes at the National Weather Service in eastern North Carolina mess with the intern by playing Adam Cohen's one hit wonder, "Cry Ophelia" every morning. I so would.

I need to sleep and run more than I have been the last few days.

My instinct for equilibrium will soon bear out.

I gave me away

2005-09-04T11:48:00.000-04:00

Some storms just don't end...

The Katrina fallout has been like seeing a nasty wreck on the Interstate. It's so painful to see, but it's impossible to look away. I keep telling myself to stop reading and watching TV reports, that the suffering is constant, that peoples' lives will remain wrecked for the forseeable future, that our incompetent leaders can't be voted out of office right now, that I can't do anything, that getting angry doesn't do anything except raise my blood pressure.

I tell myself these things, but of course, I don't always do what I'm told.

get a firm grip, girl, before you let go

2005-08-30T13:23:00.000-04:00

So....

I have been assigned. I don't know what grade I will teach or if I will have a classroom. I do, however, have a spiffy ID card that says I'm a teacher.

If I don't hear otherwise, I'm supposed to report to the school September 1.

****

District training would've been made a great unintentionally hilarious reality series had I not had to show up every day. Instead, it was painfully boring.

****

My Mississippi friends seem to be mostly OK. A's house survived, though her mother-in-law's did not. K's parents lost a good chunk of their roof. No word from reporter-buddies on the coast. The Times-Picayune evacuated their main office Tuesday morning because of flooding. As for Sun-Herald people, I saw their bylines this morning, so they must be doing well enough to do their jobs.

the faithful ones here have remained just so

2005-08-22T00:03:00.000-04:00

I (finally) put together my bed. Here's to my first night off the floor at 3A.

****

Fingers crossed, I might have found a church. Whoda thunk?

****

At least two reasons to anticipate, if not be all-out excited. Updates as events warrant and modesty permits.

****

Erika and Jeff are not expecting Kellyn until the week after next.

can't find the time to write my mind the way I want it to read

2005-08-21T00:54:00.000-04:00

I am uncharacteristically confused. What exactly was it that I told myself I should want?

****

I won't find out my placement for another five days. This is the second delay for us TFAers. The first day of school, alas, has not been delayed. These two facts are causing considerable heartburn for some of my collegues; I, however, feel oddly complacent about the whole deal. Perhaps it's because the reality of the classroom, of the first day, of the fevered preparation I will soon have to engage in, has not hit home for me. I felt it while I was teaching summer school. But that feels like it was another life. Now I'm just this unemployed guy in a big city who goes to class occasionally. I go out on the weekends. I buy stuff for my apartment. I walk quickly past homeless people on the street. I fix sandwiches with gourmet cheese.

Oh, how my life is about to be turned on its head.

the sun comes up in a coffee cup

2005-08-15T22:05:00.000-04:00

An ethics question for those quasi-lawyers who read my meanderings:

Should a person read another's blog without sharing the address to their own? For that matter, why bring the topic to the fore unless you intended to share the Web site?

Even if that person promises to never read this blog, I still think it's a cop-out. But don't let me unduly influence the judge and jury. Render ye judgements.

Bottom line, though: Michelle K. Lee is a merciless tease.

And should be stopped.

(raised pinkie)

sailin' in, yes Lord, sailin' in

2005-08-12T16:48:00.000-04:00

I am at Barnes and Noble, as it is the only place around here where I can access the wonderful world of the Internet. Cable dude comes next week, which is not so great, since I need Internet access to find out to what school I've been assigned.

I am now officially Processed by the school district. Paycheck to come (much) later.

The apartment, with the exception of my room, is put together. I need to go have words with IKEA regarding the componets they put in their bed boxes.

Oddly enough, nothing on the agenda tonight. Perhaps I'll cook.

I wonder when it will register with me that I'm going to be a teacher. Like, a for-real-assigning-papers-and-stuff teacher.

the things we never thought we could be

2005-08-02T16:16:00.000-04:00

I am back in Mississippi, albeit until I get a U-Haul and take my recliner, couch, and self back East. (That's two days from now, for those of you who insist on exactness.)

Since I am at a my parents' house, that means I'm no longer at Institute. Indeed, I am a newly-minted Teach For America '05 Corps Member. It's official--I will have my own class in the fall. About 150 students will depend on me for some type of instruction.

I could, I suppose, prattle on endlessly about Institute. I could tell you more stories about H, whose final essay nearly brought me to tears. Then there's A, who wrote a poem that would've gotten an A in a college creative writing class. A, as it turns out, should never have been in summer school in the first place. Clerical error made by someone downtown, apparently. According to my mentor, this sort of thing happens all the time. 250,000 kids in school district...bound to be a few kinks in the system, right?

But, as I insinuated, I'm not going to get into all that. Most war stories are boorish to everyone who didn't fight in the battle. You'll just have to forgive for the brief descriptions above. Pretend I never wrote that.

****

I should find out my fall assignment August 15.

we can end the speculation

2005-07-18T17:03:00.000-04:00

It's a bad sign when I walk out of the dorm in the a.m. and think, "Hmm. Feels like home."

The knock-you-on-your-back humidity is not something to which I ever adjusted during my 17-year tenure in Mississippi. It's one of the big reasons I moved north. And, oh yeah, Mississippi may be behind in every educational category, but we do air-condition our schools. Can't say the same for these yankees.

At least I didn't teach today. No, the Mister B show is only playing thrice this week, though we do have two special two-hour showings. Arrive early and dress cool.

Literally.

stones taught me to fly

2005-07-13T23:22:00.000-04:00

I escaped today.

With tired legs and a minor beer buzz, I return to the world of Institute. Not sadly, mind you, but I did need to get away.

The good news began at 1:20 when the school director called an emergency meeting to tell us that we had the rest of the afternoon off. Today, the midpoint of Institute, was declared "TFA Day." For me, the upshot was that I could finish my prep work during the afternoon (after an oh-so-lovely nap).

After dinner, I stapled a bunch of papers, grabbed a few subway tokens, and took off into the heart of the city.

As with any trip I plan, it included a lot of walking. About 20 blocks, I think. I got a root beer float and, a bit later, a beer. I heard two drunk girls sing "Love is a Battlefield."

A banal outing? You bet. A welcome change of perspective. Absolutely.

See, this is going to be my home. It doesn't feel like it yet, but I think that's because I haven't found the nooks, eccentricities, and oddities. I will, though. I always do.

got canned heat in my heels tonight

2005-07-12T21:59:00.000-04:00

I'm nearing a noteworthy moment as a TFA CM (that's "corps member," for the uninitiated) at Institute: tonight I might actually get a day or so ahead in my work. As soon as I finish this, I'm typing up two lesson plans that aren't due until Thursday.

I rock the casbah.

****

If all goes as planned, I'll give my first literacy exam tomorrow morning. See, my partner and I believe H to be functionally illiterate. He has yet to write more than a single coherent sentence, and we've heard no evidence that he can read. He's a nice kid--has a bit of tendency to misbehave, but if I were stuck in a 88-degree classroom for two hours each morning while I was being taught things I had no hope of understanding, I'd be more a disruption than he is.

Those of you who wonder about the 88-degree classroom reference....I teach on the fourth floor in a room that lacks air conditioning. We have three fans, which keeps the noise level up, as well as the notebook paper.

And, yes, I teach in a tie.

God bless Mississippi...at least we air-condition buildings there.

Yankees.

(sigh)

it's only gonna make you love me more

2005-07-10T23:13:00.000-04:00

Hey, it looks like I'll get to sleep at a decent hour tonight. Snaps for getting my work done in a decent amount of time. Double snaps, even.

Tomorrow I'll be teaching an excerpt from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" to 24 African-American students. (For those of you don't know or aren't sure, I am, in fact, white.) Time to find out if any of that stuff I learned in diversity training is worth anything.

But to look at it another way, if the students get angry at my whiteness, at least they'll have been paying attention.

Three weeks into this and I still think my job is better than reporting on wrecks and murders in the Mississippi Delta. This relationship just might work.

I'm hiding out in the big city thinking

2005-07-09T17:17:00.000-04:00

I love people, but I needed to be alone with 33,000 other people today. Hence, I assumed a cloak of anonymity and went the professional baseball game this afternoon.

It was nice not to feel the need to engage anyone for a few hours. Also, the home team won. All is right with the world.

Except:

• How is it, exactly, Tony Blair's or George W. Bush's fault that jihadist bombers decided to indiscriminately kill a few dozen people in London? I guess I missed the letter from Al Qaida that said if the Americans left Iraq (or Afghanistan or made Islam the official state religion or exiled Paris Hilton) they would quit killing innocent people. However, I was paying attention when Al Qaida operatives tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and when they bombed the USS Cole while it was docked in Yemen (after assisting in an operation in Bosnia that saved thousands of Muslim lives). Maybe it's just me, but these terrorists don't seem like the type to need a motive. They seem like the type who kills anyone who doesn't look, think, and behave like them.

• I still need to find the actual articles I intend to teach Monday.

• I still need to learn literacy teaching strategies so I can help the few kids in my class who are functionally illiterate.

• I still need to figure how to help those kids gain a few years' reading levels while teaching something to the rest of the class, too.

with a shorter past

2005-07-08T17:41:00.000-04:00

So I finish my first week as a teacher. After a so-so Tuesday and a near-disasterous Wednesday (short verson: the class grew from 9 to 29 students because another, non-TFA, teacher decided not to come to work ever again), things picked up at the end of the week.

A few members of the cast:

S: By far the best student in the class. She wrote her personal paragraph about how much she and her cousins like to beat up random people. Why? "I don't know."

C: Works hard, has a great attitude and turns everything in on time. To top it, a reasonable percentage of it is correct. Lord only knows why he's in summer school, but I suspect it has something to do with what he wrote in his paragraph: both his father and brother are dead. His neighborhood ain't exactly in the touristy section of town, so draw your own conclusions.

I: Told me to fuck off on Thursday, but I got an apology out of him and let him back in the class. At the end of Friday's class, he went to another room and called my classroom. "It's just a joke Mister B," he said. Oh yes, he gave an impromptu recitation of 20 sentences using the adverb "badly" for a game we played in class. He'll be a fun one.

J: I misprounounced his name for all of Wednesday's class. According to his paragraph, he expects to attend college. During down time at the end of Friday's class, he asked if I ever smoked any "blacks," "whites," or "greens." I think the last term refers to marijuana, but I've got no clue what the first two mean. I've got to get up on my inner-city slang.

According to my counselor-type person here in TFA-land, I've got one of the better classes.

I agree. They're supposed to be the worst of the worst, but there's potential in these kids.

I just hope I can do something for them.

the light, the heat

2005-07-05T00:04:00.000-04:00

And now I'm single.

I'm a horrible person.

I reach out from the inside

2005-07-03T22:30:00.000-04:00

Tonight I attended the first meeting of a Christian group since, well, a long time. Freshman year? Uh, I'll just leave it at "a long time."

I almost didn't go. There was a part of me that wanted to go the baseball game and have some time to myself in the stands. Lesson planning, though, took longer than I anticipated, so the spectator sport thing didn't happen. And there I was at 8:40 with nothing to do.

About 30 people were in the room. A slight majority were Protestant. Most were from the South or Midwest. I think maybe two people were from the Northeast.

Eventually we broke up into groups based on what region we are in. Fun fact: three out of four members (including myself) of my collaborative group were there. Some people, including myself, shared what we wanted to get out of the "affinity group"--TFA's term for grouping people based upon a simliar interest or background.

This is the gist of what I shared: I've struggled with fellowshipping with Christians for many years because where I am from, Christianity is used to exclude and condemn. I seriously considered not coming because I worried that self-identifying as a Christian would alienate several non-Christians I've met and whose company I enjoy. But the fact is that Christ's ministry to the poor and downtrodden (such a religious word) inspired me to do this.

End of gist.

Those gathered seemed mostly accepting to this. Time will tell, I suppose. I'll give it a whirl again next week.

I'm no evangelical, but I pray every day (for nearly 10 years now). I'm no regular chuchgoer, but I feel the need to set a moral example. I'm no saint, but superficiality and materialsm just don't do it for me. I've read a lot and had a respectable amount of diverse experiences (such a TFA term) for a Southern boy from a WASP family. I've tried several different paths.

But the only thing that rings true each and every time is what Christ preached and the example He set.

I just need to remember to not let my stubborness or my fellow Christians get in the way of that.

I conform to me

2005-07-03T16:48:00.000-04:00

I'm in the midst of lesson-planning madness. Should the worksheet be 15 questions or 20? (Fifteen, says my inner apathetic student.) Are there any uses for parentheses about which I'm forgetting? (Apparently not.) Is Thursday "Do Now" activity going to suck? (Likely.)

At least I'm not at the OMG-full-scale-freak-out mode that consumes some TFAers. For a bunch of people who don't hesitate to drop the fact that their senior thesis was well over 100 pages, some sure are afraid of a simple outline.

Either that or everyone's trying to finish early because there's some great party in the dorm tonight that no one's told me about.

The world will follow after

2005-07-03T00:58:00.000-04:00

So I return to the world of online self-examination (for the cynical among us, self-flagellation). I've got a new computer, home and job.

I quit blogging several years ago because 1) I didn't think I had anything worthwhile to share and 2) I thought it was a little narcissistic. Now that I'm teaching underpriviledged children, surely I'm immune to charges of the latter, right?

Not so much. While most TFAers are ten times of cool, some of us are as self-righteous as a Unitarian at a Baptist revival. Obnoxiously liberal, in other words.

I try to innoculate myself from the tendency to feel too good about myself by listening to lots of Johnny Cash.

Time takes time enough

2005-07-03T00:53:00.000-04:00

Test one, test two