| oh hey |
[Mar. 20th, 2010|05:51 pm] |
Hi Lj,
its been awhile! I've been really busy doing not really much at all, but I keep forgetting to write here, sorry! Its kind of enough keeping up with my food blog now, but its okay, i still heart my lj, i promise.
Mainly, there has been a whole lot of drama going on with my school the past month. Perhaps you are unaware, but I actually teach in uh, a really really bad part of town! My school is located by the train station and across the street from low income housing. It is surrounded by houses that like 5 families live in and we have a very high crime rate and a lot of trouble with drugs and gangs.
Now, I've never actually felt all that unsafe, I mean, I'm used to it. We have security and police surveillance on school at all times and I don't stick around after dark. No one has ever broken into the school and they do seem to leave us alone. I mean, their siblings and cousins and kids go there, you know?
However, last year around this time there were like...7 stabbings and a few shootings in the area? I don't know, they must have been in the surrounding area but still not that close as no one got THAT upset about it. People started talking about moving our school to a new location, but there really ISN'T another location, not to mention thats like leaving the area to totally go to hell, you know? And my kids will still have to come home to this neighborhood every afternoon, how is that helping them?
Over the summer there was actually a shooting at like 3pm (actually about 20 minutes after I left from doing classroom setup- yikes!) right down the street from school. That got parents upset...more cops were added, they are doing shift changes in our building, etc. etc. Last friday, another shooting, this one was two blocks away though, but at like 1pm. We reacted well, semi lockdown, got an extra bus for our walkers and did not let anyone walk home as the shooter was still at large. A security guard rode the bus with the walkers and walked each kid personally to their door. Still, parents are now MORE upset....there was a huge blowout at Monday's board meeting and now they want more than to move the school...they want us out NOW! They want to do crazy stuff, like have us attend half day sessions at the other intermediate school, or get portables stuffed onto all the primary schools and house us there for now, or somehow stuff us into the high school (which uh is a bad idea as a kid pulled a knife on someone there like last week!)...so basically, my life is currently a really big WHAT THE HECK IS GONNA HAPPEN?!
I'm hoping we can just stay where we are for now, and I don't really want to move anyway. Really we need to clean up the neighborhood. The town needs to actually start cracking down on the illegal households and start doing drug busts. I don't really know why they aren't doing this already. Instead they're letting things get so bad that now some parents don't even want their kids playing outside! Last year one of my kids told me all about the video games he plays all day and I was like, "You need to go exercise outside!" and he told me, "If I did that, I'd get shot!" What kind of life is this for a kid? Ugh, I just want to keep them all safe, is that too much to ask?
*Oh yeah, and after all that stuff, on like Wed night some poor guy was walking home and got shot in the neck...most of the shootings are gang or drug related, but no one has heard if it was the case with this one. He was 21, but guess what? Used to go to my school when he was a kid :( He's in ICU so hopefully he'll be okay. |
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| Whole and Without Blessing -- Linda Gregg |
[Mar. 20th, 2010|01:54 pm] |
Whole and Without Blessing
by Linda Gregg
What is beautiful alters, has undertow.
Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with.
Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes
out of this fever and see the meaning
of my life clearly. A thing like a hill.
I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,
or need to be blessed. I belong to no one. I do not move.
Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet.
and the indifferent sun warms me.
I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.
( +notes )
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| Spring? |
[Mar. 20th, 2010|01:03 pm] |
I don't know. It's warm out. It's sunny. I got up and decided to make blueberry scones. Except we were out of butter and I didn't notice until I'd put all the dry ingredients in the food processor. So I threw on some clothes and ran to the market up the street and grabbed butter. Came home and made scones. I added a little too much buttermilk and I should have paid more attention becaus I like my scones crumblie. These are good, but not excellent. Oh well.
I've bought some new clothes so I don't have to walk around Paris in old stained shirts. I bought a scale because I have a feeling my weight is creeping in the wrong direction. I feel fat and I am in hate with my body. I'm in pain most days. My sleep is crazy. I can't do very much exercise because my pain shoots through the roof if I walk more than three miles in a day or spend too much time on the ellipitcal machine. I know exercise intolerance is part of fibro, but I HATE IT. I used to hike 14k mountains in Colorado and run long distance. I took 12 years of ballet. I was never overweight until zoloft. ARGH! I tried very hard to exercise and diet before we got married and I could not lose any weight. It was weird.
I've been so laissez faire about it all and that has to change. I'm going to stop buying scones and things at the coffee shop (And yes I realize the irony that I made my own scones this morning.) I'm going there for coffee only. Instead of getting up and eating a scone or eek an almond croissant there I'll be eating eggs or something at home. I'll continue walking between 2-3 miles a day. I expect getting the braces put on will make my teeth so sore I won't want to eat much. :D
I went through my drawers and bagged up clothes to take to good will. I have a few bins to go through. And I need to go through my yarn stash and get rid of a lot of weird balls people have given me or that I am allergic to. I think I'm going to donate them to Project Linus.
My clapotis is going well. The yarn is silk and cashmere and feels like delight.
FREE TO A GOOD HOME: One pair of pink suede Adidas size US 8 1/2 UK 7. I wore them like twice. They're too small for me by half a size. Anyone? I'll mail them to you. |
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| Envoy Prayer- Kate Knapp Johnson |
[Mar. 20th, 2010|03:23 pm] |
Envoy Prayer- Kate Knapp Johnson
There's not a corner, in all the world,
without its shallow grave –
mourned, unmourned, each
tucked under a shroud of grass. I know
in all the earth there's not a plot of ground
where someone is not quietly gathering
an arsenal, mixing nitrates,
inventing a more economical manner
of death – nor one chamber
of the heart that hasn't been stolen into
and darkened… But the first winds of spring
rise till the dogwood
extends herself in her white-tiered gown;
the stones hold their witness inside
while the finches and jays spill over
the edges of a single hour.
On TV last night, a man was speaking:
"I was running, carrying my son on my shoulders
when the soldiers shot him…why
was I running? It was my home…"
The man's face was entirely covered
by his hands as if what he had seen
was so clear to him and so terrible
he was ashamed of surviving,
ashamed of being a man… And still
there are flowers like trumpets, flowers like stars –
two girls sail their bright-tailed kite over the schoolyard
while the lilacs snow down –
honey peach, and honey pear, each gift
ravishes, and restores in us
what will also be broken again
and again, without reconciliation. Lord,
do not save us
from this world.
Save us in it. |
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| The Hole (2001) |
[Mar. 21st, 2010|12:18 am] |
Poll #1540547 Rate it: The Hole (2001)
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9  Have you seen this movie?
Trivia : The film premiered in the United Kingdom in April 2001. Dimension Films, which in October 2001 acquired the rights to distribute the film theatrically in the United States, never did so; it was instead released direct-to-video nearly two years later, by Dimension's then-fellow Disney subsidiary Buena Vista Distribution -- ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) derralf |
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| High Plains Drifter (1973) |
[Mar. 20th, 2010|02:28 pm] |
Poll #1540424 Rate it: High Plains Drifter (1973)
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6  Have you seen this movie?
Trivia : Universal Pictures wanted the film to be shot on the studio lot. Instead, Clint Eastwood had a whole town built in the desert near Mono Lake in the California Sierras -- derralf |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 20th, 2010|12:05 am] |
"Mothers are the best lovers in the world, but I don't mind whispering to Marmee that I'd like to try all kinds. It's very curious, but the more I try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the more I seem to want. I'd no idea hearts could take in so many; mine is so elastic, it never seems full now, and I used to be quite contented with my family. I don't understand it."
- Little Women - Louisa May Alcott |
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| A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham |
[Mar. 20th, 2010|12:18 am] |
If I'd been a different sort of person, a braver sort, I'd taken him by the shoulders and said, "Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you'll never make a life that uses you." |
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| Matins by Louise Gluck, and a request |
[Mar. 19th, 2010|08:09 pm] |
Matins ["I see it is with you as with the birches"]
By Louise Gluck
I see it is with you as with the birches:
I am not to speak to you
in the personal way. Much
has passed between us. Or
was it always only
on the one side? I am
at fault, at fault, I asked you
to be human--I am no needier
than other people. But the absence
of all feeling, of the least
concern for me--I might as well go on
addressing the birches,
as in my former life: let them
do their worst, let them
bury me with the Romantics,
their pointed yellow leaves
falling and covering me.
-
I have a request: I recall reading a Charles Olson poem with a line that was something like, "O Poet, get a real job." Unless I am failing horribly at Google, that is not the actual line, but it's the same idea. Does anyone know which poem this is? If so, thanks so much! |
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| Shades of Grey - Jasper Fforde |
[Mar. 19th, 2010|03:55 pm] |
“I understand there’s a one hundred percent fatality rate?”
“True. But up until the moment of death there was a one hundred percent survival rate. Really, I shouldn’t let anything as meaningless as statistics put you off.” |
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| invisible man |
[Mar. 19th, 2010|05:05 pm] |
And I love light. Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form. A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney. And so it is with me. Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death.
ralph ellison |
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| The Devil's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy |
[Mar. 19th, 2010|05:36 pm] |
But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil was gone then how could this be hell? |
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| "The canals. The liquor coming through..." by Joshua Beckman |
[Mar. 19th, 2010|12:56 pm] |
The canals. The liquor coming through
the straw. The canals the land and
the bridge and the landing by the bridge
destroyed. The liquor. The little anger
growing inside the friends. The canal.
The pile of wood up against the bank.
The liquor. The friends. A little
anger growing inside them. The canal.
The jets. The wood in piles along
the bank. The dead. The jets. Liquor
through a straw. Speaking. A little anger
grows inside them. The jets. The dead.
The bank. The sky. The friends. The jets.
The dead. A little anger grows inside them.
-Joshua Beckman |
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| The Graveyard Book - Gaiman |
[Mar. 19th, 2010|03:15 am] |
"And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of exsistance"
"They kill themselves, you mean?" Said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid.
"Indeed."
"Does it work? Are they happier dead?"
"Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. See what.I mean?" |
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| Last Testaments -- Lorna Crozier |
[Mar. 18th, 2010|03:45 pm] |
Last Testaments
by Lorna Crozier
The cancer began in her tonsils,
she'd say that with a smile
almost expecting to be teased
for such a serious disease
rooting in that childish place.
She remembered her son at four
when he'd had his out,
the way he'd looked at her as the nurse
slid the cold thermometer up his bum.
She carried on as usual, cleaned the house,
fried a chicken for her husband every Sunday,
cutting the breast in four pieces, the wings in two.
The morning of the day she died
she took him down the basement,
showed him how to separate the clothes,
how to measure the soap, set the dials,
how to hang his shirts and pants
so the creases would fall out
*
( and two more... )
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| A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf |
[Mar. 18th, 2010|01:10 pm] |
" We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some country town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life." |
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| SGU #01: Air by James Swallow |
[Mar. 18th, 2010|04:00 pm] |
"In the deeps, in the places where the light of suns burns faint and the reach of gravity fails, nothing lives.
The void is inimical to life. Out in the darkness and the unremitting, absolute cold, the sheer absence of anything but scatterings of free hydrogen, cosmic rays and stellar dust means that nothing can survive.
The frail, weak meat of organic life perishes in moments. Blood and fluids flash-boiling and freezing all at once. Organs detonating under pressure violation. Skin disintegrating, precious breaths torn away. The dark punishes anything with the temerity to invade its realm; and in the infinite emptiness of it all, those who die are lost and forgotten.
But still they come, in search of something. Knowledge and power. Purpose and redemption. Life challenges the darkness to find its destiny." |
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