( 12:41 PM )
Monday, July 21. Noonish. Music Currently Playing: None
Just another reason to love the desert: presently, outside my window at work, sleeps two wildcat kittens in the crook of the mesquite tree. They came wandering up this morning, trying to get into the shade, stretched themselves out and fell promptly asleep. I would guess by their size that they're probably 10 weeks old (in adulthood they tend to be only slightly larger in size that full grown house cats). People keep walking up to the tree though to take pictures and are generally making a nuissance of themselves pointing and talking loudly underneath it and while I certainly share their curiosity and joy at being a witness to this tiny bit of nature, I just wish they'd be a bit more mature in their enthusiasm.
I suppose it's a testament to how urbanized we've all become when creatures like this cause us all so much excitement. I think this underlies a bigger truth; that we all in some way want to connect with nature, but are too busy, or have forgotten that it's even there to connect with. That sounds cheesy and I think any moment now I'll be joining a drum circle at a men's self-exploration retreat and pounding on a drum while sitting around a campfire and chanting positive life affirmations while pine-needles poke into my butt. But really. I think many people basically miss the element of nature in their lives. They see it more as an inconvenience, possibly a barrier to some other goal, something that is so frequently mastered and controlled through heating and airconditioning and etc, that they get cut off from experiencing it as a place, an environment, as a force in their lives. So along come the little wildkitties and they get to remember again.
#
( 4:02 PM )
Thursday, July 17, 4ish. Music Currently Playing: The Rentals, Seven More Minutes.
For those following from the previous blog, the education thing is... hard to articulate about. So much of it makes me really excited while at the same time so much of it seems like total academic bullshit... especially since education PhD's are apparently the easiest doctorates to obtain so there is quite a lot of total nonsense or poorly written bleck that is presented as course material in the classes for certification... Not all of it mind, just alot. So I leave class feeling divided. One one hand I am rolling my eyes, feeling patronized, I mean I have pieced apart Kierkegaard, more appropriately, I've taken Psychology 101... and none of this is new, and it's even less interesting... on the other hand.... I keep getting excited. I mean really excited (this may be, in part because the teacher who's teaching is pretty damn good...) but I mean... honestly the more I think about being in a class and teaching kids, the more excited I get. It just feels like the right thing, a job I can beleive in and work hard at and not feel like I am wasting my life away or having no effect on the world. It's idealistic, but, as I wrote in my other blog... I am tired of being pessimistic and jaded, I am tired of not beleiving in anything, especially myself, and I want to be idealistic for once. Does that make any sense?
I guess it boils down to an attitude change for me. I have had a really negative attitude about a lot of things I see in the world around me for a really long time. The government really pisses me off, the media pisses me off, pop culture pisses me off, alot of new music I am hearing really pisses me off. My poor physical health pisses me off. How stupid to get angry about this stuff, right? But it's not, you get trapped in the tunnel of your feelings and its sometimes hard to get a different perspective. Also, I have always had a problem confusing my passions for my frustrations.
But I'm not willing to keep being negative. I am tired of being critical and snide and intellectual... So... independant of this (though admittedly part of the whole process), I decide am ready for a career change. And so I realize, I could make this change in my life with a spirit of negativity and let it ruin the experience, I could see the need to "get a real job" and become a teacher and so forth as counter to "my dream" (which is what, now?) and I can get bitter and let it all affect my happiness even further, or I can enter it with a positivity and sense of curiosity and adventure and just see where it takes me. And for once though, I'm feeling really positive. Being a teacher, a really good teacher, seems like an obtainable goal, a positive goal, a dream worth having and believing in. I could coast from shitty job to shitty job for the rest of my life, and write some, and complain about how I am misunderstood and the publishing industry is so corporate and never publishes any good writing and use this as an excuse to perpetuate my negativity. I am tired of that. No more. I want to glow, man. I want to be on fire again, like I was in college, like I was as a kid, like I am seldom now, when good books excited me and I made exiciting plans to travel and every day was just like this playful adventure.
At some point some writers I know and I sort of came to this conclusion that the things that are missing in our writing are missing in our life... This sort of spooked me. Since I haven't really been able to concretely detect what that is for me... I'll sit down and read my writing (not my 2walls writing so much as the short stories and stuff that never make it here) but I reread my writing and I don't see it, and then I sort of realized that this was exactly what was missing... that committment, that beleif in what I was doing, that self-assured quality of truth and realism that sort of comes from a genuine sense of comfort with yourself. I'm not always comfortable with myself, but I am ready for that to change. I am ready to start being more reflective of my actions, my attitudes, my thoughts, and my feelings. Also, for a long time I have been including these meta-voices in my stories, characters becoming self-aware of their characterhood and all that David Foster Wallace stuff, and in general my writing has lacked a sense of.... dunno, don't know what the words are for it.... Presense? Conviction? Something was missing.
So I am going to go looking for it. And it's not something I will find just doing more writing. To change myself so that I can write, REALLY write, I think I need to go down a totally different path for a while and find my convitions, my idealisms, my beleifs, all those really powerful things that underly good stories and make them worth the reading. I need to be alot more aware of my thoughts and feelings to do this, and it seems like teaching is the place where this can occur with some really positive results.
Enough of that for now.
****
I love Webb's review of the Rumsfeld poetry, will definitely be picking that up, and I should let everyone know that there is a brilliant little segment about this that they did on NPR that fits nicely with the review and is available stream from NPR.org for your listening pleasure:
NPR's All Things Considerered: Pieces of Intellegence
Until next time... keep rockin' and grinnin' and droolin' and loosing your consonants as the fat tongue swells with each sip of sweet whiskey.
#
( 2:00 PM )
Wednesday July 9, Afternoonish, Music Currently Playing: Microphones, The Glow Pt. 2 (still! still! still!)
Ok, I'm two-timing you faithful blogg reader. I have a second blogg.
But wait, don't click away angrily... hear me out. This second blogg is actually an academic requirement. Seriously, man. I'm (ahem) getting a teaching certificate. No, really, I want to be a teacher. I've always wanted to teach to some greater or lesser extent, and it has come to my attention that laboring 40 hours a week to make some fat-ass shareholder richer just wasn't cutting it. I have never been able to shed my bright-eyed idealism, I'm more liberal now than when I turned 18 (apparently the trend is the opposite? the older you get the more conservative?) and after examining what I am good at and passionate about, it occurred to me that there is a job out there that I can do where the direct result of my labor is an improvement of the human race--teaching. So I'm going for it. A local community college hrtr offers a post-bacclaureate certification program that synchs nicely with the requirement through the department of education and the needs of the local school districts, (and it's far less expensive and somehow less dubious than the odd "night colleges" like Univeristy of Phoenix that are popping up nationally). So there I am enrolled in all of these Education courses (how meta can it get, btw--teachers teaching people how to teach.)
One particular class has a journal requirement.
So I'm thinking "journal?" I haven't written in a journal since I was like fifteen... And then I log on to my computer and check all the bloggs at 2walls to see who has written and then I browse over to William Gibson's blogg because it just turns out his every day conversational writing is just as interesting and thoughtful as his sci-fi, and I realize that I have been journaling semi-regularly myself, as an adult, for several months, right here. So why the hell not make my education journal a blogg?
Anyhow, that's what I did. It's nothing like my usual rants or musical disections or humor since it's supposed to be a reflective documentation of the course material. But If you begin to wonder why I'm not posting here as frequently and you are just desperate for something matt-ish to read... head over there.
#
|
