packing

Brian moved out last weekend to begin his residential job with Allegheny Valley School.  Ryan and I have been packing up for yet another move.  Every time I change houses I expect it to be my last for a while so I  guess I better not make the same mistake this time.  With that in mind, I’ve decided it is time to throw some stuff away: things I have held onto, memories I have held onto, books I will never read, or never read again.  It has been ONE long and crazy YEAR.

I have five bags of books I am getting rid of.  Time to refine the book collection.  It is funny how books carry so many memories with them.  Some books remind me of the person I used to be.  I must have 90% of the books John Eldridge wrote, most given to me as gifts.  I think I read one of them.  Calls to mind the passionate evangelical of my youth.  He’s long gone.  Then there are books given to me by girls that I have dated.  Calls to mind those relationships, the context of the gifts.  Some books definitely worth keeping:  Poems from Dr. Zhivago and Jonathan Keats, among others.  Textbooks remind me of the associated years at school and the classes for which they were required, even the ten  roommates I lived with in four years of college (a school record, I think I must be hard to live with).

Well, enough packing for now, off to school.

a southern reminiscence

Wafflehouse: greasy breakfast served with cigarettes and lousy coffee, and open 24 hours.  All they need serve is beer for the complete package.  Why haven’t these caught on north of the mason-dixon?  As much as I have bashed the south, and the four years I lived in Northeast Georgia, right now this sounds wonderful.

In the midst, in the mist

Stability is an idol, I suppose.  We grow dependent on a particular routine, a particular job, or, God forbid, a particular person.  We can’t imagine life any differently, can’t imagine life without them.  Is it supernatural powers that then snatch the rug from underneath of us?  Dumb luck, sheer chance perhaps?  Is the puppeteer so cruel that he can’t allow us small creatures a touch of independence, of stability?  Heaven knows the world is unpredictable.

I’ve written on multiple occasions about the unexpected changes that have happened in my life since graduating from college in May 2008.  Grad school, Starbucks, dropping out of grad school, quitting Starbucks, census bureau, Aliquippa Impact, exoneration from Aliquippa Impact, ROOTS Academy, and now?  What next?  Wednesday before Thanksgiving I was informed that, due to budget issues (state, county, local, etc.) our school was forced to make some cutbacks.  I was cut to part time at the school.  Instead of teaching English in the mornings, art and graphic design in the afternoons, I was cut to focus exclusively on the afternoon creative components.   So, now it is also back to Starbucks part time, teaching art and graphic design part time as well.  I guess I should grow dependent on instability, then what will you do?  Remove instability from me just to spite me?

Despite the tenor of these thoughts, I am content.  My goal was to, one day, live exclusively from my art work and teaching art.  I hoped to work at the school part time, say, next year.  Next year.  Next year?  Budget issue catalyst expidition, why not start now?  Teaching English sucked me dry.  It was a perpetual challenge (not that teaching healthy creative expression is peachy keen).  It took hours to plan for lessons that inevitably failed, not to mention doing research, grading papers, etc.  I’ve been given the opportunity to focus my energy on one task rather than split my focus.

We are transient beings.  Beings in process.  Mere pupa.  I get caught up in my dreams for the future (the imago)or caught up in my frustrations with the past (larva long past or recent, it seldom matters).  Instability brings me back to the present.  Presently it is snowing.  Presently my feat are freezing.  Presently Uncommon Grounds is all but empty.  Presently I breathe deep.  I get so caught up in plans, frustrations, worries, that I miss the beauty surrounding me.  People laughing, talking, plants and flowers growing. Snow flakes softly

falling.

I finally got out of my reading funk.  I started four books this summer and only finished one.  It began with Dandelion Wine.  I read 3/4 of it and just stopped.  Then The Maytrees, 1/2, stopped.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the only book I finished.  Sailing Alone Around the World, 3/4 and quit.  It took a promise to lend The Maytrees.  Clearly I needed to finish it so that I could remember what happened in the book I was fixed to lend.  Oh, but it was beautiful, again.  Annie Dillard just plain captures it for me.  Regaining some confidence, having finished my first book since July, I tore through what I had left of Slocum’s journey around the world.  Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being captured my mind a bit this summer.  When I saw his Ignorance on sail for $3.50 at half-price books, I couldn’t resist.  I tore through it this week.  It is good be back in the midst of fiction again.  Started anew Moby Dick, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Blessings.

A response to defenses of evangelicalism

This post was inspired by a discussion that was generated from Cameron MacAllister’s note “Why I don’t call myself an Evangelical.”  Cameron is a good friend, and in response to his note, Carson Clark, another friend, and a tenacious debater, launched into a thorough defense of evangelicalism as a social and historical movement in America.  I thought the discussion needed to be moved elsewhere and  broadened a touch, so I decided to expound a tad on some of the thoughts I have had on the subject since being thrust forth from the birth canal of the academic world and into the “real world.”

What struck me this morning about the “debate” between Carson and myself was that it was mostly a discussion of words, context, and meaning.  It was, and is, an ongoing discussion of ideas.  Using words and ideas, Carson is, and has been, defending systems.  And therein lies the problem I have with the 21st century academic: words, ideas, and systems.  To a majority of Americans, and I would even venture to say, to a vast majority of humanity, the world of words, ideas, and systems falls second fiddle to the world of tangibility, perception, aesthetics, and of the senses.  We are thinking people, but we are a sensory people as well.  We construct the world in the mind, but also through our vision, our hearing, our smelling, and our physical feeling.

Only connect: the poetry and the prose, the man of action with the man of thought.  God bless you E.M Forster.  Call the ‘poetry’ the man of thought, the defender of the world of ideas.  Call the ‘prose’ the man of action, who deals in tangibility.  The two must be married.  When our debates and arguments never join with the world around us, what are they?  Mere and meaningless intellectual debate.  That said, if the aesthetic world never joins with the world of ideas, what do we have?  Hedonism?

I have no interest in defending evangelicalism.  Like Cameron, I do not consider myself an evangelical.  As I have said on more than one occasion, to me it seems that the term evangelical is not worth saving.  It is a term and, contextually as well as colloquially, in America it is a pejorative term.  Christian, too, is often a pejorative in America and in many parts of the world.  For lack of a better or broader term, I consider myself a Christian, and therefore, I have a bit of an obligation to defend it.  Applying my critique of the evangelical debate, how does one move beyond a defense of Christianity that only takes place in the world of words, ideas, and systems?  Connect it to the aesthetic world.

Peter, the retired gentlemen who I have started playing chess with down at the local coffee shop, is not interested in an intellectual debate or defense of Christianity, or any other system for that matter.  He wants to see that it works.  He wants to feel its positive effect on his life.  It is time for evangelicals and Christians to drop the intellectual debate and start living and breathing their faith.  The same is true for any follower of any movement, but all the more so for the followers of a pejorative movement like Christianity.  I could run you through the ringer with debate or “apologetics” but unless you see it and experience it my arguments will not move you. In contrast, my actions should speak for themselves.

I say this, and I think I mean it: there is no place for the pure intellectual.  Get out from behind that book, get out from the classroom, and learn from the man on the street.  I’ve learned more in the last year from Larry McCoy than I have from any preacher behind his pulpit.

dealing with aggression

Working at ROOTS Academy with hurting and underserved inner city youth, I am the brunt of a lot of aggression.  Stopping to think, it seems to me that a lot of the anger that is directed toward me and other staff members is misdirected anger coming from, as I said, hurting young people.  Our students may be mad at a teacher, but I think they are, generally, expressing their hurts and emulating the aggressive, abusive, and violent behavior that they have experienced and have had directed towards them.  They are broken people expressing their brokenness the only way they know how.

I was sitting in my classroom this morning, getting ready for class, as I do most days.  I like to be the first one at school and spend some time preparing for the day.  This week I’ve been getting to school, organizing my classroom, and chilling out to Belle and Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit (such a catchy album).  Today I was looking back over the last few years and tried to recollect all the aggressive (both physical and verbal) confrontations I’ve had.  Here are a few:

• Eighth Grade: School teacher accusing me of ‘karate kicking a girl across  the hall and into a set of lockers’ (an absolute falsity)
• High School: being accused of “rummaging through the principle’s filing cabinet and stealing his possessions”
• College: School administration calling me “a moral relativist” and suggesting I was on  a “dark path toward relativism”
• College: my anatomy and physiology teacher yelling at me and calling me a liar, in the middle of class, because I mis-heard him and read the wrong assignment
• Confrontations with older brother, usually my fault and over dumb stuff
• Angry parents in the Linmar Terraces in Aliquippa
• Being mugged in Toccoa, GA
• Angry soccer moms chewing me out over coffee while working as a barista at Starbucks
• Being hit in the head with a marker my first week as a teacher
• Having paint-water thrown in my face in art class
• Having a door slammed on me while I was standing in the doorway of my classroom (three times)
• Having my notebooks, pens, and classroom materials thrown around my classroom (at least twice a week)

No matter where we are, what we are doing, who we are dealing with, it seems that this kind of aggressive confrontation is built into life.  I guess it is human nature.  I doubt it is an exclusively American phenomenon, it is certainly not an exclusively urban issue.  I think I am getting better and better at dealing with it.  Looking back, I guess I am thankful for the crazy things I have gone through prior to working here, I think they have helped me to keep my cool here at work.  Every time I am confronted, I get better at dealing with confrontation.

Proverbs 15:1  “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”  I remember getting in a fight with my brother when we were kids.  As punishment, my mom, or maybe my dad, made me write that verse out, something like 25 times.  Funny, I just remembered that.  Anyway, it seems I have had that verse memorized and ingrained into my mind since then, and I always recall it in the face of confrontation.

Be nice to a stranger today.

 

no smoke november, the second attempt

We are now, it being November the first,  5/6 of the way through 2009.  This morning while I sat at Panera waiting for my friends to arrive, waiting, I might add, because I forgot to change my clock and arrived an hour early, I took a trip back through 2009 via my blog posts for the year.  I began the year, perhaps appropriately, with politics on my mind.  Obama was just taking office.  Israel was bombing the hell into the Gaza strip without being held accountable.  All that rot.  Then came lent, where i quit caffeine and (oops) nicotine.  Then the summer came, the Census Bureau, Aliquippa Impact, (the end of an era at Starbucks), and finally I was hurdled through time and space into a teaching job at ROOTS Academy.  Been quite a year already.  I don’t have a lot of time to just sit and reflect these days, my job keeps my busy or exhausted.  I’ve really been missing my alone time, all that time I complained about back in January.  It has been a bit since I just sat down and did some writing, even longer since I finished a book, sadly.  This morning I forgot to change my clock, so I ended up having an extra hour of consciousness.  Panera wasn’t open when I got here, so I went for a walk.  Walking is good for the heart and the mind.

Last year about this time I decided to quit smoking for the month of November.  Oops, for those of you who didn’t know, I have become a bit of a smoker since leaving college.  I hope that doesn’t burst your bubbles too much.  (sorry mother).  Anyway, I’m bringing “No Smoke November” back.  Usually that would mean I would just replace one addiction with another (i.e. drink more coffee), but I am also trying to cut back a tad on caffeine.  Quitting coffee is not realistic right now, but I can cut back to one cup a day for a bit.  I’m not so much worried about that though.  The whole reason I began smoking, I think, was because it was a great filler for those awkward periods of time when you have 10-15 minutes to kill and don’t want to start anything big.  I’m going to have to find better things to do in those periods of time.  Here are some ideas, feel free to add to them (this list is more an attempt to convince myself than a real useful list):

• wash some dishes (ugh…where is my lighter?)
• Draw a picture
• Organize my desk
• Go through the pile of papers sitting on my desk and throw old ones away
• read a book or a poem

Two more months left this year.  If you feel like you’ve wasted another one, there is just enough time to really do some damage before 2010.  Might as well get a head start on the new year’s resolutions (or revolutions, take your pick).

a girl i met

Welcome to Center Township.  Welcome to Oswego, Cato, New York.  Welcome to Aliquippa, PA, population 400.  Welcome to humanity, to brotherhood.  Welcome to earth.

 

Tonight there is a girl.  She is someone’s daughter (four, twelve, forty years, it doesn’t matter).

 

A man puts his cigarette out in her face.  A crowd laughs.  Tomorrow it will be a dirty diaper smeared upon her forehead, her pants stained with sweat and urine.

 

She knocks on your door, asking to use your washer and dryer, maybe just for some money for the bus.

 

She’s looking for a hit.  She’ll give you anything you want for it, let you do anything to her for it.  Yes, sexually.  Fulfill your fantasies.

 

Degrade her, beat her.  Just ignore the man who does.  It makes no difference.

 

Homo homini lupus.  Man, to man, is a wolf.

 

The crowd looks on and laughs.

 

They’ve strung it to a fishing line and are charging free admission to the show.  She chases it through the crowd while they laugh and cheer.  It’s the coliseum out here. When is the Steelers game?

 

Her father watches as she chases her next hit.  He watches the crowd treat her worse than an animal and he does nothing.

 

He does nothing.  I do nothing.  He does nothing.  God, I’ve decided, is a joke sometimes.

 

Now they are lighting a fire.  It is her freshly chopped hair.  Scalped, she smells like human waste as the fire burns.  The crowd looks on and laughs.

 

I am not an ounce better.  While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

 

Go Penguins?

time

someTIMEs I feel like I am hitting my head against a wall here at ROOTS.  I’m sure most new teachers, regardless of the school, get these feelings: that you aren’t teaching your students anything, that you are wasting your TIME, that you don’t have a clue what you are doing, that it is just a big improv show and you are failing.  Well, feelings come and go, and each day I suppose you’ve got to just try again.  Cognitively, I know my students are learning something, too, that I can do a better job.  I’m constantly on the prowl looking for better ways to educate my students, and, especially, to engage them creatively.  Yesterday I found a couple of really cool websites.

AccessArt has launched a program aimed at introducing the use of sketchbooks in schools as a means of engaging students creatively across the whole curriculum.  I’m thinking of introducing it to my students for a little bit as an experiment.  We took a Multiple Intelligences inventory yesterday, and surprise, surprise, most of our students scored high in the Visual/Spatial intelligence category.  Maybe sketchbooks in English class will be helpful in engaging more students?  I’m still working out the kinks of how they might work with reading/writing exercises.  We’ll see what happens.

While I was exploring some of the sketchbook pages on that site, I came across Art House Co-op.  They are launching a massive sketchbook project that anyone can sign up for (for a paltry sum of $18).  Basically you pay, they send you a moleskin sketchbook and a theme, you fill it out, send it back, and your work is included in a massive exhibition including sketchbooks from artists all over the place.  Pretty great idea for collective art I think.  So I signed up this morning and my theme is “time”.  Again, we’ll see what happens with that.  I think it will be a good exercise in creativity.

Was thinking about where I am at, and where I would like to be, and what is keeping me from the latter.  It all boils down to self-discipline I think.  Or lack there of in my case.  I suck at self-discipline.  Gotta fix that.

What I want is illusory

Thanks Ethan, for putting me onto Stuart’s journal.  Tonight this entry hit me where I needed it.  I suppose we all struggle with what we want to do and what we need to do, and the often vast chasm between the two.

What you want to do is an illusion. What you have to do is heavenly. Heavenly purpose, and therefore blessed.

I want to run away, live carefree, run through fields of…something.  I’m not altogether sure what really.  Any type of field will do.  Preferably it would be over rolling hills with big fluffy cumulus clouds.

What I need to do is go home and go to bed.  Tomorrow I have school bright and early.  One more day until the weekend.  School was what I need to do right now at this juncture in life.  Aliquippa is, for better or worse, where I need to be right now.

Recalling his time alone at sea, Joshua Slocum writes:

In a bleak land is not the place to enjoy solitude.

How true my friend.  And what bleak land I find myself in these days.  Aliquippa is a hard place in which to live alone.  Yet, live here I must.  I also need to learn how to let people in.  So there it is.

Modern art, yes it is.

To people who say things like this: “I love art…but some of the modern stuff just aint.”

I say: Yes it is.

Maybe it is the analytic in me, but I think we get a lot further in our discussions when we shift the focus from “what is or isn’t art?” to, “is piece a work of quality?” or is this piece “good?”  Not only does this approach avoid a bunch of unnecessary political arguing, it provides us with a critical approach we can apply to every facet  of life instead of just “art.”  By calling everything art, we open up everything to critique.

Quit it people.  It is art.  Your’e just mad you didn’t get paid an inordinate amount of money for it.