My back is absolutely aching. I must've slept wrong last night as it was feeling fine yesterday. I mean, I was incredibly cranky, but it had nothing to do with my back. I think that my back aches with the looming doom of next week in the schools...but I hope that I just slept funny. Because if this is what I have to look forward to 3 days before I enter the classroom, I'll be in a wheelchair by May.
On that note, I'm cold & need to put on some clothes. This is what happens when you sit down with your breakfast to share your thoughts with the world.
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Big Sur & the Anti-Stephen's poetry collection has had a very strange effect on me: it makes me want to write. All the time. I can't think but in swooping sentences; I can't know something without subsequently expounding upon it.
For instance, I have been ruminating upon a particular pattern in my life. My curse and my blessing is to be surrounded by boys who are better wordsmiths than I. The curse is that they know it, too. The blessing is that they always give me something to strive for. And the striving is almost always to put myself back in the picture. I exist on the margins of these boys; I am unimportant footnotes to their main stories.
There are exceptions. Poet wrote me a poem after he burned me with a cigarette. I made it into my husband's novel this year; unfortunately I was represented as a high-achieving girlfriend who yells at the main character for playing too many video games. This is not the noble Hellenic role I had envisioned. In their writings, in their letters and in their art, I am neither the virgin queen nor the slutty siren. Maybe I am not those things in real life. Maybe I should be glad of that.
I am trying my hardest to be Somebody. Maybe I should just leave these boys to their admiring bog.
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Great, great news today: the Infallible Supervisor is being replaced by the woman who has been tutoring me in lesson planning (whom I shall now refer to as La Belle Dame Avec Merci). This switch is being framed as a routine matter to accommodate another student so nobody gets his or her feathers in a ruffle. Just to review, La Belle Dame likes me, likes my lesson planning and thinks that I'm being railroaded. She even liked my manifesto when I told her about it.
Which brings me to the next point: I have written a manifesto for Operation: Need to Fucking Pass to get me through the next 5 weeks without killing anyone. You can find it here. It's a large graphic rather than text because I'm in love with the font.
I am so deeply pleased about the new role of La Belle Dame Avec Merci that I've been grinning & glowing all afternoon. I feel like I should buy Pipefitter a drink...I know she didn't create my future (in fact, the reading was really clear about the fact that my own hard work would pay off), but she showed it to me and gave me hope. Surely that's worth something in this crazy world.
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PS: Brilliant. It's every blog entry ever written, including mine. (Scroll down; last one on the page.)
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3 years ago today: a trip to the museum
