ChezWhat?

Due to the frustration of formatting issues with blog.com, I am mooving. mooo.

Now I am chezwhat.blogspot.com

Check me out cos I am posting my musik meme, and well gosh, how cool is that, huh Natalie?  Tag youse it babycakes.

ok Suley.  I gave in.  you happy now? snark snark.

My blogger is messing everything up--
all my words are coming out with strange formatting, so I have to do things a little differently for this post.

"It's time for poetry, I submit to you the following..."  - Jonathan Richman

The year started and a new textbook.  We start with poetry in ESL Reading now

I couldn't be happier.  In researching I saw some old friends, Pablo neruda, 

Federico garcia Lorca.  And made a new one.  Below is a couple of my 

favorite old friends and a new one.

Pablo Neruda.  Pablo wasn't only a significant part of my 

undergraduate studies, he was also t substantial part of a life 

experience for me.  A boy who later became my New York 

boyfriend initiated our connaisance with a copy of the Captains 

Verses in Spanish and English.  I remember the moment very 

clearly on the edge of the PSU campus with him wearing his 

combat helmet bicycle helmet and me fresh minutes from my 

pillow.  I had made a pass at him in the coffee shop where 

I worked not days earlier.  At the time, our flame, for me burned

hot.  I learned alot in that time.  It is now a pale past to the love

 I have that endures and burns longer and more simply.  

Still, it was a sweet little time, a memory.  And while 

I studied pablo in the classroom, i also got to learn a 

little out of the class too.

This poem I choose because i love how it begins.  It is a love poem.

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente,
y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca.
Parece que los ojos se te hubieran volado
y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca.

Como todas las cosas están llenas de mi alma
emerges de las cosas, llena del alma mía.
Mariposa de sueño, te pareces a mi alma,
y te pareces a la palabra melancolía.

Me gustas cuando callas y estás como distante.
Y estás como quejándote, mariposa en arrullo.
Y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te alcanza:
déjame que me calle con el silencio tuyo.

Déjame que te hable también con tu silencio
claro como una lámpara, simple como un anillo.
Eres como la noche, callada y constelada.
Tu silencio es de estrella, tan lejano y sencillo.

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente.
Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto.
Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan.
Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto.

And now for my new friend HÓ Xuân Hýõng.  She was a concubine in the 15th

 or so century.  I cannot explain her except to say I like her poetry very much.  

Here are a couple selections I found.

translated from the Vietnamese by John Balaban 

Autumn Landscape

Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves.

Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene:

 

the lush, dark canopies of the gnarled trees,

the long river, sliding smooth and white.

 

I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills.

My backpack, breathing moonlight, sags with poems.

 

Look, and love everyone.

Whoever sees this landscape is stunned.

Three-Mountain Pass

A cliff face. Another. And still a third.

Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:

 

the cavern's red door, the ridge's narrow cleft,

the black knoll bearded with little mosses?

 

A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,

showering a willow's leaves with glistening drops.

 

Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary

and shaky in his knees, to mount once more?

 

Adeline smiles at me every time she wakes up. EVERY time.  It's like she is just so happy to be waking up and happy to be alive.  She smiles also while she is eating.  She will stop - all of a sudden - and pull out this big grin for me, then resume eating.  She usually will do it several times in a row.  She goes back to eating like it's "back to business" but for just a second she had to look at me and smile.  How great is that?

When we leave her in her bouncy thing and go putter around the house she will look down the hall, looking for us, and then when we comeback she will jump up and down madly and smile and let out a big happy sound.  Every time.  Even if we just duck behind the wall, when we reappear she will do the same thing.

Paulina, her caretaker, commented on how she just doesn't seem to cry.  It's true.  She is not much of a crier.  How much better does it get?

I want to think that it's because there is no doubt in her mind because of the quantities of smiles and kisses she gets that she is loved, but I know that other babies are loved too and they still cry.  I think we just got lucky.  Yes, we are eating it up.

 

My blog bloggereeno could make me lose my  job!  Caramba!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/sv/20050913/tc_siliconvalley/_www12634035

"For the moment, much of the news falls into the ``cautionary tale'' category. In August, a California automobile club fired 27 workers for posting messages on the Web that offended co-workers. Not long before, a Boston University instructor was fired for blogging about a distractingly attractive student; a blogging nanny was fired for telling too much about herself and her employers, and a New York beauty editor lost a new job because of blogs about the fashion industry."

Next book I wanna read.  Tom Wolfe said some interesting stuff on city arts and lectures --a cryin shame they don't do transcripts.  He was promoting his new book and he gave a come down about people who are socially active and believers in Christ.  I will edit later to add what he said.  now i gotta gymmy.

http://www.tomwolfe.com/CharlotteSimmons.html

 
 I came into work very early that AM like around 6:30.  I was single, I lived for my job.  I was prepping for class.  My homepage was set to Yahoo, I saw the news and the pictures on yahoo, but I figured it was a tragedy that was like any other.  Sometimes things that seem amazing to me are mundane to other people.  In this instance I thought it would, like so many other tragedies, be barely noticed in the psyche of our nation.  I was clearly quite wrong.  I first knew when coworker Gayla asked me if I had seen the news.  I had.  When she expressed dismay, I was mostly concerned about her standing so close to my coffee breath.  That was about 7 or maybe a little after.

I commenced the day at 8 with students.  In 4th period a boy asked if we could turn on the radio to listen, and having no good reason to say no, we did.  Though when the principal came to look at how things were going, I think I turned it off for fear of disapproval.  I was a first year teacher with a totally irrational fear of losing my job.

What transpired in the months after this day, the most touching thing to me was the people who cleaned up the mess.  Same as in New Orleans, they were never trained for that.  They were never told that they were going to have to contend with the fate of hundreds of lives due to terrorist acts.  In New Orleans the same thing, they weren't trained for pulling dead bodies into boats.  The emotional burden heaped on these dads and moms and brothers and sisters was enormous, and in New Orleans, still is.

The most perplexing to me was the very non specific references of what happened on 911..."Ever since 911..."  what did it signify in the minds of people?  Why was it such a turning point?  Pardon me for being a big buffoon, but did we think we were above an epic tragedy carefully plotted against us by our enemies?  Did we think we were above electing a president who has now 2 times failed at addressing very well the very situation that he claims is his biggest goal?  What were people referring to, I still wonder, that happened that day that "changed everything"?  Please blog readers, help this buffoon to be enlightened, what did it mean to you?  What specifically did it signify?  Did we find out we weren't special?  Did we let that teenage boy abscond with our pearl?  (huh?)

Next to the firefighters, the other images were of the innocent who had lost their families.   I saw a  photo montage on tv that made my heart hurt for them.  That loss is the primary thing I saw in 911.  All the families scratching out a life.  These events reveal the importance of God to me, he is the only thing that no one can take away.

the school year started.  I am not sure how much i love being a teacher sometimes.  A colleague expressed to me that his wife, a special ed teacher, comes home every day thinking of at least 10 things she could have done better.  How I can relate to that. 

It's not lack of confidence.  I just wonder if there isn't a better way to some of the things that happen other than the way I do.  I wonder if there is abetter way to teach certain things that I just haven't thought of.  I wonder about if I will ever reach the point where every kid that comes in and leaves the classroom will be satisfied about what they knew was going to happen there and what did happen..  I wonder if I should be easier, harder. 

The beginning of the school year especially, because you have to set a tone.  If you set the tone that you don't care, or your too much of a weeny to be hard, than they try everything.  If you are too hard, they think you just rose up from Gehenna to torment them and they resent you.  I am making broad generalizations here.  It's not as black and white as all this i know.

1. Number of Books you have owned.  Including textbooks?  I can't count them...I can estimate that our entire collection with my husbands books exceeds 500.  Of those I would estimate that at least 300 are mine, including textbooks and books I sold back in 2000..

2. Last book I bought.  Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller

3. Last book I completed.  Same as above.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me. (only five?)

The Bible:  What can I say, it's packed with interesting things to me.  I can only aspire to understand it completely.  Really a perfect book I think, if ever there was one.  Most people who pan it I would bet have never really even given it a serious try.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:  This book is not one that I read and understood the first time.  I should read it again these days.  I loved the complexity of the family relations, the repetition of  names, the depth of the humanity in each character and how they were crafted and developed.  I love that how singular we each are blows through this book like a wind, in every word.

Quinientos Anos de las Venas Abiertas de America Latina de Eduardo Galeano.  I read his  Memory of Fire trilogy and studied this book in spanish classes and it made a huge impact about how I viewed our history in the US and all of the nations to the south of us.  It is revisionist history, I know, he writes beautifully though and for me it helped me to understand what happened when South America was colonialized.  He is a bit extreme, but it's a good read as long as you temper it with some critical thought.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry:  Yes it is an Oprah selection, my mom gave it to me.  I think that if Oprah makes people read these books than she can't be all bad, though I am still amazed that she has a magazine which she is on the cover every single month?  Doesn't she get sick of herself?  I know I am sick of looking at her.  Now fat, now skinny.  She's like an elastic african american barbie doll, dress her up, dress her down.  Okay back to the books.  A Fine Balance I value for the statement it made about the poverty and suffering that people outside of the united states are acquainted with, and how they handle it.  The unthinkable things that people live through and are resolute in not giving up an attempt at joy in their lives.  And that leads to thoughts about how in America we live in a big bubble where we are lulled into nonaction and nonlives by our wealth and we fear every other country as a dangerous place--and we are terribly full of folly.  There, attack that Suley.

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud & Night by Elie Wiesel-- the most recent reads from this list.  The Fixer  is about a Jewish man who leaves the shtetl and in I think its Minsk a terrible thing happens to him. It's a history lesson and a philosophy lesson.  For some reason I am attracted to books that depict horrible injustice.   I also tend be attracted to holocaust/Jewish themed literature, though I have never read Anne Frank.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver --I liked this book and I still think about the father.  The passion and drive that  resembled something out of control and drive his family into the ground and then eventually destroys the family.  I related to the middle daughter who married the man and stayed in congo.  This book along with Chinua Achebe started a bit of a thing for Africa, hence the Sudan business.

Blue like Jazz by Donald Miller - round about 98 till 2001 I had Issues with christianity.  I was mad at it, I felt like it was a buncha rules most of which contradicted instinctual things within me.  I felt like the way I was made by God was "guaranteed to fail".  I was angry, and I was annoyed at churches.  I didn't want to not be a christian, I just needed to be able to make it make sense to me. 

I had big questions.  I communicated these to God and wrestled.  I never really talked to anyone about it because if you bring this stuff up to another christian it's a big flippin deal, like your reservation in hell was assured if you asked these questions.  I got through it, but sometimes I still revisit in a milder way the things I was thinking. 

And so Donald Miller is the only person I know even now who has the huevos to bring up the things that really should occur to christians at some point in their walk.  I call them Amway christians, the ones who seem relieved to be told what to think and don't seem to waver, but when they do waver, they go away from their faith entirely it seems like--they buy harley's, divorce and kinda feel like they wasted their life.  Which  how can you waste your life by trying to be a better person?

So on to the book, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I tore through it.  Miller is funny and insightful.  He is very Portland.  He does sound like a petulant little kid at times, but a friend told me that that tone was a sort of allusion to how we must sound to the Almighty.  Hmm.  I love a book that makes me laugh out loud, and this book did. 
I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.  

5. What are you currently reading?  Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini by Mark Leyner  but I think I am done.  I am also reading The Things You'll See: Notes to My Children on How They Were Raised by Lawrence Lucas but mostly done with that.  And a not recommended book on adoption by one Jan Beazely.

6. Who are the sucke...erm...bloggers you are passing this on to?

I challenge any person who actually reads my blog to answer these 6 simple questions about your reading.