LTDL--Brown Paper Packages

Today I ordered my ticket back from Poland. I go there on Dec. 15 (the return leg of my flight here) and return on Dec. 31. Then I will use the last leg of this ticket to go to Poland in the summer and pick Ricky up to come here to stay the summer with me. I emptied my bank account to do it. I will only be with him for two weeks. I really wanted to stay for two and a half weeks but just couldn’t swing it financially.

It is so nice on Skype when he wants to talk to me. You don’t how much it means to be loved and missed by your child. I had been dreading that he would just give up on me or just accept that Daddy is absent or just avoid talking to me because I couldn’t be there in person. He doesn’t like to talk every day though.

Today he got the second package I sent him, complete w/ Spongebob DVD (1st season), Spongebob crabby patties candies, a small pumpkin—which the US Post Office clerk cleared for shipping—an ASU Sun Devil mask (Halloween garb), a Krispy Kreme employee hat, hotwheels, some paperback Sesame Street books, etc. Some of that was provided by Uncle Steve, too. R don’t know it yet but he’s going to get some hotwheels tracks for Christmas.

I don’t know abt this blog. What do you think? I am trying to make it more approachable for everybody. I’m not sure abt a blog for the whole family, but at the very least I want to be able to invite my friends to read it. I still hesitate at every abbreviation, swear word or abuse of the third person conjugation. In class I uphold perfect English as the model. One night, a student said to me, “You like perfect English.” Then he added, “But that’s not the English I hear when I’m talking to people.” In Arizona there are no longer ESL classes for young people. My student, who’s in his sixties at least, says that at night he has to teach English to his grandkids and others. He was almost in tears when he told me this. I told him that I wanted him to be able to understand everything he hears. But actually, the structure I was eliciting from him was “a lot of,” and I was trying to get him to see the particle ‘of’ as being important. The biggest hick native speaker out there don’t say, “It cost a lot money.”

But I have by now completely blown my cover in saying these things. You now know that I am an educated native speaker and teacher of English. I have taken advanced university grammatical analysis. I studied French in high school two years, where our French teacher actually had to teach us English grammar along w/ French. I studied Old English as a hobby for two or three years. I used to analyze everything I read or heard, even before I started my major in English. I started a master’s program, too.

When I first got into English 101 in college, I fell in love w/ writing. I fell in love with my teacher too because she could talk abt grammar and rhetoric. She used to move her hands slowly, interlocking her fingers to show us how everything should fit together.

In high school, I was getting into all sorts of trouble my first year and hanging around all the wrong people. (That sentence is not nearly as interesting as if I told you WHAT I was doing every day, but again, this blog is for my friends, some of whom are/were students of mine.) I was put into remedial English, where the teacher used to read to us. The book was My Shadow Ran Fast, abt a prison parolee who had to stay straight. Hint, hint, she was saying to the motley crew.

But in that class there were magazines. Bicycle magazines. I had torn my bicycle apart and put it back together a dozen times by the time I was in high school. The magazines interested me and I started reading them. I also took metal shop in high school so I could work on my bike more effectively. I also took French because of bicycles, the tour de France, etc. I liked machine shop so much that I started out on a career as a machinist. After a while I was going crazy with boredom. I went back to college and fell in love with my own language. I got into teaching and writing.

I’m feeling anxious today and taking Axminophan for it. I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety lately and I don’t know why. I have felt this latest type of anxiety for about twenty years, and have recently realized it’d been that long and axing God why. Why should I feel anxiety around people? I don’t need to take axmiphna till I get on the train. I no longer worry abt a heart attack, which is good I guess. Ironic though, because I am probably closer to one now than at anytime in my life. What I now have is these damned impulses to do things I really don’t want to do. Only an OCD person can understand that. Why twenty years?

I’m not with Ricky. I just got a surge of that feeling.

Strings of lights. A fatter guy sits across from me. Solomon Burke in my ears. Ricky is why I write. Four small beers last night. Nice. Cloudy head today, but I’m doing ok. No steel guitar.

I’m supposed to be studying for the AEPA—a test which will determine whether I can be a teacher in Arizona, if I know my field—English—well enough, and I can’t. I can’t apply my powers of concentration to the study guide. I don’t know exactly what is going to be on the test, but it will be difficult, if the study guide is any indication—literary analysis, reading theory, rhetoric, a literary essay. I’ve been hitting about 75% and am nervous about what I’ll do if I fail. Join the Peace Corps? Just stay in the job I’m in for life? Head back to Poland and get a job in another city? I could do that last one easily and don’t for the reasons listed in an earlier blog. But I sure think abt it sometimes.

Taco time.