Category: Posts

I am fighting a sinus infection. It probably goes without saying, based upon the title of my post.  It has been over a week with this bugger, no pun intended, and the antibiotics have helped a bit, but they haven’t quelled the beast.  Enter, the neti pot.  My doctor recommended it to me as the single best thing for sinus infections–even better than antibiotics.  And then he went on to quote some study about how the neti pot had in fact reduced the number of sinus infections in England, when the government was looking for ways of getting people to rely less on antibiotics.

So.  A neti pot.  This device, this thing, seems right out of the 19th, 18th or even 16th centuries.  I picture Friar Laurence the apothecary from Romeo And Juliet having one of these things in his medicine closet.  “Here, Juliet, just stir in this mixture and give this neti pot a good run and you’ll be free of that heartsickness in a few days.”  The pot is downright homespun.  Downright passed on from someone’s great-great-grandmother or at least from the country doctor or even medicine man in the village.  How is it that this thing works such wonders in today’s modern era?

And yet, the neti pot has a good reputation.  Even before using it, friends and family extolled its virtues, sharing anecdotes of times when it “cured their ailment” or times when it was “the only thing that worked.”  Indeed, this little aladdin-lamp-like pot has a loyal following.  I decided to give it a try.

Just how does it work?

You boil water or use bottled water or filtered water and then stir in the provided mixture of sinus salts or whatever one might call them.  Stir.  Then, stand over a sink, head down, and use the spout end of the neti pot to pour the mixture into one nostril and then wait while it systematically comes out the other nostril.  Simple.

Intrigued, I decided to do a little research on the history of the neti pot.

It didn’t take long to find out that the neti pot comes from the Ayurvedic tradition.  Interesting.  So, a homeopathic remedy that is trumping the western practices of antibiotics…love it.  Sources claim that practitioners were interested in increasing the quality of the breath coming into the body, and so cleaning the nasal passages became a logical thing to do.  Says this site, using a neti pot not only helps the nose and mouth and eyes, it also clears the mind.

So, as I my initial impressions told me, this device IS in fact completely holistic and ancient.  And, for that reason, I love it.  I revere it.  It holds a place of honor in my collection of over the counter remedies.  The cute and efficient and oh-so-effective neti pot.  A little bit of ancient healing right on my medicine cabinet shelf.

My high school Latin teacher, Mrs. Jedziniak, made a big distinction between our avocations and our vocations. In trying to help us understand the difference between the roots of these two words, she discussed the idea of a “calling” for a vocation versus a “calling away” for an avocation.  While we might have a vocation, a job we did, our avocations were the activities and passions our hearts were drawn to.  These avocations were the things we would do regardless  of money or working life.  These were our passions.

I remember this because I see that most of us walk a line somewhere between our vocation and avocation.  Many of us start off following what we feel is our calling.  We train, make education choices, take jobs, internships, and meet connections all in hopes of landing our dream job.  For many of us, though, landing that first  job becomes more of an education in the world of work that an experience of blissfully having arrived at our true calling.  There is, after all, so much to be learned about the working world that has nothing to do with passion.  The working world contains rules, bosses and time sheets and deadlines and etiquette and politics and ladders to be climbed and backsides to be kissed.

So, it is only after being in the working world for awhile–whatever field someone goes into–that a person can really understand the definition or concept of the term “dream job”.  Now that all of the elements that go into a job have been introduced, a person can move on to start to think about what his or her dream job might look like.

I am interested in the leaps of faith people take in moving up the ladder in their careers or in the beginning stages of creating their careers.  These leaps of faith are times when a person simply imagines oneself into a job, and through a bold move or a decision takes on a task or job that he or she may not be qualified for–may not have the money for–may not even have the time for–and simply makes it happen because of the bold vision of the desired job waiting for them at the end of the road.

For me, this has happened multiple times.  I remember when I was first working toward becoming a teacher, 15 years ago, I took a job one summer at a summer school for ESL students out in western MA.  I really had very little ESL experience.  My training was in English Literature.  But because I knew this would get me real-time teaching experience in the classroom, I took it.  Another summer around that time I also accepted the position of Assistant Direction of a college summer program for ESL students.  Again, I had little to no ESL training, except for that previous summer experience now under my belt.  And, so, I became the Assistant Director of something.  I had never Assistant Directed anything!  These leaps of faith, however, did give me the classroom time I was looking for.  The very basic experience of standing up in front of a classroom and teaching.  From these moves, I began to feel like and become a teacher.

My move into creating a freelance writing career came about in an even more mind-over-matter way.  I began to call myself a writer in certain situations whenever someone asked about my job.  When filling out a name tag, I would put my name and then the title “writer” for my career.  I did this for two reasons.  I felt like it gave me a little bit of an alter ego.  And, I was also, whether I knew it or not, carving out a place for myself in my identity in which being a writer was a real thing.  The more I played that role, the more I became that role.  And now, a few years later, I can indeed say that I am a freelance writer, in addition to my full-time job of educator.

Clarence Jones came to speak at our school yesterday.  He is an amazing speaker, someone who employs all different styles of speaking within one 45 minute time period, engaging us with reenacting the story of how he came to meet and work with Martin Luther King Junior and regaling us with tales of how he has gone on to teach at Stanford and write several books.  At 80 years of age, he is energetic, articulate and young in speech and message.  The kids and teachers alike hung on his every word.  We were all coming face to face with a living figure from history.

I was struck by one of his biggest messages:  the only way to work with others and accomplish anything is through love.  He could have said any number of other things that would help one succeed in life, but he chose to say that love is the greatest thing.  And, the reason I was struck by that is because lately, time and time again, I keep receiving this message from great artists and thinkers.  They don’t name education or discipline or responsibility or motivation as the quality that most makes a life successful.  They name love.  Junot Diaz, speaking of the process of writing his most recent novel The Brief Wondrous Life of OScar Wao spoke at Montclair State University a few months ago.  There, he conveyed to us that he had to grow into the person who could write the book that he was striving to write.  He had to learn and develop the compassion necessary to write the book.  He said that when he started the book he was not yet the person who could write that book.  It took him 10 years to do it.  And, indeed, in teaching that book for three years now, to my high school juniors and seniors, and I am struck by the deep message of compassion and love and breaking of silences that it teaches.

Jones stated that it’s not even the love for others that is so important.  He said that we love others when we love ourselves.

So, it’s a snow day from school.  And, I am enjoying all the pleasures of having a day off.  I woke up at around 9:30.  Went down and made dunkin donuts coffee in my coffee maker.  Had some cereal.   I watched The View–interrupted for a half an hour by Mayor Bloomberg’s press conference about the state of his plowing and handling of the snow emergency.  Heard him speak hilarious Spanish to his constituents. Read a little bit.  Reading about Fairy Tales in preparation for teaching my upcoming Fairy Tale unit in my Women’s Voices of the 20th Century class that starts in two weeks.

Now, I am making brownies.  Not something I do often. Simple pleasure.

When I was little, I wanted to be a minister.  It wasn’t a big focus of mine–I wasn’t like, “I will be a minister when I grow up”.  It was more just one of several jobs that seemed cool to me and that I could picture myself doing.  I loved listening to the minster’s sermons at church.    Not the religious aspects of them, per se, although those messages were certainly moving and beautiful.  No, I liked the way a minster could bring in all of these different stories–from the Bible, from his own life, from movies and books and stories and even just stories about things that had happened that week–and weave them together to bring out a new meaning.   I loved the conglomeration of stories–high and low–all leading to a meaning or a lesson or a message about God or life.  The only thing that always kind of stopped me when I thought about being a minister, was the God part.  I wasn’t sure if I really had enough of a God calling to be a true minister.  Suffice it to say that I would have been just as happy hearing those sermons and the collected anecdotes if they had merely served to illuminate something about life or human nature.  It was the form that I loved and the fact that they spoke about God was important–but only secondarily so, for me.

In high school I was part of a group called Young Life.  It’s a Christian social group–I am not sure which church runs it.  My friend Bill Berry held the meetings out of his parents’ basement.  His house was really big, located on Wood Pond in West Hartford.  So, one night a week, I think it was Tuesdays, 20 or 30 kids from school would gather in Bill Berry’s basement for Young Life meetings.  I think most of the kids, including me, did it because it was social.  There was always some kind of activity for half of the evening, like a game or a project.  These were silly games like you might do at camp.  I can’t even remember them now.  Which is telling, I think.  Because my favorite part of the evening was always the end of the meeting when the leaders of the group would quiet everyone down and gather everyone in to listen to one of the leaders tell a sort of meditative story or sermon of sorts.  It usually involved a very personal anecdote from the leader’s life–sometimes the stories and details were really heart wrenching. Looking back now it seems like they must have been encouraged to include self-revelation.  They told about family problems or social problems they had been through or sometimes even problems with drugs or alcohol.  Things could get pretty serious pretty fast down there in that basement with the brown rug and white paneling. Where kids had been squealing in delight over games a few seconds before, the room would suddenly be quiet and intense.  I loved this.  I was in my element.  Listening to someone tell about her life and then hearing her link the story to a story in the Bible was just the meditative meaningful kind of shit that I needed on those Tuesday nights.  I know most of the other kids in the room probably considered these little talks the thing they had to sit through in order to be able to play the games and hang out with the other kids there.  But, this kind of deep revelation moved me. Again, I really don’t think I so much got the message about God though.  I just liked the meditative quality of it.  I like the storytelling and feelings and meaning.

So it makes sense to me, then, that writing non-fiction and blogging even appeal to me.  These forms allow me to do just what my congregational ministers have been doing up there in church every Sunday morning throughout my life:  Tell stories, elaborate upon some, make connections between books and people and religious texts and even history and pop culture and then draw them together into a whole that illuminates.  Congregational ministers are experts at this.  I think there is a bit of “down-to-earth” folksiness to the congregation style of sermons that really works for me.

Regardless, I write about this topic here and now because this memory of wanting to be a minister came bubbling up out of my memory a few minutes ago.  This memory kind of frees me.  It gives me license and a bit of context with which to indulge in this blog thing.  And it gives me a bit of a purpose.  Sometimes I feel like blogging and all that goes with it can be narcissistic and selfish or else I feel that I have to choose some trendy topic to write about.  But, if I instead just go with my gut–my own longstanding impulse to tell stories and connect them and sometimes (not always) hopefully illuminate something larger about life and humanity, well then, here’s my chance.  I get to be a minister.  Here in my own little corner of the web.

I am teaching Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this month to my sophomores.  My well-annotated copy of the book is like the bible to me–all the good quotations and themes and references to Romantic literature are marked throughout.  I would be lost without it.  And yet, to teach the book really well, I have to continually engage in the act of rereading.  As I sat down to read the other night, I felt for the first time in a few years, just how very foreign the act of sitting down to read a dense 19th century novel feels compared to the activities of my everyday life.  Maybe it’s just me. But I don’t think so.  Most things I do in my life today don’t require the complete concentration, quiet attention and uninterrupted focus that reading 30 pages of Frankenstein requires.  And, it felt good!  I was happy for the enforced silence and the enforced focus.  I really can’t multi-task when I am reading Frankenstein the way I can when I am, say, trying to check my email and text a friend and watch tv at the same time.  The 19th century novel, in fact, seems like the perfect antidote to multitasking.  If one tries to multitask while reading one of these tomes, one simply doesn’t really read.

English teachers the world over sing the praises of works of literature such as those by Dickens, Austen, the Brontes and Shelley because of the complexity of thought, the multifaceted sentences, the insight the books provide into time periods and cultures before ours and because of the strong vocabulary used throughout.  A newly valuable aspect of  these books is their role in demanding that the reader immerse him or herself in an act of complete focus that is becoming more and more rare today.  I used to tell kids that it was hard to read these books because it was hard to imagine what it was like to live in a world without television.  Only 10 years later, I have to amend this introduction by telling students that it’s hard for us to imagine what it was like not to have television as well as cell phones, email, facebook, texting, video games, im-ing and the internet.  And, this list grows everyday.

While the concentration I dropped into felt welcome, I could also feel my 21st century brain becoming antsy.  My thoughts danced around.   My fingers itched to grab my smart phone to check the email that I had checked only five minutes before.  Every bone in my body seemed to fight against the sense of slowness this act of reading was creating.  “You mean I have to sit and read for an hour?  Two hours?  Can’t I get this done more quickly? Isn’t there a short cut?  Can’t I hyperlink this?”

If I was feeling it, then my students certainly feel it.  Born as recently as 1995, the year I graduated from college, these high school sophomores probably have very few activities in their memory that require such slow, un-technological focus.

And yet, I see this activity as even more important.

It seems to me that as an English teacher I might do well to have my students reflect upon this act of reading.  Students are stretching out, slowing down and fighting their urge for instant gratification. It might be good to have them share their impressions about what it’s like to do this.

There is much to be learned here, and more thinking to be done upon this topic.

I attended Word Nerd Networking last night in NY.  It was great getting to hang out with my writing teaching and friend Lisa Romeo and several other writers I met there.

Some fun tidbits:

Networking is invigorating!  I love the random connections that I make with people about their careers and my career–sitting down for a conversation, I never know what overlapping piece of advice or experience we will share or pass on.

I come away from these events always–with a tidbit of knowledge to followup on.  I may not be able to predict what I will learn before walking in to that room of writers–but I always walk away with more than I started with.

Afterwards, I got a ride back to Jersey with three other Jersey writers who were there. It turns out I knew these women already. One writer, Stacey Gill, writes for Barista Kids and Baristanet, where I also write.  I have read her stuff over the past year, but I had never met her until last night. Great to put a face with the name and also share writing stories with each other.  Another woman, Bernadette, had been in a writing class I had taken two years ago with Lisa Romeo.  So, it was great to connect with these writers and brainstorm about writing and give each other advice and support regarding all of our projects.

So, as I get into this blogging business, I figure the best way to figure out how to do it is the share my thoughts about it here–on my blog!

When I was in grad school, we were always studying ways of writing and I felt like I became very interested in the idea of how fields of writing vary.  For example, academic writing is so different from popular online writing–which is also so different from writing for literary journals, etc.  Each one has its own audience and set of assumptions and way of communicating.

Martha Beck, in her book Steering by Starlight speaks about how she had been trained in academia for so long as a Harvard PhD that when she began to want to write self-help books, she really felt as if she were going against all that was sacred to her training!  Indeed, when you are in academia, there is this certain way of speaking about “other” types of writing beyond the university that make that other type of writing seem simplistic, facile and lesser.  However, now that I am outside of academia, or at least outside of the university level, I in fact feel the opposite:  I feel that academic writing is really just one way of writing and is in fact a very limited way of writing with a very limited audience.  Not to reduce it or anything–it certainly has its purpose.  But, I embrace the idea now of becoming part of a larger conversation, one that incorporates all different modes of writing and all different audiences.

So, what I think is interesting is how, as a blogger, I have to think about now how to enter into the blogging conversations that are out there.  How can I enter into this field of writing, with all of its multiple approaches and variants.

I guess the first way is to read the blogs and online media that are out there-to even become aware that there are people out there experimenting with lots of ways of writing.  Then I can gradually position myself to think about where I fit in.

Some ideas I think are important as I approach a blog:

Keep entries short (which I am NOT doing in this post!)

Life coaching IS a viable topic to write about–even if non-professionally–just from my own experience

I think I would be interested in applying all of my Literature and Teaching background to more of a pop culture audience.  How to take this literary knowledge, figure out what I like about it, and then bring it to the blogosphere—so that I write not only to academics, not only to my students, not only to my students’ parents but also to general readers, who may not know much about books or literature.

How can I write about books and literature and literary-esque topics in a way that makes it fun and enticing for my audience?

Who is my audience?

Who do I want to target as an audience?

How can I use the professional training I already have in education, literature, writing and academic research to propel my writing forward?

I just finished reading Breaking Night by Liz Murray–the girl dubbed with the phrase, “from Homeless to Harvard.”  She came to speak at our school as part of our book fair. When she spoke, I was amazed at how down to earth she seemed.  She spoke from the heart and even seemed nervous.  Now , of course she must have said some of these things hundreds of times all ready.  But, she seemed very genuine.  Good for our students to see a speaker like that.

And then I started the book and literally haven’t been able to put it down!

For one, it is extremely well written.  The clarity of her voice is amazing.  I found myself thinking about the things she said even when I wasn’t reading the book. Her words echoed through my mind.  She talked about how she used a blank transcript that she filled in with A’s as her motivation as she was working her way through high school while homeless.  She talked about how she had to choose school over and over again in the daily decision to get up and throw the blankets off her head. She described the physical effects of poverty and drug abuse–the way she had lice as a child and the way the house was left in disarray with a tub that never completely drained, filled with a brown murky water.  She talked about how she and her sister became more and more distant.  She also described her love for her mother.  The incongruity of her mother’s blatant neglect and irresponsibility and yet her affection when she called Liz “Pumpkin.”

Perhaps I was also drawn in by her story because her story is so horrific and happens literally under our noses.  There are homeless kids like this everywhere.  In Montclair, even.  Or Newark, just down the road.  And, this problem is an old problem.  It’s been around forever.  It’s not hip or current or part of the latest example of social ills.  It’s homelessness and hunger.  Plain and simple.  And the things that will solve it are:  food and awareness, distribution and funding.  Plain and simple.

So the food banks that I have visited in my community service days at school are essential.  People rely on them.  And, other organizations that aren’t as big as the food banks need food too.  It’s not glamorous.  It’s not innovative and cool.  It’s just cans in a bag.  Delivered to a shelter.