Work: Micro Fiction

-His wife slept in a frigid bed: he worked late.

-His work friends are nice, but his birthday party was barren. 

-Slapping the alarm clock, he escaped back to fakelife. 

What have I been up to?

Currently, I have a good bit of spare time on my hands. Well, not literally on my hands, but I'm sure you've heard the commonly used phase, right?  Luckily I don't have access to many video games during this stretch, so I'm forced to do something besides play The Last of Us, which is pretty amazing. So, in the spirit of self-betterment, I'm trying to be more constructive with my times and write a bit more. I'm also trying to edit Derek's novel (Derek is my pal from high school; you can read his blog here). While his prose is impressive--it's making me doubt the quality of my own work--my editing is slow. You'd think with all the papers I grade that my editing skills would be like at LV 99, but, nay, I'm still a mid-level editor. So that's taking some time.

Post Tanzania Perspective

I recently went to Arusha, Tanzania on a mission trip. It was--as you may have guessed--an amazing trip that was both personally and spiritually fulfilling. The team worked with a Tanzanian Christian school. We shared in eight or nine different churches. And we went on a safari and saw some of the crazy stuff that people see when they go to the Serengeti-Masai folks, elephants, hippos, lions, and the like.

What really struck me about the trip was how much I missed my life back home with my family. I'm not trying to be corny, but I felt lonely when I was on this trip, and it wasn't because I didn't have good company because I had great company. I spent a lot of time with long time students, graduates, colleagues, and church members. I just didn't have my family and everything that goes with that.

Failed Attempts: It's easier to post fragments than work on my writing.

NOTE: This isn't worth your time if you're expecting polished, fully developed ideas. I was just doing some free writing with my classes and typed it up because it's writing, and I may as well chronicle it. If, on the other hand, you want to see me write badly to feel better about yourself, or to just judge me, then feel free to keep on reading.

Fragment 1)

A turning point: this is the moment when your life changes. When everything that you hoped would happen, happens. The moment that TV shows and movies so eloquently and untruthfully create. This is your moment. It's not about Cynthia. Every other day is about her. She's beautiful and all the guys like her, but it's not about her so let's not shift any of the focus. Let it be about you. Are you ready? Are you ready to become the reality of your daydreams and hidden hopes? 

I've been away working on my novel...and other stuff

So I've been away from my blog for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing (I say that so that my imagined readers will stop judging me for not posting anything as if you're all just dying to read my thoughts). Most of my writing time has actually been spent editing my NaNo novel, which is currently a second draft. When I wrote that last sentence, it made me sound as if I've been diligently working on my novel since I started editing it in January, but that I would be a lie. I've worked on it in spurts, and I've been living life, playing (too many) video games , watching (too much) TV , and reading (too few) books.

Jon and His Books

Jon surrounded himself with books. He considered himself both a collector of books and a true connoisseur of the written word. Ironically, almost all of Jon’s collection of books went unread. When someone pointed out this fact, it didn’t really faze Jon. He figured that the search was as important as the books. And he could burn a weekend scouring used bookstores purchasing books he had no intention of ever cracking. He plundered yard sales and library clearance sales for extra copies of The Scarlet Letter, which he’d swear he had read at some point in his young life, but a blank ten-foot stare was his only response if you asked him anything about Hester Prynne.

Jon never bought comics. It’s not because he looked down on pulp fiction—he would proudly brag about his extensive collection of graphic novels and noir fiction—but Jon just didn’t like that there were no bindings to admire on the side of a comic when filed on his shelves. Comics, like magazines, had no girth; thus, these forms didn’t have the eye stopping power of Moby Dick or a Grisham novel.

My Son the Toddler

Sharon Olds wrote this wonderful poem titled "My Son the Man." As the father of a two-year-old boy, there is just something in this poem that resonates with me, like so many other parents. If you haven't read it, I've posted it here. Give it a quick read. It's short, modern, and unpretentious.

Kiss & Tale

I found myself constantly playing catch up because I wasn't prepared for the changes that came with middle school. My first few weeks of sixth grade were filled with lies like "Oh, yeah, I love the band Sound Garden," "No, I can't believe that dude still plays with Voltron toys," and "Yeah, dude, Airwalk shoes are so lame." I said all of these things hoping that no one would notice that I didn't know the title of one Sound Garden song, nor had I ever heard what they sounded like. Also, before anyone came to my house, I scurried to hide all my action figures and comics in the back of my closet (behind my Airwalk shoes that I had begged my mom to buy weeks before the start of sixth grade). 

Then there were girls, which I knew nothing about. I knew that I liked them. But that was about it. My first real girl friend experience was with your typical blue eyed, blondie. An 11 year old going on 13, which was what attracted me to her. That and her new body, which seemed to happen overnight. I knew when we met that it was time to grow up because, well, you know, she was mature. Or she appeared to be mature. It also helped she was one of the first girls that gave me sideways glances filled with blush and smile.

The Everyday

After teaching high school for five years, I’ve learned a hard lesson: students don’t remember the things that I want them to remember. I’ve spent countless hours explaining the facts. I’ve explained the difference between participle and infinitive phrases, expounded on Hemingway’s terse prose and his effect on modern writing, and examined what makes To Kill a Mockingbird an American Classic. While some students managed to file some of these literary principles away in their brains, I’ve found that a majority of my students don’t look back at our time together and define it by the facts I’ve attempted to instill in them. They normally remember some semi-idiotic story I told about me and my high school friends, or they remember a piece of advice I gave them about their relationship with their high school sweetheart. Every year it seems like I have the same conversation with different students. They’ll tell me a story about something I don’t remember doing or saying, and we’ll have a good laugh about it. The conversation normally starts something like this:

Missing Simplicity

Almost every aspect of my life is filled with some sort of white noise. I've began to notice this because Asher is so simple. His emotional responses to everything is so binary. Confusion, fear, joy, anger--all of these emotions and expressions are pure. When he swings, he smiles and laughs without hesitation. When he cries, he cries hysterically. And he stops when he wants to stop without embarrassment.

Too Private for My Own Good

Being a private person makes being apart of a community difficult. I’ve lived in my home for about three years. During this time, I’ve only learned one of my neighbors’ names and I’ve only exchanged casual greetings with my closest (in physical proximity) neighbors. This isn’t because the neighbor to my left is a spiteful person who borrowed my leaf blower and never returned it, nor is it because I’m a hermit. It has more to do with the fact that I haven’t made the effort to get to know my neighbors. You see, I live in a neighborhood, but I don’t live in a community. I care about my neighbors in the way I care about people on the news. If something bad happens, I feel bad, but I move on.

A Paragraph or Two

I didn't write this to complain...But it is crunch time at school, and I have about 35 more research papers to grade before Christmas break. I feel like my mind is going to break from self induced stress. It's like a anthropomorphic research project punched a hole in my face and my brains mix with blackred goo pour out of the hole (the thought reminds me of a garbage pail kid card).

This is me letting it go...

I was teaching John Updike's shory story "A&P" this afternoon to my English 102 class. One of the students, a thin-faced woman in her mid-to-late-thirties, asked me where I taught full-time.

Hesitant, I responded, "Valley Fellowship Christian Academy."

Her mouth formed a half-cocked smile and she kinda chuckled, covering her face with her book.

Befuddled, I asked, "What?"

She just repeated her action as if I were some peon.

Going After Cacciato: It's been a Month and I Need to Write

Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (catch-ee-otto) is the book that I dated all this summer. She was my ball and chain and I couldn't help but wish I was with her younger sister The Things They Carried. But I couldn't justify hooking back up with The Things They Carried because I spend every school year with 4-7 books that I've been with more than once. I needed something new. Something fresh. And I got it.

Writing in the Shadows

As a high school English teacher, I have the tendency to immerse my literature classes with the writers I love. I find myself creating units around novels that I want to spend more time reading. Once, I assigned Beowulf (the Seamus Heaney translation) to a class just because I had bought the book and had yet to read a word beyond the first page. But being a student of literature has handicapped my personal writing. I have found that I live in the shadows cast by my favorite authors.

Writing With My English 101 Class

I wrote with my English 101 class last night and a woman in the class shared about her dead son. It was amazing to see someone so vulnerable. First class, first free write—she slits her wrist and bleeds for 26 strangers to watch. When I saw this, I was amazed. Her freedom empowered me. I was renewed, re-energized, ready to write about myself. Not teacher me, not friend me, but me in the purest sense of the word. I was ready to write about the 16 year old me that lost his older brother and held his hand as he breathed his last breath. About the me that sat with my wife as we found out that we lost our first child before it was born. Willing to open up. Willing to be honest. Willing to share.

I'm not sure what it all means, but I had to write about it.