Notes from my Mental Health Day

I'm becoming schizophrenic, y'all. I forget who I'm supposed to be from time to time, start using my teacher voice with my peers in the creative workshops I'm taking, find myself laughing at my kids' inappropriate jokes (when I should be schooling them on how to be respectful college students). I was commenting on my classmates' memoir essays* for poetry workshop the other day, and I caught myself marking weak thesis statements, misplaced modifiers, poor paragraph development. That's probably not the best way to be a respectful classmate, is it? Well, teaching basic writing really informs the way I read writing. And the way I write. Don't mess with Tim/Mr. Sisk when it comes to transitions and topic sentences.

Today, I've decided to take a break from all the grading and teachering to focus on getting my thoughts in order. I'm calling it my Mental Health Day, a day in which I will not respond to student emails, I will not do lesson plans, and I will not read a blessed critical essay on poetry or drama for the classes I'm taking. That's why God invented Sundays, right?

I'm going to the Greek Festival with some friends and reading around in Gregory Maguire's Wicked for fun. I'm going to wipe down my kitchen counters and make some chicken cutlets. Then wipe the counters down again. And then I might work on revising some poems, or I might just read some of the poetry collections I've been picking up from book sales and the library that I haven't had time to do much more than skim. I'm expecting all of y'all to hold me accountable.

*Memoir essay: Use an experience from your life to situate yourself in a poem you like, thereby reading it autobiographically and getting inside the poet's head to better understand the lyrical decisions she made. That way you can understand how the rhythms, line length, form, etc., works in that poet's poem and import those strategies into your own poetics. It's a wonderful assignment, probably best for advanced writers (but, you know, it might be a good way to teach beginning writers how to engage with a poem). I chose "Practicing" by Marie Howe and wrote about my first kiss. The exercise was so helpful, I plan to do it with other poems as I work on the critical introduction to my chapbook.

In Absentia

Hot damn. I have a new respect for my teachers, especially the ones whose primary course evaluation method involves grading essays. If my kids ask me one more time when they are getting their papers back, I'm going to explode. This week, young ones. I'll get them to you this week.

Yes, this is why I've been absent. Because I'm a teacher, but I'm also still a student, and I have not yet found the balance among being Tim, Mr. Sisk, and Bookspaz the Blogger. So the ol' blog has taken a backseat to the drama theory I've been reading, the rhetorical analysis I've been teaching. Now, I'm snatching a minute while my clothes tumble and my coffee gets cold to get a bit of blogging done. Here goes.

I've applied, been accepted, and had a phone interview for the Southern Teachers Agency. This means when private and independent schools around the South start looking for English teachers, my very friendly placement counselor, Jay, will match me up with them for interviews with principals, and I might be employed next year. When I asked my thesis advisor to write me a letter of rec for this program, she rolled her eyes a bit. I shouldn't teach high school, she says. Then she proceeded to give me the name of the English Dept. Chair at the community college here in Knoxville. So, I'll apply there too, but I bet I won't have much luck. There's an academic glut in East Tennessee.

What I really want to do is work in a bakery for a year or so. I've always wanted to learn to decorate cakes, and baking is one of my Most Favorite Things To Do. It calms me. Focuses my attention on something so my mind won't scuttle around among the jostling thoughts of papers to grade, books to read, exams to prepare for, boys to stop myself from loving. There's one in Knoxville I adore. I might see if I can weasel my way into a position there this summer. We'll see.

I just don't want to be one of those aimless wanderers with a Master's degree in English. I want a job and and a dog and a two-bedroom apartment. That's why I'm making plans so soon.

In other news, the teaching is going well except for the fact that I'm never as good in my first class as I am in my second. Every MWF I leave the first group (or rather, they leave me since I teach back-to-back in the same classroom) feeling like those kids deserve a better teacher. But I'm what they've got, and I'll keep on trucking along. I'm still getting my land legs, y'all.

I've made up my mind to ride my bike to Panera Bread today and write a little. I haven't had time to write much of anything besides emails and paper comments this week, and I've got some poems I need to get out of my head. You all know the feeling.

I hope everyone is well. I hope you're all registered to vote. I hope you're all voting for Obama (one of my friend's students spelled his name, "O'Bama.") Love.

Wherein Mr. Sisk rants not about teen pregnancy but teen marriage.

So, looks like teenage pregnancy is all the rage again. Solange Knowles back in '03. Then Jamie Lynn Spears. And all those pregnancy pact girls in New England (thank God they weren't from Mississippi). Now, I'm specifically interested in Bristol Palin's pregnancy, because as we all know, her abstinence-only education supporting mother is the newly announced Republican veep candidate. Perhaps Bristol's untimely knocking up will communicate something to her mother about sex education. I doubt enough to change her politics, though.

I'm not trying to be pejorative here. I commend Bristol for keeping her baby. It's going to be tough, but it's going to be worth it. What absolutely blows my mind is the news that Bristol intends to marry the baby's father. At 17. Now, feel free to disagree, but I'm strongly under the persuasion that having a baby at seventeen most likely won't ruin her life, but getting married that young will. That's two adult roles the poor girl will have to take on all at once: mother and wife. Hopefully those hormones will kick in and guide her in the mother role, but I hear it takes people years to learn how to play the spouse(admittedly, it probably takes men longer). And at seventeen, I worry both Bristol and Baby Daddy will be way too self-involved to make a relationship work. Loving a baby you birth and can't send back is one thing; loving the boy who knocked you up Til Death Do You Part is quite another. I'm flabbergasted, really.

It's 2008. No longer is the stigma of being an unwed single mother as severe. Okay, I've never been one, but I've known plenty and it seems to me that there is quite a precedent for successfully raising a child as a single mother. There is not, however, the same precedent for young marriages (hell, marriages in general). Perhaps it's my Gen Y sensibilities showing, or my white trash morality, but I think there are far worse things in this world than having a baby out of wedlock. Much worse. War, poverty, restless legs syndrome. Marrying at seventeen. Sheesh.

I hate to rant so much, but damn, y'all. Does anyone else find this impending marriage as ludicrous as I do?

In other news, Mr. Sisk is back in action with a vengeance. Not only has he successfully conferenced with all his students (all 43 of them!) without canceling class (a nightmare, btw), but he's also stayed on top of his grading and made two unsuspecting eighteen-year-old girls cry. Well, they actually made themselves cry, or thought crying would get them out of having to buy books. But it didn't work, because he knows college freshmen are often very selfish (he was one not so long ago). And that they are too immature to get married.

Wit that, I dash off to read Nietzsche. That's a line I never thought I'd use.

Happy Tuesday, y'all.

Why I love Michelle Obama

Because she is articulate and seems genuine.
Because I buy into the hype.
Because I believe her when she says she believes in change.
Because she's a mother and a mentor and a public servant.
Because this country needs the Obamas in the White House.






Anybody want to volunteer at the Obama campaign with me this Thursday?

On the topic of Friendship

When my momma managed the Family Dollar store at Bullfrog Corner, she became best friends with a hairdresser named Eunice who worked at the Mac's. No. 2 hair shop in the same strip mall, past the Super Valu that used to be a Piggly Wiggly that used to be a Big Star. That was back in the late 90s when I was just starting out in high school and came home crying a lot because I just didn't have any friends. Fourteen, fat, and effeminate were not traits that put one on the fast track to likablity and Horn Lake High School, and I knew it well every afternoon when I had no one to sit with on the school bus. My momma, though, she always knew how to make friends. A real go getter, my mother takes situations by the reigns and guides them in the direction of her favor. I still smile when I think of the story of Momma and Eunice's (now defunct) Friendship. It goes like this.

Eunice used to walk down to the store on her breaks from hairdressing and waste her tip money on polyresin angel figurines. Being the astute Southern woman that she is, Momma noticed Eunice's melon nail polish one day as she rang up her covey at the cash register and told her how much she loved the color. Within the same conversation, Momma found out where Eunice worked, her living situation (poor thing rented a mother-in-law wing from some family on Horn Lake Road) and decided they'd be friends. So, she said it, just like that: "Eunice, you look like somebody I want to be friends with, so let's be friends."

They were good friends for quite a few years, too. Eunice used to come over to the house and bring Momma little boxes of candy and neon colored cigarette lighters, and Momma would drive Eunice to see her mother at the nursing home. For a while there, I even got into the habit of calling Eunice "Aunt Nez," as Inez was her middle name and she had no nieces or nephews to regard her affectionately. She even would cut my hair for free if I went down to the shop after it closed.

Eunice was a recovering alcoholic, though. Momma knew this going into the relationship. Hell, she probably found out that much in the initial cash stand meeting, and that probably made her want to be Eunice's friend even more. I'm a lot like my momma in that we both take on the underdogs, the underachievers, the fucked up friends we hope to fix. Momma did her best to fix Eunice, even took off work for two days, paid for the gas, hotel--everything--and drove her to the hospital in Jackson so she could get on the list for a liver transplant.

I doubt Eunice got the transplant. How could she have ever afforded it? And anyway, Momma put her down a year or so later because the poor hairdresser got depressed and turned back to the bottle. That made my momma so mad that she swore she'd never talk to her again, and I don't think she has except once, a year or so ago. She called Eunice because she had read in the paper that her momma died.

I say all of this because I've been thinking a lot about my friendship style in the past couple of weeks, and I am trying to make sense of my motivations. Taking a cue from my mother, I approached a new MA student named Eric and informed him that he will be my new best friend last week. We have hung out together every day since. I wonder if that was a creepy thing to do--to approach a relative stranger and demand mutual affection beyond the boundaries of acquaintanceship when we really are not more than acquainted at this point. I like to think I'm being proactive in the situation, and I remind myself that I've routinely done this type of thing before, just on a more discrete level. I meet people, decide I want to be friends with them, then proceed in charming them with my dazzling, albeit self-deprecating, wit. That's what I do.

But I hope my motivations are pure. I really do believe they are, but I always worry that I try to orchestrate too much in my life instead of allowing things to develop organically. I like to be in control of what happens to me, y'all, because I feel like if I don't take my life by the reigns, surely someone else will. I'm a chronic rehearser, I come from a family of planners, and, like my momma and daddy before me, I weigh all the options before making decisions. It's my legacy.

Maybe this friendship style is, too.

Absorbing the Cost

For years now I've been plagued by expensive repairs just before school starts. For any of you college students out there, you know that the beginning of the semester is also The Most Expensive Time Of The Year, which is always painfully true for me. And compounded by a plethora of other, unpredicted expenses, causes me to stress and average about 20 "WTF?!"s a minute. Allow me to elaborate.

When I was about to move to UCA for college way back in 2003, somehow the windshield of my car burst into a trillion pieces while sitting in my grandmother's driveway one hot Mississippi August day. Of course I only had liability insurance, which did not cover glass breakage, so I had to pay out of pocket in order to fix the car. $300 I'll never get back.

Then last year, when I was about to leave Good Ol' Conway for Even Better Knoxville, my car broke down near Hot Springs, from where I had to be towed, a new timing belt and starter had to be installed, and a whole slough of other repairs I can't quite remember except that they totaled near $800. That I'll never get back.

This year it wasn't the car that did me in (though I did have the muffler replaced a month ago), but my computer, or more specifically, my HP Pavillion Notebook whose warranty expired mere weeks before the hard drive decided to go bust. The hard drive with my syllabus and pictures and entire academic record of my first year of grad school. The computer store (a local place, thank you very much) was unable to save anything from the old hard drive, but fortunately I'd backed up most of the academic work, poems, and syllabus in Google docs. But no more pictures or Miley Cyrus songs. Good bye, summertime memories. Have fun exploring the infinite abyss with the $260 that I'll never get back.

At least in these trying times I've had the money (or good credit standing) to afford the fixes. At least I have things sorted out now, since school starts tomorrow, and ohmigod I'll be Mr. Sisk every day for the rest of my life. I've got my bearings now, and my syllabus is done, too. Those are two very important things to have your hands on.

Good luck this semester, y'all. Of course I'll keep you updated on the teaching life.

Snippets (with a nod to C.D. Wright)

In another universe, I might would be the ankle-sprained member of a women's Olympic gymnastics team. The spirited stunter with a heart of gold, enthusiasm to spare, who would see her team to victory had she not torn her ACL dancing the Cupid Shuffle in the locker room shower. Out of the way already, toots. So close, but still no gold.

When I was seventeen, all I wanted to be was Winona Ryder's character in Mermaids. Charlotte, the confused, slightly macabre, too-smart-for-her-own-good teenager whose life is drastically changed for the better after she loses her virginity to the handyman in the belfry of the convent next door. I wanted to scream out the window of a stolen car, "I want to live a violently exciting life!"

A violently exciting life is not something one can plan. I'm young and naive and a pretty bad poet, but I've learned at least that much from living the life of a Compulsive Rehearser.

Sometimes, when I'm rehearsing aloud to myself, I answer back in different voices. You think I'm not as crazy when I do that.

You think I'm more crazy when I admit that I've lied extensively about the number of people I've slept with. Or perhaps you'll think lying about sex is the curse of youth. Either way, I'm a liar and you still like me.

If this were Mississippi and over there was the Mississippi River, the humidity would uppercut us, leave us gasping. Instead it's a beautiful day in East Tennessee, cloudy, 65 degrees. A change could make me cry.

I'm not the weepy type, but were I, I'd cry in front of you. Only so you'd pet me. Instead I write and bebop and lie in catatonic states. I'm pretty busy.


*I've been trying to mimic C. D. Wright's poem, but all I can get down is tone, not style. Yesterday a friend told me I should write prose more, and though I've never envisioned myself as a prose writer, I gave it a shot with my "Snippets." Maybe, if I can muster the craftsmanship, I can go back in and make my paragraphs ghazals. Then Galway Kinnell would love me.