"Come into my world, I've got to show, show, show you"

A month or so ago, my friend Michelle posted about her memories of traveling Europe with her best friends while sharing headphones on trains to listen to a Rilo Kiley CD in a walkman. For her, those songs will always take her back to that time, when she was a younger, different self, seeing new things with good friends, and she can't help but feel nostalgic for that old self when she hears the music.

Her post struck me, because she was so dead on about the problem of time. Time is something we discussed in my poetry class on Tuesday night after reading an essay by David Baker in Radiant Lyre. For Baker, time is something constructed by people, but also something we are inevitably opposed to. This opposition is evident in lyric poetry when you think of John Donne chiding the sun to leave him and his lover to their love making. But the role of the lyric (or in this case, the pop song) also has to be to work within the parameters of time. It encapsulates a moment that we can always go back to and reinfuse with time, with memory, and understand again why the lyric is so powerful.

That said, I want to take a cue from Michelle and share a song that stands in my history and always reminds me of wonderful things, but particularly an amazingly debauched Spring Break camping trip with my Writing Center compatriots back at UCA. God, I miss those crazy kids some days. Anyway, the song is Regina Spektor's "Hotel Song," and I remember it being the theme song of our trip. Eight tipsy (and a few stoned) twentysomethings piled into a red Jeep Cherokee tearing up the gravel roads of podunk Ponca, Arkansas, singing out the windows, "a little bag of cocaine, a little bag of cocaine, so who's the girl wearing my dress?" It was one of those moments when you can't possibly wish to be anywhere else, that time could end then and you'd know you felt really alive at least once. God, the Ozarks couldn't offer us enough that day. Here's a video of Regina Spektor for those of you who are unfamiliar with the song (shame on you!)



Hey, it's Thursday. That means the weekend is almost here. Godspeed, friends, making it through the last two days. Can you believe the end of this semester is within sight?

The times, they're a-changing

Come Daylight Savings Time each year I can't help but think of my daddy.
My daddy, sitting on his couch with his blond yippy pooch in his lap fumbling with his cell phone, calling me (usually more than once) to remind me to change my clocks. He's done it ever since I've been an adult, or, if that doesn't work for you, ever since I haven't lived at home.

Except he didn't call to remind me this year. Must have slipped his mind. Daddy's mind has been slipping more and more in the past couple of years. He's nearing sixty. He's got liver trouble. Alzheimer's runs in the family.

I'm expecting him to call in an hour or so, though, after he thinks he's given me enough time to shake the sleep off. He's good about letting me get up and around before calling on Sunday mornings. He'll tell me all about the Ole Miss game yesterday, how my high school's team isn't going to make it to the playoffs. He'll tell me who we know that went to jail over the weekend--Daddy's an avid paper-reader and police scanner-listener--and who's in the funeral home (because to say Ms. Francis died just isn't polite).

I will listen. I will nod, and he'll know I'm nodding even when he can't see me. I'll say yessir, and then, when he's finished not talking to me as much as talking at me, he'll tell me he has to go and hang up without saying goodbye. And my feelings won't be hurt, because that's just how he is. For some reason or another, goodbyes are too hard for my daddy.

This Robert Hayden poem has always reminded me of him:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Remember to set your clocks back an hour.

Gen Yers Care

In my English 101 class, the students are doing a unit on work, which will ultimately lead to a research/observation paper about some aspect of working. Since I'm a GA, I don't teach every class, but I am teaching all next week. While browsing around the net for some teaching ideas, I found an interesting Time article about Gen Y work ethic.

Some of the stuff reported in the article surprised me. While I'm well aware of the tech savvy workforce Gen Y has created (and I feel as if I betray my generation by not knowing HTML), Gen Y's trends toward opportunistic job seeking, working with friends, and volunteering is very thought provoking. I can see how members of my generation are primarily self-interested (and thus less loyal to companies which we assume will screw is over in the end), but the volunteerism is interesting. Perhaps Gen Yers are padding their resumes with volunteer experience as a self-interested way of getting ahead in the work world.

Also, note the trend among recent college graduates who move back in with their parents while they search for jobs. This provides a cushion between rent-and-utilities-paying adult life and mom-does-my-laundry student life in which twentysomethings can take time to find higher paying jobs without taking the financial risk of moving out on their own. Personally, I'd sooner live in a cardboard box than move back in with my parents, but I can see how the comfort and stability of living at home until something better comes along is appealing to some my age. Being an adult is scary sometimes.