The End is Nigh

I adopted kitties two (or was it three?) weeks ago and have been staying home to hang out with them. Their names are Stella and Martha, and they follow us from room to room, attack each other, sleep, eat their kibble, poo/pee, and let me hold them when they're tired. We're in love with them, but one of us is of course more vocal about it. (But I catch the other one airplaning a kitty around the house or sitting at the computer with a kitty sleeping in his lap.)

I joke that we are retired, because Leif is between jobs and I am off school. It's almost the end of my break, though (this is my last week off), and I'm allowing myself to sit around a whole lot as long as I slowly work through the to-do list I wrote on our fridge marker board at the beginning of the summer (dance stuff is on a slight hiatus because I'm not participating in the next mini-gig. Our last one was Flamenco at Art Melt, which turned out quite well). For instance, yesterday I ironed my work shirts (the button-up types that have been hanging out in the other closet for months--maybe even half a year--waiting to be ironed). I think it took two hours, and I have no idea if the shirts look any smoother (have I mentioned how much I hate ironing and how incompetent it makes me feel?). At least I got to half-watch the Masterpiece Theatre Anna Karenina on Netflix through my parents' Wii that they lent us. (Usually I use it for 30 Rock, but sometimes I like to mix it up with a movie or Wii Golf, even though I cannot beat Leif.)

Let me explain my strange and boring movie choice: "classic" literature is free on Kindle, so I downloaded a bunch that I thought would be half-interesting. I finally finished Jane Eyre and watched the BBC one on Netflix a while back, so I thought it'd be fun to so the same with Anna Kareneninina.

Boy, was I wrong. I'm sorry, but this novel sucks. I am perplexed as to why anyone in history has called it the greatest novel ever (William Fucking Faulkner said this!). I agree with what Russian critics of its day said about it on Wikipedia: it's "(a) trifling (romance of high life)." I dragged myself through half of it, motivated by a slight curiosity about what would happen to some of the characters and a vague hope for some interesting sex scenes (of which there were ZERO--not even any non-gritty innuendos. The only proof that any of these characters had sex were that characters would pop up pregnant in the next chapter). Overall, I appreciated that Tolstoy (whose short stories I like!) wanted to write about what happens after characters fall in love with each other, but 1) he just did it in such a haughty, Christian, moralistic way--the "pure and innocent" (read: socially awkward and religious) couple have everything work out for them, and the couple that are having an extra-marital affair end up ruined, and 2) his writing is straight-up boring (and not in a dense, rich, tedious-with-a-payoff kind of way). I know it's a translation and he wrote it in magazine installments, but sheesh. It takes four chapters for an insignificant brother character to die, for instance, and it has no bearing on the main plot.

I've started to have nervous school dreams again (the ones where I have to teach but I am also a student, and I have to get to class on time and I have a bad schedule). The good news is that unless my principal made a scheduling error, I am teaching all honors classes this year! The greatest part about this is that I can focus on planning only one course and I have to make just one set of midterms and final exams. I feel, also, that it will allow me some extra planning time to think of ways to push those smarties further in terms of assignments. And I can incorporate stuff I learned at the AP seminar. I have to confess, too, that teaching grammar to the regular classes is the hardest task I've ever experienced in my career, and I never quite got my curriculum the way I wanted. Sometimes I'd have them take notes and work out of the textbook, sometimes I'd run off a million copies of a workbook page, sometimes I'd make them do a little project or presentation. In the end, I'm not sure how well I connected it with their writing, and all I can hope is that I gave them a foundation that they can apply in future papers. So I feel relieved. I like the holistic honors grammar stuff a lot more.

Leif was kind enough to come to my classroom with me last week to help me put it back together, post-floor-waxing. He discovered that my computer is broken. But at least we moved everything back into its place and I made a neat poster-collage out of some of our old college and high schools posters that we were going to throw out. I'm going to put some bullshit title over it about brainstorming or imagination to make sense of it, but mostly it just looks cool--there are art and sci-fi scenes, and I cut the band names off some old Sparklehorse and Flaming Lips posters. I feel like it's going to be a good year. The only thing I can really complain about is that I have a first hour class now, so waking up at 5:30 sharp will be a non-negotiable. And they probably won't have good discussions. I hate.

While I am not ready to return to grading papers, I am ready to break up this whole sitting-around-the-house routine (even though I haven't felt bored at all). It makes me feel incapable of accomplishing even the smallest task. The only reason I don't feel ill is that I've been making green juice and eating almost exclusively plant-based food at home (except when out, anything goes--I had pork ribs at Leif's parents' last night, for instance). I ran twice last week (but you have to go around 8 pm to minimize the chance of dying) and went to a hard yoga class. The week before that I taught dance for three days, took one ballet/hodge podge class that me and a couple of other dancers put together on the spot, and went to a medium-light yoga class. My muscles haven't quite reached atrophy and I haven't gotten a bed sore yet (or even a couch one). I plan to make myself go to yoga at 5:30 today. Things are going pretty well on the health front. I think I have been obsessing about it less. A lot of this has to do with feeling inspired after reading Kris Carr. I've been at home cooking instead of going out and celebrating summer with blow-out dinners and drinking (that dies down after June anyway). Also, I feel that I have discovered a secret weapon now that we have a juicer (and discovering vegan black bean tamales didn't hurt either). The areas that I still plan to improve on are night snacking and too much wine. (I would say less chocolate, but I'm back off the chocolate train now that I've consumed the entire bag of "Twist" that Leif's mom always brings me from Norway. I did find two delicious candy-alternatives at Whole Foods: vegan chocolate pudding and raw chocolate coconut macaroons.) Anyway, the school schedule will help with health habits--who has time to night-snack or to squeeze in three glasses of wine before 9:30?

I feel slightly disappointed with myself for not devoting part of my summer to fiction (or even creative nonfiction) writing. I still miss it and would love nothing more than to be in the middle of writing a story that I'm excited about, but I don't have any ideas, and I don't feel into it right now, for whatever reason. I have been playing and singing a lot of new songs on the piano to soothe the part of me that wants to create stuff. Until that part has writing ideas, this will have to do. I keep saying I'm going to send off a story to a journal, but I haven't done that either.

In other news, I saw the final Harry Potter film and enjoyed it thoroughly. It's the end of an era. I'm sure my students are having a hard time with it because some of them have been reading the books and watching the movies since they were six years old. They've literally grown up with Harry as he grew up. Yes, it annoyed me that the Hallows were nowhere to be seen in this movie and that they left out the entire Dumbledore and Voldemort back-stories, and that they changed the ending and botched the Harry-Ginny interactions. I still enjoyed it, though. It almost makes me want to re-read the series. Almost.

In other other news, my brother moved to Atlanta for the year to go to recording-studio school. They left yesterday. I am excited for him.