April 15, 2018
Dear You:
Long time, no talk! We totally need to catch up! How’d your last Lone Wolf Howling at the Moon tattoo sitting go? Did your cousin ever return your thigh-high boots? He’s not to be trusted, that one; you might need to swing by his cottage and riffle through his closet if you ever want to see those 24 inches of patent leather again. Oh, and I hope that one scabby spot on your elbow finally healed up real good-like! I swear, it looked like a miniature Rhode Island (haha: “miniature Rhode Island”…redundant much?) for so many weeks I was about to start digging for clams inside that thing.
Me? Oh, I’ve been great! We’re having our usual crazy April weather, and people are being their usual crazy selves, acting like they’ve never seen such a thing before. Sometimes, this time of year makes me feel desperate inside and as though I might need to start clawing at the skin just below my cheekbones, but for some reason it’s not bugging me this year. A mid-April blizzard just feels like a good excuse to keep a thick blanket on my lap, a huge pan of barssss in the kitchen, and three pairs of socks on my feet, and what’s bad about any of that? Don’t answer! Harhar!
Get this: I stayed up past 3:30 a.m. this morning watching the live stream from Coachella, and Beyonce was headlining. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you don’t get why she’s a thing, but we all have our failings, and that’s only one of your three thousand. Joking. GAWD, you’ve been so sensitive since Marla left. So what if she took the hand blender? You never made smoothies anyhow!! Anyhow, that Beyonce performance (SHUT UP AND JUST ACCEPT THAT FIVE BILLION PLANET EARTHERS MIGHT HAVE A POINT THAT SHE’S SOMETHING SPECIAL JEEEEEZUS YOU ARE SO HARD HEADED) was, like, huge. I won’t describe it too much cuz it’ll be wasted on you, but basically, she performed for two hours, sang more than 30 songs, and had multiple costume changes (Even you would have appreciated how hard she worked to keep her left boob hidden from the audience when the tape inside her costume started failing, threatening to unleash that flawless caramel orb to explore all kinds of public mischief. Did she miss even a single deep squat when Solange came out to dance with her? No, she did not. Did she hit every wa-wa knee bend exactly on the beat while clutching at her chest? Yes, she absolutely did. Did she prove that she is using the stage she has earned to pay homage to black culture and move some white people’s iggnrnt needles? Yes, yes, she did, and if you are unwilling to acknowledge the importance of Beyonce in a racist world, then I hope Marla comes back for your potato ricer.)
#Beychella this dance break pic.twitter.com/RsD7G6G0KS
— AZ (@Zuelva__) April 16, 2018
April 17, 2018
Sorry I got cut off mid-Beyonce rave the other day. I had to grade a few research proposals submitted by the messiest class I’ve seen in…hmmmm…carry the twelve…erase the seven…a heap of years. These tomfools started at mid-term in a compressed eight-week class, and every week since then, I have scratched my head and wondered, “What is up with this crew?” Like, you know how Marla used to make a big show about Wednesdays being Taco Night, and she’d sigh really loudly about how, as usual, she’d have to be the one to buy the groceries, and then, as usual, she’d be the one to brown the meat and shred the cheese and chop the iceberg? Remember all that ostentatious drama and then how Wednesday night would come, and there’d be no groceries bought, no food prepared? And you’d be all, “Hey, M, I kind of took it that you meant to make the tacos tonight. Did I misundersta–” And then she’d snip in and yell from under the afghan on the couch, “NO TACOS. NO DINNER. NOT HUNGRY.” And you’d be afraid to say anything because what can you say when someone’s all loud and put-upon and then they don’t even do the thing they were being loud and put-upon about, and you feel like you’re trying to show up but you’re kind of nervous because you don’t quite understand the passive-aggressive complexity of the one who’s puffed up but not actually doing a single thing?
So this messy class is Marla on Taco Night. Get this: there were 25 students enrolled in the class at the start. The first week, for the introduction assignment, 13 of them participated. It’s an online class, so the only way I can get their attention is to rattle the grade book, post even more announcements, and send out emails. But, duh, like that doesn’t work when they aren’t looking at any of those things. By the second week, there were 11 students who turned in the assignment. My brain was all WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON? I teach this class all the time, exactly the same way, and pretty much most of the students get through in fine form. But this crop? These guys paid hundreds of dollars for this class, some of them taking out loans, of course, and yet they keep greeting every activity, every attempt to get their attention, with a shrug. The sheer WTF of this class has me confuddled. But then I got all sleuthy — you know how I still lose sleep over where in the fricking world Carmen Sandiego is — and realized more than half the students in that section are using Minnesota’s post-secondary enrollment option (PSEO) to earn college credits, which means the state pays for their tuition and books. Usually, PSEO students are all fired up and rad and stuff, but this particular messy section seems to have attracted a crew of ’em who can’t be bothered when it’s not making a dent in their fanny packs.
Yeah, so anyhow, as of today (two days shy of two years since Prince passed, kiss my ring and hold it to heaven), there are 18 students still on the roster — the rest withdrew or were dropped for non-attendance — and of those 18, only ten of them have a grade above a “D.”
I swear these studentios are in the grips of some magical-ass thinking that is telling them completing every third assignment is somehow going to tip a “C” their way. What bugs me the most is that I know, when reality comes over to roost on their chests, these some same students are going to believe their poor grades are my fault, and nothing is more exhausting than being held responsible for other people’s lack of effort. I’ma blame them for my shoddy housekeeping, if they come at me.
Honest to holy, pal, I know you thought Marla was a lot, but if you looked at this class each week, you’d be straight-up free-will handing her your spaetzle maker and telling her “Just take it. You ain’t so bad.”
April 19, 2018
Gawd, this puppy is getting long, and I know you hate having to flip the paper over to keep reading. I can just hear you now, hollering as you sit at that sticky Formica kitchen table: “Yer damn felt tip bled through, Jocey! You think I got time for deciphering this this fuckin’ mishmash?”
All right. All right. Just a couple more updates, and then I’ll leave you to dick around with your egg peeler, if you catch my drift. HARdeeHARHAR!!
So you know how I live in a city where we love snow, or else we should shut up and move? Part of my snow love relates to shoveling. Ahhhh, shoveling. It’s a beautiful therapy, that business of shussshing the blade under the flakes, scootching it along the ground, and then hoisting and tossing. With shoveling, there are clear parameters and clear ways of measuring achievement — kind of like how Marla would announce from her laid-back perch at the sticky Formica when you’d sliced enough potatoes on the mandoline?
The suck for me is that I did some hard shoveling a couple months ago during this one week when we got two feet of snow in the course of a couple of days. And since then, bud, I tell you: my left elbow is fucked up. Get this, though: Byron shoveled with me, and so did Allegra one day, and both of them experienced after-effects, too! Hold me close, young Tony Daaaaanza! (I know that was random, but it’s what I was feeling, so relax). Since the girl is young, her elbow bounced right back, but both Byron and I are still battling the pain of tennis “snow” elbow. Check this out: we can go to yoga and lower ourselves in chaturanga just fine, but if we want to, erm, freshen the air in the bathroom with some spray, pressing the button on the pump is excruciating. IT’S A FOREARM ISSUE, this elbow problem.
It got so bad for me that I was going to order a brace or a strap. I even said “acupuncture” one time. But instead of spending money on something I just wanted to go away, I decided to punt. I remembered I have a bunch of compression socks I was using last year when my left heel was fucked up (note about aging: something will always be fucked up; if you’re lucky, it’s not the whole of you all at once), so I decided compression is compression, so why buy an elbow squeezer when I already have foot squeezers? The upshot is, dear Dickie, that I now spend my days with a sock on my arm, my elbow nestled into the heel section, and whaddya know the thing is actually feeling better by the day. BETTER LIVING THROUGH INVENTIVE PUNTING, SAYS I.
The nice deal about aging — there have to be silver linings when your body is always finding new ways to plague you, right? — is that I have, for a couple years now, been able to get to a mindset of “Howzabout instead of focusing on what I can’t do, I spend a little time enjoying what I CAN do? Howzabout that, O Noggin Fretter?” So my elbow squeals. But: I can still jump. And I do rewy, rewy love to jump.
4/23/2018
Gad, how time whizzes! Here it is, more than a week later (Beyonce has already done her second amazing Beychella performance, with an even taller Nefertiti crown this time), and I’m still pecking away at this thing. Here I wanted to give you a bunch of recs for things I’ve been enjoying and talk up the mental diversions that give me solace in over-busy days. If I go on too much more, though, it will be another week before I send this. Soooo, quickly then: you really should listen to Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo — the story of a family of First Nation siblings that were taken from their mother during “The Scoop” in the 1960s in Canada, when the government went about fracturing indigenous families beyond the work it had already done for centuries. Young Cleo was adopted by an American family and rumored to have been raped and murdered when she was 13. Her siblings, with no idea where Cleo had been adopted to or what had really happened to her, ask a journalist at CBC to help track down the reality of their missing sister. All I’ll say is that I sat in a chair in our living room at 4:00 a.m., listening to the fourth episode, and there in the dark, I kept muttering, “Holy Shit.”
Also, I wanted to tell you to give the reboot of One Day at a Time a looksie. Listen, you crabass, just know you’ll have to relax into the live audience that feels like a cheesy laugh track, but once you give over, you will find yourself having a tv watching experience that makes you feel like you’re ten again, sitting on the shag carpet drinking Tang, watching any of the kabillion sitcoms that populated our youth. This reboot has been updated, and now it focuses on a Cuban-American family, covering issues that no other tv show has, as far as I’ve seen. It’s super charming, and every episode makes me cry in the best way. You know how Marla was a big effing Trumper and so it was a relief to watch her skitter off with your condiment gun because the news alone is hard enough these days without the negativity living in your house with you? Well, One Day at a Time is the best because it provides the feeling of a safe place in a nutty world.
Damn, I’m short on time again — have to get in the car and drive a few hours to a high school to do a site visit. Also, we had Allegra’s grad party this weekend (so many people and pancakes!), I got a Fulbright to teach in Belarus this fall (I. am. not. shitting. you.), and my most beloved friend Virginia has had her hospital bed moved into the living room so that she can rest in the light as she heads towards the light. She said the other day, “The boundaries between here and the beyond are erasing themselves,” and then she sent audio greetings to Allegra for her party in which she imparted a blessing upon the child who is about to head out into the world, reminding our girl that she, Virginia, was the first to see the top of Allegra’s head emerge from me when she was born. Then the 81-year-old in her last days told our 18-year-old who still has so many days in front of her, “I am holding you up to the face of God,” and every time I listen to her voice saying those words, I sob like you did when Marla bolted with your egg slicer.
Sorry this thing is kind of a sloppy mess. But, hey, that’s how I’m feeling, so suck it up, buttercup!
‘K bye!!
SWAK,
Jocey