25-50-75: Day 5

It's June 1st and the weather is strange.  More like fall than impending summer.  I'm happy for cool air as it makes working in air-condition-less rooms much easier, but I haven't been to the pool since Monday, and my body aches for sun and water.

Two days of training kept me from the gym, but I got a workout today, though not on an elliptical machine.

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I spent the morning boxing and moving books in our high school book room.  I've taken on this behemoth task the last couple of summers, and while it is admittedly a lot of work, I love it.  It strains my muscles, makes me curse publishers for putting out crap textbooks that become obsolete within a month of publication, and it requires me to rise early if I want to get in any pool time in the afternoon, but I love it.  Nothing is more rewarding that hauling 40 pound boxes of books around and reorganizing space to be more efficient, right?

I spent a number of years working in bookstores or working in the book sections of bigger stores, so being in three small rooms, attached by doorways, filled with floor to ceiling bookshelves, is a bit like coming home.  Today I moved 18 boxes to a classroom on the first floor, packed up 9 boxes for our district office, moved out 2 empty bookshelves, and came up with a reorganization plan that is pretty genius.  If I do it right there will be an empty room that can become my office and that would be just fan-damn-tastic.

The healthy eating thing has been tragically out of practice.  Why can't I resist the lure of chicken nuggets?  Answer: I'm too lazy to be prepared at home for needing to eat in a hurry.  So the solution is to spend some quality time at the grocery store and in my kitchen this weekend prepping healthy food I can eat on the fly.  No more excuses.

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It took me a little time to get through the most recent book, not because it was long or involved, but the short stories all had to do with cancer or divorce or relationships in various stages of decline, and those subjects are difficult for me to process.  My mom's rounds of cancer have, over the years, messed me up in ways I am still dealing with.  I just never let myself fully process how I felt when she was sick until last summer--when a major part of my life fell apart for a bit--and I was forced to sit with all my feelings and just. fucking. deal with them.  It was ugly and hard and not something I would wish on my worst enemy, but I am better for having gone through it.

That being said, if you want some cathartic sadness in your life, go pick up a copy of Mary Clyde's Survival Rates.  There is redemption in it, sort of, but you have to be willing to stretch pretty far to find it.  Which is, I suppose, why she won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction when the book came out.  Like O'Connor, nothing is easy for Clyde's characters and, by association, nothing is easier for their readers either.

Next up is Matt Bondurant's The Wettest County in the World.  It's the book the new movie Lawless is based on (which I saw a preview for whilst attending Snow White & the Huntsman today--I LOVED it).  I started this book last summer but never finished it, my head just wasn't in memoir space, but it is now, so it's on deck.

Sidebar: if you haven't seen the History channel's Hatfields & McCoys mininseries, run don't walk.  I have one more part to watch and I am absolutely hooked.  If history had been this interesting in high school, I would have been an infinitely better student.

25-50-75: Day 3

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No gym for me this morning as I woke up and my entire body was in revolt.  I, apparently, have abs, and they are very very angry with me.  Add that to the riot in my calves and total rebellion in my hamstrings and, well, no gym.  Plus I attended an all day training at our district office to learn how to create iBooks for our classroom, so my time was somewhat limited.  [for anyone thinking the training was lame, you're wrong: it was totally cool.  I'm going again tomorrow to build a book for my American Lit classes, and I am sort of beyond dorkily excited about it.]

Healthy breakfast, lunch out at La Familia where I didn't engage in rice and beans and took advantage of their hot salsa's ability to curb my appetite.  By the time I got home, I was super hungry, but I managed to forage healthily in my own fridge, so it's been a win win in the eating well column.  The hardest thing for me is missing the sun.  I love the pool, and I won't be back there til Friday.  Oh well.  Gym again tomorrow, no soreness as an excuse.

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Finished Mantel's An Experiment in Love.  Eh.  The pace didn't pick up, though the darkness beneath the surface panned out.  A hidden pregnancy, the narrator wasting away as she denied herself food in an effort to save her limited funds while at boarding school, a couple of abortions.  You know, typical English school girl fodder.  It was alright, but unless you are a fan of watching flies narrowly escape getting stuck to slow drying paint, I wouldn't recommend it.  It's not so much that it was bad as that there was very little at stake ever, and that just drives me crazy in a novel.

Next, I'm going to hit a collection of short stories by Mary Clyde called Survival Rates.  I was completely intrigued by the cover (below) and the author's personal history.  She went to Brigham Young, is a Mormon (Mormons FASCINATE me, I think it's the whole tablets in the desert, magic underwear thing), and she has five kids with her husband, but the descriptions of the stories sounded dark enough that I bet there's a bit more to old Mary than meets the eye.  I'll keep you posted.

25-50-75: Day 2

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Oh how I've missed the gym.  I can't always get the juice up to go, but when I do, I ALWAYS feel better.  Someone should remind me of this when I complain about feeling, well, anything negative.  Being there, my heart rate rising, my body pouring sweat as I push forward, makes me feel in control of this lump of a body I've been given.  [that is not a slam on myself: we're all given lumps, it's up to us to shape them as we choose] Of course, some of us get Charlize Theron lumps and some get Roseanne Barr lumps, but we can all make them into whatever we choose.  Thus, the gym.

To be truly motivated, I need a good playlist.  Today, I had an average heart rate of 124, I went 65 minutes on a Total Body Elliptical machine with a distance of 5.07 miles and 548 calories burned.  This basically means I burned off my breakfast.  Word.  How did I do it?  With this playlist:

The Believer--Common feat. John Legend (Warm Up)
God is a DJ--Pink
Umbrella (workout mix)--Power Music Workout
Independent Women, Pt. 1--Destiny's Child
Lapdance--N.E.R.D.
Womanizer--Britney Spears
Shake Ya Ass--Mystikal
Wind It Up--Gwen Stefani
Right Round--Flo Rida
Fergalicious--Fergie
Move Ya Body--Nina Sky
N**** What, N**** Who--Jay-Z
When I Grow Up--The Pussycat Dolls
Grown Woman--Mary J. Blige feat. Ludacris
Carry Out--Timbaland feat. Justin Timberlake
Everywhere I go--Lissie (Cool Down)
So Are You to Me--Eastmountainsouth (Cool Down)

Are some of these songs ruthlessly offensive?  Yes.  Does the feminist in me cringe at lines like "B**** ride a d*** like she's making a baby"?  Yes.  But I'm not really listening to the lyrics.  I'm pushing myself to the beat, and try as I might, I can't get myself motivated to workout while listening to Nickelback or Creed.  I need something dirty and pulsing and a little bit wrong, but I balance it with my lady-power anthems to feel a little less like a traitor to my gender.

Lunch out with the girls and then healthy dinner on deck--Healthy Choice, actually.  I'm going to add a salad and extra vegetables to it to make it more filling, but I'm not in the mood to cook today.  So thank you frozen food industry for supplying alternatives to bowls of Golden Grahams (my typical go to when I am too lazy to cook).

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Finished Tomato Red last night as predicted.  I don't want to give anything away for those of you who might want to read it.  Woodrell has a pattern, at least in the three I've read by him so far.  Set up a tragic situation with people who could not possibly be any more flawed, reveal something almost redeeming about them only to have that trait morph into something sinister/evil/just plain MESSED up, insert major tragedy (sometimes more than one), and then watch all the shit hit the spinning-so-slowly-it-barely-disturbs-a-fly-in-the-outhouse fan.  And all of this takes place in the deepest dankest dens of the Ozarks.  It's not pleasant, and it's not always easy to read, but I'll be damned if it isn't well written.

I started a novel last night that I picked up on the dollar clearance shelf at Half Price Books.  I cannot tell you how many gems I've discovered there solely based on an intriguing title or back cover blurb.  I'm not sure yet if this one falls into the gem category, but I'm going to stick with it.  The book, An Experiment in Love, by Hillary Mantel (Brit, raised Catholic, attended a convent, lost her faith and at 18 began studying law at the London School of Economics), focuses on the relationship between three young girls in school in England in 1970.  It's been alternately clever, descriptive, and slow thus far, btu there's something dark beneath the surface that's keeping me interested.  I will most likely finish it tonight, so look for more on it tomorrow.

25-50-75: Day 1

Though our last contract day at school was Friday, so technically this past weekend was the beginning of my summer break, it didn't really feel like break until today.  Why?  Because today, I went to the public pool for the first of many leisurely and sun-drenched afternoons to come.

I should start by saying I woke at seven, read for a bit, had breakfast, played with my dog, and then took myself to Half Price Books in Olathe where I purchased some of the materials I will need for that elusive number up there in the title of this post.  But, again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I was a kid, we went to Kanopolis Lake a lot.  Enough that my brother and I looked like little brown loaves of bread with butter hair--we were both blondey blonde then.  As we aged, we darkened up. Well, our hair did.  While we both still get a little color in summer, it's nothing compared to the lake days.  And we went to the public pool in Salina, too.  I don't remember who we went with, it must have sometimes been a babysitter of some kind since our parents both worked, but there are times I know we went as a family because I remember thinking how beautiful my mom looked in what I think of now as her ultra-80s white one piece--oddly reminiscent of that famous one worn by Liz Taylor--and I remember watching my father execute picture perfect dives off the high board.  Not very many dads can do that.  Mine was a champion diver in high school, so he was skilled in that area, but at the time I didn't think about his training, I just thought he was infinitely cool.

In grade school I took private swimming lessons, lessons at the public pool, and lessons at the YWCA.  I lived for the water.  I was advanced enough to take lifeguard classes by the time I was 12, but you weren't allowed to take them til you were 14, and then we moved, so that whole guarding life thing never panned out for me.  

The point of all of this is that I love the water.  I LOVE the water.  Perhaps it's cliche to mention here that I am also a Cancer, a born water sign, but it's true no matter how silly it seems to say so.  When I am near water, all pressures of the world ease.  I float, I feel the sun, I hear people being obnoxiously loud, sure, but more than that, I hear the lapping of the waves, I smell the lake air or the thick huff of chlorine.  And, a couple of times, I've even been lucky enough to suck down giant lung-fulls of ocean air.  No matter what the water source, when I'm near it, I feel at home.  

Which is why today felt like the start of break: I was near the water.  I packed my bag, grabbed my summer pool pass (a steal during last week's per-season special--at only $60 for the whole summer, it means I'll basically be paying about a buck fifty for each trip versus the cash in had price of four dollars), and headed out.  

As I lay there reading Julie & Julia by Julie Powell, I got this idea.  Her project--to cook all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just 365 days--was daunting, irritating and times, but I have to admit it was also a bit inspiring.  I kept thinking about my summer break.  I will be working in my building to inventory and re-organize our department book room every morning in June, and most mornings in July I will be up there working up course packs, curriculum guides, and lesson plans for the classes I'll teach all year including a new on I'm really excited about, but I will have afternoons and evenings free.  No papers to grade, no school meetings, just me and time.  And me and time have never been good on our own.  We need a buffer.  A plan.  A helpful friendly routine to make one of us pass productively without the other one passing out.

So, I have devised the following plan.  From today, May 28th, through August 10th, I plan to lose 25 pounds and read 50 books in what works out to be 75 days.  Technically classes don't start back up till the 16th, but the 10th is the last free Friday of the summer, and I know I'll spend part of that last weekend up in my room getting ready, so the 8/10 is a good stopping day. 

What do the 25 pounds and the 50 books have to do with the pool?  I'm glad you asked.  I have been planning to start going to the gym again this summer for awhile now.  I like myself, but I could feel better.  Less winded walking up stairs, more energy on long days, etc. and being at the public pool is one helluva motivator.  Every shade and shape of humanity graces that joint, from Skinny Mindy and her nearly concave stomach and abs to Too Tall Tessie with a backside twice the diameter of mine.  I made myself a promise to cut out my occasional fast food habit, to cook more, and to go to the gym at least once for every time I go to the pool.  Since I can't hit the water tomorrow, I've got a date with the elliptical at 7 a.m.  

As for the books, I read voraciously given the time, and there's nothing but time at the pool.  I want to prove to myself I can do, and I want to get at some of the stuff I bought last summer that never made it to my bedside table.

So, here we go world.  Day 1:

25 Pounds

Well, it's day one.  Healthy breakfast.  Last fast food for the next 75 days at lunch--you didn't expect me to not eat fries one last time did you?--dinner is in the works: angel hair with lemon, grape tomatoes, fresh basil, green onions, and goat cheese.  Lots of water all day, evening plan to make a new kick ass gym mix for the iPod.  Don't expect me to tell you how much I weigh today, I'll just give you the total loss at the end.  I may be interested in accountability, but all the hutzpah in the world wouldn't make me post my weight on the interwebs.  I am a lady after all.

50 Books

Started Julie & Julia last night before bed and finished it at the pool today.  It was a good read in that I wanted to see how she came out, but I found the narrator--and book's author as it is a memoir--to be insufferable at times.  If it's so hard to do x, y, or z, then please stop doing it and shut the hell up.  In the end though I did see her point: sometimes throwing yourself into something everyone else says is crazy is the only way you can keep yourself from going that way.

At the pool I started Daniel Woodrell's Tomato Red which I'm sure I'll finish before bed.  It's good, less moving than Winter's Bone, but the voice is the same.  You can feel him working out the kinks in his Ozarkian landscapes that ready him for the bigger book.  He's the featured author for this fall's Read Across Lawrence, so I'm boning up on his work.  (Get it?)  

If you made it this far, stay tuned and wish me luck.  I plan to ride this sucker til the wheels fall off.

Mother's Day

Today isn't the only day I celebrate my mom, it's just the nationally set aside day to do so, so I'd better make this good.

My mom didn't have the career dreams that some young women have.  As a kid, she knew she wanted to be a mom--a huge job in an of it self and one she effortless done with grace and endless humor since 1976--but it isn't the kind of thing she's ever going to win public awards for or be given promotions, pay raises, or pats on the back.

My mom has worked my whole life, in a factory, at a make-up counter, and for the past twenty plus years, in an office at a pharmacy. The funny thing is, that's her work, it's how she makes a living, but it's not her passion.  Her passion is, and has always been, my brother and I.  Parenting us and loving us as though she were being evaluated by the great mom administration board in the sky, and she has never failed us.  Not once.

Did we have a perfect childhood?  No.  No one does.  Neither did she, neither did you, neither did anyone who has ever lived or will ever live.  Perfection doesn't exist.  But we always knew we were loved, we always knew she would hug us and tell us everything was going to be okay, when we were upset she would make us talk about it, she advocating literacy and rewarded us for helping her with chores by taking us to the library--the library!  It's still a place I revere because it was never punishment, it was reward.  And the being there wasn't the only reward, being there WITH HER was a huge part of it.

I get my love of reading from my mom, my desire to know more about things, my innate curiosity about the world, my appreciation of art and my passion for poetry.  She is the reason I can recognize beauty in the world--she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

My mom's heart is bigger than other people's.  She cares more, feels more, loves more than others, and i get that from her, too.  It means being a little more sensitive than the rest of the population, but I don't mind at all, I want to love and care and feel and give at least as much as she does.

And in the past two years, when I have struggled so much personally, she hasn't always said what I wanted to hear, but she has always been willing to talk and she has loved me through every single moment of it.  I know she loves me without hesitation or reservation, and that's a gift few of us ever get.    We've been talking a lot lately about things I've learned in therapy, about her childhood and how it affected her and in turn how it affected my brother and I--she is never afraid to talk about this stuff.  She wants to know me as much as I want to know her, she is fearless in her desire to be the best person she can be and that is, probably, the trait I admire most in her.

She knows we can all always be better, but that we are--right now--as perfect as we can be because we are trying, and that is the best any of us can do.

So Happy Birthday, Linda Kathleen Humbarger Draper.  I love you more every day.  This one's for you:

Grandma Olive

My grandmother Olive Caroline Habbart Draper passed away several years ago.  Today was her birthday.  I googled her name to see what I could see and came across this picture--it's from her high school graduation in 1930 in Beverly, KS.  She's the 3rd from the left in the front row--how great is her Mona Lisa smile?

Advice?

As a part of my job--that I love--I am on a committee that helps consider and draft curriculum changes for our district.  Teachers in my discipline from both area high schools serve on this committee under a coordinator who-despite being well intentioned and a genuinely nice person--is a bit out of her element having never been a high school English teacher.  This means the committee members function with an overseer of sorts, but no real person of authority guiding our meetings.  To her credit, our coordinator has acknowledged she knows less than we do and is willing to learn.  I applaud her for that effort.

The other people on the committee are all seasoned teachers with years in the discipline and a vested interest in the curriculum.  The members from my school, including myself, are rabid readers and constantly revise what we do in our own classrooms, excited by the possibility and thrill of change in a profession that can--due to bureaucracy--often feel sadly flat and lackluster.  Our colleagues from the other school, though I have never taught with them, represent themselves as more comfortable with the status quo than with any concept of change.  I understand this stance, it is easy and requires far less effort and has always worked before.  I do not begrudge them their position though I disagree with it.  We all bring something different to the table, and that is the point of a group of people making decision vs. on person: all perspectives must be represented.

The issue of late, however, has been in the way my enthusiasm and passion for my job has been perceived.  I fear my other school colleagues see me as some sort of power hungry strategist intent on pushing my own agenda to the detriment of their positions and/or feelings.  Nothing could be further from the truth, and yet on four separate occasions someone from that side has chastised, corrected when no correction as needed, or verbally attacked me for what I can only describe as the way I communicate.  I become impassioned.  I may speak quickly and loudly, but in a room full of educated adults participating in the conversation with me, I feel this kind of reverence for what we do is warranted and certainly not something that should be condemned.  But, the negativity pours out.

I do not want to change the way I work or present myself, but I do not wish to be attacked either.  I believe wholeheartedly that none of these people would have made similar statements to my male counterparts from my own school which saddens me to no end, that even in a professional setting men are allowed to voice their opinions passionately and women aren't.  My basis for this assumption is that I have seen my male counterparts worked up, near incensed, and no hostility has been directed their way.  I, on the other hand, can't seem to attend a meeting without being attacked.

If you have advice about how to handle this situation, I would appreciate.  I truly respect my colleagues and believe their opinions matter, I do not wish to upset or undermine them in any way, but I simply cannot tolerate their ill treatment any longer nor do I wish to compromise my integrity by being someone I am not.  So,  I guess what I'm saying is...help.