Lately I have been considering and discussing writing a blog post on God billboards, but I can't seem to get around to actually doing it.

As I write this, I'm switching back and forth between my blog tab, a tab with a New York Times piece on concentration, a tab with a New York Times article on genius, and facebook. The first article explains that I can't actually be reading/writing all this at once and am losing productivity in the process; the second tells me that if I were to just focus on writing, I might become a great writer; and facebook is so much fun that I'll never get around to developing "a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine" and stick to it and become a genius.

What gets me is this:
1) In order to reach one's full potential, one must be able to concentrate.
2) In order to concentrate, one must be able to tune out other stimuli.
3) I can't tune out facebook. How are my students supposed to tune out hunger, abuse, violence, drug- and alcohol-addicted parents, poverty, and just being teenagers?

I always, always tell my kids that they CAN develop their brains into anything. They can be smart enough to do anything, to become anything. They are not inherently anything--anyone can shape themselves into anything.
I do believe that whole-heartedly. I COULD tune out facebook, and they could tune out reality.

I also know, that my genius kids, all else tuned out, will have to work 7 million times harder to be on par with their wealthier counterparts. They've already lost years of practice and learning that others have on them. And it kills me how much potential and intellect is lost--cures for cancer and hilarious comedy shows and historical perspective--because so few of them believe that the 7 million times harder work will actually pay off. Because so few of them even know what that--genius, discovery, innovation--looks like. And, of course, my students are NOT stupid, even the most difficult of them, they've just focused on all the more immediately stimulating things.

I don't know really what more to say. It's just heartbreaking. As a teacher, it's basically my point to refocus them. But to this effect, and to their overwhelmed brains and bodies, I'm kind of beside the point. What I teach is often no where near the point. And for many of my little kiddies, there is no point.

It is really one of the most wonderful feelings to recognize oneself in another's writing. I don't mean finding which characters were inspired by you in friends' stories; but rather, realizing that your emotions can, and have, been put into words. Sometimes I don't even know that I'm feeling something until I see that it is capable of being felt.

I'm getting married soonish. I never took marriage or love or gross stuff like that seriously before. It seemed irrational and oppressive. But now,

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,

absentminded. Someone sober

will worry about things going badly.

Let the lover be.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks


I wish I had a dreamy photograph that I could insert here.

You know,

it amazes me that I can

1) look into a place
2) take pictures of that place
3) yell hello and have a yelled conversation with the people in that place
4) hear the same birds and river noises as those people
5) fish the same water as those people
6) probably be hit by a well-launched water balloon from those people

but I can't
1) walk a couple hundred feet to shake hands and picnic with those people without violating international laws.


Note to Self: Look into legality of cross-border water fight.

Last Saturday

I spent the late afternoon at Anzaldua Park and Dam, on the Rio Grande, taking photos and reading. People from both sides went into the river to fish. At most, the water was chest-deep; I guess because of the dam. The water gushing through it filled the air with a gentle roaring. The sound and the sun made me sleepy. The book kept me awake.
I believe the park will end up on the Mexico side of the border wall, even though it's in the United States. One of these days, I'll want to lie down again on the sticker-filled grass, and I'll need a passport.
I could walk across the river. What would they do, deport me?








Why are the pictures so small and blurry?

Aqui.

South Texas is the only place I've lived that gives me a sense of the roundness of the Earth. The sky is not an endless expanse; if I look far enough past the dryness, I can detect a curvature in the land. Above it, the crystalline blue ceases to be a canopy, but rather becomes a blinding white wall I might, at any moment, roll in to.

And there's little here in this misnomer of a Valley to keep me from doing so. It lacks the opposites-attract pull of my family. It lacks the heaviness of buildings erected on the winning side of history. It lacks the cradle of live oaks clearly demarcating the roads and paths. Here, I depend on my own sense of balance and stability to keep from tumbling into the place where blueness fades into nothing.

I gave my copy of this book away.

This novel, by Jane Bowles, is one of the most immediately weird books I've ever read. It's striking: the characters weren't memorable because they remind me of someone I know; rather, they're memorable because I'll never meet anyone like them. Within the first few pages, one of the 'serious ladies,' as of yet just a girl, undresses one of her friends, puts her in a burlap sack, covers her in mud, and insists that she go into a stream to "purify herself." Miss Goering, as the central lady is called, plays versions of this game--called "I forgive you of all your sins"--throughout the novel, with "an active inner voice that curtailed her observation of whatever went around outside her."
In the book's final pages, having finished another such a game with a series of spurned, obsessed, and comical lovers, she asks herself, in a lost moment of insight, "is it possible that a part of me hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin?" It's a terrifying moment--in it, I asked myself the same. Maybe I have no idea. I can't even answer this question. If, perhaps, something is hidden from myself, I wouldn't even know. Not even right now, as I consider it.
The novel, described by Millicent Dillon, Bowles' biographer, is "a series of repetitions, variations on a theme." It offers me yet another character with a fate to fear: the other "serious lady", Mrs Copperfield. She's not Miss Goering's diametrically opposed foil, but rather an alter-ego, a reverberation. Where the pattern of Miss Goering's behavior follows the scene of a young girl forcing another into the water; Mrs Copperfield will not approach the ocean until taken by the hand. She is "interested only in a bearable life" and guards her happiness "life a wolf." Like Miss Goering, Mrs Copperfield is oblivious to her repetitive behavior. She ignores the path of destruction she leaves behind as easily as Miss Goering fails to notice herself burning the path before her.
And I wonder--would I even know if the world around me were in shambles? Maybe someone would tell me. The other characters in Two Serious Ladies, however, only serve to highlight the tendencies of the two women. They are simply too absurd to mean much in their own right. Peggy Gladys, for example, is a rich, eloquent seventeen year old half-Irish, half-Javanese Panamanian girl who chases after Mrs Copperfield. Her 'point' is not so much that Mrs Copperfield is irresistible, or that there was a plethora of women with unexpected backgrounds around Panama at the time; instead, she illustrates Mrs Copperfield's tastes. Peggy is too young, too dependent for her. Mrs Copperfield avoids the beautiful young girl because she needs someone to lead her into the water. There's something pathetic about the drunk child waiting, sitting on a barstool as Mrs Copperfield runs off to find Pacifica. At the same time, the sheer ridiculousness of an rich, well-spoken, beautiful, Irish-Javanese-Panamanian girl chasing after a middle-aged woman, an “old hen”, who is chasing after an old hen Spanish whore, is just silly. Similarly, Miss Goering's two housemates Arnold and Miss Gamelon, move in with her after only just meeting her. The characters are ludacris--Arnold unexpectedly nicknames Miss Gamelon "Bubbles" in the middle of the text--


Blah, I've been working on this for days and can't figure out where to go with this. I should probably write it without such an awful academic tone.
Either way, read the book. Give me your copy when you finish.

Being Healthy

I'm taking a multi-vitamin now; it's called "Kid Vits." I chew 2 a day and I'm not sure that I feel any healthier.

I've also been making an effort to get Vitamin D. So, yesterday I walked forever at the World Birding Center that's a few miles from my house. "Birding" sounds to me like something that wouldn't be good for the birds, but really it's just looking for/at birds. Apparently, it's very popular. Of course, I didn't go for the birds, nor did I really see many. It was warm and sunny and January is the place to be.


I have pictures but lack the internet connection to load them.