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.

The Two Best Poems

In The Arc Of Your Mallet
by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī


Don't go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don't see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon,
be that with me. Be the rose
nearest to the thorn that I am.

I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night.

There's nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don't know where I'm going.
You're the road, and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love.

(translated by Coleman Barks)


A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.



Oh, and this poem is so good, too:

Poem
by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up




I should be Lana Turner; but instead, I'm Rumi without Shams Tabrizi. Actually, I think I'm Shams.

Michelle Frizzle, Chancellor of D.C. Magic School Buses

I whined to Neema yesterday that all I ever wanted to do anymore was shop. He said that I should start spending time writing again because it is something fulfilling to me.
Instead I'm blogging. I'm not sure if that's much of a cure. Over winter break, I facebook stalked lots of people and the most fabulous of the bunch blogged. Lots of them blogged about shopping. Once I had a Teach for America blog. I wrote about teacher clothes.

I'm a English/Language Arts teacher in a small town on the U.S.-Mexico border. I am torn between wanting to look like Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus



and this description of Michelle Rhee, from a Time Magazine article:

She emerged from her chauffeured black SUV with two BlackBerrys and a cell phone and began walking--fast--toward the front door of the first school. She wore a black pencil skirt, a delicate cream blouse and strappy high heels. When we got inside, she walked into the first classroom she could find and stood to the side, frowning like a specter. When a teacher stopped lecturing to greet her, she motioned for the teacher to continue. Rhee smiled only when students smiled at her first.

I think I look somewhere in-between. I can't wear cream; I am too messy. I can't have a pet lizard; I am too irresponsible. I can't drive a school bus and I can't afford a chauffeur. I drive my own black SUV. High heels make my feet hurt and I have yet to find the perfect purple flats.


I crave shopping and write about clothes because I'm not sure I like teaching. I AM sure that I love biryani. Since I don't know how to make it, here's a recipe for cookies*:


Oh, great, I can't find my recipe for cookies. They're really good cookies, perfect with a cup of Earl Grey tea.



* I am not/refuse to be a "foodie."