In the couple of weeks since I decided to slow my blog to three days a week from five days a week, I’ve gotten an inordinate amount of complaints. I could take that as a compliment, because it means that people are enjoying the blog. And I AM kind of flattered. For example, my mother said that a day without my blog is “like a day without sunshine.”
Aww.
Then there were the other complaints. I’m not going to name names, but there were the people who told me it’s my JOB to entertain them. And the people who told me that I will never be a serious writer if I don’t blog every day.
To those soul-sucking vultures who think it is my primary duty in life to provide lengthy and amusing posts for you on a daily basis, I would like to invite you, at your earliest possible convenience, to jump off a cliff.
I mean, I'm thrilled that you find me amusing. But am I here to amuse you? (NSFW)
However, for those of you who either politely inquired about the frequency of my posts or else have decided to suffer in silence because you know that true art cannot be rushed, I would like to explain why I cut it down to three days a week.
Stephen King, who is one of my all-time favorite authors (despite my firmly-held belief that all of his books have the same plot: someone or something goes crazy and kills people), described the problem perfectly in his book On Writing. King worked as an English teacher before he got a six-digit contract for Carrie. And he explained that the problem with teaching was that for the first time in his life, writing was hard. He said that while he loved his kids, by Friday afternoons, he felt like he “had jumper cables clamped to [his] brain.”
While there are a lot of really rewarding parts to teaching, it’s also the most mentally draining activity that I have ever experienced. I spend seven hours of my day with thirty pairs of eyes on me.
Now I AM narcissistic enough to enjoy being the center of attention, but being the center of attention for that long is exhausting. I know that I’ve said this before on this blog, but as my mother always says, as a teacher, you’re the subject of someone’s dinner table conversation every night of your life. And the problem is, they’re much more likely to discuss what you screwed up than what you did right. So if you get lipstick on your teeth, spill coffee on your shirt, or have a wedgie that needs picking, THAT is what your kids will be telling their parents over dinner that night.
But for those of you who still think I owe you five blog posts a week, let’s walk through my typical day. I get up at 5:30am every day for school. And still usually arrive just minutes before my first class starts. I teach from 7:25 until 8:12, then I get my two planning periods together. Which SOUNDS good, in theory. Unfortunately, that early in the morning, I’m not as good at focusing as I would like to be (due largely to my chronic insomnia). But I spend as much of that time as I can grading papers, inputing grades, Xeroxing, and planning for the rest of the week.
From 10:01 until 2:10, I’m in class straight through. Lunch is in there, but I ALWAYS have newspaper kids working with me and English kids coming in for help during those periods. There’s no break at all in there, and because I’m in four different classrooms for the last four periods of the day, I don’t even have time for a bathroom break between classes. If I have to go, I have to hold it or find someone to cover my class.
I know what you’re thinking: at 2:10, she gets to go home.
You’re funny. Really. Hilarious.
Most days, I don’t get out of there until after 3, and that’s an EARLY day for me. Often I’m there far later for meetings, group planning sessions, or to work on the newspaper. Then, when I finally DO get to go home, I have grading to do.
After all that, when I finally have time to sit down and start my blog for your amusement, my brain feels like jello that was made with pineapple chunks and therefore won’t gel.
But three nights a week, I still try to come up with something witty and funny to say. Which means I am left with no time to work on any other writing (like my next book, which fans of Beyond the Palace are already asking for). And if I don’t pay attention to Rosie somewhere in there before I collapse into bed (which almost never happens before midnight), she shows me how sympathetic she is to my busy schedule by leaving me little presents on the dining room rug.
So to sum up, I do love that people are enjoying the blog. And when I’m off for the summer, I’ll probably go back to five posts a week. But if you nag me about it during the school year, I’m going to use one of those nights off from blogging to retaliate in an immature show of annoyance (most likely by wrapping your house. I’ve been around high school kids for WAY too long).
But if you just can’t get enough of my writing and are DYING to read more, pick up my book. And if you’ve already read it, tell everyone you know to read it. Because if I get a real publishing contract and make enough money to write full time, you’ll get more blogs.
And if that STILL doesn’t make you feel better, I’m trying to use the extra nights off to polish up my next book to self-publish. So more writing IS coming your way, you just might have to wait a little while.
Anyone who knew me as a child is probably not remotely surprised that I turned out to be a writer because books have always played a huge role in my life. There are a handful of books, however, that have been more influential than others in making me into the person I am today. So if I am a monster, the following books are my Dr. Frankenstein (which happens to be nowhere near my list). Except for the first one, they're in no particular order.
Any list of books that have helped shaped me has to start with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.
I first read it at ten years old, and have read it over twenty times since then. It was even the theme of my bat mitzvah (which worked pretty well, as we had the party at an antebellum mansion). When I first read the book, I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara.
She was so determined, some unabashedly unstoppable. And to a young girl whose mother once described her as possessing the “evil, going-to-take-over-the-world-someday gene” (yes, she meant me), Scarlett was the female role model who didn’t exist anywhere else.
As I've aged, I’ve gotten deeper shades of meaning out of the book. I get frustrated with anyone who spouts off the BS from James Loewen’s book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, because his argument against Gone With the Wind ignores the fact that a novel can be historically accurate in showing the racism of a time period without being a book that promotes racism. But the main thing that struck me as I got closer to the age that Scarlett is at the end of the book is that by the time I was old enough to understand that I did NOT want to be like her, it was too late for me in many ways.
Perhaps the most significant effect that Gone With the Wind has had on my life however, has nothing to do with Scarlett O’Hara. Because from the moment I started reading my mother’s old tattered copy from the 1960s (which didn’t even survive that first reading, let alone the subsequent readings), I knew that I had to be a writer. And one of the best compliments I have ever received came from the website IWriteLike.com, which compares samples of your writing to that of famous authors and tells you who your style is most similar to. And when I put the entire text of Beyond the Palace into the program, I was told my writing style was most like Margaret Mitchell’s.
My novel is less than a third of the length of hers, but despite its heft, Gone With the Wind is worth every single page.
The next book on my list is Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
I know, I know, Pride and Prejudice is every Austen lover’s favorite book. But Sense and Sensibility is darker, which I think lends so much more realism to the story. So many of the problems in Pride and Prejudice center around the class divide, which doesn’t really exist in the world I live in. But the problems in Sense and Sensibility can still keep people apart today. The characters, written over two hundred years ago, are multi-dimensional enough to ring true even now. We have all been Marianne Dashwood at times and followed our hearts, only to be emotionally ravaged when we learn that love isn’t always enough to make a relationship work when two people have different priorities.
And we’ve all been her sister, Elinor, in love with someone we can never have and kept forever from that person by the hateful Lucy Steeles of the world.
Before there was Regina George of Mean Girls, there was Lucy Steele, befriending Elinor with the sole intention of crushing her rival. If you’ve never read this gem, pick up a copy now. You’ll have to be able to get past the Victorian language, but if you do, you’ll find a surprisingly raw love story that resonates incredibly strongly despite being written by a long-dead British spinster.
Stephen King’s The Stand makes the cut next.
I know, that’s a huge jump from Jane Austen. But Stephen King creates a whole world in this novel (granted, he kills 99 percent of that world off within the first hundred pages, but that's the basic plot of all Stephen King books--someone or something goes crazy and kills people), and the ability to do that, to breathe actual life into a set of characters is something that mortals are seldom able to accomplish. I also know that a lot of people label Stephen King as a hack because of the practically superhuman speed at which her churns out novels. But every time I pick this book up, I’m still amazed by the ease with which he can juggle so many people’s lives and make ALL of them three dimensional.
My books are far from the horror genre so far (although I probably WILL venture into Stephen King’s territory at some point in my career. I’m just waiting for the right story to hit me), but one element of his work has inspired everything that I’ve written, and that is that all of his characters who wrong others have a chance for redemption in the end. They all make a choice to do good or do evil, and the lesson I have taken from that for my writing is that there’s no such thing as a purely good or purely evil character. Everyone is the star of his or her own plotline, and they are all able to make redemptive choices. They don’t all choose to redeem themselves, in fact most of them don't. But they have a reason for their behavior and the free will to choose their own path, and I have tried to give that same ability to my villains as well.
While there are a dozen books that people call “The Great American Novel,” I think that title belongs unarguably to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
This is the book I turn to when I lose faith in humanity. When I feel that everyone is ONLY ever looking out for him or herself, I read this book to humanize myself again. With the POSSIBLE exception of Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a better character in all of literature than Atticus Finch.
He manages to be caring and strong at the same time, but most of all, he’s REAL. Most characters who care more for others than themselves are no more than weak foils to the protagonists. Amelia in William Makepeace Thackery’s Vanity Fair or Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice are shining examples of these morally righteous characters who are too weak to be that likeable. But Atticus, even as he cries over the injustice of Tom Robinson’s death, reminds me that there IS true, genuine goodness and strength in the world.
The end of the novel, no matter how many times I read it, leaves me surprised, touched, and less jaded with the world. If you haven’t read this one since you were in school, read it again. The first eight pages will bore you if you don’t remember enough of the story for it to make sense, but when you get past those eight pages, you’ll thank me. I promise.
And last, but by no means least, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
I’m ashamed to admit that when I read this in high school, I hated it. And to be honest, I still think that all of the female characters in it are horrible. But Fitzgerald was so far ahead of his time in so many ways. Nick’s one-third life crisis resonates so strongly with what my generation currently faces that I wonder how earlier generations could have identified with it as strongly as we do. I feel like the baby boom generation WANTED to get married and start having kids in their twenties, like Daisy and Tom do. But Nick flees to the east to escape from that world, and finally, after everything that he sees that summer finds that at 30 years old, he is “five years too old to lie to [himself] and call it honor.” And in the gap that I’m now seeing between myself now and the person I was merely a few years ago, I’ve come to realize just how talented Fitzgerald was at capturing the human condition as it is now, some eighty-five years after he wrote his greatest novel.
One of my college professors used to tell us that everyone should read The Great Gatsby every five years because as your situation in life changes, so will your take on the book. Bruce Springsteen described "Born to Run" as a song that has kept him company on his journey through life, and that it has grown with him as he has aged, and I think The Great Gatsby has that same quality to it. Which, coming from me, is some of the highest praise possible to give.
I’ll get into the books that shaped me the most as a writer another day, but if you like what you’ve seen on my blog or in my first novel, take another look at these five books while you’re waiting for my next book. Which is coming. Soon. I promise. All I need is a title. I was thinking along the lines of “No TV and no beer make Homer… something something.”
You’d never know it to look at me, but I have a ridiculously dirty mouth.
Did you hear that?
It was the sound of everyone who knows me collectively saying, “Duh!”
I know, I know, it's bad. In fact, I realized I might have a problem when I started watching Dexter and instead of being shocked by how filthy Deb's mouth is, I thought, "Hey! She talks like me!"
While I take full responsibility for the profanity that I use on a daily basis now, I started extremely young and THAT was my father’s fault. When I was two, I was playing a game and, when I lost, I let out a massive string of profane language.
My mother immediately turned on my father because she knew EXACTLY where I had learned the particular phrase that I used: it was his favorite expression to shout in traffic. And as an impressionable two year old, I thought that was what you were SUPPOSED to say when you were upset.
For a while, at my mother’s urging I’m sure, my dad switched to Yiddish curses when he was upset in traffic so that my brother and I wouldn’t know what he was saying. But that didn’t work either, because when he wouldn’t tell us what words meant, we would turn to his mother, Grandma Selma. Dad always described Grandma Selma as speaking three languages (English, Yiddish, and Romanian), but none of them well. We would ask her what the word meant and she would immediately yell at us for saying whatever the particular word was, then ask where we had heard it. Then she would tell us what it meant.
To this day, ninety-five percent of the Yiddish that I know is the profanity. So if you need to know how to tell an old Jew to go defecate in the ocean or to stick their head someplace where it doesn't belong, I’m your girl.
My parents never got on the same page about whether profanity was okay in the house. And I don’t think they ever discussed it with each other either. When my brother and I were kids, our dad told us that he didn’t care what kind of language we used, as long as we understood that some people wouldn’t approve of what we said. His example? Don't tell the principal to go do something that isn't anatomically possible to himself. (Although when dad gives an example, he skips the euphemisms.)
I love you, dad. Really. You’re awesome.
My mom, on the other hand, pretends to be shocked when I say anything vulgar, especially in public, but to a lesser degree when it’s just the two of us. For example when I referred to someone I don’t like as a feminine hygiene product in front of her one day, she lectured me for about twenty minutes on using appropriate language. Yet two days later, she called the same person the very same feminine hygiene product. I called her out on this hypocrisy and she said that the difference was that I said it in public and she said it over the phone to me. I'm firmly of the belief that there is no one on the planet who hasn't heard any of the words that I use, but that excuse doesn't get me anywhere with my mother.
As I’ve gotten older though, my dad has encouraged my cursing more and more, which I find hilarious. I was on the phone with him while driving on 495 one day, when someone cut me off. I let out a resulting string of profanity that would have changed an R-rating to NC-17, telling the driver in great detail what he could go to do himself AND his mother. My mom would have yelled at me. My dad, however, cheered me on. He proudly yelled, “That’s my girl! Give him the finger! Give him the finger!”
Words, in and of themselves, aren’t dirty. I mean, honestly, no one is going to argue that the word “poop” is an inappropriate term for defecation, yet substitute a different four-letter word that means the same thing, and people will go nuts. But I hate to break it to you, a LOT more adults would buy the book Everyone Poops if you changed the word choice. I’m just saying.
At school, I run into problems because, as a teacher, I DEFINITELY cannot curse in class. I would wind up in my principal’s office immediately if I did, and I already get in so much trouble over running the school newspaper that the sofa in his office has a permanent imprint of my butt.
So I HAVE to keep my language under control at school.
In general, I do a really good job of this. I’ve had a few accidental slipups over the years, which tend to make the kids laugh hysterically. But because I just correct them when THEY slip up, (with gems like, “I must have heard you wrong, you said, ‘shoot,’ right?”) instead of turning it into a battle, they usually don’t go running home and say, “Mommy, mommy, guess what Miss Goodman said in class today!” (Thank God I teach high school!)
The biggest problem that I’ve found though has come with my car. With my old car, if I screamed obscenities at someone in traffic, unless they could read lips, what happened in the car stayed in the car. Now that I drive a convertible, when I tell someone to go do something that isn’t anatomically possible to themselves (special thanks to my high school journalism teacher for that particular clean way to express that sentiment), they can hear me.
Which is something I REALLY need to remember when I’m running late on my way to school in the morning and someone causes me to miss a light.
But I suppose I should be grateful that I don't live in ancient times. I clearly would have suffered the fate of the men who said "Jehovah" in Life of Brian.
Because I am a giant kid, I love Halloween. Of course, I love any excuse to put on a costume and fun makeup, which means that I get extra Jewish around Purim every year. But this year, my cousin’s bat mitzvah is the Saturday of Halloween weekend, and I’m too old to go trick or treating on Sunday night, so I don’t get to dress up this year.
Which is tragic.
Especially because I was sick last year and missed Halloween then. And I had a REALLY awesome costume planned for last year. I was going to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, which isn’t that surprising considering that’s always been one of my favorite movies. But I was going to bring Rosie with me. Not as Toto. I was going to put her in her OWN Dorothy costume, then tell people we had a little miscommunication about who was supposed to be Dorothy and who was supposed to be Toto.
And before you say that's awful, look at how cute the dog ruby slippers are!
But no. My newspaper kids had to get me sick right before Halloween. (That’s right, Ben. I’m calling you out. That’s when you got the plague and gave it to me.)
Luckily, teaching high school has one MAJOR perk to it. No, I don’t mean getting the summer off. Or even being done with school at 2:30 every day (which really ISN’T a perk when you consider that I have to BE there at 7am every freaking day… I’d gladly get out a little later if school would start later). I’m talking about Homecoming Week.
No, I never cared about the game or the dance or who won King and Queen, even when I was in high school. I loved it because it was a week of playing dress up. Of course, my least favorite day was spirit day at the end of the week. Mostly because our school colors were orange and black. And as my best friend reminds me every time I tell her I’m planning to kill someone, orange is NOT my color.
Now everyone who’s been a student in one of my classes knows that I’m not exactly Miss School Spirit. I hate wearing big, baggy t-shirts, and I REALLY hate wearing the exact same thing everyone else is wearing. (Which I proved the first time we had to wear our newspaper staff shirts on a distribution day when I was in high school. I had requested a smaller size, which Keegan refused to order, so instead of wearing the shirt with jeans, like every other staff member did, I wore mine with leopard-print leggings and knee-high boots. Keegan started ordering smaller shirts after that.) But when it’s an excuse to dress up in a creative way, I’m happy to show off my spirit.
It’s a little more difficult to do this in a high school setting than it is for Halloween, however, because all outfits have to stay school-appropriate. But it’s still do-able in most cases.
In previous years, I’ve pulled out some fun outfits. My personal favorite was on music genres day, when I decided to rock the disco look, complete with a one-piece denim, bell-bottomed jumpsuit, platform heels, and Farrah Fawcett waves. And my kids are always SHOCKED when I wear sneakers to go with a theme day. (They have no idea that I’m NOT actually 5’10 when I take off my heels.)
This year though, I’m struggling a little with what to do. I’ve already got my outfits picked out for Pajama Day and ‘80s Day (hello Madonna lace-gloves and leggings!), and as always, I’m skipping Wacky Tacky Day (because I don’t do tacky. Ever. Under any circumstances. No way. No how. And I know my mom is reading this and agreeing with me 100 percent), but this year they’ve added “Celebrity Day” and I don’t know what to do with that.
I’ve been asking my kids for suggestions, but so far, most of them aren’t appropriate for a teacher to do—aka J-Woww, Kim Kardashian, and Marilyn Monroe. (Side note, who the hell is Kim Kardashian? Like I don’t watch reality tv other than Jersey Shore, and as far as I can figure out, she’s famous for having a pretty face, a big ass, and no discernable talent. Is that really all it takes to be famous these days?) One student was sweet and offered to go as Bruce Springsteen so I could go as his wife, but no one except me would know who I was if I did that.
Another student said he plans to wear a latex glove with a bloody glove half over it and be OJ Simpson, and he said I could be Nicole Brown Simpson, but I think that one would get me in trouble pretty quickly. (Even though I think it’s hilarious.)
I could reuse a Halloween costume from a few years ago when I went as Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but only girls knew who I was. Guys had NO idea. (And I find it ironic that my “classic” and appropriate-for-school choice would be dressing as an actress who played a high-class prostitute in the role that I was copying her style from. But it was IMPLIED whoring instead of overtly stated whoring, so I guess that’s okay.) And while I like that choice, one of my newspaper kids is also going as Audrey Hepburn, and while she said she doesn’t mind if I do the same thing, I feel bad doing the same thing she’s doing.
So I’m opening this up to the fans of my blog. (Some of whom are in Europe apparently… who are you guys? I’m seriously curious who my Denmark, Germany, and United Kingdom fans are…) Who should I be for Celebrity Day? It has to be at least MOSTLY school appropriate (aka not TOO much cleavage), and something I can do relatively easily (I’m not getting plastic surgery, dying or cutting my hair, or creating a Lady Gaga outfit—and yes, I know I could just drape myself in sandwich meats for that, but I feel like that would smell pretty bad by sixth period, and I’m not sure I’d make it out the door past Rosie in that getup). And no, I’m NOT going as a Republican! So don’t even THINK about any Sarah Palin or Christine O’Donnell suggestions! It’s CELEBRITY Day, not dress like an outspoken idiot day.
PS, if anyone OTHER than Lynnlee gets what the title of this post is referencing, I'm impressed!
A week ago today, a new Maryland law went into effect making it illegal to use a cell phone while driving without a hands-free device.
In theory, this is a great law. In theory. But as Homer Simpson would say, “In theory communism works. In theory.”
In reality, however, this is usually still a good law. Driving with a cell phone SHOULDN’T be legal. Just like how radar detectors probably shouldn’t be legal in any state. But I’m really glad they are in most of them.
Unfortunately, in the last week, I’ve proven that I personally am the exception to the rule, because somehow I’m a MUCH more dangerous driver when I have to worry about my Bluetooth headset.
For a normal person, this doesn’t make any sense. A normal person was probably already using his or her Bluetooth before the law was in place because it’s easier and safer. But I got my first cell phone right when I was learning to drive. So I can literally count on one hand the number of times that I’ve driven a car without having a cell phone with me. (And every single one of those times was a panic-driven mad dash home to get my phone when I’ve realized that I forgot to bring it. I’d honestly rather show up naked somewhere than show up without my phone. It’s like Linus with his blanket. I just can’t be without it.)
With that said, I don’t talk on my phone all that often, either in the car or otherwise. And the few people who I actually do call on a regular basis are on speed-dial, so when I DO use my phone in the car, I do it safely.
I will admit that I’ve been known to text from the car. I know, I know, I’m a monster. But everyone who texts has done this before. If you’re going to come after me with pitchforks and torches, you’d better go after everyone else too. I HAVE, however, limited myself to doing it at lights or in non-moving traffic because my school had an assembly on texting while driving that was so emotionally scarring that it’s probably going to wind up costing me a sum that could bankrupt Bill Gates in therapy bills down the line.
I made it through the first two days of the new hands-free law with no problem. Last Thursday night, in preparation for the law’s first day, I found my Bluetooth headset (which during the blizzards last winter, I decorated with pink rhinestones—I glued rhinestones on almost everything I owned during the blizzards. Rosie should be grateful she has fur, because if she didn’t, I probably would have bedazzled her too), charged it, and put it in my car.
As soon as I got in the car on Friday and Saturday, I put it on and promptly forgot about it because it’s pretty comfortable.
Which meant that I forgot to take it off and LEAVE it in the car for future use.
So by Sunday, when my dad called me as I was running some errands, I had no clue where it was. And in the ten minutes between when he first called me and when I finally located the headset (which was somehow under the floormat on the passenger side of the car. I still no clue how THAT happened), I almost died approximately 17,986 times. Had I just answered my phone (or figured out how to answer it on speakerphone on the Palm Pixi—if anyone can help me out there, please let me know!), thousands of innocent lives could have been saved from the potential danger that I put them in while trying to find my headset.
And unfortunately, I went through the same process several times before figuring out that it’s a SECONDARY offense to be talking without a hands-free device. So as long as I’m not speeding or running a light or drinking a beer while driving, cops can’t pull me over FOR talking on my phone.
Now they tell me.
But I AM trying to follow the rules. I found a clip to hold my headset in place in the center console when I’m not using it so that I’ll always know where it is, and I’m making a concerted effort to leave it in the car when I am done driving.
However, when they stop letting me hold my ipod to change the playlist that I’m listening to, I’m moving to a state with less stringent driving laws.
Which won’t be Virginia; I love my radar detector too much.
Or Delaware or Texas. Because I freaking hate those states.
Which probably leaves one of my favorite states, New Jersey*. Get ready for a new neighbor, Bruce! I think you should invite me over to welcome me to the neighborhood. Because I love you.
*(Yes, I know New Jersey has hands-free cell phone laws too. But it's just a better state anyway.)
But until I move, if you call me and I don’t answer, it doesn’t mean that I’m ignoring you; it’s far more likely that I died in a fiery crash while trying to find my Bluetooth headset to answer your call.
