“Mess of Me”

Switchfoot’s new album was supposed to have been released in August/September. Because they’re producing it on their own, and are dedicated to releasing their best album yet, it’s been pushed back several times, and the new release date is November 10. I’m saddened by this because it’s been three years since we’ve gotten a whole album’s worth of new Switchfoot; however, I can wait a little longer if they promise it’s going to be the best yet.

They’ve done some fun things to get fans ready for the album, though. They set up a scavenger hunt of sorts through Twitter, where they hid copies (or had fans hide copies) of their first single “Mess of Me” around the world. They also debuted a video for “Mess of Me” two days ago, featuring footage from their last tour.

I’m sitting at the branch library in Greer, attempting to watch the video on YouTube for the first time. This computer takes decades to buffer, however, so I’m really only getting the song in short clips with long pauses in the middle. However, although this is a crappy first experience with the song, I’ve gotta say that what I’m hearing sounds pretty darn good. I cannot wait until the album comes out, and they announce new tour dates, and I can be obsessed with new Switchfoot music once again.

And now, for your listening and viewing pleasure…”Mess of Me”:

Three Weeks In…

…and I’ve learned a good bit about teaching. Some days, I leave class invigorated, sure that I’m changing the world, teaching my students things they’ve never heard before, encouraging them to expand their minds. Other days, I walk out of class dejected, pondering the vacant looks on their faces, with eyes glazed over, as they struggle to stay awake.

Most days, however, I leave class grateful for this opportunity, encouraged by knowing that it’s a process, and my students and I have all semester together to explore the world of writing.

I have learned a few important things, though:

1. As much as I love grammar, even I can’t make subject/verb agreement exciting at 8:00 in the morning.

2. I cannot teach writing the exact same way to two distinctly different sets of students. I’ve done some activities in one class that I know the other class would not find interesting. I’ve asked questions and recieved vastly different responses from my two classes.

3. Bibles verses and Beatles lyrics are fantastic sources for teaching students parts of a sentence.

4. A penguin is not just an aquatic bird.

5. Just because a student has a British accent does not mean he’s actually British.

Teaching is great. Really. It’s challenging in ways I didn’t expect. It’s exhausting. It comes with a great deal of responsibility. And I’m more sure than ever that it’s what I want to do the rest of my life.

Ain’t I a Woman?

Last Saturday, I was at a firefighter competition in North Charleston, and I overheard an interesting conversation. A firefighter had just competed in a hand pump competition with a group of other firefighters. The goal was to pump as much water from a fire hose using only brute strength. It’s hard, vigorous labor that leaves the firefighters covered in sweat after mere seconds.

After his team competed, this man was talking to his wife. He mentioned that they’d pumped water so many feet, and were only a few feet off the lead. He remarked that they’d accomplished this with two women on the team (a team has 9-10 people).

His wife reprimanded him sharply, accusing him of being sexist with just one icy-toned “Don’t even.” He tried to explain: “No, you didn’t see. The pump was lifting her off the ground.” He remained calm and levelheaded, while his wife bitterly argued, “She was jumping. She was jumping.”

The husband aptly changed the subject, and I turned my attention elsewhere, lest I make some comment or gesture that would inadvertenly reveal my sudden anger. This woman’s attitude, like so many other women’s, is the reason feminism is perceived as a dirty word by many. Women fight losing, empty, irrelevent battles. This woman, standing in the shade in her designer sunglasses, next to her infant in a stroller, had no right to fight this battle. Had she been one of the two women in that round of the competition, her remarks would have been appropriate, even welcomed. But her husband, involved as he was in the competition, observing the women on his team, was probably right. Women are not physically as strong as men, as a general rule. There are, of course, exceptions, but I have no problem admitting that I am physically weaker than most men I know. This in no way makes me less of a woman.

Women will earn back so much of the respect we have lost if we can admit both our strengths and our weaknesses. Self-awareness is what makes us stronger, not beligerently fighting to be seen as identical to men–when we aren’t. Fighting for equal pay for women who do the same job as men? Fighting for value and self-worth, so that women are no longer seen as property? I can get behind those issues. Fighting to prove that our muscles can be as big as a man’s? Ridiculous.

I admire the women who are trained and passionate enough to participate in such a physically exhausting competition. My strength is not there, and I know that. I’m fine watching from a distance, or letting a man carry a heavy box for me. As long as I am concentrating on doing the very best with areas where I’m talented, I can admit my imperfections and weaknesses. And is that not the way God designed us to be?

Another incident, previous to this one, had me thinking along those same lines even earlier that morning. On the way to Charleston that morning, that irritatingly poppy Katy Perry song “Hot N Cold” came on the radio. (And I won’t even discuss the bad image she’s given women.) While listening, I realized one of the reasons I used to be so against so much music by female artists. The music I was generally exposed to–girl power music on Top 40 stations–is crap. It’s complaining about bad boyfriends or men who left or lamenting boys who’ll never notice the girl. Katy Perry is accusing men of being indecisive and uncommitted? Is that not the very thing men often accuse us of being?

I am emotional and indecisive. I’m sure I send crazy mixed signals when I’m confused and unsure. But I think the reason men are confused by us, or are uncommitted, is because we expect too little of them. Where feminism has gone wrong is in teaching women to think they’re better than men instead of teaching women to be fully who they were intended to be–distinctly different, but not inferior.

We lament that men are lazy, that they don’t pursue us. We expect them to let us down. They’re human; they will, just as we will disappoint them on occasion. As long as we continue to be desperately searching for romance in any and eery man who enters our lives, whil simultaneously acting superior and degrading them, I think we’ll continue to be bitter and discouraged. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy–expect things to go horribly awry, and they will. But perhaps if we stop expecting men to let us down, and we start expecting them to be strong leaders, we won’t be disappointed as often.

We shed what was left of our summer skin.

Back in May, I posted a to-do list for my summer. I expected my summer to unofficially end on August 31, the day classes started back at Converse. Instead, on August 18, I found out I’d be teaching developmental writing at NGU, and every bit of  free time I’ve had since then has been spent preparing for class or grading papers.

Nonetheless, September is here. School is back in session at both NGU and Converse, and it even feels like fall outside (at least in the mornings), although summer doesn’t officially end for three more weeks. It thus seems appropriate to wrap up my summer to-do list.

My goals:

1. Survive summer school. Done! History of the English Language was an incredible learning experience for me. I had to be more disciplined and focused than usual because I couldn’t rely on catching up in the classroom. I also learned a lot of material about the history of England (and the language, of course), and I learned about why we pronounce or spell words certain ways. It was really great. And I did well in the class, too.

2. Get my face rocked off. Most definitely. I’ve seen Civil Twilight three times (yay!) and the Winter Sounds twice. Of course, there was The Fray in June in Charlotte, which was phenomenal, and I met Jon Foreman after the Fiction Family show in Asheville. There’s still more to come, too: Muse’s new album is released in less than two weeks; Switchfoot’s new album comes out in November; Civil Twilight is playing Fall for Greenville (and we’re considering a road trip the next day to see them play in Nashville); and the Muse/U2 show is 29 days away!

3. Read voraciously. Of the four books I’d intended to read, I manged three of them: V for Vendetta, The Scarlett Letter, and the fourth volume of the Buffy comic books. Underworld, with its 800+ pages, which I attempted to start during summer school, proved to be too much of a challenge, however. Perhaps later. I read plenty of other smaller books, though.

4. Watch TV. We did indeed finish Angel early in the summer. And while I haven’t managed any of Lost yet, I did introduce Harvin to M*A*S*H, and I watched all of season 7 of The Golden Girls.

5. Play outside. Looking back, I don’t think I did enough of this. Sure, I caught fireflies with the Leisters at Look-Up one night, and I spent a few lunch breaks sitting in the grass with a book, and we finally played on a swingset in Salem, MA, but I could have played outside more. Autumn is almost here, though, and it’s my favorite outside-time-of-the-year. I can at least enjoy some fresh air when I drive with my window down.

6. Have a great birthday. Of course! My brother came to visit me for the first time, and he spent the night. Chris also came up for a few days. On my birthday, Berry, Chris, Harvin, and I went to P.F. Chang’s for dinner and then to a frozen yogurt place downtown called Blueberry Frog. Fun! Delightful! Then, the day after my birthday, I met Jon Foreman after the Fiction Family concert. Just in case I haven’t mentioned that enough yet.

7. Be consistently on time to work. Yep. I think I was only late one day, and it was only by about three minutes (thank you, slow drivers on 101). It’s continued into the semester, too, even though I have to be here earlier (8:00 on MWF, and earlier than that since I’m teaching an 8:00 class on Tuesdays and Thursdays). Go me for being punctual.

8. See the ocean again. Done. I went to Myrtle Beach for the state firefighters’ convention in July, and our hotel was right on the beach. Then, in Massachusetts, we saw the harbor in both Boston and Salem. That’s the North Atlantic, you know. It seems so much cooler than what we have in SC.

9. Write letters. Well, okay, I sent some postcards from Boston–to my parents, my brother, my grandmother, and Naomi. I could have done more, but it’s a start.

10. TRAVEL! Have I mentioned Boston yet? The most incredible, epic road trip ever? Yeah, I did that.

So there we are. It was a great summer–productive, enlightening, adventuresome. All that any girl could ask for. Now, autumn is quickly approaching, and I’m completely wrapped up in the world of academia. I’m teaching, dealing with students in the library, and taking my own classes. And I’m enjoying just about every minute of it. It’s gonna be a crazy semester!

August Books

1. Anne of the Island, L. M. Montgomery. The 3rd book in the series. My favorite, I think. Anne and Gilbert finally get together.

2. Rules of the Road, Joan Bauer. A very good YA novel. The prequel to Best Foot Forward, which I re-read last month after finding it on sale at a bookstore at Myrtle Beach. This book I found on sale in Salem, MA. Traveling = cheap, good Joan Buaer books.

3. The Road, Cormac McCarthy. I started reading this two years ago and didn’t finish. I started again after buying my own copy (with Viggo Mortenson on the cover) at that bookstore in Salem. Had a hard time putting it down–I only did so because I was having such a great time in Boston.

4. Coming Home, Barbara Jean Hicks. It’s Christian romance, but it’s good.

5. Nature (and other selected writings), Ralph Waldo Emerson. I bought a copy of Emerson’s work at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial House in Concord, MA, because I only had anthologies with excerpts. Upon reading Nature in its entirety, I found that I actually like Emerson a lot more than I originally thought.

6. The Gammage Cup, Carol Kendall. A Newbery Honor Book from the 1940s, this fantasy is one that I re-read pretty often. It’s about a group of people called the Minnipins who outlaw five of their own for wearing colors that are too bright and for questioning the accepted history of the Minnipins. Those five outlaws then discover that a group of invaders known as the Mushrooms are looking to attack, and the save the Land Between the Mountains, where all the Minnipins live. It’s really great.

7. Water for Elephants, Sarah Gruen. A book about the circus! I really enjoyed this story about a man who joins the circus in the 1920s…except for the gratuitous sex scenes that were completely unnecessary to the plot of the story. Ugh. If it weren’t for those, this book would have been truly spectacular.

8. The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin. It’s a Newbery Award winner from the 1970s. I like the premise–sixteen “heirs” are given clues to discover who killed Sam Westing. The only problem is that, even reading it as an adult, I had problems keeping track which character had what clues and who was partnered with who. It’s a lot to keep track of, which I think harms the story. Younger readers don’t have the ability to keep that focused, I don’t think. Still, it’s a fun little mystery.

9. Mary Anne and the Little Princess, Ann M. Martin. Yes, this is a Baby-Sitters Club book. I discovered a stash of them in my closet when I was digging for the bag I’d used at the Greenville Literacy Society’s booksale last year. The BSC books I’d bought then were still in the bag. I read this one.

Sadly, my book-reading ground to a screeching halt when I started teaching. I have so little free time that the only time I really get to read is a few minutes before I go to bed. At that point, I’m so tired, I can only manage a few pages. Nonetheless, this brings my total for the year to 75. I have 15 between the syllabi for the two classes I’m taking, so if I can only manage ten outside of class over the next few months, I’ll have my 100 for the year!

#88: See Fenway Park

Traveling with Harvin and Ticcoa, who are anti-sports, pretty much meant that my chances of convincing them to catch a game at the stadium was very low. But I was satisfied with merely standing in the presence of Fenway Park, one of the most legendary stadiums in baseball history.

It was pretty fantastic to be standing on the sidewalk outside Fenway. Next time I go, though, I’m catching a game. I wanna see the Green Monster.

Nonetheless, it’s an accomplishment. Here are some pictures:

We were driving away at this point, so because of the angle, I missed the “Park.” But, hey, “Fenway” is the part that really matters, right?

#87: New England Clam Chowder

I love clam chowder. I live in South Carolina. Therefore, I made it a goal to order clam chowder at least once while in Massachusetts.

[Side note: I also ate lobster for the first time that I can remember while there. I ordered a lobster sandwich from Panera. It was divine. And special that I ate lobster for the first time in Massachusetts.]

Back to clam chowder. I managed to enjoy a cup of chowder three times: once in Salem at a restaurant called The Lobster Shanty, once in Concord at Walden Grille, and once in Cambridge at Legal Sea Foods, which Dr. Sepko recommended. Her husband Ken declares that Legal makes the best chowder ever.

I agree. It was superb! So good that I almost had a quart shipped home to Dad in South Carolina. So good that I’m demanding that my family go to Atlanta soon, since that’s the closest Legal Sea Foods to where we live.

While the chowder in Salem and Concord was delicious, they were still no match for the chowder at Legal. That combined with the amazing fish and chips I ordered made that meal the best one we had the whole week. I heartily recommend that if you’re ever in a town where there’s a Legal Sea Foods, GO! It may be the best meal you’ve ever had.

An unexpected, challenging, awesome surprise.

I’m just gonna say it…

I’m 24 years old, and I’m teaching (developmental) college English.

Yes, it’s true. I never expected it to happen so fast, yet here I am. I taught my first class this morning. Granted, it involved introducing myself and going over the syllabus, but it still counts.

For some reason, this goal never made it onto my List. Maybe it was just so big and obvious, I felt like it didn’t need to even be written down. Nonetheless, my desire to be a college English professor is the reason I started the M.A.T. program at Converse last year.

How did this happen? Dr. Boone, one of our English faculty, unexpectedly resigned over the weekend due to some health problems. This left Drs. Collier and Sepko scrambling to shift her classes to other professors. This required several of them to overload, and that created a problem. So because a Bachelor’s degree is all that’s required to teach developmental and remedial classes, Dr. Collier asked me Monday afternoon if I’d be interested in taking one of Tim’s writing classes to free him to take one of Dr. Boone’s 1310 c lasses. I said sure, not really thinking anything would come of it. After all, I was a last resort, really, and surely something else would work.

Nope. Dr. Sepko called me yesterday morning to ask if I’d take both of Tim’s classes. I agreed. By yesterday afternoon, I was super-hyper, bouncing around White Hall, getting my syllabus from Tim and advice  and encouragement from every other English professor. This morning, I walked into a classroom with a stack of syllabi with my name and office hours on them, and I met my first students. When I returned to White Hall, I walked into Tim’s office (which I’ll be using for my office hours) to discover that Betsy, Tim’s wife, had acquired a desk for me and made a nameplate. I was awed. She’s so sweet, and it’s really awesome to know that they’re trying to make me feel like an actual instructor now.

On top of my new desk was a stuffed animal: Stitch, left for me by Dr. Bruce. During my very first English class with Dr. Bruce at NGU, he pulled out Stitch and announced that, although he was a new professor here, we were all going to be a family. And we were. Seeing Stitch on my desk six years later, right after teaching my own first class made me so happy. It’s been a long time since that day, and I’ve changed so much, and it’s such a great reminder of the family I have at North Greenville.

I love this place. I love English. I’m going to adore teaching, I’m sure.

So although my life has been super crazy over the last two days, as I’ve tried to figure out my new teaching schedule on top of my full-time library/writing center schedule, on top of my own grad school courses, I’m super excited about life right now. This semester is going to be wonderfully chaotic and challenging and great!

#45: Boston

Although Harvin, Ticcoa, and I said for weeks that we were “going to Boston,” in reality, we only spent one full day in the city. But what a day it was!

Our activities in Boston included walking the Freedom Trail, a 2.5-mile long walk that connects 16 stops important in the founding of our nation. We didn’t go to every stop, but there were some cool ones:

1. The trail starts at Boston Common, America’s oldest public park. It’s big and beautiful and right in the heart of Boston. Lots of green grass, the Frog Pond, and expensive parking. We wandered through the park, took a few pictures, and moved on to the first big stop.

2. Granary Burying Ground. Paul Revere is burried here. John Hancock. Samuel Adams. Ben Franklin’s parents. The five victims of the Boston Massacre. It’s really an impressive place, just a few blocks away from Boston Common. Old, crumbling tombstones; dirt paths; steeped in history. I love graveyards, especially when cool people are buried there.

3. Next was King’s Chapel and King’s Chapel Burying Ground. The graveyard actually came first, and the church was built later. In literary history, King’s Chapel is important because it’s where Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale were buried in The Scarlet Letter. Sadly, they’re not real, but it’s another great little, old cemetery.

4. We also saw the site of the Boston Massacre, just outside the Old State House. A ring of bricks marks the spot where the five men died.

Near the massacre site is also the visitors’ center for the Boston National Historic Site, which encompasses most of the spots on the Freedom Trail. I bought cool postcards there.

5. Fanueil Hall was an awesome place, if only for the marketplace near the old building. A replica of the Cheers bar is there; Chris demanded that I stop in and buy him a t-shirt. My dad also appreciated my stopping in, as well.

Fanueil Hall Marketplace is an impressive building. Food vendors sell all sorts of international cuisine. I ate Thai food–delicious! Coa enjoyed a lobster roll and Harvin a seafood wrap. Good, inexpensive food.

6. We visited the Paul Revere House, too–the only house museum on the Freedom Trail. It wasn’t that great, really. Just four rooms housing some artifacts from Revere’s life. But it was a self-guided tour with little signs and descriptions on everything. Not the best museum we’ve been to, by far.

7. The best stop on the trail, and one of our best of the week, was the Old North Church, where the lanterns were hung to warn the colonists about how the Patriots would be entering Boston: “one if by land, two if by sea.” We arrived at the church in time to hear a great tour guide give a talk about the real history of the hanging of the lanterns. Revere was the one to give the order to hang the lanterns, but he never actually hung them–he headed off in the direction of Lexington and Concord to warn those residents.

A young man named Robert Newman was one of the two men to hang the lanterns in the church. They climbed up to the belfry to get the lights as high as possible, and when they emerged at the bottom after taking the lamps down, the British had already entered the church. Newman and the other man leaped out of the windows to escape. A replica lantern now hangs in the window known as the “Newman window.” One of the actual lanterns is housed in the Concord Museum, which we saw later in the week, and we also visited the site where Paul Revere was captured just outside of Boston. More about that later, though.

Poe, darling Poe, was also born in Boston. The boardinghouse where he was born is now a coffeeshop or something similar. There is a plaque on the building, though. We stopped to take a picture.

Boston is really a spectacular city. So much history, surrounded by so much urban development. It’s a pedestrian’s city, too–they’re fearless! They’ll just walk out in front of traffic, knowing that they’ll stop. I had to work up the courage to cross, even when the don’t walk sign was lit.

It’s a city I’d very much enjoy living near, but living in the city would be a nightmare, I think. I don’t have the courage–big cities still frighten me a bit.

There’s one other part of Boston I saw, that I’ll talk about later, since it was a special item on my list. I stood outside Fenway Park. It was a beautiful thing.

New England Trip Day 3: Salem, Massachusetts

Our first full day in New England, we headed to the great little seaside town of Salem, which is, of course, most famous for the Witch Trials that took place there in 1692. And, boy, do they play it up. There are so many museums dedicated to witch history, but we only visited one–supposedly the best and most visited–the Salem Witch Museum. It was fun, for the most part–not as kitschy as I expected. The first part was a dramatic reading, of sorts, of the history of the witch trials, and then we walked through a section of the museum detailing the portrayal of witches throughout history.

After leaving that museum, we wandered through Salem Common, played on the swingset a bit, and then headed to the Engine House Restaurant for what promised to be the best pizza in Salem. We were not disappointed.

The best part of the day came after lunch. First we visited a half-priced bookstore with books stacked to the ceiling! It was surprisingly well-organized for a store with almost no shelves. And it’s certainly an adventure shopping for books when you’re a clutz maneuvering through narrow aisles with the constant threat of books falling on your head. It was here, however, that I found my copy of The Road, and it’s awesome to have such an adventurous story of buying what’s now one of my favorite books.

After leaving the bookstore, we drove to The House of the Seven Gables, which was one of our best visits of the entire week. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cousin once lived here, and while he was visiting the house (which only had 3 gables at that point) one day, she told him, “This was once a house of seven gables.” With that remark, his story of the curse of the Pyncheon family was born.

Seven Gables is a beautiful place. The gardens are marvelous, and it sits right on the Salem waterfront, so one may sit in the garden and look out at the boats in the harbor. Ah…I wish I were there right now. Here we are in the Seven Gables garden, before the tour even started.

And, oh, the tour! The house has a lot of stuff original to the families that lived there. But perhaps the coolest part is that, a hundred or so years ago, when the house was first transformed into a museum, the owners added elements of the fictional Seven Gables in order to attract more guests. So, readers of the novel will note the room where Hepzibah Pyncheon would have sold her baked goods. While not original to the house, it’s still been there about a century, which is seriously cool. But the best part about the whole tour was the tiny, narrow, hidden staircase that was added behind a chimney. In the novel, Clifford maneuvers around the house and appears in the dining room from the story above, seemingly like a ghost. The owners added the staircase to show how Clifford could have been so stealthy. And we got to climb that staircase! It’s steep, dark, narrow, and a little scary. All of that equals awesome, though. Because I was standing closest to the chimney, I got to be the first to climb it, and when I arrived at the top, I burst out of the staircase gasping for breath. It’s confining, but the coolest part was just that I got to climb Clifford’s staircase. Yes, I’m a literary dork.

Also at Seven Gables is the Hawthorne House, the house where little Nathaniel was born in 1804. He only lived there a few years, but it was just the first of several houses that we got to tour that darling Hawthorne had lived in. Also, in the gift shop, I bought a poster-sized print of the Osgood portrait of the angelic, handsome Hawthorne. Soon, he will grace the walls of my room. Indeed.

Because Seven Gables is so near Derby Wharf, we walked there after touring the house. First, we stopped by the Custom House, where Hawthorne worked and wrote much of The Scarlet Letter. I sat on the steps of the Custom House. Perhaps in the very spot where Hawthorne’s foot once touched as he walked into work one day.

If one sits on the steps of the Custom House, one will look straight down Derby Wharf, to the adorable lighthouse there. It was my first lighthouse outside of South Carolina or Georgia! So exciting! It’s an adorable little 25-foot-tall lighthouse, one of three small ones used to guide ships into Salem Harbor. Off in the distance, we could see one of the other two. Two lighthouses in Massachusetts in one day. Very awesome.

Salem really is a great little town. I thought it would be much more involved in the witch history, and while they definitely embrace it, the tourist aspect of it doesn’t take over the whole time. Salem is worthy of visiting on its own merit, beyond just its history. It really is a great New England, seaside village where people live everyday lives. However, I would definitely love to see it in October. I hear it transforms into a spooky little place then.

Salem also embraces its literary history. They seem quite proud of their most famous literary icon, Nathaniel Hawthorne. There are two roads there that can be confusing if one knows the history of the name–Hathorne St. and Hawthorne Blvd. Hawthorne added the “w” to his name in order to remove himself from the stigma of the Hathorne name–his great-times-something-grandfather was a judge in the Salem Witch Trials, and Nathaniel wanted to dissociate himself from the name.

Finally, at least, I’ll show you the massive Hawthorne statue on Hawthorne Blvd. It isn’t representative of the young, angelic, heartbreaker Hawthorne, but older Hawthorne was a distinguished-looking fellow.

(We really love Hawthorne, by the way. I love his work, particularly his short stories, but he seemed to be the author that evoked the most giddiness in all of us, as you’ll see in later posts. We even ran into a mother and daughter in Concord on our second day–we had all toured the Wayside together the day before–and she referred to us as the “Hawthorne girls.” I like that title.)