09.28.08
Posted in Personal at 10:42 pm by JC
I am the worst housekeeper on earth, or close to it anyway. I can admit this. Not with pride; I wish I did a better job, but I don’t mind sharing my lack of talent. But there is something nice about cleaning, once you’re doing it, and I do have dreams about keeping a clean and organized house one day. I have ideas for just how I want to do it. It will never be perfect, but I think I can be an OK housfrau one of these days. I really want to.
But cleaning does give me time to think, and usually its the “cleaning and sorting my life” sort of thinking. I guess they go well together. I always try to juggle too many things in my life, and the problem with that is not that I have too long a list, but that all the things I juggle are HUGE. And all of them are dear to my heart. But somehow in life, the wrong things end up on top, like my job, instead of my home, my family, my friends, my faith. I think that a lot of people make this mistake. Part of me says that if I took care of things in the right order, that everything would run more smoothly, but work is constantly running behind – behind on grading, behind on the play, behind on whatever asinine paperwork I’m supposed to be completing – that the idea of putting it further down my list sounds like a disaster.
I’m the type of person that loves to make personal schedules (work out here, work on next novel here, clean house here), and then can’t stick with them. Obviously I’m not making a schedule I can live with. But cleaning the sink made me feel, for a little while at least, that maybe I could.
I also thought a lot about writing. I have wanted to be a writer ever since I was a kid; I grew up with my nose in a book and a pen in my hand. For the last couple years I’ve finally decided to get serious about it, but, like most worthwhile things, it has been hard. I had given up on being a novelist around the age of 16 because I convinced myself I couldn’t compose an entire novel; they were just too long. But then last January I proved my 16 year old self wrong. Now I’m restructuring, reworking, retooling, re-everything-ing.
It’s interesting; when you tell people you’re working on a novel, one of the many responses is something to the effect of “Do you see all the crap that gets published? You can do it if they can.” This is, of course, meant as a compliment; someone is saying that after assessing my intelligence, they have deemed me more competent than the drivel they’ve read. I do appreciate this, I guess, and it is funny how many writers I know (myself included) that have been comforted by reading a “what-the-hell-was-everyone-thinking-when-they-paid-for-this” novel. But I realized [as I scrubbed a particularly stuck smooch of toothpaste] that that just isn’t good enough. Not only because I don’t want to waste my time tracking down the one agent and editor combo willing to publish garbage, but because I have absolutely no desire for anyone to ever say, “Well did you read that book by JC Garren? Yeah, if she can get published, so can you.” I’m better than that, and my characters deserve more than that.
So, bring on your rejections, your criticisms, and, if you have any, your compliments. I will take it. I may ignore the parts I disagree with, but I want to be good. And that means learning my craft.
I had other thoughts while cleaning the bathtub and the toilet, but I’ll save you from those.
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09.20.08
Posted in Personal, Society at 12:04 pm by JC
We’re off to a good start this year. I like my schedule, I have (for the most part) really good kiddos in my classes, and I’m getting along wtih the new administration. So… I can’t complain. Hopefully off to a good start is indicative of the rest of the year and not the karmic balance for what hell is to come. 
We’re working on our own version of Alice in Wonderland for presentation in December. As always, I’m awed and amazed at my students’ creative abilities and desire to create a beautiful production that works as a whole. Anybody who thinks that teenagers are lazy or selfish doesn’t work with them; they are the greatest group of hopeful, intelligent people and so full of possibilities for what can be.
We’ve divided up into groups, and some are working on costumes, set pieces, or different pieces of the props. I’ll give them a problem (“how do we make hedgehogs the croquet sequence?” or “The back right corner of the stage needs something tall that people can climb on and that has a child-like quality to it) and they come up with a solution (“build paper mache hedgehogs covered with fabric fur on top of radio controlled cars” and “create 2′ and 3′ blocks, like the kind with letters on them, paint characters and items from the show on them instead of letters, and stack them”), give me a supply list for me to retrieve over the weekend, and start construction on the next week (we have a sample hedgehog – it works beautifully, and the framing for the blocks has started. I have the most amazing kids. And no, I’m not in some rich, feted district, for those of you thinking that. Teenagers want to do good work. And, I’m convinced, theater attracts the coolest people.
So… next time somebody tells you that the youth of America are a sad lot, tell them they are ridiculously wrong.
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09.05.08
Posted in Personal at 7:22 am by JC
So, I know two people who are pregnant, two people who are trying, and many, many people with bebes under the age of 2. So… it’s officially an epidemic. My husband and I are in discussions, and though we’ve both agreed that we want one, he’s pretty panic-a-licious about the whole thing. Not that I’m not, but I hide it better.
So, the other night as we were discussing it (with “Another one bites the dust” playing in my head), he had enough of a panic attack that I declared that whenever I found out we had, ahem, mission accomplished (after we became a trying couple, of course; as at the moment we’re not), I was going to post it to my blog before telling him or anybody else (practice run for telling people in person), then, after telling my mom, I’d get my sister, Kat, and Ginger (and whoever else was interested in helping) together to confront him in a Daddy-to-Be Intervention, and that’s how he’d find out, that way he had a loving support group to help him deal with the trauma. Oddly enough, he didn’t like my humor.
Who do you think should be the first to know when a gal gets knocked up by her husband? I’m kinda leaning towards blog…
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09.02.08
Posted in Politics at 8:05 am by JC
But you’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/01/obama.palin/index.html
If this had been in reverse, you cannot tell me that the religious right wouldn’t be slamming the dems for their lack of morals. I’m just glad we have further evidence that abstinence only education is so effective. Not. And then Obama tries a novel strategy of winning votes by taking the high road. Maybe he is doing it to win votes, but I gotta give props to a man who wins votes by doing the right thing.
I was really not sure who I was going to vote for. Then I saw Obama’s speech last week which, granted, lacked any real substance (like all political speeches around a campaign), but I still felt moved. It was awesome. And then McCain chooses the crazy evangelical right winger as his running mate. Hm… a woman, yes, but she thinks I’m going to hell, so that sorta counter-balances that. And then this… and the friggin’ evangelicals aren’t thinking… “Hey, maybe I’m wrong about abstinence only education; maybe I should consider my thoughts and actions”. No. They’re saying, “Yay pregnant seventeen year old! This drives a mighty blow against Satan!”
*sigh* I don’t understand.
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