A Different Stripe

I have a lot of striped shirts, mostly because I prefer to wear t-shirts and pants to school, and plain t-shirts sometimes seem a little more casual than what I'm going for. It might be hard to tell that I'm going for anything at all, and it probably should be, because I don't give my wardrobe a lot of thought.

Evidently, there are some who do, however. This year, for some reason, my students have been commenting on my clothes. They talk about my shoes and my tie-dyed socks, but more than anything, they want to know what's up with the striped shirts.

Shrugging it off only adds fuel to the fire, and I confess to becoming a little self-conscious about it-- one kid even put stripes on the fish that was supposed to be me on her team t-shirt design.

Lately, though, I've had a little luck in turning the tables. When someone asks why I wear so many stripes, I tell them it's because stripes are awesome. "Who's with me?" I ask, looking around, and I can always count on 3 or 4 others wearing stripes, too, to give a little shout out.

Today the whole thing took a turn. As I was getting the kids settled after lunch, one student came up and threw her arms over my shoulder, wagging her finger back and forth between our shirts. "Stripe club!" she said.

"Who's with us?" I added, and just like that, stripes were much cooler.

Call Me Skyfall

I saw the new James Bond movie today, and at the risk of seeming egocentric, it was clearly all about me. The franchise and I have something in common: this year is the 50th anniversary of our entrances into this vale of tribulation. As much as I'd like to think we both have aged nicely, thematically the movie addresses staying relevant in a changing world, a challenge that faces Bond, M, and MI-6 itself, with the central question for all of us being how to balance the benefits of experience with the inevitable ravages of time.

Perhaps Tennyson, as quoted by M, said it best:

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Nothing Wrong with a Good Head Scratch

There are awkward moments in certain conversations when someone mentions an idea or a person or an event that is unknown to you. What to do? Do you interrupt the speaker and declare your deficit, or do you nod knowingly hoping you'll be able to make some sense of the reference in context?

This dilemma might be intensified when another person in the discussion admits to not knowing the particulars and so asks to be brought up to speed. In order not to be enlisted in the tutorial, you must avert your eyes, but not so much as to reveal your ignorance.

Or, so I've been told.

These days, I'm not too proud to admit it when I read or hear a word I'm unfamiliar with. Such was the case today when I read Maureen Dowd's op/ed piece in the NYTimes. The starting point of her essay was the throw-back nature of Mitt Romney's popularity among white guys of a certain age; Mad Men was used as an exemplar, but then Dowd noted that that particular TV show "seems too louche for a candidate who doesn’t drink or smoke and who apparently dated only one woman"

Louche? Cool word! And the best part is I know it now.

Chicken-headed Folk on Penny-farthings

When you pay to stay at other people's homes you are hostage to their taste for the duration of your rental. For the most part, the place we are staying this weekend has been beautiful at its best and inoffensive at its worst. That doesn't rule out bizarre, though. You decide where on the spectrum this particular piece of art falls.

Home Away from Home

We are spending the weekend with my brother's family in a vacation rental about an hour and a half outside of town. The house is incredible-- definitely one of the nicest places I've  ever stayed in my life. Surrounded on water on three sides, it has wide, heart of pine floors, tons of windows, 5 bedrooms,  several porches, a huge kitchen with 2 sinks and 2 dishwashers,  and plenty of other amenities that made the harrowing drive down rutted dirt roads through pitch dark farm fields totally worth it.

Over the years we have rented a lot of vacation homes.. That sort of accommodation just fits our needs better than a hotel ever could. Plus it's fun to imagine what your life might be should you actually have a home in this location. Predictably, there has been much variation in the quality of the places we have stayed

I know the boys will never forget the place where palmetto bugs and centipedes shared their room. Then there was the gorgeous house in the middle of the woods-- once inside it was all hard wood and vaulted ceilings, but you had to get past the mosquitoes to enjoy it. Another time we stayed in a place in the California canyons that hadn't been touched since the 70s. It still had the original shag carpeting, velour furniture, and mirrored walls which Treat crashed into at full force. ( To be fair, it also had a fun little pool, a hifi stereo, a nifty LP collection,  and a pool table.)

There have also been lovely things like the adirondack chairs and ceiling fans on a certain porch in Maine, the crooked wooden floors in the upstairs of the same hundred year old fisherman's home.. I particularly liked the bread maker in one place we stayed, and you can never say enough about an ocean view and beach access. In other homes there have been fabulous kitchens, huge tables we could all fit around, bright sunrooms with comfy couches, and big living rooms with giant TVs and fireplaces.

In the end, it really doesn't matter as long as it's big enough for all of us to stay together.

No NaNoWriMo fo Me

I just got an encouraging email from the sponsors of NaNoWriMo.

...you might have finally started to come down from the creative high of week one. If you're feet have nearly touched the ground now, it's possible you've started to panic (even if this isn't your first year, you might have started to panic by now). There are all sorts of panic. Why am I doing this? Where do I go from here?

I appreciate their sympathy, not because I'm trying to write a 50,000 word novel this month, but rather because these days panic is pretty much the professional status quo in my neck of the woods. NoWri is unfathomable at the moment.

Even so, the contact was doubly valuable to me because today was the day when our writing club met. Believe it or not, 14 kids spent an hour after school writing and reading each others' work just for the fun of it. Amazing! Those kids regularly refresh me with their creativity and talent. Words and ideas flow from them like water from a spring. At one point, they were talking about using online document sharing to help a student who wasn't even there (she has a weekly conflict until December) work through being stuck in her novel's plot, and before they left, they tried to convince us to let them meet twice a week.

I wish I had the time to do that.

Haiku

The election is over,
and the world awaits.
Hasn't it always been there?