Great minds, average minds, small minds and robots.

,

http://twitter.com/#!/AhmadBakhiet/statuses/7504393779810304

The quote in the above tweet* (which, according to Wikiquote, may not have been uttered by Eleanor Roosevelt) has been bothering me since I heard it 15 years ago. Because as much as I love a good discussion about ideas, I’ve also done my fair share of gossip and I spent my career as a journalist talking and writing about events and people.

Now that I’m actively studying fiction, I find that people and and events are, in many cases, far more important than ideas. Or at least, interesting characters and dynamic events provide a way of introducing an idea to a reader. Reading pages and pages of an author proselytizing about lofty ideas or ideals is the way to turn me off as a reader. But when an idea is lived out by a compelling character I’m much more willing to consider that idea.

Recently my husband and I had a conversation about this quote. Because I’m too lazy to recount the conversation in words, and because I just discovered Xtranormal, I will post it in video form.**

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JXHLHZTspo]

*I don’t actually know the Twitterer at the top of the page. His tweet came up when I Googled the quote, so I decided to include it.

** I realize some of the dialogue doesn’t make sense. Sorry about that. Most of our conversations are like this.

/2 Comments/by

Getting Boyfriend the cat to make a commitment.

My best Boyfriend.

My husband is downstairs, building a very small house for our front porch. It looks a little like a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home for cats, and it’s the latest step in my fiendish plan to adopt the stray cat known mainly as Boyfriend.

Boyfriend has been around since June or July, when he showed up, starving and timid, on our front walk. We fed him and he kept coming back. He got his name this summer, after he developed a habit of calling up to my office window when he wanted food and cuddles. Smitten, I thought of adopting him then, but we had two cats at the time. So Boyfriend remained outside. And I stopped worrying about him because he appeared to have been taken in this fall. I’m thinking he was taken in by the college guys in the neighborhood because he’s fat and not neutered.

But then my older cat, Copy passed away. And then all the students started going home for Winter Break, and Boyfriend started coming around, asking for food and trying to get into the house. And I started thinking of making him a permanent family member and giving him a permanent home and a permanent name. Read more

/0 Comments/by

Free things for Christmas

I keep forgetting to use one of my own photos as a holiday card. So this isn't a holiday freebie, but it could have been.

I love Christmas. I also love free stuff. So putting the two things together always makes my day. And because sharing makes everything better, I want to share my a few of my favorite holiday freebies with you.

1) Free holiday music. Last year, I was in desperate need of holiday music. I had only one holiday CD, and I disliked that album intensely. It had exactly one good carol on it. The rest were second-rate, mid-century carols by mediocre artists. If we lived in a just world, those songs would have been lost in a record company’s basement, but we don’t. Somebody dredged the carols up and stuck them all together on a disc which I got – I kid you not – from a cereal box. Chex, I think. Anyhow, my feelings about the album are beside the point, because I lost it while moving. While I didn’t miss the album at all, I totally missed having Christmas carols. I know I could have turned on the radio and tuned in to any one of the stations that plays holiday music for the month of December – hell, WEBE 108’s signal is so strong that we can actually hear Bing Crosby singing White Christmas on appliances that aren’t radios.  Still, I was so sick of all those songs. I’ve been hearing them since I was born. The last new carol on those stations is probably Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” and that came out when I was in high school.  I wanted something new. Or at least something good. My savior was Amazon’s MP3 store, which gives away 25 holiday tunes during the month of December – one for each day. And for the most part, the music is really good. Yeah, Dan Fogelberg and Carly Simon occasionally sneak into the line-up, and there are at least three versions of “Oh Come, Oh Come Emanuel.” (To be fair, there is a cool metal version this year, by the lead singer of Judas Priest.) But generally, the music is by contemporary artists and there are even new carols. My favorite this year is Winter Hymnal by the Fleet Foxes.

My New Yorker holiday bow prototype.

2.) Home-made paper bows. I got this idea from my brother, who made his own paper gift bow for my mom’s birthday present last week. I think that’s an awesome idea because I never have enough gift bows. Well, I do, but because I scavenge the bows off last year’s unwrapped presents and re-use them, all of my paper bows are smushed beyond recognition. So I’m making bows, using the below video and our pile of old New Yorkers. At left is my first attempt. It’s a one-in-the-morning bow, so it’s not winning any prizes. But it’s still really cool to be able to make them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPEYWjLpluI&feature=related]

3.) Desktop wallpaper. This isn’t actually holiday stuff. But I thought I’d include it because stars are a part of the Christmas story and also a part of the fabric of almost every other religion on the planet. And also because this is just cool. The Hubble Space Telescope posts its best images on its website. Several of those images can be downloaded as wallpaper for your computer. I like the cloud towers in the Carina Nebula best. It’s an awesome way to see the stars, even if you’re staring at your screen.

Happy holidays.

/0 Comments/by

The nuns

Sister Mary Stigmata never taught me.

I was just reading some fiction which featured an archetype that’s been in heavy rotation for at least half a century, and at most, a thousand years: The Evil Nun.

You all know The Evil Nun. She hits poor, defenseless, innocent children with rulers and singles them out for shame and humiliation. Her anger and frustration cause her to brand little girls as tramps and little boys as shifty truants. She’s violent. She’s mean. She’s ruined your formative years, and she’s been in more movies than Kevin Bacon. She’s appeared in The Blues Brothers and, in a slightly more nuanced incarnation, in Doubt. All of you – even if you never went to Catholic school, even if you aren’t Catholics, even if you’re a very peaceful Quaker who has no argument with anybody – you all shudder in her presence.

Except I’ve never met the Evil Nun in person. And I went to Catholic school. While I was there in the ’80s I met strict nuns. I met emotionally distant nuns. But never once did I meet The Evil Nun. Not once. And I feel like I’ve missed out on a great shared experience of 20th century Catholic school students. I really liked the nuns who taught me. What’s exciting about that? Read more

/4 Comments/by

Finals.

Me, planning next semester's syllabus.

It’s finals day here at Fort Davis. This means that although I don’t really have that many students this semester, I’m spending the day surrounded by final projects, two copies of my class’s final student newspaper, my attendance book, a collection of pens, two cold cups of coffee and random pieces of paper that have been living in my bag this semester.

I don’t post much about my job as an adjunct professor at a local community college, mostly because I don’t want the kind of trouble that comes from writing about the workplace online. But I don’t think any harm can come from posting my feelings about the end of the semester, which are always bittersweet.

On the one hand, the semester always ends exactly when it needs to. Right when the pressure is the highest, and people start getting the flu, and everyone’s motivation has flat-lined, bam! No more classes. We have finals and then we’re outta here! Woohoo!
On the other hand? I always end up missing my students. Especially the ones who are going off-campus for good, graduating or transferring from community college to a four-year institution. I’m happy for them, but I’m sad to see them leave.

I was unprepared for this feeling when I started teaching three years ago. When I was a college student my own reaction to the end of the semester was a big, unmitigated YAY! Granted, things were busier for me then –  I was taking five and six classes a semester, working two on-campus jobs and working as a college newspaper editor at the time. I used to say good-bye to my professors with abandon. I cut them loose the moment I walked out of the final. My thought was that they would never remember me anyhow – they had so many other people to teach, why would they remember who I was? Until I ran into a former prof and he remembered me. Moreover, he was pleased to see me and interested in what I’d done with my life. And now, when I run into former students, and they’re happy to see me, or when one of them emails me with a question, I find that I am always ridiculously pleased. If I knew what an awesome feeling it to be contacted by a former student, I would have contacted more of my teachers. Actually, it’s probably not too late for that.

All right. Enough blogging from me. Back to the finals. I’ll be writing more about teachers  – although not college teachers – tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’m writing about nuns.

 

/6 Comments/by

Trees, snow, and my belated list of thanks.

Oh, you crazy tannenbaum.

There’s nothing quite like the smell of a Christmas tree. Especially right after you’ve brought it into the house and right before your nose gets used to it and you cease to consciously smell it. The fresh-Christmas-tree scent is one of the few scents I wish I could get my nose to smell for the whole season, but I know that by tomorrow I will have to stick my face directly into the branches to smell the tree. In a week, I will be crushing needles to smell it.  I can’t be the only one who’s experienced this.  In fact this is probably why Yankee Candle is able to do such an appalling trade in balsam-scented candles.

Right now however, the tree is two days old, and smells just like a little piece of the forest in our newly cleaned living room. And the best kind of snow is falling outside: The kind that looks pretty, collects on the ground, but does not make the roads treacherous.

And because I’m grateful for all these things, I thought I’d write the blog I failed to write a few weeks ago. Inspired by a few other people’s Thanksgiving posts, I had meant to make a list of five little things for which I’m grateful. Not the big things (wonderful husband, awesome parents, brother and future sister-in-law, roof over my head and job that I love) but five little things that make me happy every day. Things that seem so good that they might be revoked by the government. Read more

/4 Comments/by

Sunday was not Bridgeport’s day.

Sunday was not a fantastic day for Bridgeport.

My paper’s headline this morning? “Counted Out.” The CT Post/Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition-sponsored vote recount turned up batches of uncounted ballots, and a one-in-four chance that if you cast a photocopied ballot on Nov. 2, your vote was miscounted.

Great. I’ve blogged about the botched election (we didn’t have enough ballots on Election Day) and the recount, but this finding is at least worth a post. That’s more than 1,000 misread ballots. I think my favorite part of the CT  Post’s article was Registrar of Voter Sandi Ayala’s comment when she was asked to respond to the findings. She told The Post that during the original tally, her workers were tired and working under stressful circumstances, “with cameras in their faces and microphones on top of the table where they’re trying to do a tally.” I agree with Ayala – her workers were under a lot of stress. But who let the press into the room where the tally was being done and why?

To top off the day, Seth MacFarlane mocked Bridgeport and Bridgeporters on Family Guy tonight. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be quite so stung – I’d be perversely proud that my city was on television – but today I’m smarting over the election fiasco. The coup de grace? A built-in preemptive strike against the letter I was about to start writing. Blah. The mockery is below, until Family Guy makes whoever posted it take it off YouTube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozepC0AI9Sg]

Seth MacFarlane, you are to Bridgeporters as Mel Brooks is to the villagers in the beginning scenes of Men in Tights. That’s all I have to say this evening.

/0 Comments/by

Home.

Sometimes I still accidentally refer to my parents’ house as home.

I’ve been out of the house, more or less, for a decade but it’s an easy mistake. They still live in the same awesome, 100-year-old house I grew up in. Its silhouette has changed over the years, trees have grown up and come down, and it’s recently been painted yellow, but it’s still the same house I was brought home to as an infant. It provided the setting for all of my childhood dramas, games and fantasy. I spent hours in the backyard. I used to look out my window at the hills opposite and imagine the kingdoms that lay beyond them. (I was disappointed to learn that the hills were only hiding Waterbury.)

I know where everything in this house is, and a lot of the things I used to think of as mine are still here – the mural on my old bedroom wall, the painted rock that serves as a doorstop, the shelves on which my international doll collection used to sit – but recently something’s changed. Read more

/12 Comments/by

Writing at the library.

In a bid to get more work done, I’m moving my morning/early afternoon writing to the library. It’s not my ideal writing spot, but it works, because unlike my house, I don’t have to clean the library, answer the door, the phone or anything else.

I’ve picked the prettiest library in the area, the one with the fireplace and a limited collection. It brings back memories. My mother spent years working in a library and when I was a kid my brother and I used to take the school bus to the Oakville branch library, where she was employed. We did our homework there, did chores around the library and helped her and the two librarians close up. When it was warm, we could walk home.

Being at the library now is a strange flashback. I had forgotten about the “regulars” who collect at local libraries:  Mothers with their story-hour children, retirees, middle school kids who show up to hang out, and people who don’t have anywhere else to go. I remember them all and now I’m seeing them all again. Very little has changed. There are still the people who think of the librarians as their personal servants. There are still those who stand and gossip with the librarians. There are people who need to talk to the librarians because they simply don’t have anyone else to talk to. I know these people. I know all about these regulars –  as a child I hid behind the magazine racks and stared at them. I used to help my mother reshelve their books, and when I played too loudly in the library basement after my homework was done, my mother would shush me so that they they could read in peace.

It’s so strange that now I’m one of them.

/2 Comments/by

Last day of the Bridgeport recount.

Oh, the Bridgeport recount, co-sponsored by the Connecticut Post and the Connecticut Citizen Audit Coalition. It’s big news. We can read about it in the paper. We can follow it online. We can even head on over to City Hall Annex and watch the recounting process, but since I’m no longer paid to pop into government buildings, I opted out of a visit this week.

The recount, which was prompted by Bridgeport’s massive screw-up on Election Day (we ran out of ballots and everything went downhill from there) started on Monday and will end this evening. The CT Post, which published a Nov. 21 editorial demanding that the ballots be recounted, requested the ballots under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act and partnered with the Connecticut Citizen Audit Coalition and various other voter advocacy groups, which are actually conducting the recount.

There’s not much new information on the progress of the recount this morning (the CT Post reported only a paragraph about the recount in today’s paper and the paper’s Election 2010 blog was last updated two days ago). Then again, counting more than 20,000 ballots isn’t very exciting and there’s probably not much to report. But on Sunday? Oh, the headlines we’ll have.

I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this recount. I don’t think there’s any doubt that a recount of the ballots is a necessary thing. Bridgeport screwed up big time on election night, and when it came time to count the votes, poll workers were stressed, sleepless and harried by representatives from every big campaign while Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz urged them to count faster so that her office could certify the election’s outcome. Who can do a thorough job under those circumstances? No one.

On the one hand, I’m proud of my local newspaper for taking a stand , FOIing the ballots and organizing a recount. We have the best Freedom of Information laws in the country and they’re not used as often or as well as they should be. So, seeing my local newspaper use the Connecticut FOI laws to organize and sponsor a recount of our city’s ballots is kind of a thrill.

On the other hand, something about this recount feels wrong. I haven’t posted about it this week because I can’t really put a finger on what it is that’s bothering me, but I suppose that I don’t like the idea of a non-governmental agency co-sponsoring a recount. Lennie Grimaldi blogged about the recount on Wednesday, wondering aloud to the Internet if the CT Post wasn’t just trying to sell papers by co-sponsoring a recount. His take was that yes, the city should recount the ballots, but no, the CT Post shouldn’t be organizing said recount.

Grimaldi has a point. The CT Post is, like news organizations across the country, trying to sell papers. And what a glorious way of selling papers this is! It’s better than inserts, or free offers or pictures of puppies. This is actual, huge, big local news. And I think that’s awesome.

But I also think that the CT Post might have overstepped its bounds by actually co-sponsoring the recount. Should the paper be shaming the city into a recount? Yes. Should the pressure exerted by the Fourth Estate force the city to recount? Absolutely. Should they actually be sponsoring the recount? No. In an ideal world, the city should be doing it.

But as was proved on Nov. 2, we don’t live in an ideal world. And if the city won’t recount the ballots, someone should.

/0 Comments/by