Dinner: a discourse.

Who shops for dinner, and how is that shopping done? That is the question. I still have in my possession a small red clothbound book from two decades or more ago, in which I wrote my shopping lists on the left-hand page, and my menus on the right. I was a veritable wizard of using stuff up. I shopped once every two weeks, and that meant--as you have probably surmised--that by the end there was damned little out of which to conjure comestibles. As I am sure I have wheezed on about in the past, I was a scholar of my cookbooks, and knew what kind of cookie or cake I could make, if we needed cookies or cake, when I had but one egg, or when I had oil but no butter (often), and so forth. I knew how to substitute this for that. I could make homemade yogurt and I stretched fresh milk with powdered.

I knew that we were heading out of the woods once I started to work, when we could afford cold cereal on a regular basis. I am not defending cold cereal, but it made life easier by far when I did not have to arise from my slumber in the gray of the morning to cook a hot breakfast each and every day, as I did for quite some time. With the development of slightly more money clinking around in our pockets and coin purses, my shopping became less straitened. I still planned, I still listed, but I could go to the store if I needed another gallon of milk or a lemon or, you know, popsicles or a watermelon. It got better.

These days, when I consider dinner at my house and I draw from my vast stores of cooking experience a fresh and unspoiled blank, I make a list of things that I could cook, things that I almost always have the ingredients or. Risotto, I might write on the list. Plate of vegetables. One of the things I can almost always rustle up is a bowl of pasta, with something saucy to go on it or something vegetable-y. Or both. Pasta, in my book, makes a satisfying supper. You don't have to eat a lot of it--i.e., you don't have to go into a carbohydrate coma--but it is filling and warm and can be quite elegant. That's if you don't look in your refrigerator and think, ugh. Or what the hell. Which, to be honest, is how I feel sometimes when I look into the drawers and find some sad looking carrots and half a sheaf of now decidedly unfresh celery. When, exactly, were those depressing vegetables purchased? What is there to be done?

Luckily, the people, there is in these modern times a thing called The Internet, where people who write there occasionally surprise you with a recipe. And even luckier, sometimes the recipe kind of matches what you have in your refrigerator, in which case: WIN.

I ran across a pasta recipe today (it was an adaptation of this recipe from Mario Batali) that called for sundry vegetables and blistered tomatoes--charred in a hot pan so that the skin blistered. I read the list of ingredients: orecchiette, asparagus, spinach, tomatoes, burrata (that fancy fresh mozz with cream in it, whoa). I thought: Me, me, me, me also... I'm really close on this one. As in: I had the right pasta. I had some gorgeous fat purple asparagus. I also had broccoli that I could cut into very skinny stems, and I had some cherry tomatoes that needed a purpose in life. Also: baby kale, which would stand in for spinach. And a ball of mozz. Not burrata, but close enough.

Thus inspired-stroke-guided, I did the following:

1. I heated the oven to 400 degrees. I filmed a roasting pan with olive oil. 
2. I used a peeler to peel the bottom half of those asparagus stems. Then I cut them in uneven diagonally angled pieces of about 3/4". 
3. I peeled the stems of the broccoli and cut it into skinny long pieces.
4. I cut half a purple onion into thin half moons.
5. I took some coarse salt from Slovenia (thanks, Natasha!) and crushed, along with some crushed red pepper, with the flat of my big knife and strewed it all over the vegetables. 
6. I tossed the pan around until things were a little bit oiled up and put it in the oven.
7. I began to heat my heavy skillet. Concurrently, I began to heat a pan of water for the pasta.
8. When the pan was hot, I put in a little oil and the baby kale. I let it wilt, then tossed it around till it was still green but very docile. I put that on a plate. 
9. Into the still hot pan, I threw my slightly-the-worse-for-wear cherry tomatoes. Grape tomatoes, really. I let them hang out there and char. I tossed them around a little so they could char on other spots. Then I turned off the heat and just let them blister away.
10. When the water boiled, I put my third of a pound, approximately, of pasta in and let 'er cook. Orecchiette is a hefty pasta, so it takes twelve minutes or more.
11. While that was happening, I tore apart my mozzarella into shreds. Nothing too fine.
12. As the pasta was getting close, I checked my roasting vegetables--they were perfect. I took them out. I checked the pasta every couple of minutes. 
13. When it was done, I drained it, put it back in the pan, and threw in a couple of tablespoonsful of butter, then all the vegetables, and then the mozz. I tossed it and tossed it until the butter was melted and the cheese was melting and everything looked fantastic.

And then we ate it. And let me tell you: it was so good.

School supplies.

Here's what I've bought to prepare myself for school (I can't be the only one who feels a perennial, autumnal urge to buy pencils this time of year):

1. pens (a set of two, one of which I'm not sure where it is, actually.)
2. more pens (because you can't have too many.)
3. a pencil box (for corralling my wandering pens. Obv.)
4. notebooks, a pack of three that will fit into my purse. (NOTEBOOKS. my precious!)
5. satchel (omg it is the best thing everrrrrrrrrrr.)
6. cowboy boots (yippie ki yay!)

Here are things I considered buying, but didn't, but still might:

7. new watercolors (I already have, like, five sets. But a new set is so choice.)
8. set of paintbrushes (for the above. For all my painting needs, really.)
9. set of glitter glue pens. (for grading papers.)
10. pencils, old school.

What do you want, need, have to have for school? Or, if you're not in school yourself, what do you want, need, have to have so that you can be in solidarity with school?  And learning. And everything that is right and good in this world? Plaid skirt? knee socks? saddle shoes? protractor?

Edging closer.

Over the past few days, I've responded to questions from some creative writing students about the place of creative writing in the world. I also responded to an e-mail or two about curriculum, which led me to first find, then to take a look at my notes from May of this year--that's right, two and a half months ago, like an eon--notes from a meeting where I started to imagine what I wanted my composition courses to look like this fall. That's right, a month from now. Less than a month.

But who's counting.

I'm also at a point where my own creative projects seem to share a margin with work I hope my students will do. I worked some more on my photo essay, which is shaping up pretty nicely. It involves images from the Scotland trip and some thoughts about ruins and ruination. I'm also using photos of the shacks from our Joshua Tree/Morongo Valley trip from last year.

It's great to work with those images and to bring my disparate thoughts about these abandoned and collapsing structures together into a series of statements with something like a coherent through-line. This is something I would like my students to be able to do, with or without the photos. Same with my video essay about feminism--assembling primary and secondary research materials, ordered and juxtaposed in a way that creates a nascent argument, with the writer's own point of view to frame and shape all of it. With or without video, voiceover, ambient noise, or a soundtrack.

But it's okay that my projects are verging on demos for what I want my students to do. It's what teachers do--find a connection between their own projects and what they hope their students might be able to do. Yep, that's me, a teacher. Getting ready to teach, although well in advance of actual syllabus making.

Today, this came to me as a recommendation from the UK Amazon:

Amazon.co.uk, you've got my number.

(not) Counting down.

The other day, driving home from the movies:

Me: ...and I just hate thinking in actual, concrete, numerical terms about things, even when those terms are realistic. Like when you say, "You still have six weeks left of summer!"--and I know, there aren't six weeks left, not even close to six weeks--thinking that way just drives me crazy, because it feels like things are shutting down. And I hate that feeling! I would totally rather lie to myself, and say, like, I still have half the summer left! or a lot of the summer left! because it makes me feel like things are still possible. Even when it's not true.

Historian: (drives. He already knows this about me. He is a concrete thinker. He is a realist. It is good for a person like me to have a person like him--in a word, him--around.)

Me: ...I don't necessarily think everyone feels that strongly about it, though.

Historian: (pauses) ...no, maybe not.

Despite my strong commitment to fantasy-calendaring, I am getting real with myself. I am thinking not in terms of weeks but parts of weeks, for cramming in the stuff I want to do before I need to get even more real with myself, and start preparing for classes.

Today was a good day. It was a quiet day. I gathered my wits. I took a bike ride in the morning and then I worked on my photo essay. I thought about the things I want to do over the next fractions of weeks. I tried to get a big picture of my day-to-day, so events won't sneak up on me and give me a rude surprise.

We are putting bags of stuff on our curb tomorrow for a charity pick-up. At the store, I bought cherries and stuff for granola and carrots and Izzys. I mailed a package. I washed the sheets and the duvet cover put them back on the bed. My granddaughter called from Scotland to chat. I worked on my photo essay some more. Tomorrow is a deadline day. Another quiet day, a day on which I will get some stuff done, yo.

In other news:

The historian: Did you know they used to have poetry readings at the Olympics? Not just at the ancient Greek games, but back when they started the Olympics up again, up into the 1940s.

Me: Well, if I were in the Olympics, the best I would do is semi-finalist or finalist. I would never win.

(Whiny, right? But the good news is, the revision and re-titling of my manuscript I did in the spring has paid off, in that this manuscript is now getting a lot of semi-finalist/finalist action. Not actually winning, but closer.)

...and lastly, today nouvelle vague filmmaker Chris Marker died. I already posted this on Facebook, but if you have never taken a half hour to watch La Jetee, I highly recommend that you do. You can watch it here.

Travel, for real.

So, despite a truly ridiculous amount of sulking when I found out I would not be going to AWP this spring (alas, I want to pout afresh! but no, I shall bravely carry on--), I am in fact traveling across America this spring. Just not to AWP.

I will be traveling with a large and representational and therefore perhaps high maintenance? group from my college to a large and official and therefore perhaps a bit high stress? conference in Philadelphia. We will be taking off at a ridiculous hour on a Saturday morning, have brief layovers--what I would, if I had booked the travel myself, have decided were unrealistically, terrifyingly, connecting-flight-missingly brief layovers--read "dashes through unfamiliar airports"--going both directions, and I will be staying four nights.

In my travel algorithms, this means

• clothes that will make a possible nine point five outfits, because sometimes you need to choose.
• six pairs of shoes, because you can't possibly accurately predict the precise shoes you might need, when in a foreign land such as Philadelphia.
• various grooming products that I cannot live without I am so not joking!
• scarves, obv.
• pocket money to run to the drug store (oh, I have already researched the drug store nearest the hotel, yes I have.) for stuff I will have no doubt forgotten, such as my toothbrush perhaps.
• important reading material, plus
• magazines.
• laptop,
• iPod,
• chargers galore, and
• other stuff I can't bring to mind right now, but any one of which forgotten might make the trip an utter disaster.

Oh, and also I still have to put together my presentation.

So the real question is this: carry on? or check?

I am, as the above list no doubt screams  implies, a checker. Yes, I know you have to pay the fee. Yes, I know they lose your luggage sometimes--indeed, my luggage has been lost once or twice. Yes, I know it adds time (which is money!) to the torturous hours you have already spent in airports.

But I loathe the wrestling of luggage in the tight space of the aircraft. I loathe other people doing it around me. And honestly, I loathe the idea of doing without a single thing that I may need to feel comfortable, put together, myself, when I am so very far away from home. It is already making me a little crazy. Currently, I am considering the following options:

Plan A: carry on. For this eventuality I bought a bunch of little empty travel containers of various shapes/sizes/capacities. Pare down my clothes, etc. to the bare minimum. Try not to act squirrelly and rookie-like at the TSA security extravaganza.

Plan B: carry on. Buy almost all grooming products when I get there, at the drugstore I have researched. Wasteful, but you don't have to struggle with the little bottles, quart-size ziploc bag, the suspicious grillings of the TSA personnel, etc. Worth it, possibly?

Plan C: check. Like a sane person. Seriously.

What is a syllabus?

Is it the skeleton of the course, that structure upon which the flesh and musculature of the days and weeks will rest?

Is it a promise?

Is it a contract? a recipe? an agenda, a calendar, a game plan?

Is it a sketch, preliminary to the painting that will emerge? A musical score, which the class and I will perform?

What I'm really asking is, can I just call what I have good enough, and let it go? or do I have to keep working on it?

Monday Ops.

Today had the following elements that had to be planned and carried out with surgical precision:

• birthday breakfast for running/former-missionary/college son (happy birthday!)
• arrival at office when I said I'd be there
• numerous items on the long, long list of shit I had to do
• leaving my office on time so that I could make a luncheon appointment
• leaving my luncheon appointment so that I could shop for two baby gifts for the two (2) new grandchildren who have recently arrived in our family (hooray for babies!)
• expert shopping, so that I could arrive home by 3, so that
• running/former-missionary/college son could take my car to his first interim class meeting at 3:30 p.m.
• packaging up the baby gifts so we could go visit the babies
• visiting the babies, one at home, one at the hospital
• arriving home in time to watch The Closer.

In an example of the crack timing I executed today, let me say that I shopped like a ninja. I was in and out of that Target with two baby jammies and two baby blankets, two festive gift bags, coordinating tissue paper, and a copy of In Style, like it was my job. My ninja job.

In a break from the ninja work, we held two beautiful tiny babies. One of the babies was at home, with her sisters milling around and talking about the Christmas tree (Us: What do you want for Christmas? One of the baby's sisters: I forgot. Us: How about an orange? Sister: . . . or a banana? Us: how about both? Sister: [shrug]); the other, brand new, was still with his mother at the hospital, where it was quiet, even hushed.

Holding a baby is the opposite of ninja work. Holding a baby is the antidote for the suspicion that you might be rushing around just a little too much.

I think now is a good time to panic.

Don't you?

It all started with the brilliant idea I had to pay Danny, running son's friend, to strip wallpaper and paint our bedroom while we're in Idaho. What is this stage of life for, if not to pawn off work on young people and pay them the benjamins so they can afford to go to college and eat junk food and buy concert tickets and whatnot.

Tonight, as I was searching for the copies of my poems that had the notes on them from my writing group, so I could make a pass at the manuscript before I hand it off to my friend for her take on it, I was struck by a series of facts that had that duh duh DUH feel about them, aka, the sound of DOOM:

fact 1: in order that Danny may begin the project of wallpaper stripping, we must create space and maneuvering ability in the room.

fact 2: creation of said maneuverability will entail moving a LOT of stuff out of that room.

side fact: OH MY LORD there is so much stuff. what is the meaning of this stuff? why the stuff?

fact 3: ahem, also, I will need to move my clothes out of that over-stuffed closet.

fact 4: where will I put the clothes? and the furniture? and also the clothes? and don't forget about the shoes.

fact 5: not to mention the dust.

fact 6: and someone needs to choose the paint. and also: go buy the paint.

Ergo, I am awake at 2:45 a.m., writing this and revising my manuscript, and making a long list that attempts to cope with the limited number of days before we leave and the amount of stuff-schlepping that needs to occur, along with various family and social engagements, good heavens.

Stop the bleeding.

Today, Powell's, and we were there for several hours which means I did some damage, book-buying-wise. I have recently purchased poetry in several bookstores, so for those of you who are interested, here's some of what's on my poetry reading list, coming up:

Li-Young Lee's new book Behind My Eyes
The Endarkenment, by Jeffrey McDaniel
I Remember, Joe Brainard
In the Western Night: Collected Poems, Frank Bidart
Divagations by Stéphane Mallarmé
a collection by Nazim Hikmet
Translations from the Human Language, Terry Ehret
some translations of Euripides by Anne Carson (Grief Lessons)
Spell by Dan Beachy-Quick
a Selected Poems by Mahmoud Darwish
a collection of Paul Celan's poems (never read him!)

I am in the situation of having a whole lot of books--a whole lot!--so I feel I must establish a reading agenda. This means sorting and arranging the books. I feel it coming on, the sorting and the arranging. And then the reading. My sister-in-law bought me a wonderful book called A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel. I started to read it in the car on the way home from Powell's. Maybe I need more of a plan than "read the next book that falls into your lap, as long as you finish the book for your book club on time."

Earth Day Challenge: Day 6.

My Scotland daughter lives in a place where people recycle. She does not hesitate to point out to me that she's a much better recycler than I am, because she recycles glass.

She is, of course, technically correct, but in my own defensive defense, glass recycling is the kind of recycling that is hardest for us, because our curbside recycling doesn't take glass, and because there is no place close to us that takes glass. So it means figuring out a place that we occasionally frequent for other reasons, getting our act together to collect our glass recyclables, and remembering to take it when we go near the glass recycling place. But: I have located this information. The recycling location is near the houses of three of our children, and it takes glass.

What is it, can anyone tell me, about some places only recycling brown glass, others doing only clear glass, and still others doing clear, brown, and green glass?

Anyway, if you too want to recycle glass, you can find a lot of info here. And if you'd like to read a pantoum about the last quarter of tonight's basketball game, you can find it here.

Decorated.

Well in advance of Christmas! Before the grading is done! I give you the megastore Christmas tree!




Bonus: little grandson pictures from last Wednesday.



(The Scotland grandchildren, along with their Christmas joy, live here on the web, in case anyone has missed that fact.)