Top Ten List: Memoirs of a Couch Potato, or How I Must Have Got My Bangs

There's lots about it I could say, but today I just don't feel like talking trail.

Instead, here's a list of the horrible sitcoms I wish I could watch a marathon of while I do laundry today. I don't have channels on the 15" television standing on a crate next to the faux fireplace in my apartment. The only movies my roommates own are musicals about Glenn Miller or old obscure Disney movies with the huskier teen Jodie Foster (but it's Candleshoe...I would totally watch Foster in Freaky Friday if we had it here and now).

So, without further ado, here's the top ten list of bad 80s sitcoms I would watch from now til 2 a.m. if I had access to a marathon of them. These are shows I would stay in my pajamas for, eat tuna casserole right out of the pot for, and grow bleary-eyed while eating ice cream after midnight for. But only on a laundry day.

10. Mr. Belvedere. One of television's greatest plugs for adult literacy, Mr. Belvedere's nightly journal-writes I believe are one of the reasons I decided to major in English in the first place. When he holds his not-really-his family close together from behind the couch, he is holding in a powerful safety net against loneliness and despair and even at eight-years-old I could understand this and even at 25-years-old I like to take the behind-the-couch stance for holiday family pictures. Even still, I wish I had an old-timey lamp to journal-write by at the end of the day, just before the credits roll.




9. Small Wonder.
It's a little red-headed girl who is a robot with the voice of a demon-possessed teenage boy smoker. What is not fabulous about that? And what better episode to start off with but the one when the little non-robot boy gives her a milkshake which makes her short out and spin around in short jerks and spasms, yelling out monotone nonsense.....what happened to that great little girl actress? She was a hoot. She really was a small wonder.




8. Clarissa Explains it All.
I hated this stupid show. But I used to watch hours and hours of it to avoid homework. I kind of want to watch hours and hours of it again just for the nostalgia of it. But I really did hate this stupid show. Melissa Joan Hart bugged me and I hated the way she'd just write her own computer games with such skill and ease. I was always trying to do that as a kid but never had the right stuff for it. But the IDEAS....I had the greatest ideas....I could've made millions, won awards....




7. The Adventures of Pete & Pete.
Before there was Salute Your Shorts and Hey Dude! there was Pete & Pete. I think this series was probably Nickelodeon's first real messed-up crazy original show since You Can't Do That on Television. It really paved the way for all the little TV shows they have now....it was a bit brilliant and more than a bit creepy and strange. The two brothers were both named Pete, and their adventures were nostalgic, generic, and as weird as anything Outer Limits could pull. Where Clarissa annoyed me, Pete & Pete disturbed me. I didn't fully enjoy either show, but I watched them both with a fascination and attention that lends towards lava lamp stupor. A real great theme song, always takes me back to lawn sprinklers when I hear it.




6. Laverne and Shirley.

I would like to be the Laverne to someone's Shirley (any takers?). I am THIS close to putting elaborate cursive E's on all of my shirts. Get rid of Squiggy and his side-kick and you have one fabulous way to kill a lazy afternoon.




5. Welcome Back Kotter.
Oh Vinnie Barbarino, you're such a babe. Who wouldn't want to be a sweathog? I still kind of want to name one of my boys Gabe. That's the kind of tender, warm influence Mista Kottair had on me as a young impressionable teen. Gabriel. I could pull off having a Gabriel.




4. Three's Company.
I've always been a sucker for Three's Company marathons. John Ritter is just so damned hot. John Ritter, wherever in heaven you are, I'm still in love with you. So darned cute. With his big ole' bell bottoms and pearly snap shirts and his adorably and comfortably predictive slapstick comic routines....he took Van Dyke's ottoman trips to whole new levels. I'm going to blog a whole entry on just Ritter one of these days.




3. Perfect Strangers.
I actually used to watch this one the fall of 2001 around 10:30, between classes at BYU-I. I would cook two packets of instant Quaker oatmeal, cozy up with myself on the couch, and watch two back-to-back episodes of Larry and Balky before having to be back up on campus for humanities. I lived with Cousin Erin at the time--ironically we have been referring to each other as Cousin Larry and Cousin Balky since the tender ages of ten and eleven. We'll both admit to have done the dance of joy together at Christmas parties in our day (I am Balky, obviously). And does anyone remember the creepy Halloween episode from the T.G.I.F. days? Scared the pantz offa me.




2. Mork & Mindy.
I grew up having an enormous crush on Robin Williams. I used to daydream about being Mindy (I always thought she had the cutest hair) and how Mork and I would go fly kites and fly around in giant eggs wearing red spandex with rainbow suspenders.....maybe this is too much information. Mork & Mindy was one of those big people TV shows I learned to look forward to watching with my Mom before kids my age should have had an interest in big people TV shows. And does anyone else remember when Mork showed up on episodes of Happy Days? I swear that was real.




1. Punky Brewster.
Back in our days, orphans were all the rage. What with Roald Dahl books, Pippi Longstockings and Escape to Witch Mountain, having no parents and making it all on your own was in. All great things happened to orphans and many of us birthed in the early 80s maybe even remember playing Orphans the way kids before us played House. Or maybe it was just me after all. In any case, Punky was probably the most influential television program for me as a child. I cried every time they played the episode where Cherry visits her parents' grave, and I cried when Punky's adopted father has a heart attack. I was on pins and needles when Punky's friend drank poison and Punky had to read the back of the bottle to know to give her milk (another 80s TV plug for literacy). I was so scared when Punky gets trapped inside the refrigerator while playing hide-and-seek. I felt like I was coming-of-age, too, when Punky put pudding in balloons and stuck them in her shirt to amuse her friends in that tree-house with different colored wooden steps nailed to the tree. Yes, I would watch Punky Brewster all day long and into the night if it were on.

Well, did I miss any?

Oh, You Teenage Angst!

Four 13-year-old girls. That's it. That's all I was up against. I only had to take four 13-year-old girls through 20 miles of bushwhacking through catclaw mimosa and cholla cacti patches, climbing up to ridges and following fingers down into Cherry Creek and then up to Ash Creek. I had done it with a boys' band only four weeks earlier and only found the Friday hike to be somewhat challenging, mostly due to dehydration and repeated run-ins with rattlesnakes under century plants and non-rattler snakes in trees (picture: me, pushing away a branch to walk through a bush, only to realize up close that said branch not only had hypnotizing beady little eyes but was also slithering closer to my face, followed by yelping and hand-waving and flash-dancing backwards into the boys behind me). We decided Arizona might as well just introduce the Black Mamba to the Sonoran Desert to give us a new element of hard-core. The Black Mamba! That was our week's war cry: "Hey all! Shall we take this rock-ridden windy-as-hell switchback pack trail down to Cherry or sit on our butts and let the rock slides carry us wither-they-will?" "LET'S RIDE THIS MOTHER DOWN! FOR THE BLACK MAMBAS!!" And now I need new trail pants.

BUT. Black mambas are nothing compared to the death-breath mutterings and lip-pursed grimacing from 13-year-old girls on the rag. All I kept thinking throughout the week was how much I needed to call my mom to apologize for everything I ever said, thought, did, acted like I was going to do, whispered, groaned, moaned, or otherwise felt from 7th to 10th grade. Mood swings my eye. I could have bedded down with Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, El Niño all three before closing my eyes in front of those four little girls.....those girls, with their cute little grins and dimples one minute and those red-patchy cheeks and fangs with sassy little retorts the next. Or worse--the quiet "I-don't-even-care-anymore-so-leave-me-alone-it-doesn't-matter" clam-in-its-shell cop-out....(how many hyphens is it going to take in this post to get this point across?).

I remember feeling the way they do. The world was just barely unfurling for me and expectation and dreaming was everything. I envy them in a strange way, but mostly I pity them. They think they can have it all, they aren't going to end up like these weird adults in front of them, with all their insecurities and baggage--they are DIFFERENT. They are only 13, yet they can bag a 19-year-old man because they are more mature, more understanding, more grown up than everyone else they go to school with. I vacillated between supreme frustration at the constant bickering--"Emily! Brittany's taking the fire-poking stick to make a cat hole! WHY aren't you DOING anything?! Brittany! Brittany! Bring back the stick! Emily! Make Brittany bring it back! Omigawd, she's already half-way up the hill! EMMMALEEEEEEE! Cory keeps PUSHING me! I was NOT sitting on your food bag but even if I was maybe if you just put your own stuff away once-in-a-while you retard, I hate this stupid band, this place sucks so big.........".....I lost my train of thought with this sentence just recalling the incessant whining. Or when they sat. When they just decided, you know, they can't MAKE me hike. This is MY program. So they sit down, in the dirt, five miles in either direction to the closest source of water, at five in the afternoon. My shoulders sag, my jaw juts out with a peculiar twitching in my left eyelash, and I sit down with the girls to listen to their sad stories until they decide they are done breaking after all. Or I lecture first, wave my finger menacingly in the air, pretend to go on without them, come back, pace a bit, and then fall into the shoulder-sagging, fine-I'll-sit-down-and-listen-to-you stance and move from there.

However, I think mostly I worry. Frustrations aside, these are the little girls I caught Canyon Treefrogs with, admiring how good the sucker hands were at clinging to our hands and arms and laughing when I found out they'll play dead and sit in the palm of your hand if you put them on their backs. We caught and ate crawdads together, mutually grossed-out and excited about ripping off their heads and cracking their skeletons, smearing the green intestinal goo and tearing out the black poop chute for a ridiculously small morsel of real meat that smells like a real Red Lobster restaurant. These are little girls doing things at home I haven't even done. I want to neuter the male predators searching out junior high pre-teens on MySpace, I want to lock up the high school seniors and weird cousins and that-one-uncle that takes advantage of these girls, these girls with their young eyes with new long lashes and new high cheek bones and new noses less little-kiddish than the nose I still sport. These girls don't even have underarm hair yet. So what do we do. What can we do? What can I do except hike all day with these moody, puberty-stricken kids who think they are the Firsts, the Only Ones, the Newests and the Nexts, and when the sun goes down, what can I do except hike them on to water in the moonlight and starlight, pointing out the catclaw bushes that point themselves out at me by gashing long red lines across my arm from where they skulk in the shadows of the manzanita and the juniper? What can I do except take them to water, convince them to bust a coal and blow it into fire, cook a cup of lentils with lots of powdered cheese for the next day's energy? And all this in the hopes that they will want to talk, and that hopefully when they talk they will think, and that hopefully when they think they will become awake to the world, to themselves, to the space outside of making out in front of the lockers or having sex in his car in the middle of the night, to the space outside of tree houses and porn mags in those tree houses. That hopefully they will become awake to a space that's safe, that's real, because there has to be a safe place that's real for everybody, doesn't there have to be?

Even if black mamba snakes do get introduced into the Arizona wildernesses, it'll be a safer haven than what waits for these kids in their public school bathrooms. If only raising a teenager was as easy as reminding them to bury their poop and to drink six canteens of water a day. If only the most rebellion a mother ever saw from her daughter was her sixty minute refusal to hike up a hill. And thus ends my cynical approach to this past week's experiences. I am Clear Moon Full Night, and I have spoken.

Broken Wings and Cow Tank

Sorry it's been a while....I wish I could write several posts to record all my trail diaries here, but I won't make you few faithful friends wade through all the blather of it. In short: my first week back survival camping with at-risk youth was painful and terrible. I almost went back to my parents' basement, snake-ridden regardless. I pulled my groin, I fell into dehydration, I couldn't eat more than chicken broth at night, I felt fatigue for the first real time. I let someone else carry my pack up a mountain. My pride, my energy, my heart and my eyes were dim and flat. They made me leader and trainer, but I felt like I'd been put into the program as a patient, which maybe isn't necessarily a bad outlook on any week.

I returned home that week wondering whether I should be in Arizona at all. That week, Elder Holland spoke at my stake conference, my first Sunday in my new ward. It was the first time in over 15 years that an apostle spoke in a Mesa stake conference they said. It was his typical hellfire and damnation approach, and it left everyone in laughter and tears and hearts that swelled both heavy and light which is a horrible explanation but all I've got for you today.

He spoke of night journeys, of the lack of light and happiness, of sleepless worry and angst....I thought of many of you and wished you could have heard E. Holland shout at us with something like Moroni's anger for us not to dare to think God doesn't love us. Not to dare leave the church during those long nights, not to dare think God is unaware, angry, dismissing, or unfeeling. He said God loves broken things, that it takes broken clouds to get rain, broken earth to get grain, broken grain to get bread. He told us to stay calm if we felt God breaking our heart, to not dare bail when God is only halfway through. He promised us that God keeps the altar close, that after our heart has been broken and placed upon that altar, that He has promised to quickly return us a more powerful, better heart in return for what we trusted Him with. He told us again and again that God loves his broken things the most.

I don't have too much to say, I'll come back later this week and fill in this space with funny stories about the boy band I walked with a rotation ago, or the silly girls I ran around with this last week, but for now I'll just give one brief moment I had at a cow tank in Tonto National Forest last Sunday, while most of the rest of you were watching conference and the snow drift past your windows.

It was warm, I was sunning myself in the muddy banks around the cow tank after filling my canteens and dropping them with two drops Clorox bleach each. We didn't hike that day, but I sawed off a limb with a bent blade to coal-blow a juniper bowl that has already begun to crack. I don't care, I'm finishing it anyway, out of sheer stubbornness. I had just left a sitting with another staff member where we discussed all the world's great questions of soul and spirit.

For those of you unacquainted with cow tanks, they are man-made puddles of thick water meant for cattle and attractive to all other forest beasties, including javelina, cougar, rattlesnake, and the occasional band of at-risk youth. The worst cowtank water I ever had left green flecks on my teeth and tasted like expensive Asian tea, or so I told my band of girls last summer. We shivered as it went down and made sarcastic guesses as to how much money we could make off it to the posh elite crowds their own parents sometimes belong to. Sometimes cowtanks are dry as a bone, I've slept in dry cowtanks before, waterless and cold on the shit-filled hay bed bottoms. The cowtank I was currently at looked somewhat better than this one:



I noticed a butterfly floating along the surface of the middle of the murky water doing the dead man's float, and I wanted it. It was an Arizona Sister Butterfly, Adelpha bredowii eulalia; we'd seen them all week flying through the oaks and sucking moisture from between the rocks around the creekbeds and water pockets. I wanted to put her in my journal and keep her wings to remember the week by. So I stood, dusted myself off and grabbed a long broken limb from out of a nearby dying tree. As I pulled the thin parchment creature across the water to my side of the shore, I was sickeningly shocked to see the butterfly was still alive and stepped back to watch her stand up and begin to sun her tattered, broken wings in the 3:00 sun.

I sat beside her, which made her nervous, but she couldn't go anywhere so she stayed next to me, her wings at a perfect angle to the sun's light and heat. As her wings dried, she began to flutter them and slowly flap them forward and back, forward and back. I was enthralled, entranced.

I called my girls from my camp with two hoots, and they obediently came from between the trees, ragged, smoky, dirty, smelly, with twigs in their hair. I loved their sweet, ornery faces and almost laughed out loud at the sight of their scared faces, wondering if I found unburied poo or some other disgrace that would constitute a family pow-wow and lecture. Instead, I showed them the butterfly I felt I had saved from an untimely drowning and let them call her Mona. I let Mona walk along my hand, the three girls' heads bobbing all around my wrist, watching the butterfly's long tongue extend and feel all around the hair on my knuckles until, satisfied or confused, she rolled her tongue back up in an impressive spiral and let it disappear magically into her tiny face.

We took turns holding Mona and talked about how horrible it would be to spend all morning face down in a cow tank and how miraculous she could fly again by letting the sun dry all the cow dung and dirty water from her fragile wings. We talked about what it meant to have heavy wings and what kind of light in our lives can act as that healing warmth.

Unfortunately for my great metaphor, as soon as Mona had the strength, she flew from one girl's arm right back into the damned cow tank. As we grabbed another long branch to pull her back out, we laughing talked about how sometimes we need several new beginnings and how it isn't necessarily the end if we fly straight back into the cow tank.

I guess I don't have much more to say right now....I have to get ready to go into the office, I need to stop by the bank. My budget's tighter than it's been in years, but my heart feels stronger in contrast. My body has readjusted to the trail and I am no longer the slowest hiker. But I'm likewise becoming more and more aware of the cowtanks I'm dead-man-floating in, though I deny it and justify it most of the time. Well, I'm in no state to say anything real profound here and now, ......I figured I'd better post something though so you faithful friends don't just stop reading me altogether. Thanks for all the recent nudging comments, sorry I've been so absent. You should all come to Arizona. Snow is overrated.

Weekend in Tucson

It was my uttermost pleasure to spend a couple of days with the Watson clan in Tucson this past weekend. Before I head out on the trail tomorrow morning, I wanted to post a few pictures and give a large global shout-out to Jaren and Charity in thanks for a time well had. (And I've got a black pair of glasses as well, so I'll pick up that red pair in a few weeks. And Charity, I'm still destroyed from Dancer in the Dark. Sharon, I finally saw it. Destroyed. Demolished. Punched in the vocal chord. Stabbed with a tipless ice pick. Forced to drink the sacrificial blood of cocker spaniel puppies. After the credits rolled, Charity stayed up a few extra minutes with me in the 3 a.m. darkness and talked me through the aftermath. But this is a different post.)

Here's some pictures of the night hike the Watsons took me on the night before I left. What isn't included are pictures of the three coyotes Jaren almost ran over in his car, and neither is the snake that he really really really really wanted to see and that we actually never saw. He did find a stick that looked pretty snake-like...Charity and I both agree it probably was a snake before Moses took care of it.

Actually, the first picture is of a Sonoran Hot Dog. Hot damn but I haven't had such a beast of a meal in a bun before. Yea, verily verily, for I have said, a bacon-wrapped dog covered in beans and tomatoes and Mexican dip held gently in a soft sweet bun brings me to tears of delicious gratitude. I had two that day, and I'll have two hundred more before I die. God bless the Sonoran hot dog and God bless the Watsons for introducing it into my culinary culture.

These pictures of the night hike aren't the greatest. I didn't major in photography. So before you know-it-alls snub me for my poor taste in camera option or how much or how little flash I used, I actually like the ghostliness of these scenes and figure it's as good as I can do for now.




The Watson Clan children are pretty adorable. The youngest doesn't warm up easy to strangers and it is with sheer pride and gloating that I can boast how she began calling me "Grandma" by the time I left. Although, for future notice Amelia, I'd rather be referred to as your Aunt. No offense to Grandmas all around, including you Mrs. Norris. I'm just saying. I'm still a virgin. No virgin is ever really ready to be called a Grandma. I'm just saying.

These spiders were everywhere, with great beautiful webs that defy all my strongest grasps on mathematics and geometrical equations. I don't know but that spiders are extremely brilliant perfectionists. They're like Asians and Chinese characters...I'm not racist, I'm serious. You can always tell when an American is writing kanji, I don't care how many times you've seen The Karate Kid. There's a gene being spread about over there that reeks of precision and nimble, accurate fingers. I think in the future, we'll be able to harness this power from the DNA of spiders. Squares will be squares, A's will look like A's. We'll all be able to write a "g" so it looks like the "g" those old typewriters used to spit out. The one that looks like a figure 8 with an apple stem. The kind of "g" I am using in my blog to describe "g". I bet a spider could figure that one out real easy, if it wanted to.

Unfortunately, we gawked for too long and our spider friend decided having his web in broad headlamplight in front of these jokers wasn't going to get him any grub, so he began to swiftly tear his crib down. We felt bad, though at the same time, the process was beautiful. His handle on gravity and balance was impressive.





The kids finally started nodding off, and were all but asleep as we made our way back to the car (let me add here to getting the van into the parking lot was a feat on all itself.....I'll just say it involved two of us stepping down on tire-piercing spikes to get it through the exit side of the parking area. Hmm, I suppose that's actually all there was to that story. It seemed much more exciting at the time. Like Paul Newman sawing the heads off parking meters or something).

And ten minutes after this picture was taken.....

And this last picture is just to prove that I really was also there.

Thanks again Jaren and Charity for a time well spent. I'm excited to come down again soon, in the meantime, I found an apartment of girls to jump into and I hope I'm making the right decision. I feel I'll be more social, though the family I'm staying with claims I won't be able to practice the same sacrifices that would prepare me for family living. You all know I'm not in this place to be occupationally single for the rest of my life, right? I yearn for a family living. Don't I? Am I really subconsciously holding onto a wanderlust nomad selfish free spirit existence? Is this why I don't call Paul from Institute back even though he declared Official Crushdom on me a week ago? No, damn it. I didn't call him back because he freaked me out by confessing a great crush before he knew my name. Where are all the normal people and will I fit in when I find them. Question mark. Things to ponder whilst I be on the trail. Better to live with three single girls than someone else's family at my age, isn't it? Isn't it? Me oh my, the indecisions still fly. Somebody buy me a magic 8 ball for crying out loud.

Return to AZ

This is this.

When my best friend Sharon and I couldn't get into a rodeo in Rigby a couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves instead watching Hairspray from the Edwards Theater in Idaho Falls. We indulged ourselves horribly, giggling at John Travolta in a fat suit and heels with an accent so horrible his career ought to take off again just from how self-deprecating he's become since the cocky days of Vinnie Barbarino and Mista' Kottair. Then, Christopher Walken knocked me gutless with his deadpan slapstic that included x-ray glasses and an ape suit. I remember my first love for Walken transpiring probably about the time I saw him as Max Shreck in the horrible but entertaining Keaton Batman movie II when I was ten. After Hairspray, Sharon turned to me and said, "Now do you want to see a real Christopher Walken movie?"

So we opened an account at Blockbuster and rented Deer Hunter. Darren, you've mentioned that rated R movies are one possible golden ticket to hell, so let me warn you right now that your soul may be at stake for watching this movie. Let me also say that your soul might also be at stake for not watching. Should I suggest Clean Flicks, my Provo man? (I'm not even going to get into that debate.) [AUTHOR'S NOTE: It has come to my attention that friend Darren actually does not disregard films for an R rating and most probably also does not approve of Clean Flicks in general. Or the fact that I called him a Provo man. Even though he is one. My apologies to all for marring this image and associating this my great friend with the large group of people who confine themselves to PG ratings and won't let their children watch Beauty and Beast because Belle's yellow dress is so low cut. If I don't let my children watch Beauty and the Beast it will be because I don't want to foster the deus ex machina approach to solving problems or that death is the great enemy and shedding a tear will conquer it or that pretty girls should always get their way. But that's another can of worms I'm still working out. Bottom line: I retract my statement concerning D.Z. and movie ratings. Apologies, friend, apologies.]



And I'm not going to do the film justice here and now because there is a righteous boiling black cloud thunder/rain/hellfire/damnation/cats-and-dogs storm a-brewing just outside my windows and I must very soon run off to watch lightning crack through the sky from my backyard. It is a royal haunted apocalyptic storm thrashing about.....the kind of day you might catch Tim Curry in a sewer drain. The streets are flooded and I kid you not that I just saw a striking strand of HOT PINK lightning bolt through the air, lighting up my front room windows. I can hardly concentrate on Vietnamese Russian roulette at a time like this.

So let me just say THIS. Rescue Dawn
is an incredible film, especially for Zahn and Bale. But it pales, thins, folds in comparison to Walken, DeNiro, and Streep in Deer Hunter. The pacing, the characters, the music, the language, the pitiful hometown in coal country Pennsylvania are so bitterly human and honest that Sharon and I both stayed wide riveted awake until the film finished at 4:30 a.m. (late even for us). I am changed from this movie, from the poet in Walken, from the diseased, nightmarish evils of warfare and survival. This film deserved all the awards it won in 1978 and it deserves to be remembered and re-viewed. Whatever Rescue Dawn was lacking in spirituality, realism, and heart, The Deer Hunter provides, though the result is necessarily gritty and unbearably disturbing. I just had to back up my last post with this one before going on to a new subject. The sky is still green....I'm going to go heat up a slice of pizza and watch the rain fall now.

Survival Camping

My brother Will and I just got home from seeing Rescue Dawn in a theater peopled with another dozen or so various riff raff....mainly older war vets with their frail, white-haired wives who held hands and both guffawed at certain bitterly humorous places in the film. A few boys my age hung around the back, one with a beard and a thin face who I maybe would have approached if I were a more forward type of girl. A couple of girls in flip flops left the movie about twenty minutes in and came back at the credits to pick up their dates.

It wasn't one of those movies a person goes back to see again and again. Steve Zahn scored hugely in my mind. His sunken eyes and bitter, broken spirit were worlds away from his goofball "presidential flashcard" antics in That Thing You Do. This film ripped me up while at the same time sickeningly enticed me to look forward to survival camping in Arizona again this fall. I have a lot of questions about wilderness therapy and what all the point of "survival camp" really is. I always felt the word "survival" is a bit heavy when you take into consideration the real survival stories like Dieter Dengler's or Chris McCandless's (whose story is also coming out in the theaters soon). Though...if the person doesn't survive, I suppose you can't classify it as a survival story....?

But McCandless or Everett Ruess or even Edward Abbey aren't really the same type of survivor (erm...wannabe survivor?) as someone who didn't just go off and live in the desert of their own accord. Dieter became a hero for not dying, but would Aron Ralston, the guy who cut off his own arm in a Utah canyon, also be considered a hero for not dying? If he had died, wouldn't he have just been considered foolish? Wouldn't he have become just another worst-case scenario to warn hikers and climbers about in order to get them to pay attention in safety seminars? Does it take a war story to make a survival story heroic? Surely, Aron would have racked higher on the scales had he at least saved some babies on the way home.

Today is the day I would have hopped a flight to Japan, had I decided to go. With a sore throat and inflamed lymph nodes, I admit I am happy not to be on such a plane ride at this point in time. Still, I recognize the sacrifice of not going, and, still unsure why I wasn't supposed to take the opportunity, I bide my time trying to make up for it, trying to escape to whatever other adventure will bring me close to something real, something worth doing. Things I can only see and feel while I'm tied down to nobody but myself.

Ed Abbey kept himself in the desert saying, "I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock." With a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes and having just walked out of a movie about Vietnam, I confess, currently, that Abbey's words only make me want to lie down in a bed and eat otter pops while I can. "Gather ye popsicles while ye may...."

The cynic in me also knows that not every young teenager I'll walk with in the desert will see a juniper tree the way Abbey sees it. Wilderness therapy obviously isn't a sure deal for anybody. And in the few months I experienced the desert last year, I had enough scrapes with real danger to know it's folly to trust that Nature won't cream you just because you consider what you're doing as valiant or even God's will. Though at certain points, trust in God's hand is about all you can lean against. Still, even after leading seven teenage girls crabwalking over loose shale five feet from a 30-foot dropoff into dry creekbed in the middle of Bronco Canyon, letting the girls rest in the laughable shade of two-foot mesquite while the other leader, Gina, and I wept in prayer in a crook of rock a few feet away, I still feel "survival" is a heavy word. Yet didn't I change from the moment? Is this what I'm going back to look for? The raw starkness of man vs. wild....as close to a real survival story I'll allow myself, knowing that I have a med kit, radio, GPS, and satellite phones to ensure I'll definitely live through real danger?

As a girl, I'm not supposed to understand this escape as much as a man would. Okay, I'll grant you that. I can feel the urge to nest when it comes out. I find comfort in sweeping myself a place in the sand; I enjoy camping in the same spot for two or three days at a time. I always felt more comfortable when Huckleberry and Jim had made it safely back to their raft--their home base. Even so, there's something about the weight of everything I need on my back, the choice solitary opportunity of appreciating the scenery while squatting behind a tree, of falling asleep to the stars above the cliffs ahead while coyotes howl in the distance. There's something about drinking water out of shallow divets in boulders or chewing the sugary bases of century plants, or of sitting back on your heels next to other dirty people and watching the dance of a hundred fireflies twinkling over watercress in the dusk. Even to be able to distinguish how one person smells from another I find intimate. There are people I walked the trail with whom I loved so much, I have their smell memorized as if they were peppermint or strawberries. Maybe it's that I have to have companionship...maybe that's the girl in me. I think so. It's in my blood to sniff out partnerships, not trails. Maybe? ....Maybe I'm still a bit feverish.

Reasons to Quit Academia

I just got my teaching evaluations back from my last semester of school. Well, hot damn. They were the worst yet. Statistically, I was still above average and given an overall "well done" but the supplemental comments were biting and immature. I'm ready to throw in the hat and take up a secretarial job, one where I can blend into the background and be required of no more creativity than to find different ways to say, "How may I transfer your call?"

Sure, maybe the last semester before graduating is supposed to be tough. Along with teaching two classes of sophomore composition, I was in the middle of revising the final drafts of my thesis and meeting for various defenses (that seemed to only get held between my two classes, requiring me to run across campus). I can blame this on my classes being held in dorm rooms, one room being completely unusable one morning because the door lock had run out of batteries. So we sat in a dim, dingy commons room next to a broken full screen television, underneath movie posters of the most intellectually challenging showcase (Star Trek: Nemesis, Never Been Kissed, Zoolander, Cheaper By the Dozen, I Know What You Did Last Summer). I could blame this on the lack of working dry erase markers, the complete lack of any kind of technology and of broken technology with missing parts I don't realize don't work until after I've wheeled big screen televisions and three foot high speakers across campus to the dorms in a wheelbarrow provided by the media warehouse. I could blame this on one classroom's replacement of erasers with large dirty white rags and a white erase board that actually pressed into the wall as I wrote on it, requiring me to place my other hand on the board to steady my writing area.

But I was optimistic. I knew I wouldn't score as high this semester because my mind really was focused on graduating and filling out all the red tape. But perhaps, after all, I am still too young to be teaching, too immature and too close to the students put in my classes. Yes, it IS difficult to compose myself academically when an old district leader signs up for my class, or his girlfriend signs up the next semester. Ward members who think it will be fun or easy to take my class sign up and label me immoral or disgruntled when I ask them to read essays entitled "Shitty First Drafts" or Tim O'Brien pieces. I do not like finding out I'm dating my students' roommates. I do not like hearing from my roommates that my students want to date me. I do not like having friends tell me they cannot date me because I've been an English teacher to all of their friends.

I get discouraged when one asshole writes in his teaching evaluation, "You drove the point home and were easy on the eyes." I do not like getting other evaluations that end with, "Overall great job, Babe." I am tired and I am finished. Some students plead for an easier workload while others chastise me for making class so mindless and cheap. Some students despise the reading assignments while others remark as an afterthought, "you should have had us read stuff sometimes." Why didn't you give us stricter deadlines? they ask, after I granted them an extension because they begged and begged for an additional weekend. Why all the redundancy about the rhetorical triangle? they ask. It is because your compositions obviously lacked the most simple components and the further I drilled them into your frizzed out, earbudded, selfish minds the better your essays actually became.

The hardest bit of feeling this way towards my classes is that before I know how they truly feel, I really appreciate and enjoy all of them. Yes, these evaluations are the worst I've ever received. But regardless, I really enjoyed my students and tried as well as I could at the time to make class rewarding and interesting. And now I am tired. One idiot a year ago confided in me that when he took my class, he stayed awake by staring at my ass. How the hell am I supposed to engage students in persuasive thesis statements and library research when I am nothing more than a piece of low quality meat to these jerks who ought to know better. I should have taught elementary school. Because at least then I could have avoided these know-it-all 23-year-old boys who just got their trophy wives and learned everything they needed to know on their missions and define their idea of "bringing home the bacon" as undressing their foolish, childish, rambling English instructor in their minds.

And THIS is ALL I will ever say about THAT.

Raising My Glass of Kittens to Both Future, Past

I'm almost done cleaning my room. For those of you who know me, you will understand what a feat this is. It got so bad, I admit, I had to pull the mattress out of my room and into the family room because I could no longer get from the door to my bed. In my defense, I have not allowed myself more than 48 hours at a time in my parents' house since school got out. I dumped everything from my apartment into the middle of my floor and scavenged for pants and books for each next trip/tour/job I subsequently embarked on. I had never been so bad. My mother took pictures behind my back and showed them to my Aunt Lori who didn't believe it until she saw it.

It is now possible to once again frolic in my room. I'm working on the borders now. I bought two bookshelves last night and spent the evening organizing all the books I've collected and boxed and stacked during the past ten years. I cancelled my Planetarium Marathon with Cagefighter Kev to do all this (but mostly because my Planetarium card is still somewhere in the hidden crannies of my border stacks). I did manage to find my USB cord to my camera and I distinctly remember taking it out of my room and setting it "HERE, so I won't lose it." But now I don't remember where HERE was...... So I pulled a picture from my 75 cent copy of Cats Quarterly I found somewhere past the seven consecutive aisles of fireworks at Odd Lots in Bushkill, PA. I sometimes find myself collecting weird and tacky cat mementos because of the ten freakiest men with feline obsessions found on this planet, I know three of them. And you never know when you're going to need to make a birthday card or a mix-cd cover. Plus, the wine glass full of cats appropriately reminds me of the fabled Poconos Palace located approx. five minutes from my Aunt Lori's home, where the "world famous" 7-foot champagne glass whirlpool honeymoon suites await your eager arrival. Along with trailer parks and several thousand white-tailed deer, the Poconos Mountains are known for ridiculously kinky and cheap love getaways. Oh the giggling I did in the Poconos....it was most seriously the finest few days I've had with my aunt and grandmother in years. I'm a bit disappointed that the champagne glass whirlpool is opaque....it is a rare conversation topic to have with your grandmother--that of what a naked body must look like smashed against the strange angles and concave shape of a see-through champagne glass....surely not romantic. I mean, how would one even sit in a manner inoffensive to the one watching from below? I wouldn't be the one to get in first, that's for sure.

So actual current pictures of the friends back east still to come. In the meantime, I've expanded my blog profile with small gems I've unearthed in the mines of my bedroom so I can look as sufficiently self-absorbed as I am at this point of existence. It is a rough patch to clean out one's closets. This, Jen, is why I procrastinate room-cleaning. It's hard on my heart. You never know what hidden memory is lost beneath last semester's papers or within that old backpack kept behind the clothes hamper. But surprisingly, I've done well this time. Maybe this means I'm finally at peace with all the soreness of the past. Maybe I am growing up a bit. I feel good, cathartic. I'm learning to let go, throw things out. Clear my drawers, level the playing field for whatever is coming next.

But I'm still not getting rid of my Grover doll, and I just KNOW I'll figure out what to make with this old salvaged seatbelt if I hang onto it for another five years.....