Happy Birthday, Magritte

Book Banning and How I've Come to Know and Appreciate Formulaic Sexual Literary Climaxes

At the therapeutic boarding school I work for, I have been elected as Fräulein Fahrenheit451 and when my girls approach me with baskets and boxes of hodgepodge novel collections both literary and trashy, both beautiful and perverted, both Boxcar Children and vampire romance, I can't help but feel like I am a foot taller and forty pounds thinner, with a sharply pulled back bun that makes my eyes stretch wider to further scrutinize, judge, accuse, and condemn.....the better to damn you into silence with, my pretty *cackle cackle*

It's an unfortunate position, and one that I gladly procrastinate by writing 2008 Holiday Goal Lists while the books on my desk continue to pile and pile. The math teacher I share a room with occasionally asks me how would I like it if he stacked protractors and graphing paper all over the desk. Well, I'd like it very much, sir. I think protractors are funny and nostalgic. But he would never get away with it. Girls have cut themselves with blunter objects, and thus the protractors get locked away on Weldon's side of the desk when math class is over.

I enjoy banning The Clique series (Sealed with a Diss, Bratfest at Tiffany's, Best Friends for Never) or any books where the biographical information on the authors include how they worked for bikini magazines at Laguna Beach before hosting various crap MTV programs until they realized their true calling in life: writing young adult trash fiction. I'll ban those all day. Send 'em my way.

I also don't have a problem banning most fantasy romance novels where super sexy werewolf bad boys with depressing pasts are suddenly smitten into borderline repentance and submission to the pale, frail, wonderfully misunderstood high school virgins who want so badly to find release from their "lame" responsibilities to family and community. Far better for the girl to drink the blood of the undead and chase adventures so long as she gets to sleep with the werewolf before she graduates. (Some of these are pretty graphic, too...I read a passage where a girl had to drink the blood leaking from the dying vampire's mouth as she made out with him in order to rid him of the poison he had unknowingly drank. It's beyond macabre...this is past Poe's burying still-beating hearts beneath the floorboards...it's out-and-out Elizabeth Bathory bleeding out her victims and taking baths in their blood to get aroused.)

Which brings me to my point: I am getting damn good at figuring out these cheap formulaic smut frameworks. Hand me a questionable grocery store aisle fiction book and I'll flip right to the bedroom scene. Go about 3/4 of the way in, just before things start to wrap up. Everything before that is just foreplay. Guaranteed if the main character girl meets a boy in the first or second chapter and the author describes anything about his build or his emotions or either of their lips or makes any kind of reference to water or food, they'll be sucking face or doing the deed for the novel's climax. It's getting depressing, really. I feel like Freud when he first realized everything must just come down to sex after all. All of the "problems" or "crises" in the stories are just subplots. It's not really about the spaceship looming closer and closer to the earth's atmosphere or the fact that the vampire boy faces an immortality of drinking other peoples' blood--the real issue is that all the characters are sexually frustrated and issues can't be resolved until there is some type of physical release.

My job is to decide which releases are appropriate for my at-risk teenage girls, most of which have had the type of ecstasy-influenced sexual experiments that I will never have, even if I do end up jumping in the sack with somebody someday. The making out descriptions are embarrassing, but pretty PG on average. I've had to submit myself to crap like this: "we were a wheel of tongues and fingers, and my joy was at its peak"--ugh, it's more of a turn-off than anything. I laugh when they try to get me to approve Nora Roberts' smut. I am an expert at WheresWaldo-ing her sexy scenes. And not because the whole book is full of sex either. They are literally a hundred and fifty pages of slow, painfully boring foreplay that eventually leads into these awful sexual release chapters that make me blush head to foot and I can't stop reading them once I find them because I am so curious of both the act itself and the Dirty Danny Tanner way she writes about it. It's so.......domestic. And nasty. All at the same time. It's like watching a Murder She Wrote episode where Angela Lansbury has to go undercover as a sex slave to catch Mr. Moorehead in confession for killing a prostitute that was also his daughter. I swear that was in a book I just banned. Maybe not.

Some banned books I keep on my desk so I can read them. I flirt with Clockwork Orange while the girls do their freewriting exercises. Some books I approve wholeheartedly but nobody confesses that the book is theirs because they didn't really want to read it in the first place. I have been thoroughly enjoying and fully approving Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I have to be careful with that one because it makes me laugh aloud. If no one takes responsibility for it by the time I finish it sometime next week, I'm just going to lend it to some of my favorite students who will appreciate it.

Book censorship is a drag. I hate letting smut go through just because it's PG-rated smut while I have to censor Sylvia Plath, Chuck Palahnuik, and Alice Walker for the maybe obvious reasons that some girls are not mature enough to separate the truth from the characters. Where we might read questions, they might read justifications. Where we might find open eyes and understanding, they might find allies and blind faith. The Bell Jar triggers real bell jars, The Fight Club triggers real fight clubs. The Color Purple gives them possible good reasons to experiment with each other in secret bathroom meetings (something we already have a problem with this week).

I feel so pessimistic about the literature I find my girls enthralled over. J.K. Rowling was great. I refuse to read Stephanie Meyers, though I certainly have enough friends who say her books are comparable--though certainly more shallow. When I was a teen, I actually enjoyed the books I read in English class--I devoured Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Samuel Beckett and Chaim Potok. That's why I became an English major. So I can't empathize completely with these girls who need more stepping stones to great literature. More Goosebumps series or whathaveyou.

So.....................maybe I'll write my own book for teenagers. Maybe. And I can tell you right now, it won't have anything to do with wizards, vampires, or boxcars. Well, maybe a train will be involved. Definitely ghosts. And the climax WON'T be a make-out scene. I'll throw the romance bit in there for kicks I suppose, but I refuse to write a novel that can be graphed out to mimic the formula for a roll in the hay. Although, if I do have a romance scene, it will definitely take place on a haystack. That's hot.

Holiday Goals 2008

A heavy thunderstorm I fell asleep to last night induced me into a series of oddly bloated weirdo dreams and I woke frequently in sweat and confusion. I vaguely recall wandering around in a robe at 1:23 a.m. and finding my roommate in a Cosby-influenced sweater and listening to "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree." I was confused, also dazed, and I patted the dog's head as I tried to find myself. Nora the Dog licked my hand and I drank a glass of water and went back to bed with a stomachache.

I slept like a drunken banshee the rest of the night, dozing deeply, but making hell out of my blankets and thrashing myself all out of sorts until 6:45 a.m. when I cracked open an eye slit and saw with a sparkle in my eye and a grin in my step a Christmas miracle of silent, blanketing snow--the first real patch this neck of the woods has seen this season. Despite my previous night's feverish stitch, I felt renewed, like I was nine-years-old again and looking forward to a whole two months of anticipations and school vacations.

One year ago, I was walking through patches of snow and Chewbacca mud (named so from how it made your feet look after murkily trudging through it for five hours) on the trail, but sunning away at poolsides from my apartment complex in Mesa, AZ, off the trail. This year, I want to make up for the past few years of rushed holiday seasons and set some goals on how to make the rest of 2008 positively nostalgic and dripping with holly berry sap and Christmas wassail.

HOLIDAY SEASON 2008 SUPER-IMPORTANT MEGA-GOALS

1. I will watch the following Gilliland Family Tradition Holiday Movies in no particular order: Home Alone, Chevy Chase's Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Elf (recently canonized), Mr. Krueger's Christmas, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (I know it's been getting a lot of attention on this blog, but for some reason we watch it every Thanksgiving).

2. I will also watch as many creepy old movies from when we were kids as I can find. This includes: horrifying claymation movies starring misfit toys or the California Raisins, Ernest Saves Christmas, the movie where Dudley Moore and John Lithgow eat puce-colored candycanes that make them fly around, that other movie where Dolly Pardon saves an orphanage of kids and flies around with Santa, and most definitely the classic cartoon celebrations of Garfield, Peanuts, and The Three Chipmunks. Oh, also, the cartoon where Chip and Dale run around inside a Christmas tree. And Disney's Christmas Carol. I'm going to spend a lot of time in front of the television.

3. I must also fulfill the Gilliland Family Tradition of putting ornaments on the tree while listening to the cassette tape of the Beach Boys' Christmas Album. "We Three Kings of Orient Are" is a particular favorite.

4. I will make fudge and eat it, too. I also want to learn to make five new different kinds of hoity-toity winter soups and share them with whoever is around.

5. I would like to frost a sugar cookie people family and then bite off their limbs one by one while the rest of them watch.

6. I plan to more fully utilize the mistletoe concept this year and take advantage of having my fellow only fifteen minutes away in December (as opposed to the two hours without traffic away he be today I say).

7. I'd like to read The Polar Express and shed a tear at the end, just like Mom always did. I don't have kids, so Nora the Dog will have to do.

8. I want all of my Christmas presents bought by November 20th. I know this doesn't give me much time. Damn it.

9. I must spend several entire days in my pajamas with the XBox 360 and William. No showering, no real meals, just bowls of holiday flavored trash and bottled waters. I'm going to rock Fable 2 and Fallout 3.

10. I want to wear a disgustingly cheesy Christmas sweater (extra points if it lights up somehow) and wear it either caroling, hay riding, sleigh riding, nativity viewing, or dancing with sugar plum fairies. And get my picture taken.

These goals were stupid. But I had to post something! It's the first day of snow!

Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.

So I had a Rory Gilmore moment at a fancy shmancy country club over the weekend.....I believe it was the first time someone has attempted to seduce me via the wine-'n-dine. Well, I drank water. I also ate two pork chops and two spring rolls filled with burgundy apples. I believe I impressed our somewhat metrosexual and portly waiter who had attempted vainly to steer me toward the salads for something "light." I've never been one much for "light." I mean, if you're going to pay more than ten bucks for a meal anyway, you may as well not spend it on lettuce and baby tomatoes.

Most of my students have grown up in country clubs and coached me all week on how I should act in such a hoity-toity environment. Despite my fellow's repeated assurances that the place "wasn't THAT fancy" (it was), I still enjoyed being alluded to all those crap Julia Roberts' movies where she is poor or Italian or a prostitute and someone rich (or from rich stock) pulls in to sweep her off her feet in a glamorous and passionate fashion.

My Brit. Lit. class at the south campus told me I shouldn't wear leg warmers to the club and I shouldn't shout things like "HOLLA!" which is how I occasionally begin class if my blood sugar is low. One of my favorite students, a snarky snowboarder with the longest blonde hippie hair this generation has seen, asked if I couldn't, as a favor to all the girls at school, go to the mall dressed as a hooker and finger all the expensive threads I could find at the Provo City Towne Center and wait for people to give me questioning glances at my fishnet tights and slut boots (my girls don't yet realize that just because THEY have a closet full of revealing outfits at home, not EVERYONE does), and then I was supposed to pull some credit cards out of my petite little red pleather purse and say: "Yeah, I got money! You don't think I got money?!"

Well, I didn't do that. But I did have a girlfriend doll me up with beefy curls and ringlets, eye shadow that would make Ferris Bueller's sister look tame, and lipstick to boot. Aubs, if you're reading this, I love you. My fellow told me I didn't need to look like that all the time, but it was a bit fun to role play the lord and lady bit for an evening. We took his dad's Mercedes Benz and the Janis Joplin inside my heart screamed against it but I just kept pulling the Rory Gilmore card. I can hobnob it and still retain my soul. At least for one night. I don't own a vase, so there is a bunch of flowers in a water pitcher on my desk at home (a real good mix of flowers, too, not roses...he opted for roses but figured I wasn't the rose type. I'm normally not one for bouquets in general......but they sure do spruce up my room!). Anyway, they spread out better in the water pitcher as opposed to a vase that would only constrict and formally compose the little plucked garden.

Ah, me. It is only fitting that a weekend full of fancies and fineries and Frightmares at Lagoon with the old gang, the new fella, and the sister Amanda should be followed up with a routine, ritualized, sheer-Emily push for SABOTAGE. Huzzah! My inner mongrel of escape and get-the-hell-out refuses to be bought off! The she-devil demon emerges, raising its pious, self-righteous, scared shiznatless, razor canined teethclaws, out for thrashing as passive-aggressively as humanly, nay subhumanly, possible at any and all hints towards commitment and shared identity and the subtle flaws and miscommunications that lurk in them waters. .......How terrifying to be a Brangelina, a PB&J, a Tomkat........a cankles or a moob.

Surprisingly, to both me and the she-demon, my fella didn't even really strike back, he just quieted the beast (not unlike that chick and her brother on Heroes....you know the couple. She gets panicky and her eyes turn black and start to bleed and kill off everybody around her, but then her brother can take her by the hands and stare into her eyes into her soul until the black enters his eyes and dissipates? Same story). There I was all, "KALI MA! KALI MAAAA!" with my hand ready to rip out somebody's heart, anybody's heart, in the name of whatever sick religion my soul runs to go sacrificing for when I get freaked out about the future, but he stopped me before I could pierce anything deeper than dying epidermis. Then he saw all my recent Facebook wall comments and we decided to go public. Hence, my change in status. I secretly despise my activity on the internet and Facebook is such a clever snake in my bag of procrastination tricks, but it seemed the thing to do yesterday afternoon. Holla! Next thing you know I'll be doing something REALLY crazy, like clearing the slate of wall-of-famer conquests you see on the picture panel to our right. It began as a film reel of my favorite people and memories, but no, it isn't completely unlike a wall of mounted animal heads, either. When those old boys go, then you'll know I'm really in it deep. In the meantime, it looks like I'm going to learn to skateboard, snowboard, and get a taste for punk music. Luckily, I already know how to climb and write real good. So.............haaaaaaaaaaaaaa............grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.........
whompwhompwhompwhompwhompwhomp.
Here goes nothing!

***jumps into the black space, lets go of the easy ledge, takes one last breath before the deep plunge, presses the red button of the Great Glass Elevator, [insert favorite related cliché or pop cultural reference here]***

I have a boyfriend.

"Welcome back.....your dreams were your ticket out....."

Well, well. My, my. ............(rock and roll can never die.)

Etta Place is moving on.....unfortunately not to Bolivia with two bank-robbing scoundrels. Then again, I did recently meet a nice, clever boy in Logan who mentioned bank-robbing as a potential weekend activity sometime.....also, we spied on Bolivian cultural dancers from the top of a haunted amphitheater last month....so that's something, yeah? I may have met a Butch Cassidy to my Etta Place after all, at least for the time being....... (We'll miss you, Paul Newman.)

I'm beating around the bush here. Rexburg. I'm moving back to Rexburg.

BYU-Idaho has offered me a year appointment to teachy Engrish starting this January. I went to the interview for the free gas, the hotel room, and the chance to play with Sharon. Plus, I love the drive. They had me teach two classes, including a section of English 331 where I introduced Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I used my old gargantuan anthology of Medieval British Literature and tried not to stare too much at pages where Darren Zufelt had repeatedly written the word "poop" in my Sir Gawain margins. I feel like this experience is very fitting for the overall aura of this upcoming move back, back, back in time and place. Me trying to act mature when my former self is glaring back at me from the corners of the Smith building.

I am excited--this is definitely a large step up the ladder, monetarily and career-wise. Yeah, sure, I'll apply for some PhD progs for 2009....what do I have to lose? Yet, I am caught. I yearn for two lives...to split myself and keep my fingers in my work here with my girls and send another half of me to my old home in Idaho to gallivant away with old professors and dreams.

I have a student who can't read. She acted horribly in class so I pulled her out and have been seeing her one-on-one in my free period. We are reading The Hiding Place a few pages at a time and she's really getting into it. We've been researching WWII and concentration camps together--not the cheeriest topic to delve into, but delving! Girls who responded so coldly to me when I first arrived are chums now, staying after school and talking books and futures. We cried together with their parents in Bryce Canyon and I gave many hugs beside the bonfire under the stars. My Brit. Lit. students insisted I eat dinner with them on Friday and go to their house's group therapy. I haven't told them anything about leaving yet. I ate and laughed with the girls, the same students I recently took with me to see the Greek tragedy Medea at BYU last month, where we giggled and gasped at all the screaming, roaring, and gnashing of teeth, how they afterward bounced up and down dancing to the radio all the way back to Spanish Fork, while I laughed and shouted for them to quit shaking the 15-passenger van I was trying to drive.

I looked at the girls' pictures on the refrigerator--beautiful young girls with long blonde hair or short red pigtails, swimming in the large cement pond out back that was originally set decades before the school was built as a means of putting out fires on the farm. Pictures of girls snowboarding off the dumpsters in the parking lot, pictures of 4th of July make-up and wacky sparkler hair, pictures of all of them sitting family reunion style on the front steps. I don't know what I'm trying to express. I went to group therapy--I've been to a few now, and I'm always amazed at the places these girls go together and the light that hits them in tears or laughter when they realize something about themselves, their families, their former boyfriends who abused them, their former friends who they can never go back to if they want to have a chance at staying clean. I wanted to take my girls to see Romeo and Juliet on Valentine's Day. I wanted to go on the river trip next May. I want to read the end of The Hiding Place with J.B. I want to see I.M. go home because she's come so far, even just since I've met her in June. I want to write that Tupac paper with C.L. and that Bob Marley paper with J.S. I want to have another toga party when I teach Greek tragedies again (we all wore bedsheets and ate grapes and pitas with hummus, toasting each other with Martinellis and destroying an old fake plant arrangement so we could have laurel crowns behind our ears).

But the wind is blowing. I feel it under the hair on my arms. I could never die in Provo. I would have fluttered off eventually. Just not so soon! Papworth got it right when he took me to lunch last week....he pulled me aside and told me, "Don't sweat it kid, you've got the job." I told him I wasn't sure if I wanted it, and thirty minutes into receiving advice and perspectives from the rest of the party we were with, Papworth broke in and said, "Don't waste your breath, everyone. This girl has a phobia of changes and decisions. I've known this kid for years. You should have seen her trying to make up her mind about missions. She'll figure it out. And she won't pick it just for the money, either."

Well, the money definitely influenced me. But the rest I figured out in the following nights, between me and God. So this is it. This is where I take the running leap into the black vacuous hole of the future that somehow has coincided with the sepia-painted fantasies of my past.......thar be ghosts in them thar Rexburg hills. She's a different place than I knew from 2000 to 2003--there are new roads, real restaurants, a temple, and movie theaters that cost more than two bucks. Campus itself is a spiderweb of detours and construction: the Smith annex gone, the old bookstore gone, even whole parking lots gone. But I'm no fool. I know what visions creep through the upper levels of the McKay library and the sage-brushed expanses of land that surround Beaverdick Park. (Apologies for any of you cyberfriends who found this page by Googling "beaverdick"......it's all Mormons and virginity up in this site here.)

I'm nervous to run into 19-year-old Ghost Emily. Would she be proud or disappointed of her 26-year-old future self for returning to this dusty red city of Mill Hollow, Fongs, Craigo's, Horkley's? Will I find myself walking the snowy moonlit midnights retracing my steps from Hogi-Yogi to La Jolla? From American Manor to the David O. McKay Writing Center? Will I stalk those old houses, railroad tracks, and rivers, waiting for Trev, Jen, Serena, Joe, Jade, and all the rest to creep out and greet me as if never a day has passed? Will I start wearing toothbrush bracelets and keeping candy in my pockets? Will I be able to resist sinking back, but retain maturity, live as faculty, as returned missionary, as future possible PhD candidate in this bowl of memories both bitter and treasured?

I don't know. I am terrified as much as I am intrigued. I thought I had sluffed academia like a snakeskin. But being interviewed by old professors, old friends, walking into their offices and remembering the same old books on their shelves that they had when I knew them when--suddenly I want it again. I want the conversations, the debates, the theory, composition, competition. I love my job. I love my girls. I ache when I think of leaving my classroom full of magazine collages, Huck Finn displays, cards from girls, the stupid black crepe paper I've streamed along the room for Halloween. Sometimes you just have to leave and hope you left whatever legacy you were supposed to attend to in whatever territory you had become a citizen. I think I live my life like an old computer game......every stage, every scenario is crucial to the overall ending of the game, otherwise why would the programmer have created it? Every piece of inventory will have some kind of useful purpose at some point. Well. I don't know what I'm saying. I have until Christmas here and I'm going work my ass off. I probably shouldn't say ass anymore, either. Sexy Rexyburg. Hot damn.


Who'd of thought they'd lead ya? Who'd of thought they'd lead ya?

Freedom, Escape, and a Big Fat Leviathan Post About What I Miss About the Trail

Half the campus left with their parents for Bryce Canyon this morning. All the bags and vehicles and gear and general running around the parking lot like headless chickens tired me out significantly as I tried not to mow anyone over with my little Hyundai Elantra. I'm excited to go out with the next wave of girls on Sunday and I'm pleased that my school principal wants me to stay out for another four days, twice as long as any of the other teachers.

I'm excited, I'm sad. I know it's not going to be like my adventures in Arizona. We'll be camping in tents right off from the road, drinking bottled waters and eating breakfast burritos from huge grills and cobblers from Dutch ovens. I'm pulling out my old trail shirt and Dickies and wearing all my leather satchels, bracelets, and headbands, but I'm afraid they're going to seem like a costume instead of a persona. There will be nothing death-defying, nothing hard or gritty or extremely, powerfully beautiful. Instead, I'll be climbing trees trying to flee from worried, rich parents who want passionately for me to know just how much more important their child is from all the other children and what I must do better in my classroom to get their money's worth.

So here is another list. A list of the freedoms I miss from walking the desert mesas of the Bloody Basin, of Cherry Creek. These are the things I dream about when my classroom walls keep out the sun and the wind and the florescent lighting fogs my eyes until I'd rather keep the lights off and skulk in the darkness, waiting for my next opportunity to hop into a dinged up Chevy Suburban and kick dust all the way to nowhere, until nowhere becomes everywhere and the blue sky hangs like a magnet over the burning, thriving soil of the Sonoran.

THINGS I MISS ABOUT THE TRAIL:

1. You can go to the bathroom anywhere. You want to be away from water, but besides that, you don't even need toilet paper. Juniper needles are not only effective, but antiseptic. There is no greater personal moment than the one you take at the break of dawn on the top of sun-licked mesa looking over vast valleys of dark purplish hills littered with saguaro cacti. I will never not love going to the bathroom outside.

2. Finding and revisiting secret places. Nothing beats hiking down lonely creek beds that haven't seen human footsteps in years or more to suddenly find a storybook grove of trees next a deep crooked elbow of clear water and being able to stay there for two nights. Shelters become established, bookshelves are created from logs and branches, hammocks go up and socks get dried out officially. Anybody who has read My Side of the Mountain or The Boxcar Children know that just because you don't have a letter of certificate doesn't mean you don't own a place. I have whole rooms and sanctuaries waiting for me in the desert, scattered on invisible paths I know well enough to walk without compass or map.

3. Finding your own water. Nothing is less anti-climatic then going over to the sink and filling up a tall glass of tap water. On the trail, water is life and water is everything. You spend full days searching for good water and anyone who has walked the trail long enough knows what it's like not to find it and what it's like to find it after so long. There is a book called The Search for Delicious that was my favorite book until I discovered Roald Dahl in second grade. The people of the kingdom looked far and wide for the definition of "delicious" until they all got tuckered out after a full day of battles in the teeming heat of a summer's day. They went down to the creek at the center of the woods and declared the cool fresh water as the true meaning of "delicious." Fruity, I know, but I was, like, seven-years-old. And there were elves in it.

4. Dropping pack after a full day of sweaty hiking. Walking the trail means your back is sweaty from about 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Especially when that's the week you are carrying a satchel of soapstone for carving or obsidian for pressure flaking. You feel top heavy and powerful--like a rhino. Finding that perfect campsite and letting that tarp full of all your worldly possessions slide tumbling to the dusty ground at your feet is like sprouting wings. It's like your whole body has become an orifice for air and you are breathing in from all pores. Then, you collapse back onto it and your pack is the most plush, warm, comfortable pillow of your life.

5. Harvest Moons. Nothing beats a low-lying orange-tinged harvest moon creeping up over the cowtank while you are chewing the fat with a band of grungy, adorable teenage boys around a healthy blaze of a fire you gathered your own firewood for from the surrounding woods. The moon makes you feel like Butch Cassidy, like Ichabod Crane, like Shakespeare's elvish Puck.

6. Cheesecake. I would love to escape to the trail for a fat, heavy, dirty-looking cheesecake. The crust is made with flour and brown sugar and enough water to make dough. You press the dough around the bottom of your tin cup to make a bowl about 1.5-2 inches deep and cook it in ashes and coals until it is golden brown and not doughy anymore. You slide the crust bowl from off your cup and mix three parts powdered milk with one part tang or Gatorade powder (lemon is oh, so good) or if you are lucky enough to have a hot chocolate packet or cinnamon with you, dear heavens above it is so delectable. You add just the slightest amount of water to make a thick cheesecake paste and you fill your crust with it. Walnuts and almond shavings are also recommended. Then, you'll want to take a flaming stick over the top of your cake and bake the top to fully enhance the cheesecake facade. Let it sit awhile in the cool of night. Take a bite. Make yourself sick. It'll totally be worth it. Save it for the morning if you want, but don't come whining to me if it starts to rain or blizzard on it tonight.

7. Nightwatch. I know, seriously. I complained about it for months, but nothing beats sitting around the embers of a fire that already contains so many jokes, so many story-tellings, so many crises averted and concerns resolved or in the midst of resolving. It's lonely and deep and dark. It gets to the point you are relieved and entertained by the tarantula that lurks in the shadows ahead or the scorpion that freaks out and runs away because he was hiding underneath the book you just picked up. Drifting between dreams and consciousness, watching over the sleeping mounds around you like a shepherd over sleeping sheep. I'll never forget the blizzarding night that I was joined by three of my boys who weren't successful at keeping the snow from drifting under their tarps and wetting everything they had. The four off us tended a fire of snapping, steaming wet sticks and told stories until they slept all around me and I watched to make sure they didn't sleep too close to the licking of the flames.

8. I miss being on the top of everything. I'm trying to not quote Titanic here. I miss hiking up beastly, angry, loose-rocked, snake-filled, catclawed hillsides and cliff faces and at the end of the day standing on the edge of a slight ridged finger that rides across the face of the earth and drops down on all sides. I love being above the vultures and the hawks, seeing where creeks came from and where they're heading, tipping my hat towards peaks we reached on earlier weeks, peaks we'll get to in coming weeks. I love hooting, echoing, fading. I love rowdy bands of boys and hyper bands of girls whooping and hollering and singing as we buttslide all the way down to Cherry Creek.

9. I miss the bands. I miss the mini-families. I miss the adventures and the camaraderie and the trust. I miss the sittings and looking into people's eyes and feeling my heart fit to burst when someone else feels the prickings and lets themselves tear up or lets themselves get quiet or lets themselves laugh for the first time in too long. I miss sitting against rocks and letting teenage boys talk to me and ask me questions while we file stones into beads and pendants. I miss girls lying along grassy hillsides with me, eating purple papago lily blossoms and talking about our dreams and our truths and our fears. I miss hot houses and Olbas Oil. I miss walking onto the trail and hearing former bands call out my name and scream out the Japanese words I taught them. I miss naming people after noble symbols of nature, of animals, of trees, of rocks and weather. I miss their last weeks on the trail and feeling them trying to hold and suck dry all their last moments. I miss escaping into the desert and keeping them dry and safe. I miss hiding them away from all the shit that happens in high schools and neighborhoods and lonely, confusing hotel rooms and rich, decadent, deceiving parties.

10. Number ten. What to say. I can't believe this blog post got as long and drawn-out as it has. I just wanted to say a few words as I sit in this classroom and babysit the math classes while the math teacher is camping. I don't even know who if anyone is reading this. I miss the simplicity of the trail. I miss the checklist of things to do each week, each day, each hour. I miss the pulse checks, the steady documentation of goings on, the no-tracing and the pow-wows. I miss everyone being on the same page and working with the same mindset. We were never perfect at it--never. And I like where I'm at now....I really do. But going to see the secretary isn't like walking into the offices I left in Arizona. Therapists don't know me really and staff don't know me really either. I miss not being on the same boat and in the same crew as everybody else. And now, I'll stop whining and get back to work.

Finito.

Top Ten Sexiest Men Who Also Happened to be Funny in the 60s & 70s

I made a list of all the people I am in love with as I was driving back to Provo the other day. A high majority of the sexiest men who ever lived also happen to be about 90-years-old today and not generally regarded as sexy from a mass media perspective. I'd like to recognize them today for the beautiful, intelligent men that they were (some have aged better than others) and make an overall plea to the gods of love to send their doppelgängers and blood soul kindred bosom brothers my way puh-leeeeease. These boys in Provo are a snore. I highly doubt a date with Bill Murray would consist of sitting around watching that crap Transformers movie in a dark basement........every weekend.

From the Least-Most-Sexy to the Sexiest:

10. Robin Williams, Mork & Mindy

If David Bowie was my sexual awakening, then Robin Williams was my first crush. He was just so cuddly and kind and bright-eyed. I think it also helped that I was eight-years-old and watching from a 12-inch circa 1980s antennae television that blurred out most of his rampant chest hair. But you have to admit he's sexy in Dead Poets Society, too. Also, Hook. Also, Jumanji.

9. Rick Moranis

"Gee that Seymour, he's a cutie....but if not he's got inner beauty....." Just look at those lips, those innocent eyes, those amazing performances in Ghostbusters and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. How could you not be attracted to Rick Moranis. The man is a hidden gem and I only wish I were shorter. And older. And lived in Hollywood.

8. Dan Akroyd

Dan Akroyd was such a cutie in the 70s. I loved Dr. Raymond Stantz and his cheerful, naive, kind manners. He was funny and selfless and good. And when he and Steve Martin shook their fingers in the air and twisted and shouted their foreign bellbottomed booties back and forth across their bachelor pad as two wild and crazy guys, I was overcome. Dan Akroyd doesn't get enough sexy credit in this world.

7. Christopher Walken

Need I say more.

5.Chevy Chase

"I'm Chevy Chase's 26-year-old Mormon mistress, and you're not."

5. Richard Dreyfuss

There's something sexy about an ambitious man, whether it's a passion for killing sharks, sculpting mountains out of mashed potatoes, cruising the strip, or killing Bob. The curly hair and stubble doesn't hurt, either.

4. Bill Murray

I've had a crush on Bill Murray since he showed me how paranoid, terrified, freakishly worried people can be funny and cute and kind and cuddly after all. I was remarkably jealous of Scarlet Johannson's role in Lost in Translation. I never cease to be amazed by Bill Murray and his choices of roles. He's the best thing that ever happened to Wes Anderson.

3. Curly-Haired Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks must have hid his hyper, giggling, yelling, fantastic genes in his curly locks of wonderful hair. Then, he grew out his hair or chopped his curls and lost all his most wonderful characteristics. Sorry, but it's true. I pined over him in The Money Pit and would fantasize about someday going home to find him dangling from my ceiling in a large braided rug.

2. Dick Van Dyke

Oh lovely, lovely Dick Van Dyke. That grin, that wink, that hair, that nose...he's tall, too. I have loved Dick Van Dyke since I could just barely know how to read. He's the reason I watched Mary Poppins. He's the only reason anyone should ever sit through three hours of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I'm still attracted to him and his bushy white mustache when I watch Diagnosis Murder with my mom.

1. John Ritter

John Ritter, the love of my life.... I don't know.....there is just something about a large grin and a pair of bellbottoms with consistent tripping over ottomans (see Dick Van Dyke, above), falling over chairs, buckets of water falling on heads, running into walls that just melts my heart. Where has slapstick gone? Don't people know that the very quickest way to win my heart is to trip over a stool in a horrible messy way and look up grinning toothily at me from the floor? I'll be yours, baby, yours! Big collars and bellbottoms don't hurt, either! John Ritter, I hope you are resting in peace. If I never find anyone in this life, I will find you and guide you to the light. I will flirt to convert you from heaven.

THE END

Gorax

The future's all yours, you lousy bicycles.

Last week I found myself at an informal high school buddy reunion in Clinton, Utah. I held their babies, laughed behind the back of my hand at a poor 4-year-old boy who hated everything and everyone and showed it, and let two toddlers hand-feed me trail mix like I was a baby doe at the zoo. I discussed morning commutes with the husbands and let my long lost girlfriends tell me my "time will come" and someone is bound to come along and discover the hidden marriageable gems within my prickly and childish skin. I have to say I enjoyed my time with the babies most of all. I like having my hair petted and food jammed between my teeth.

Most of you that frequent this page are already wedded and bedded and babied. So really, no, you cannot relate to this post. Let me be defensive here (grin, wink). More so than even fantasizing about a husband (I've long since swept those old dreams from my mind....I'm sure I'll be married eventually, but I'm afraid my standards aren't as lofty as I once envisioned. I wanted to marry Gilbert Grape, Laurie Laurence, Teddy Kent, Dr. Raymond Stantz, Jack Kelly, Dickon Sowerby. These people aren't real), I've begun to be haunted by unborn children.

Gross, right? I know. But what can I do? It's just happening! Whenever I take long drives or bike rides or walks, whenever I can't go back to sleep or I'm in the house by myself, I'm visited by dark, shaggy-haired little kids who are pretty good-natured for the most part and clever for their ages. Yeah, okay? I'm jealous. Envious. GREENLY envious. I secretly despise as much as admire all of you married and procreated blood brothers out there. I'm sorry! I'm apologizing! It is what it is. This is this. I feel as barren and desolate as the desert I came from. I am overwhelmed by the chain of events that must inevitably come before I have my son, my daughter. The time seems without boundaries--as vast and unpredictable as gray-clouded mornings that seem always just on the verge of breaking up or downpouring. Well.

I find myself protective of my teenage girls at school. They know me pretty well now, and I am instilled with a confidence and gentle reproving that have led many girls to trust me with their stories and respect me for the expectations I hold with them. I adore them, and love several. I am proud of my girls who arrived a month ago, ornery and bristly as any catclaw I ever hiked through bare-armed, who come to class smiling now, joking with me and pelting me with bags of flour after I got them good in our Steal the Flag Flour War last Friday. I go home and weep for the tally marks they have cut into the fleshy sides of their forearms and biceps, their upper thighs. I cry for the bastards who took advantage, who pressured them into so many addictions and depressions, for the parents who stocked their homes with alcohol, pot, pornography. I want to make a home for my girls. I want to be a home-builder. I want to mother and nurture and nest and beat off adversaries with beak and claw. I love going to work where everyone is working so hard at taking off masks, bearing what they strived for so long to hide away, secret into corners. Maybe that's why I'm unveiling my biological clock today, maybe I just want attention. Who knows where thoughts come from? They just do.

Well, ghost kids really aren't that bad to have around. I promise I won't bring them along on any first dates. For my friends who have people to go home to tonight and dinners to make for all your hungry mouths, hug them extra tight tonight. I'm just saying, you can't be too grateful for what you have. I'll try to remember that myself. Over and out.

Identity Crisis

I'm living in Provo now and surprisingly loving it. Truly. I live south enough to avoid most college freshmen, and I am within walking distance of an Asian marketplace, a historic city library, a cemetery, and a lonely gazebo I can watch lightning storms in with the company of old smoking men. I met my roommate, a 28-year-old successful artist girl avec very large dog, on Craigslist, but I'm adamant it was fate that brought us together. We get along brilliantly...she even loves What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Wipeout! Truly a match made by the angels. Last night was really the first chance we had to successfully beef up our connection by sharing dirt on former educational pursuits, failed relationships, hopes, and dreams. I even found out that my collection of primitive living almanacs and how-to books rival her own library. Shock!

Anyway, midnight came and we were still story-swapping last evening. I lay against the extremely large and comfortable couch in our front room, staring at the ceiling and playing with my hair when she says, "Has anyone ever told you you look just like Winnie Cooper?"


Well, I have. So, this selfish post is dedicated to the characters I've been told consistently and by multiple people throughout my life that I look just like. Winnie Cooper definitely takes number one. I've been told that since I was 12. My secret crush was the first to make the connection and I wanted so much for him to be my Kevin Arnold. Didn't happen.

I've also been told by later crushes that I looked just like Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth. If only. She is beautiful. I would love to have a friend do my hair huge and brilliant like her's in that snow globe dancing ball scene with super hot David Bowie. My friend Russ claims that Mary Poppins was his sexual awakening movie. Mine was the snow globe scene from Labyrinth.


Recently I've had people suggest I remind them of Kiera Knightley dressed as a boy in the Pirates movies. I think "dressed as a boy" is the key element....I don't see it, personally, but again, consistently and repeatedly this is what I've been told.


I also apparently look like Pixar characters (I know what's that like...my arch nemesis from 2001, Chris Bailey, looks JUST like the boy in Toy Story II that sings "You've Got a Friend in Me to his Woody puppet doll and hugs him all happily. Spitting image, man). The girl from The Incredibles and the tiny girl from Monsters, Inc. are supposedly what I would look like computer animated.



Finally, I took one of those lame "Who do you look like?" online celebrity programs where you upload a picture of yourself and they tell you who you look like? Well, the computer thinks I look like Kiera Knightley, Sandra Bullock, Liv Tyler, and no other than Danny Devito himself.

McCarthy's The Road

I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road in 48 hours. Books have been making me cry lately, I'm not sure if it's hormones or what, but I wept like a child when I finished this last night at midnight. I am haunted, again. I've always had a fascination and "a thing" for apocalyptic novels, but I have never read anything as realistic and rational and absolutely sickeningly terrifying as this read. There is no hope and all hope. It is empty, blank, dry, lifeless, dark, and cold. Yet it stands as one of the bravest and most wrenchingly poignant stories of love I have ever experienced. Don't read this book if you like apocalyptic novels to end with the tiny sprout of green poking through the dead earth at the end of the story. McCarthy does not sugarcoat, and he does not soften his blows and risk kitsch endings. However, he gleams more light from dead cold ashes than I thought possible. This book has forced me to realign my priorities, reconsider my loved ones and my life, and spend fifty more bucks on food storage (salt will be the new gold, people!).
Anyway, if you haven't read it, read it. I'm considering teaching it to my high school girls during 4th term but I'm worried it will only increase their suicidal tendencies (I was close to giving up halfway through the novel, it was so bleak and so terribly hopeless). If any of you have thoughts, I'd like to consider them.

Oh, and hopefully the movie will be as incredible as No Country For Old Men. As I was reading The Road, I was trying to decide who would make a good actor for the father and I am pleased that Viggo Mortensen has taken the role. The movie comes out in November, an appropriate time to revisit the novel of so many chilled nights and snowy mornings.

What........? Why..........? How........?

I can't take anymore, Mr. Lucas. You have crappified so many things....I didn't think it could get worse.....really.....I mean, I was patient, you're an older man now, not quite as up on your game as you used to be.....I just thought, let him do this but know that it isn't real. None if it. Star Wars I-III are figments of the collective unconsciousness's imagination to aid a dying movie director into a slightly cushier retirement.

But no longer. I'm not gonna take it. This--what the hell is this? It looks like an extended Final Fantasy cut scene. I thought the trailer was another lame video game ad. Pixar's Toy Story came out in 1995 and they still had better-looking graphics. How dare you give people these cartoony crap images of Yoda, Jabba the Hut, even C3PO..... What gives you the right? Why haven't we rebelled yet? Why haven't the pure golden nerds of the 70s and 80s generation ganged up and assassinated Lucas yet? For his own good! I can't........I feel so much anger.....my hands.....they keep clenching.....I feel an extraordinary energy inside my bones, building to somehow prevent the shame and embarrassment this movie will inevitably bring upon itself. Why. WHY?!

I watched Hellboy II for five dollars in West Jordan the other evening. It was more charismatic, more beautiful, more charming and interesting and visually captivating than anything Lucas has done in this century. The creatures in Hellboy II made Darth Maul look like a Disney villain. No, worse. Maleficent was way scarier than Darth Maul. I wash my hands of George Lucas from now til forever. Sorry, old friend.

Stormy Weather Fever Reading

Northern Utah this week has been a beautiful mess of thunder, lightning, and double rainbows. I escaped several times this week to my dead grandfather's old garage past the yellow blossom thorn bushes and into his cemetery of massive rusting Caterpillar construction equipment; Gardner, Inc. semi-trucks with breaking hinges and rat droppings on the chapped leather seats; aging tractors my grandfather built practically from his own two hands. It has been haunting and poignant. I want to walk to the cemetery down the lane and lie across his grave, the communion between himself and mine being as raw as it has been as I've retraced his old haunts, slept in his old bed in his old room, kept my clothing in the drawers he once kept his. There is a small brass key I found behind his chest that I like to try in different locks around the house and yard.

I've been reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, too, climbing into the driver's seat of Grandpa's CS-323C Vibratory Soil Compactor to get out of the rain, to sink deeper and deeper into Brontë's fever dreams about Heathcliff and his Catherines, of Mrs. Nelly Dean and her clever, humble, tender narration of her several masters and her sideline participation in their selfish bourgeois dramas. I couldn't help but fall victim to their temper tantrums and their angry, vengeful, bitter, torn hearts and subsequent acts of passion. I despised, then pitied, then revered Mr. Edgar Linton and his poor stupid younger sister. Even when I found Heathcliff's demeanor and choice of actions to be despicable and demonic, I wept for him and cried real tears when he dug graves and tore into coffins to reach, in any possible way, the love and light he had selfishly tried to tuck away since his horrendous, abusive boyhood.

I wept for Hareton and fell in love with his Yorkshire accent. I even felt for awful Hindley when Nelly saw his boyish ghost sitting innocently atop a stone wall in the thick of the foggy moors. I am so grateful for Emily's ending to her only novel as I thought for sure the story would have no redemption or hope after all as I neared the closing chapters. I was far from disappointed.

I feel spooked and morbidly active. I dozed as I finished the novel, lying prostate on the antique sofa in my grandma's parlor, waking to the claps of thunder and lightning flashes that echoed through the huge windows overlooking the dirt road running west from the house. I read during a heavy downpour of rain about Heathcliff starving himself on the wet moors beyond the Heights and following the ghost of his other half, his blood soul sister to the kirkyard and back to the house and back to the woods. I know it isn't right, I know these things aren't true--soulmates and such--but I sank my teeth in anyway and bit hard against Heathcliff's agony and wasted revenges and felt Emily should not be critiqued for creating his character in all his monstrosity. His tragic tale manured the soil in his death for what progeny was left of the Earnshaws and Lintons and I think the young people at the close of the novel know more of gratitude for peace and tranquility than they could have otherwise. A beautiful, haunting tale, and one that I will keep by my nightstand for future windy dark afternoons and feverish illnesses.

I will also add that the whole story would have been moot if the society of the novel was not so entirely restrained to two households in the middle of nowhere, to the extreme isolation that cousins had no choice but to marry cousins.

And to follow up from my last blog post, The X-Files movie sucked. Sorry David Duchovny. If any of you all want to really experience the X-Files, go buy seasons 1-3 and enjoy episodes starring more celebrities than you might remember from the 1990s.....Seth Green plays an awesome long haired hoodlum in one of the very first episodes and I just watched a Season 3 episode last week where Jack Black plays the long-haired nerd who owns a Video Arcade and dies in a pile of his own quarters. That episode is also nice for the Sonic the Hedgehog level 1 music playing consistently in the background, not to mention the James' songs that hit the jukebox just before another victim bites it. Revisit them! You can't be disappointed!