Category: anxiety

A Few Thoughts on This Whole Pandemic Thing (And Why I’m Actually Not, Surprisingly, Freaking Out Right Now)

On By angeliquejamailIn anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic23 Comments

I know everyone is a little on edge right now, and that’s understandable. As a person who openly struggles with anxiety, I really do get it. And I want to start this post by acknowledging that I am definitely taking the coronavirus seriously. It needs to be taken seriously, and we have a moral responsibility to do everything we can to slow down the spread of this disease. I truly believe that and am enacting appropriate measures to that end, not just because I don’t want any more people to catch it but also because our health care system needs to have a chance to catch up and not be overwhelmed. Flatten the curve.

However, I am not panicking. And — again — as someone who openly struggles with anxiety —  and in particular with anxiety when it comes to my health — this probably seems just plain weird. But I want to explain why I’m not freaking out right now, and why I think the rest of us shouldn’t freak out, either.

First, I have some thoughts about why there are long lines at grocery stores, why some of their shelves are empty, why several of the people I’ve encountered lately have been running around half-rabid with panic-furrowed faces. You can read umpteen million articles online about the psychology of scarcity (real or perceived) and the fear-contagion effect, and it’s probably a good idea to do so if you tend toward worrying. You can also read plenty of pieces about the real science and facts behind COVID-19 that will probably calm you down; I recommend this too. And if you want a nerdy and fascinating look at why soap and water are super effective against this and other viruses, check out this tweet-thread.

But the main thing I want to remember during this frenetic moment is that we have been here before. Over the last couple of days, a lot of the worst anxiety I’ve encountered has centered around the idea that “nothing like this has ever happened before,” or the also-popular “we’ve just never seen anything like this before.” And while it’s true that we have not in recent memory encountered a global pandemic while also being “led” by anyone quite like this, if we break the current situation down to some fundamental parts, you’ll see we have been through this before — and we came out of it.

Remember other difficult times? For some of you, that might be 9/11. For some, hurricanes or other natural disasters. The older you are, the more frames of reference you have. We came through those, but they freaked us out while they were ongoing. Sometimes transition times are like watching something scary happening in slow-motion. You think you have an idea of how it’s going to end up, but the moment just keeps going and elongates the apprehension. (And in hindsight, that apprehension gets compressed and some of that feeling goes away.)

So yes, we have indeed been through this before, if you break down what we are currently experiencing into two main parts: transition and information overload.

Transition:
*  We are in a moment when things are happening quickly around us. Events are being cancelled, places are closing down, our lives are filled with uncertainty. (For some of us, that profound and existential uncertainty has been going on for a good three years at least. This current situation is only compounding it, which makes everything feel exponentially worse.) All of this may feel disappointing at best and unnerving at worst.
*  That uncertainty about the future can be terrifying. So people go to the grocery store and stock up on things related to things that they feel vulnerable about, like toilet paper. (It doesn’t matter that COVID-19 isn’t a diarrheal illness.) Other people see them panic-buying and do it, too. That’s part of the fear-contagion effect. The thing is, panic-buying gives us the illusion of control over our situation, and then when we can’t do it because the shelves are empty, we have the sense of no control, and that causes panic. (See how this cycle feeds itself? Stop panic-buying, please.)
*  Anytime we go into a period of transition, things can feel unsettled, so we can feel unmoored. But the important thing to remember about transitions is that they are, by nature, temporary. We are moving into a series of new habits — working from home and social-distancing, for example — that will probably start to feel normal-ish, or at least not wildly untethered, once we adapt to them. Humans as a species are eminently adaptable, which often bodes well for us.

Information Overload:
*  Let’s talk about our reliance on being plugged in. If humans are adaptable, we must recognize that our newest generation is a little bit cyborg: our technology has become an extension of our selves. As such, we may feel glued to our screens, and those screens may be popping up with push notifications every few minutes with “updates” telling us every time another case of coronavirus has been confirmed in a region near us.
*  While information can be helpful for many people, this hyper-vigilance might actually do more harm than good, because the subconscious urgency of the word “alert” and the phrase “breaking news” causes us, frankly, to go into freak-out mode. This keeps eyeballs on the news, which in turn enriches the people who advertise on the news. It might be worthwhile to just stay away from broadcast news for a little while.
*  Any time we’re in an evolving situation, “news” is going to come in fast and furious and sometimes incorrect. If we checked on it only once a day (or twice a day, spaced out significantly like in the morning and in the evening — but not at bedtime), we would probably be a little more reliably updated and would probably feel less panicked about it.
*  Seriously, unplug. It helps. Find hobbies that aren’t online. If you already have them, enjoy them. We cancelled our Spring Break trip and are staying home. I’m planning to make some visual art and read some books and am really looking forward to it! I find reading fiction and making art to be therapeutic and generally beneficial to my life. What works for you?

Again, I know the coronavirus is something to take seriously. And I am. (See also: We cancelled our vacation and are staying home and practicing social distancing.) We’re washing our hands and disinfecting surfaces. We’re not taking unnecessary risks. And we’re also not panicking.

Bear in mind the actual facts:
*  This virus can be killed with the most ordinary stuff: soap and water. Slay it. It is in your power to do so. Do it.
*  Cases of COVID-19 are going to increase as more people get tested. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s more of it out there, because it was probably already out there before we started paying attention to it. More people are getting tested now, so it’s going to look like it’s increasing.
*  For the vast majority of cases, this is a relatively mild illness, and the vast majority of people do recover from it. People who are in especially vulnerable populations are more at risk, but most people are not “especially vulnerable,” and we should do what we can to help protect the ones who are. Use common sense and follow the science on this one.
*  This is all going to get worse before it gets better, in part because the news is going to get worse before it gets better. But it will get better.

Avoid speculation and catastrophic thinking. And if you’re prone to anxiety, as I am, this requires conscious effort. But it will help.

In the meantime, what kinds of things do you like to do to de-stress? Share it in the comments below so we can all find some fun new self-care techniques!

 

Poem-A-Day: Jeannie Gambill

On By angeliquejamailIn anxiety, children, Jeannie Gambill, National Poetry Month, parenthood, parenting, poetry7 Comments

My children are eleven and about-to-be-thirteen. Sometimes I wonder whether I will ever stop worrying about them. I’m confident the answer is likely no.

Sometimes at school events, I test this. I’ve been teaching at this school for eighteen years. They’ve been attending this school since they were four. They treat the campus — which, after all, is a comparatively safe one most of the time — like they have the run of it. This is not uncommon among faculty children who have grown up within its walls and gates.

But I still worry. Part of me wants to walk them to their building every morning and pick them up from it after school. (I don’t, though, not anymore.) And sometimes when we go to a game, I even let them run off and play — excuse me, “hang out” — with their friends on the other side of the fields, and I plant myself in the bleachers as if it were the only place I wanted to be.

On such occasions I like to tell my friends I’m snapping off a helicopter blade.

At the last reading I gave, several poets were presenting their work, and one of them, Jeannie Gambill, read this one. It resonated, to say the least.

I sometimes think I will start to relax when my kids are past the age of twenty-five. Jeannie assures me this will not be the case.

***

Directive
to a grown daughter

When you ride your motorcycle
wear your helmet.
Not the half helmet.
Wear your full helmet
always.
When you go out on your motorcycle
take only streets
where
there are no cars
no trucks
no buses
no other moving vehicles.
Do not go out in the rain.
Never on the freeways.
When you decide instead
to go on your bicycle
be faithful to all of these
instructions. The routes
you’ve shown us you take to work
through neighborhoods
on your bicycle, there are
cars parked on these narrow
streets. Be careful. It’s hard
to see you.
Your motorcycle surely lost
from view when you are in traffic.
Do not go into the traffic.
Do not go anyplace where
there is danger. Stay
blocks away from any vehicle
in which the driver
is un-focused. Please say
you will do these things.
When you train on the highways
in the hills   when you want
the challenge   need the long
stretch   the cumulative miles
when you bike into the hills

when you take your bicycle
round the curve   slow
on the upward incline
and   down   down   gaining speed
the curve   go round the curve
go round and down the hill’s
curve     not too fast.
When you line it out
the song of you
adhere please
to this
entreaty.

***

Jeannie Gambill’s poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Cenizo, The Weight of Addition: An Anthology of Texas Poetry, Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston, and the Texas Poetry Calendars of 2011 and 2012. She was recipient of the 2011 Dana Award for Poetry, and a winner in the Artlines Competition (2012). She has been a featured poet in Houston’s Public Poetry Reading Series and was a finalist in the Ruth G. Hardman/Nimrod Poetry Competition. She lives in Bellaire, Texas.

Poem-A-Day: Ani diFranco

On By angeliquejamailIn Ani diFranco, anxiety, culture, music, National Poetry Month, Poem-A-Day, poetry, spoken word poetry2 Comments

So, the connection and crossover between poetry and song is storied and long. I think it was Paul Otremba, in a poetry workshop I was taking, who once suggested (and I’m paraphrasing) that if the song lyrics could stand on their own, if they didn’t need the experience of the music behind them to be meaningful or have an impact, they were probably also poetry. This seems like as wonderful an explanation as any I’ve ever heard about where these two forms overlap.

One of my favorite artists, without question, is the incomparable Ani diFranco. I love her work. Sometimes her albums (and her concerts) offer us a bit of spoken-word poetry, and because I’m keen to demonstrate that poetry comes to us in sometimes unexpected places and unexpected ways, tonight I’m sharing this song/poem of hers.

“Tamburitza Lingua” appears on the Reveling/Reckoning double album. It captures, adeptly, the existential angst of life in America at the apprehensive end of the last century and precarious dawning of this one, intertwined with the existential angst also of being a human of a particular mindset, age, and consciousness. I think you’ll understand this as you listen to the words, which are backed up deftly with a minimalist score that increases the feelings in the poem in an unexpectedly catchy, but never kitschy, way. (As a side note, a “tamburitza” is a mandolin-like instrument played in Slavic regions, and “lingua” means resembling or a part of a tongue.)

There are other videos of this song which are perhaps more interesting to watch, but I’m not really focused on that. This is a beautiful image, the lyrics show up like a moving poem over it, and the audio is good. Please to enjoy.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=tamburitza+lingua&qpvt=tamburitza+lingua&view=detail&mid=608041E006FCCCF07D49608041E006FCCCF07D49&FORM=VRDGAR

12 Days of Christmas Music That Isn’t Awful (Day 8)

On By angeliquejamailIn acceptance, angst, anxiety, Charlie Brown, children, Christmas, Christmas song, holidays, jazz, music, Vince Guaraldi Trio4 Comments

Have you ever wanted to cry from a Christmas song?  I don’t mean in the my-ears-are-bleeding-and-I-can’t-believe-someone-committed-this-refuse-to-a-recording-for-sadistic-posterity sense, but in the unexplainable sense.  The way it feels when something just triggers your tear reflex, and you weep for no apparent reason that you or anyone else can discern.

When I was a child, “Christmas Time Is Here” from A Charlie Brown Christmas made me cry.

Now, I looked forward to this holiday special every year and never missed it, but inevitably the scene of the children all skating on the pond, of Snoopy flying across the ice like joyfulness personified, struck a chord in me I didn’t like to acknowledge.  I didn’t have the conscious vocabulary then to express Charlie Brown’s angst myself, but I definitely felt a malaise come December 27th, after the holiday was finished and my cousins and I had separated from our inevitable holiday sleepover and there was nothing to look forward to but going back to awful school.  (I think that’s why I celebrate New Year’s Eve so persistently now.)  My father explained to me, when I was a child, that I had the “Christmas blues” and was sad that the holidays were over, and while this made sense to me logically, it didn’t really scratch the itch of not understanding my sadness.

And this song made me cry, inexplicably, every time I heard it, even into my early adulthood.  It doesn’t anymore, and in fact I rather like it.  I’m not sure, honestly, I ever didn’t like it.  Such a conundrum.

So this morning my kids gave their holidays concerts at school.  They sang with everyone else in their grades a delightful collection of holiday songs highlighting Christmas, Hanukkah, the winter weather, and world peace.  My son’s concert was fun and sweet, several dozen first graders bravely soldiering through some very cute melodies.  Then the third grade arrived, with my daughter front and center.  The opening notes of the first song wafted out of the piano, and boom — they opened with this song.  It was beautiful, clear, charming, and even better than Vince Guaraldi’s chorus of cherubs.  I very nearly started crying again, and this time I think I understood.

It’s not just about angst.  It’s not just about the emotional confusion of being a child and not understanding everything you want to know about yourself yet, or having the language to know how to ask someone else to explain it to you.  It’s not just about being younger than most when you come to the epiphany that life has a dark side, too.

It’s also about beauty and love and the preciousness of a singular moment when things fall into place the way they’re supposed to, and recognizing that sometimes that gift can happen to you, too.

 

 

So now we’re out of school.  I still have a few finals left to grade today and tonight, and then I’ll be done with this semester.  Yay.

Happy Texas Independence Day!

On By angeliquejamailIn anxiety, birthdays, poetryLeave a comment

And here’s a poem for you.  I wrote it about ten years ago.

March 2nd, 2003

We sit, muted, restless of purpose
and wanting to feel joy.
It is a birthday, mine,
but it could be anyone’s.
We talk about movies, popular films
lacking in consequence or grace,
for thirty-seven minutes.

We are saying to each other, here,
here, take this.  I can give you
half an hour without news broadcasts,
without manufactured terror.
But such a long time lends itself
again to draining, and the subtle,
anxious bone of malcontent creeps.

It has the nerve to give my mother’s
lemon chicken a tired flavor.
They give me small envelopes of money
without cards.  We are all effete.

We are all waiting.
Later, at home, we turn on the radio
at surprise moments to see if
war has broken out.

Embracing my Inner Goth (part 5)

On By angeliquejamailIn Anne Rice, anxiety, creepy, fangs, goth, Goth culture, grief, humanity, Interview with the Vampire, Ken Dracula, New Orleans, summer travel, teeth, vampires10 Comments

Look!  It’s another installment of my six-part gothiness series.  You can read the previous four parts by clicking on these links:

Embracing My Inner Goth (part 1)

Embracing My Inner Goth (part 2)

Embracing My Inner Goth (part 3)

Embracing My Inner Goth (part 4)

***

Part V:  More Fangs!

A few months after Tiny Beowulf, our second child, was born, my husband and I went away for the weekend.  Not far, just a few hours’ drive, but this getaway vacation was a big deal.  We headed to San Antonio, where I have family and friends, and which is also a great city to get away to when you don’t want to be gone for long or be too distant.  We saw a friend’s acting re-debut that Friday night and gallivanted around downtown and the Riverwalk that Saturday night with my cousin Andy.  It was a fantastic time that also taught us the valuable lesson that it was, in fact, perfectly okay to be away from our toddler and infant for a couple of days while they hung out with their doting grandparents.

But I also had a mission on this trip.  Ken Dracula (remember him from Part 2?) had moved away from Houston some years before, and my brother had told me he’d resurfaced in San Antonio — and Robert had his number.  Of course he did.  It had been over a decade since my last fangs.  Their color no longer matched my pearly whites so well, and as I’d grown into an adult, my jaw had grown too, so the bridge didn’t even fit well anymore.  I’d decided it was time for a new set.  I rationalized that I could be a vampire at school for Hallowe’en instead of the same predictable witch like so many of the other teachers.

I made an appointment with Ken to get some new fangs made.

I could not, however, entice my husband to come on this appointment with me.  “I want to take a nap,” he said that Saturday afternoon.

I certainly didn’t want to go alone.  But Andy was coming to meet us; maybe he could show up a little early?

“I like that idea,” my husband said through his yawn.  “Go spend time with your cousin.”

Andy was happy to go with me.  He seemed to look on this errand as a weirdly grand adventure; I looked on it with excitement, an exuberant throwback to my younger days to prove I hadn’t lost my sense of self in becoming a mom, as so often I’d seen happen to women at my stage of life.

We got to Ken’s apartment, and immediately I felt something was off.  For one thing, it was hard to find him.  Not the building itself, which was actually rather easy; it was difficult to figure out where the entrance to his apartment was.  The building was a retail storefront of indeterminate identity, closed on the weekends.  Ken’s apartment ended up being in the back of the building.  A few phone calls and some wandering in the driveway later, Ken came out of a screen door onto his porch to meet us, all flip-flops and bermuda shorts and faded t-shirt, all tousled hair and bags under his eyes and anemic, gaunt frame.  It had been a very long time since I’d seen Ken Dracula, but in his younger days, he’d been reasonably good-looking and spunky and generally entertained by every aspect of his life.  This Ken was a changed man; he did not appear to have weathered the intervening decade well.  He’d gone all nosferatu; instinctively I worried about him, but then I brushed the feeling away.  I barely knew the man.  He was my brother’s contact, and even Robert barely knew the man anymore.

Suddenly I thought, What the hell am I doing here?  I’m a mother, for pete’s sake.  I’m a grown woman.  The image of myself as a twenty-year-old traipsing up the stairs in my parents’ house as quickly as I could to hide my fangs from my own mother — that woman who is a grandmother now — shimmered briefly and then faded like a ghost in the clear reason of self-awareness.

I was on a fool’s errand.

But Ken had seen us; we couldn’t leave now without being jerks, and jerks we were not.  Clumsy, manic, he bounded down the few porch steps and held out his hand to me to shake it.  I had the impression of someone who never got many visitors anymore.

Andy gave me a sideways glance as if to say, Is this the guy who’s going to make you fangs?  Honey, I love you, but you’re kind of a freak.  What he muttered quietly was, “You ready?  Because it looks like Ken Dracula is.”

We were ushered up onto the porch and then through the screen door into a cramped kitchen that was more clutter than function.  Pots and pans and tupperware pieces piled onto tiny squares of countertop.  A few half-empty supermarket-brand spice bottles littering the top of the ancient stove unit.  A sink whose white enamel was chipped, rust stains dripping from the drain vents.  On a fridge too new to be vintage and too old to be trustworthy, crumbling newspaper clippings and fliers from the San Antonio club scene.  The walls were covered in empty cardboard daiquiri carriers with here and there an early 90s-era CD box.

This place was such a far cry from Ken’s former, tastefully decorated apartment in Houston I was actually afraid, for a moment, of what I had gotten myself into.

He gestured for me to sit upon the red chair in the middle of the kitchen.  It was one of those dinette models that in another setting would have been cutesy-kitsch sitting next to a sparkling formica table against a turquoise wall.  But here, resting with its back up against a cluttered one-foot-by-one-foot butcher block island — because that’s all that this kitchen could fit — it took on the aspect of a dentist’s chair.  Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. came to mind.  And then so did Sweeney Todd.

Andy had been discreetly peeking through the doorways — there were two.  When Ken stepped out to retrieve his tools, my cousin hissed me over to take a look.  One opened into a hallway, which Ken had disappeared down into, that led to other rooms in various states of disarray.  A pile of laundry in a corner, a short stack of yellowing Anne Rice paperbacks next to an end table.  The other doorway revealed a large room that might have been great for entertaining with its hardwood floor and lack of furniture.  And maybe it was used for parties: we saw festive crepe-paper decorations and man-sized cardboard character cutouts of Frankenstein and Darth Vader.  A frayed straw sombrero topped an ancient stereo cabinet, and large speakers stood a sad sentry in the corners.

Andy said, “Where did you find this guy?”  I couldn’t tell if he was terrified, bemused, or in awe.

“Um…” I began, but then Ken came back.  He glanced at us as if to wonder why I wasn’t sitting in the chair but said nothing, and I quickly sat down on the puffy red vinyl seat.

Ken had brought his denture acrylic and latex gloves.  Instead of using metal tools, he used a bamboo skewer and some Q-tips.  In spite of his apartment and his general appearance, it was clear to me that he was operating safely.  His materials were reliable.  I felt ashamed of my inner voice for questioning the situation.

It was just fangs, that’s all.  Easy-peasy.  Just like he’d done hundreds of times before.

While Ken worked — and, I had to admit, with competence — he chatted easily with Andy about the night life in San Antonio and about Anne Rice.  The club scene was all right, Ken guessed, but then he took on a slightly sad tone when he began talking about the woman who had been his idol.  While my bridge was curing, the acrylic heating up in my awkwardly open mouth as I tried not to compulsively touch my tongue to the bar behind my teeth, Ken patiently answered Andy’s questions about the author, who had in recent years (a.k.a. Andy’s adolescent and early adult life) fallen out of the mainstream.

“She sort of stopped writing her vampire and witch books a while back,” Ken said with…was that a hint of wistfulness?  “After her husband died a few years ago, she just sort of…stopped.”  Ken was quiet a moment, checking on my fangs, putting the final shaping touches to them.  I looked up into his eyes, which focused intently on his handiwork and not at all on me, though my face lay in his gaze.  I wondered if Ken still worked in a dental office.  Then he said, “Of course, losing your partner…well, no one ever really recovers from that, do they.”  It wasn’t a question.  And no, it wasn’t wistfulness, either, but commiseration.

Ken himself had lost his partner a few years before, he informed Andy, as if I were supposed to have known about it already and just hadn’t brought my cousin up to speed because I couldn’t speak while in the dentist’s chair.  And then suddenly Ken’s appearance, his apartment, his bizarre decor came into clear, puncturing focus.

“But Annie used to throw these amazing Hallowe’en parties every year in New Orleans,” he continued.  “I used to go out there and make fangs for people.”  He began shuffling around in a clutter of papers and photographs from one of the nearby stacks.  “I’d set up in the corner and just crank them out for the guests, fifteen dollars a pop.”  He half-smiled.  “That was back in the day.  Fangs were cheap then.”

I’ll say, I thought.  These are setting me back fifty.  I mentally shrugged it off.

He dug out an ancient photo of himself in full Dracula regalia and make-up, fangs prominently protruding from his grin, the affectionate arm of Anne Rice herself, cloaked in black panné velvet, slung around his shoulders.  As he showed off his photo to us, a little of the spark of exuberance the old Ken Dracula had radiated back in the day tried to shine.  I would have smiled politely had the bridge finished curing.  Andy did so for both of us.

“That’s really cool,” he said.  He sounded sincere.

I sort of waved my hand a little in the direction of my mouth.

“Oh, of course,” Ken said and removed my new bridge.  I relaxed my jaw and took a deep breath.  He inspected my new set and then smiled.  “All done,” he assured me and handed them over.  As he explained the rules for caring for my new fangs — rules I’d heard before and remembered well — I noticed that the color was slightly too dark, that the bridge itself was a little jagged in places.  I put them back in and tested the fit.

Just a bit too snug to be comfortable, like wearing retainers I had grown out of long ago.  I knew I wouldn’t be wearing these again.  But I didn’t say a word other than a very sweet “thank you.”  Ken smiled.

“So does Anne Rice still have that big Hallowe’en party every year?” Andy asked.

Ken blinked his eyes thoughtfully a couple of times before answering.  “Well, I haven’t been back for some time,” he said.  “But last I heard, the party was still going strong.  Annie, though, she hasn’t been seen there in years.”

***

Click on this link to be taken to the final installment in this series.  Thanks for reading!

Embracing My Inner Goth (part 6)

 

A Reminder and A Poem…

On By angeliquejamailIn 9/11, anxiety, poetry, reveur, The Night Circus5 Comments

…and the poem is a reminder.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time memorializing 9/11 today, even though it is a Tuesday and the sky is that gorgeous shade of blue that heralds the impending drift of autumn. But I do want to highlight a poem that is particularly meaningful, in case you want to read it, entitled “How My Life Has Changed” by Hilary North. Here’s the link to a prose-poem version of it.

And here’s a piece I wrote about anxiety last year at this time.

In a short moment, I will get on with the rest of my day, not forgetting or diminishing what happened, but also realizing that to dwell upon it could lead to a waste of all the other wonderful things I could be doing to make my life and the lives of people around me better and more fulfilling.

For another reminder, this Thursday is the 13th of the month. I call upon all rêveurs to celebrate with me!

What is she talking about? you may be wondering.

If so, you’re not alone. Here are two previous posts — the first to jog your memory or the second to clue you in, if you’re new to Sappho’s Torque (and if you are, welcome!).

Be well.

Three of the Best Books I’ve Ever Read Which Made Me Miserable While I Was Reading Them

On By angeliquejamailIn anxiety, books, Dalton Trumbo, death, grief, high school, Johnny Got His Gun, Lev Grossman, teaching, The Lovely Bones, The Magicians, war protest literature4 Comments

It seems like everyone comes out with a list of must-read books each summer.  And since I’m clearly too late to jump on that bandwagon, I thought I’d do it up a little differently and give you some suggestions of books which are very, very good but which made me rather unhappy while I was reading them.  These are books which were well written or technically astute enough to break through my misery, distaste, or other negative reaction to convince me they were still awfully good books.

And a warning: this post isn’t just a series of book reviews.  I’ve often said that one Continue reading “Three of the Best Books I’ve Ever Read Which Made Me Miserable While I Was Reading Them” →

Meet My Seven-Year-Old Daughter, the Orange-Belt Fairy Princess Badass

On By angeliquejamailIn anxiety, children, humor, parenthood, promotion test, respect, summer, summer camp, Tae Kwon Do4 Comments

So when school let out a few weeks ago, my daughter’s Tae Kwon Do class had their promotion tests, but she missed it because she was home from school that day, sick with a fever. I could go into the details of how we had to go repeatedly back and forth to find a time when she could make up her test, but honestly, they’re not very interesting. Suffice it to say, it took a while, and she ended up having to crash a summer camp session at another school to do her test at the beginning of their class, or else just not be able to move past her white belt. And although she tried out Tae Kwon Do for a semester and liked it well enough, she’s thinks (at this moment, at least) that she’s ready to go back to ballet when school starts up again in the fall. We didn’t want her to have gone through a whole semester of martial arts and not get her belt promotion (i.e., closure), so we made the effort and got ready for the test today.

Now, when I say “got ready,” this primarily consisted of my reminding her every day this week to practice her moves so she could pass her test. We were going to have five minutes at the start of the summer camp class for her to accomplish it, and then leave. Win win for everyone, assuming she would pass.

Unfortunately, explaining the logistics of it to her made her a wee bit nervous. “Practicing” meant she would perform a single kick of some indeterminate sort, and then get distracted by wrackspurts or something and wander off to pick gurdyroots. In other words, no actual practice was happening. Well, fine, I thought, she’s seven years old and needs to understand why practicing something you want to do well at is important, and after all the stakes here aren’t particularly high and it’s a good lesson to learn on blah blah blah. So I didn’t push.

Well, we get to the camp today and get her changed into her gi, which is white and made of cotton. My daughter is growing so quickly, and the white cotton gi had to be washed in hot water with bleach every week this semester because just looking at it funny would make it filthy, and — you do the math. The pants are a couple of inches too short. And we hadn’t put her hair up this morning before she went to her camp (which is for Creative Writing, by the way, nothing physically athletic*), because she likes to wear it down. I offer to put it up for her before her test, but she isn’t interested.

So see if you can get a mental image: my petite, snaggle-toothed daughter (she is seven, after all, which is going into the prime of her tooth-losing years), in her slightly too-short gi and white belt, turquoise and purple glasses atop her nose (the ones with the colorful flowers etched along the arms), her long brown hair in piece-y straight tufts, barefoot with bright pink sparkly toenails…

…walks into a very large, unfamiliar room, greets her coach, then goes to sit down on the floor along the edge of the wall all by herself while the kids from the camp mob into the room for their class.  They are all bigger and older and blonde and tan, wearing shorts and t-shirts from their various camps with their rainbow of brightly colored belts that indicate they have been doing this a lot longer than she has.

My daughter stands out.

She looks at them. They look at her. They all loudly ask their coach who she is, then run to sit on the floor against the wall. From her perspective, they appear to be charging toward her en masse. She looks at me, no longer smiling or even a little excited. The terror in her face is masked only by her long hair falling into it, but I can see that anxiety, because I am still that frightened little girl sometimes in my nightmares, the ones where I have to play the piano in front of a huge audience (like The Tonight Show during the Johnny Carson years) and haven’t practiced in, oh, about three decades and all I can manage to eke out is much-too-fast version of Bach’s “Minuet in G Major.” You know that dream? Surely you know that dream.

My daughter is sitting on the end of the row. The little boy next to her, scrubbed clean and buzz-cut, looking like he’s been on a beach the last couple of weeks, just stares at her. She stares back at him for a moment and then folds her arms and legs around herself and pokes her gaze out to me. I nod encouragingly.

The kid asks the coach, “Does she know ninja drills?”

Ninja drills? What?? I think, Uh-oh, she doesn’t know what that is, this is going to make her even more nervous —

“Yes,” the coach answers, “she knows ninja drills.”

Oh? That’s interesting. I wonder what those are…

Class begins, and my daughter dutifully stands and bows to her coach, just like everyone else. All of them, my daughter included, head for the punching bag stands and start their drills. All these other kids are tearing it up with their side chops and roundhouse kicks and neck freezes or whatever other Vulcan death moves they’re doing. They’re shouting hi-ya! like berserkers.

My daughter is pushing at the bag, gently, you know, so as not to hurt it.

Her coach comes over and she tells him she’s nervous. He pats her shoulder reassuringly and reminds her of each move she needs to execute. While the others are warming up, she’s going to have her test. It takes her a couple of tries to get back into the swing of things, I suppose, but then she’s beating the snot out of that punching bag, shouting hi-ya! like the best of them! She chops, she slashes, she kicks, she punches, she elbows, she turns around and beats the thing up behind her back. She has gone, in five minutes, from trembling mermaid and unicorn aficionado to a freakin’ Power Puff Girl Rage Monster. Her coach smiles proudly, but in a relaxed way, you know, like he expected nothing else.

I’m grinning so wide I think I just might cry.

She finishes all the rest of the drills really well, and then the main event arrives. Everyone goes back to sitting along the edge of the wall, and this time my daughter doesn’t look so scared. The other kids are still eying her a little skeptically, but she just pushes her hair out of her eyes, lifts her chin up, and gives me a happy thumbs-up.

The coach brings her back up to the middle of the room. Everyone else is silent. It is time for her to Break The Board. When the other kids see the board set up, a couple begin stage-whispering about whether she can do it or not. She appears to ignore them. The coach asks whether she’s ready, and she nods her head, beaming.

She composes herself quickly, centering, taking a deep breath. Then she lifts her bare foot and brings it crashing down on that board. Hi-ya! It makes a crack as it splits in half and then clatters to the floor below. She stares at the thing in shock, the other kids forgotten. She picks up the pieces of the board and runs over to me, shouting, “I broke the board! I broke the board! Oh my gosh I can’t believe I broke the board!!”

I don’t know who’s beaming more, me, the coach, or her. He calls her back over and presents her with her orange belt, and she skips happily toward me, exclaiming that she’s so proud of herself.

Of course I’m proud of her, too, and I tell her that. We exit the room — her: skipping, hair swinging back and forth down her back — fragments of board and orange belt in hand.

Time to go to lunch with my Fairy Princess Badass.

***

*  I’d like to point out also that my daughter chose to do Creative Writing camp on her own. I didn’t make her do it. And she’s loving every minute! I am so proud.

Academic Calendar Conditioning (and a Reminder)

On By angeliquejamailIn anxiety, contest, final exams, grading papers, grief, habit, high school, neglect, procrastination, stress, summer, teachingLeave a comment

So I’ve been on the schedule of a typical academic calendar for thirty-five years now, nonstop.  My husband assures me that this consistency is the reason for the reinforcement of my periodic stress.  In other words, I’m conditioned to be overworked and therefore stressed out beyond reason from about the end of April through Memorial Day.

I cannot argue with his logic.  Especially not right now, when I’m in the middle of the busiest two weeks of the school year.  I would argue, but frankly, I don’t have time.  There’s a stack of papers nine inches tall waiting to be graded, and I haven’t even given my final exam yet.

There are other times during the year when I am similarly busy and stressed out.  However, between Thanksgiving and December finals I’m too happy about the holiday season to worry about it much.  Then, I’m blissfully able to remind myself that being behind at school is always a finite problem:  the semester always ends, and by hook or by crook, report cards go out, and then I’m done.  But right now, the summer break, when I can devote myself more fully to my writing, is so close that all I can think of is how burnt out I feel every time I sit down to work.  The glorious weather and the wall of windows in my classroom that look out onto a lovely courtyard do not help.  (My friend Amber, who used to teach at UC Santa Barbara, could see the Pacific Ocean from her office window.  That would be worse, I think, but only for my work ethic.)

I used to have insomnia the beginning of August every year, from the time I began teaching until the time my daughter was born.  (Then I didn’t have the insomnia because I was just so damn tired all the time I couldn’t possibly have trouble falling asleep.  Not at any time, not in any place.)  A lot of my colleagues experience this also, the inability to sleep well (or, in some cases, at all), for about two weeks before the school year begins.  I suppose we should all count ourselves lucky that we care so much about teaching that we worry whether we will do it well enough.  I will say that my colleagues continually inspire me with their energy, talent, and devotion to their students’ success.  As teaching careers go, I’m at what Bull Durham would call “the show.”  And I’m grateful for that.

But this means that for a while a few times a year, the other stuff I do suffers a bit.  For example, my blog.  Let’s just call this post a long-winded apology for not a lot of substantive sharing lately.  It’s not that interesting and important things haven’t been happening.  They have.  I’ve even had a few episodes of mildly worthwhile introspection about them.  But since Easter, it’s been a maelstrom around here.  Yes, work has been busy.  Yes, my daughter turned seven.  Yes, my writing has been doing interesting stuff.  But also, people have died.

Some of all that I may blog about this summer; I don’t know.  I am fairly certain, however, that I will write much more substantial things for you, dear readers, more often than I have the last several weeks.  I appreciate that you’ve stuck with me thus far.

I’ll be done with this school year by the end of May.  I’ll still have school work to do over the summer, of course — the idea that teachers don’t have to work during the break is a damaging myth worthy of Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumours” — but my time will be more my own and less frenetic.  Or at least that’s the plan.

Until then, go on and vote in my poll from last week.  You know, the one about The Silliest Thing You’ve Ever Heard.  Tell everyone you know to vote also.  Do it before tomorrow, when voting will close.  I can’t wait to find out who the winner is, especially since at the moment there is a three-way tie for first place.

And as for all the rest, thanks for hanging in there with me.  All the best.