2006

If a picture is worth a thousand words, these are worth thirty grand. Which is far more words than I have in me to write, in the waning hours of the year. I'm not one for resolutions on New Year's Eve. I'm much more given to reflect on the 365 days that have just passed, and what happened therein:

I left my job, I started a new one, I started a novel, I stopped writing a novel, Stuart got promoted, Stuart got his green card, we went to England and New England, I turned 26, Biscuit graduated with his degree, Neff went to law school, Barrie got married, I discovered how much I love sci-fi and fantasy novels, my hair grew longer, teaching turned out to be very hard, I made a few new friends and held on tight to my old ones, I celebrated Christmas and Easter and birthdays, I drank lots of good wine, I tried lots of new food, I fell more in love with my husband than ever, and I've grown up just a little bit.

Bring it on, 2007.

borrowing brooklyn

We arrived in Brooklyn Heights yesterday to spend the holiday weekend hanging out with Dexter until Beth comes back. I love the neighborhood - and having a dog around - too much to go back to Astoria without grumbling a little. Things are proceeding well, although you'd have to check Dexter's Myspace page to see if he's still trying to figure out who these total strangers are and where his family went.

There has been no peebelly that I've noted and the burrowing under the blankets where we were sleeping was far more hilarious than it was intrusive. I took Beth's advice and brought his dog bed downstairs when we came to bed, and at first, Dex settled very politely into it and I thought he was too shy to crawl onto the bed. But about an hour later, I woke up to tiny spindly terrier legs pacing back and forth along my shins, with a clear message of frustration: "WOMAN THAT IS NOT BETH, WHY AM I NOT UNDER THE COVERS."

Rather than rebuff him again and send him into an adolescent spiral of writing in his journal and listening to The Cure, I lifted one corner of the duvet and sure enough, dog dove happily underneath.

Only to be foiled from curling up between my feet when he discovered what a Kicker I am. Something that Stuart grumblingly commiserated with him over, during breakfast.

Dexter, Stuart and I have spend today dilligently pursuing our holiday goals - reading the Winter Fiction issue of the New Yorker (me), playing SSX Tricky (Stuart) and chasing sunshine across three couches (Dex). All is well, I think.

blessed is the season

I hope wherever you are, you're sitting around with your family laughing about Christmasses past and hilarity present. I hope you've gotten wonderful things you need and beautiful things you never knew you wanted but cannot live without. I hope your food was delicious but the company extraordinary. I hope you got funny, silly stocking gifts like an oinking pig whose nostrils light up. I hope your father tells embarassing stories that you don't even really mind sharing.

I hope you put gently and carefully aside the well-developed cynicisms and jaded armour that we use to survive in our daily journey. Because today is a good day to do that. It's a good day to jingle along to jingly Christmas music and hug back the huggy relatives. It's a great day to kiss everyone you love and smile at the guy in the next car. It's a good day to be a little soft, a little vulnerable, and a little open to engaging your world in the conspiracy of love.

Leave the bags of discarded wrapping and everyday heartbreak for tomorrow.

Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy Christmas. Ain't it grand?

the new year

Today is a few minutes longer than yesterday. I was thinking about that as I walked home last night, on the winter solstice, which also marked my last day of the fall semester at my new job. I wondered, can I still call it my new job? When do I have to start living a normal life again, when does the bombshell of all the newness stop radiating?

But today is a few minutes longer than yesterday. If the year is a curve, today is the first turn-up of the line. I have a week long break - the longest since I started. I have a new semester starting, where even though the weather won't get warmer for a while, the days will keep getting longer and in some metaphor, perhaps this means teaching will get easier.

Oddly enough, I have had the best worst two weeks possible. For much of them, my priceless teaching assistant T wasn't in because she was taking her finals. So I was essentially on my own, with replacements wandering in and out but very passively, not being assertive and sharing the discipline-maintenance like T does.

So, the past two weeks have been very difficult on my nerves, on my blossoming authority and classroom management skills. But I have actually handled them. I have even had good moments. I have picked up new tricks, changed my tone and gotten results, figured out when to pull the line taut and when to give them a little slack. I've worked out new systems - with kids, I have found, systems need to be constantly revised because the great danger in getting them too accustomed to a method is that it will cease being effective.

So you can see, they were the best two bad weeks I could possibly have. One of the challenges has been prepping my first graders for the Christmas concert we held yesterday, where 21 wriggly, squirmy little bodies were meant to get up on stage and sing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town for their families and friends. You can bet the wriggling stopped when they first rehearsed it on the Big Stage, I've never seen my chaotic first graders more interested in literally toeing the line out of fear. FEAR IS A GREAT MOTIVATOR, I added to my list of Things I Swore I'd Never Consider Teaching Tools But Actually Really Are.

So now, on this upswing day after an entire semester of rollercoaster moods and crying jags and self-doubt, I am feeling pretty good about surviving it and feeling pretty bad about the toll it's taken. I haven't written with any consistency this semester - my whole plan of writing in the mornings and teaching in the afternoons just fell apart when teaching in the afternoons clouded my mornings, too. I haven't blogged enough because the major thing affecting my life - these children - is difficult to talk about and fraught with complications. These are two things I'm swearing to improve, in the upswing of today, with a whole week of rest that I've earned ahead of me.

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, finding often that it's an arbitrary time to make promises. But actually, falling as it does smack in the middle of my school year, I'll go ahead and take that very convenient tradition to heart. The days are just getting longer from here, right? Surely I can start putting them to better use.

p.s.

My comments are being unnecessarily protective lately. Everyone keeps getting "blocked for questionable content" and frankly, I'm not quite Lindsay-Lohan enough for a bouncer. Rest assured that I have not blocked anyone or gotten ideas above my station, you know. Any ideas as to why my perfectly innocuous blog friends who are just saying nice things are getting rebuffed, well, if you can't comment your solution, email it to krissa care of gmail. Kisses!

margo tenenbaum the third

In between a slew of Christmas parties that both my liver and my feet are recovering from, Stuart and I put up our Christmas tree yesterday, which, because we're huge geeks, has been nicknamed Margo (get it) for three years now. We dragged her home in the sunshine, and set her up with minimal fuss. She's a natural tree, no evenly-trimmed perfection for us, no sirree. Gimme the uneven, imperfect wholesome one every time. Where's the Christmas spirit in a perfect tree? Half the fun is using ornaments to cleverly disguise the flaws! Of course, real trees are a novelty to me - we always had a fake one that traveled the world with us because unless I wanted to decorate a ficus in the tropical heat of sub-Saharan Africa, it was fake or nothing. I'm fine with fake; it's easy as heck and there's no pesky watering. But if you're gonna go real, you might as well go all the way.

She's in a new corner this year - instead of hanging near the window, she's in the front of the living room. It means all that furniture there - the entry table and the lamp - have to find new homes for the season. See also: cluttered office!

It doesn't matter, though, because nothing quite beats the feeling of seeing the lit and sparkling tree first thing in the morning, smelling that balsam fir smell. I like to think I'm not usually one for cliches but Christmas gets me every time. I smile more in public, I watch sappy (/-ier) movies, I get really excited about wrapping paper and getting the corners just so, I plan to bake various spice-smelling things. I'm kicking down the closet door in this age of hipster disenchantment, people. I love Christmas so much, I'm one step away from wearing bell earrings and a Rudolph necklace.

One BIG step, but still. Wheee tinsel!

all is calm

It's not like I'm really here, or gone - I'm more somewhere in between. But five people I don't know have emailed me in the past week showing a refreshing interest in humanity by checking that I'm alive. Plus, I figured, I can't really go to BlogHer next year and canoodle with Kristin and Leah if I don't actually BLOG anymore. Can I?

I'm not even sure why I feel so silent when I open up MT. You'd think I'd have a lot to say about how weird it was when Stuart was away, or how awesome it was to spend an entire day on Biscuit's couch, or how my mother managed to pull off a sit-down 20-something person Thanksgiving with the sort of flair and panache I hope to God is genetic, or how I had all these great creative plans for wrapping paper themes and handmade Christmas cards that are sort of falling through the cracks of my constant mono-levels of my common cold.

Is there anything worse than blogging by dint of mentioning all the things you're NOT blogging about?

Like I said, I have little explanation for my quiet. Lord knows no one is used to me being quiet (beating everyone to the punch with that joke). I'm just feeling quiet. But I love this place, and I love you people, and I love that you email me to ask if I'm dead, so let's rev this cranky little engine up again with some reader participation and a bald-faced cry for help.

Two years ago, I made an awesome CD called Not So Faithful: Songs for the Festive Heathen, heartily bolstered by your suggestions. It was awesome, and I'm reviving it this year in time for our Christmas party. I need your brilliant suggestions. I have only two criteria:

1) no jesus/festival of light stuff, hello, it's called Songs for the Festive Heathen

2) it must rock

Sadly, my first criterion knocks out the awesome Barenaked Ladies/Sarah McLachlan God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen/We Three Kings medley, which is a pity because that's my favorite carol of all time, but there you have it.

Give me good suggestions, and ask nicely enough, I might even send you one.