Waging...pakefulness?

This is kind of how I feel at the moment, it being 4:30 AM and I having been awake for half an hour on 3.5 hours of sleep. I am working on a job application so as to send it in by a noon GMT deadline. Noon GMT=7:00 AM EDT. So far, so good.

Surprise...Ice!

After an unseasonably warm and not-snowy debut, winter finally coughed and sputtered to a start here about three weeks ago. It turned cold suddenly, cold enough that I found myself actually hoping for the heating to work in its usual ridiculous overtime way so that I would be warm enough under my down comforter. (That's a slight exaggeration.) And generally, it stayed fairly cold--not as cold as Boston, and definitely not as cold as Michigan or Canada or other cold places, but for a state in the lower Northeastern United States, not bad.

Still, it refused to snow until about a week and a half ago, when the clouds decided to shake their shaggy heads a little and let down a few tiny flakes. This has mostly been the situation since: cold weather, occasional snow flurries, occasional dusting of white stuff on the colder pieces of ground. From time to time, a thin blanket (more like a cotton sheet)over lawn and street and car.

Last night, the only difference was that it was warmer out, slightly above freezing, so the big flakes that fell melted into a fine slush on the pavement when they landed. The grass looked nice and pretty, as if some magical baker had come by with his bag of flour and lightly dusted the green places of the city. But otherwise, the ground was merely wet.

This morning, I woke up groggy, and after talking to Virginia on the phone a bit, decided I was going to surprise her by meeting her for a kiss before she went into the city to study at the New York Public Library. After gathering myself enough to be dressed and reasonably insulated against the cold, and bearing my car key in one hand and a bottle of mango nectar in the other, I stepped out the door...and onto a patch of ice that had formed from the slush of the previous evening.

This was the fun part: falling happened very slowly. I felt my foot slide and tried to stop it the way one usually does when one slips. But my foot kept sliding. I dropped the juice and tried to catch myself on the outer glass door, or the railing to my right, or the brick corner post but missed, I think. I twisted and my feet kept falling, began to move down steps. I slapped my right hand on the other railing, but it was covered in ice and my mittens slid and my keys disappeared from my grasp. My body extended fully, my torso turned downward to face the stairs, I landed and continued to slide. My left hand gripped the top step. My feet stretched out down the stairs, my hip bounced on the corner of one of the slate steps, my right hand came off the railing and grabbed for another step. I stopped. Ouch.

The less fun part was figuring out how to get up. I took stock of myself. (Bruised hip, scraped fingers, sore wrist and thumb. Okay.) I took stock of the stairs, which were almost completely covered in ice, and the railing nearest me, which was as well. My bottle of juice lay calmly on its side at the top of the steps. My keys had vanished; I suspected they had ventured into the bushes to my right. I pushed myself up, grabbed both railings, steadied my feet, and gingerly climbed the stairs. I re-collected my juice and went back inside to regroup and strategize. Something would have to be done, and quickly, if I were to make it to see my baby.

In the end I ventured outside cautiously and realized that a filament of bare concrete lay exposed on one side of the stairs, thanks to the notorious warming effect of sunlight. I made it down the steps, and after rooting around in the bushes for a bit, found my car keys down by the sidewalk. I hopped in the car, drove off, and, happy ending, got to surprise and kiss Virginia! So she was all smiley and happy when she got a ride into the city, and I was all smiley and happy as I drove to the store to get rock salt so that I might do battle with my icy nemesis. And a good time was had by all.

Reading Other Poets

I was talking with my housemates (Theresa & Jaime) the other day. We were hanging out in the kitchen eating late breakfast and sipping tea. One of them, I think it was J, brought up her dislike of the idea "enforced" (not her words) by so many of the writing teachers at Sarah Lawrence that in order to write good poetry (or good anything), one must copy and emulate the masters (and hence one must read read read). T assented to the opinion. Both of them felt that such an attitude was merely encouragement to imitate without being original yourself. I gently disagreed, saying that I felt the point was not to copy but to learn what each writer had to teach about technique, craft, and style.

Not long after that conversation, I was browsing through the Internet jungle and remembered a blog I used to enjoy reading--that of Shinichi Tohei Sensei, youngest son of Koichi Tohei Sensei, the founder of Shin Shin Toitsu Aikido. The latest entry has a short parable about an apprentice swordsmith, which Shinichi Sensei relates to the power, importance, and way to use the subconscious mind. (Shinichi Sensei writes:

When we try to achieve something, we will evolve in the shape of our own imagining. If the shape is predictable, we will develop into that shape. If the shape is brilliant, then we will develop into that shape.By imagining the very highest level for the beginning, we are able to create what is to become. The important thing is to feel and know the very best until it gets into your subconscious.)

The parable struck me as extremely relevant to the conversation on Sunday. You can write and learn to write well all on your own, but having others to teach you is incredibly helpful. The point of reading the masters is not to mimic them--not to produce poetry just like theirs--but to learn good technique, so well that it fills your subconscious with understanding of quality craft--of good writing-- and you learn from it so that when you need to use such techniques, you can.

Goals

Grady (my mother's friend and roommate) writes goals for each new year rather than resolutions, because goals are more positive to him. (His goals list for 2006 was about two pages long, typed, and he only missed two of the goals on it.)

I like this idea, so I've thought about it some and written out some goals for myself for the coming year.

Here are some of my goals for 2007:

• Learn to write every day. (Minimum: 30 mins. Ideal: 2 hours.)
• Learn to meditate (do ki breathing) every day. (Minimum: 30 mins. Ideal: 1 hour.)
• Find a good post-graduate school teaching or teaching-related job. Such a job should (ideally) fill these requirements: increased my teaching skill and experience; pay me enough to live with some comfort and pay back my student loans and other debts; take me abroad, ideally to London or nearby.
• Develop and pursue a very challenging, healthy exercise routine that helps me increase strength, flexibility, and endurance, as well as cardiovascular health. (Ideally, it will incorporate principles like those followed by the athletes at Gym Jones.)
• Improve my proficiency and fluency with French
• Produce a manuscript for my first book of poems
• Actively submit writing to journals and contests and fellowships
• Save some money

What are yours?

Recycling in Yonkers

New York's supposed to be a liberal/progressive town, right? (Heh. Cynthia, my former landlady, would laugh at my use of "town" instead of "city.") With all sorts of civilized amenities like public transportation and fluoridated water and traffic jams and stuff? Recycling, you would think, should number among such things.

But not in Yonkers. No, in Yonkers, we make recycling as complicated as we can muster without being accused of being obstructionist. We have weekly recycling pick-up, yep, sure do. But rather than something convenient--say, a single recycling pick-up on the same day as garbage collection--we have two separate types of recycling: Paper (which includes white bond paper, cardboard, and newspaper, but not OJ or rice milk cartons or magazines) and Commingles (which includes plastics--but only plastics 1 & 2, and only if they're bottle-shaped, I believe--steel and aluminum cans, and glass). There is a special recycling day that is entirely different from trash day, and on that day, only one of the two given categories will be picked up. The categories alternate weeks and are adjusted strangely in the case of a holiday. We have a special calendar to remind us when these things happen. It is tiny and difficult to understand, much like the Florida ballots from the 2000 presidential election. It almost seems like the City of Yonkers doesn't want us to recycle...

Stupid TV Shows

From the Discovery Channel Web site for a show called Future Weapons:

Combining a swivel barrel with a video sighting array, [the Cornershot] allows the operator to observe and fire at a target around corners without exposing himself to enemy fire.... Its Israeli designers and other experts see great potential for the weapon in anti-terrorist operations.

This makes perfect sense because terrorists always hide around corners. With this weapon, the mighty U.S. military will surely vanquish evil forthwith.

About Virginia

Virginia sweeps me off my feet regularly. She is sweet, sexy, intelligent, creative, kooky, passionate, focused, compassionate, driven, beautiful. She'll probably want to hide after reading this, too. (She's amazing, that's all I wanted to say, and I love her.)

She's 24, Swiss-born (a citizen of both Switzerland and Paris), trilingual (French, Italian, English), and a graduate student studying English linguistics at the Sorbonne. Currently she's working on her DEA (diplôme d'études approfondies) while working as a French assistant at Sarah Lawrence. We met training Aikido; she has trained Iwama style for about three years, and at the beginning of the school year, she walked into my first Aikido class of the semester and asked me if I minded if she put on her gi top. Since then, we've been finishing each other's sentences and generally anticipating each other's thoughts and actions. (Okay, there was a bit of turbulence and some obstacles before we actually got romantically involved, but...)