weather

i hate this weather. i hate how it rains one second and is sunny the next. i hate how suddenly it's cold. i hate how grey it is most days and that the sun only shines about one day out of the week. i thought NY was bad, but this is torture for people with seasonal depression (not saying that is me but it's just a thought).

and yes, that is a picture of a puddle that i took. for class.

brilliant

in one of my classes this week, we were asked to write about our favorite k-12th grade teacher. 

my mind went blank, before briefly thinking about a college professor that i really loved. i then remembered that the TA asked us to write about a teacher during our k-12th grade years. so i thought about my public school teachers but i couldn't really think about the specifics she was asking us to describe so that seemed like a bust. middle school was ok, but my feeling of being unsuccessful in school doesn't bring up warm and friendly memories of teachers. i was all over the place in high school...but then it hit me.

i took an african-american literature class in high school with a teacher that i had heard a lot about and hoped to take a class with. most students seemed really transformed by his classes and raved about him. being a shy student, he scared the shit out of me but i knew him and he knew me because my sister had taken several classes with him. small school settings make it hard to hide.

he was a burly man with a big pot belly and a lot of facial hair who always wore a flannel shirt, jeans and hiking boots. he looked like he was straight out of the woods. in reality, he was straight out of the woods - he actually lived in a log cabin in the woods somewhere by himself with no tv or phone. (i might be making part of that up, although i am 75% sure i am right about 100% of what's in that sentence). i always imagined him in the woods with all of his books, observing nature and smoking cigarettes. he was obvious about his love of teaching, literature and smoking. he never hid that from his students. it honestly felt like there wasn't a lot he would hide from us.

i can't tell you all of the books we read or the assignments he had us complete but i can tell you that something happened in that classroom which i had never experienced before in a class at this school. he was the first teacher who sat down in the circle with us. he was actually listening to us and we all knew by the way he leaned his body towards the person who was speaking. he told us about his own experiences when he lived in predominately black neighborhoods (harlem, to be exact) and how they related to the texts. here was this white man relating to all of the students in his class. all of us. in an environment that wasn't very diverse, this was the first class where i actually felt diversity. he taught the class without skipping any chapters or telling us that sections weren't important (i swear to you that happened earlier in hs when we read "invisible man" - my teacher told us that one of the chapters wasn't important so we can skip it but i read it and used it in a paper i wrote for that class. BOOM!). but he was the kind of teacher i wish i had taken earlier in my hs career and every year after that. 

i recognized then, and i see more clearly now, that things aren't always as they seem. 

as an adult and someone who works in education, i recognize now that he probably did hide things from us. it's almost impossible to not hide something because there are things that young people should not know about their teachers and that's completely ok.

he once told us in class that seriously brilliant artists are also the most fucked up people in the world. i believed him then but believing him also confused me. to me (and many others), he was so brilliant. but also a strange and isolated man. i wondered, and still wonder, if there was more to his story than we could have known.

in 2006, he passed away not knowing the impact he made on me and still such a mystery in my mind.

i've been thinking about him and this and more all week. i even dug up a blog post a classmate wrote about him after he passed away. at the end of class on tuesday our teacher said, "you should all think about emailing the teacher you wrote about to say thank you." i wish i had taken that opportunity back in the day when he was still alive. even with all of the mystery that surrounds his memory for me, i am grateful i had the opportunity to learn from him and get to know the brilliant, strange teacher i had always observed from a distance. 

wherever he is now, in whatever other worldly place we go to when we pass away, i want to say thank you.

wonderful ideas?

one of my favorite graduate classes is called "the having of wonderful ideas" but it's probably one of the hardest classes to explain to people. it sounds like a real hippie type of class but it has to be the class where i feel the most inspired! i'm clearly drinking whatever lemonade the professor is serving up in class.

the quick and dirty of the class is this:

we spend every week learning how to follow people's thinking in order to help them learn more about a given thing/topic/new idea. this class consists of demonstrations during class time that inform the fieldwork (aka - experiments) that we do on other people, fieldwork reports, small group sections where we talk about the ideas together, weekly journaling to think deeply about what we are learning, lots of readings and a moon journal. yes, i said a moon journal.

because moon journaling seems to intrigue people the most, i will say that the general idea is to (almost) daily write down any observations we have of the moon. we are not allowed to look up anything about the moon though. through our observations, we should be coming up with questions and ideas about the moon. when we discuss it in class and section, i love to hear people talk about the emotional and personal connections they have made with the moon and what they are learning. we are all learning different things, which makes us also learn from each other. it's fascinating.

here are my moon journal entries that i keep in a mini moleskin the boo's mother bought me when i left ny:

so if you notice the moon, think of me. add to my observations. i would love to hear about what other people are observing!

art in boston

this past weekend, the boo came to visit so i decided it would be the perfect time to check out the os gemeos exhibit at the ica with my good friend. my pics can't do the exhibit justice - the colors, patterns, paintings, installations...it was really exciting.

i took more pics but these are my favorites.

we also checked out the art in the rest of the galleries:

i really loved these two sculptures. the one on the left was a hanging sculpture made of fragments from a building fire and the one on the right was in the elevator shaft. 

 i was a total geek for these mirrored chandelier sculptures. they were designed after chandeliers in the metropolitan opera house and look like galaxies. i like art where i can see myself in it.

after roaming around the museum, we also decided to find the os gemeos street art around boston. 

 the size of this was amazingly impressive.

 i had fun walking up to this wall and touching the art.

i wish i could paint like os gemeos. love.

9/11

i have to be honest - in my selfishness of being at school, i completely forgot that tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

and now...

well, now i feel really strange being away from ny, my home. i'm miles and miles away from what i understand and know and it feels strange. i feel lost.

usually people talk about where they were and what they were doing when the planes hit. after 11 year, it's still too fresh for me to really do that. what i will say is that being in brooklyn when it happened changed my life. and i have never felt the type of fear that i felt that day. i hope other people, especially the young people in my family and everyone else's family, never ever experience what we experienced that day.

my move in pics

it's really pretty here.

and so it has begun

that's right, ladies and gentlemen - the school year has officially started! you're looking at a lady who stepped foot into a classroom after being out of school for (GASP) 8 years. i worry that i won't be able to keep up, that the readings won't make any sense, that my writing will suck. and then i remember. i got into this place. i think i'll be fine.

i am taking the awesomest classes (more about that later), meeting really amazing people, and feeling inspired by all of my professors already. sometimes i wonder, "is this really my life now?"

but i have to admit that i am missing home more than i ever imagined. leaving the place that has been my home for my entire life has really turned life upside down. sometimes i wonder:
how did i ever make it in ny?
how did i ever make friends!?
how did i ever discovere the bars that i love and the restaurants i will never find anywhere else?
is that all going to be possible here?
i know that this may seem extreme since this experience will only be for 9 months, but it really has me thinking...all of the ny transplants - i salute you! it certainly can't be easy to make a new life in a huge city like ny! but...it gives me hope that my new life will be just as rewarding and that i will learn more about this city in the 9 months that i will be here than any other city.

i might possibly be rambling right now. i've been waking up way before my alarm goes off for no apparent reason. if anyone knows how to stop that from happening, i am all ears.

and just to prove that i am still alive and kicking here in boston, that pic above is for you!