Poison

   Blogger is being dumb and not letting me load pictures.  So we're back to just plain text.  Time to use your imagination, kids!
   
I have had several dreams about being the same age as my students.  Not that I dream that I'm thirteen again, I think we're usually in early high school in my dreams.  But usually I'm just one of them, sitting in a desk with my feet up ignoring the teacher and worrying about the other things in my life.  In those dreams I've been befriended by some students and snubbed by others, and we generally make our ways through the confusing dreamscape.
 
Last night one of my students poisoned me.  Not maliciously.  She's one of my best students, and in my dream her goal was to be a chemist, so she put a lethal amount of poison in my drink just to see what would happen.  It wasn't her fault she didn't realize there wasn't an antidote to that poison.  There was nothing to do but go to school and wait to see if I would manage to survive somehow.  And she didn't want me to tell Mom, Dad, or the teachers so she wouldn't get in trouble.  Of course, I agreed.  I mean, it's not like she had tried to murder me, her action just sort of might lead to my almost certain death.  The poison made me ache and bleed from my ankles and wrists.  The blood was mixed with a clear, watery substance and would soak bandages and ooze constantly.  The fact that I wasn't bleeding very much indicated a good chance for survival so far.  But my mind was definitely not on the lessons my teachers were giving.  I was wondering if I would die, and if I should casually slip and "I love you" to my parents to make up for the fact that I wasn't telling them that I was doomed.  If I didn't croak in the first 48 hours, I had a good chance of miraculously surviving the poison.
   
     I kept changing bandages, watching the amount of blood and puss fluctuate throughout the day.  Sometimes it was just enough to bead out of the skin like condensation, sometimes my ankles or wrists would drip without my realizing it.  I remember worrying about the red spots on the school carpet.  But I couldn't tell anyone about them, because then they'd figure out that I was poisoned and my friend/student would be in trouble.  By afternoon of the second day I was still alive, but the oozing was getting worse.  It had also spread to my knees and patches on my thigh.  It was also getting harder to hide.  But I was almost safe--although I was informed that even if I survived the two days I might suddenly relapse and die anytime for three weeks.  But if I could just surive the day, I would be alive, my friend wouldn't be in trouble, and no one would have to be sad.  My last memory of the dream is sitting in a parking lot in the sun with my bandages off watching the poison-affected patches drip wondering how I could keep hiding them and if I would survive.

I recently resolved to give up one of my biggest timewasting addictions.  This means that I've been on the hunt for something to fill all that time besides doing the things I ought to do.  Today, I found I new webcomic.  I think this one is the most cynical I've found yet.  I love it.  Nothing makes me feel good about my day like a good dose of cynicism.  Really.  It makes me feel hopeful that someone's that clever and critiquing everything that harshly.  Does that make me sick?  But anyway, my favorite comic that I read today was this one

    

Secondly, I'm going vegetarian for the month of February.  I'm practically vegetarian anyway.  Meat just takes too much money to buy and too much effort to prepare.  Plus, being vegetarian is, according to just about everyone healthier.  It's better for the environment. ("A 2006 United Nations report summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry by calling it 'one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.'"1) Finally, it's encouraged by the Word of Wisdom (D&C 89:12-13).  And it's cheaper; which goes a long way with me.  And it's easier to throw some lentils in my rice than it is to figure out what to do with all that ground beef grease.    

   

Considering the lifestyle I already live, it's not much of a sacrifice.  The only thing I'll miss is sushi, which I can't afford anyway.   Knowing all this, I'd been thinking of trying out vegetarian life all on my own anyway, when a friend turned to me and said out of the blue, "Hey, wanna go vegetarian for the month of February?"  I didn't hesitate a moment.  Other than an occasional inconvenience, I really don't see a downside to this.  Easier, cheaper, healthier, encouraged by the Lord, and saves the world.  Why the heck not? As if on cue, My new comic gave me this.

   

1.  http://www.goveg.com/environment.asp

Hope, Dream, Plan, Change Your Hair, Live: Repeat.

      Once upon a time and four years ago I was nineteen, and when I was nineteen I was going to be a whitewater rafting guide.  I was going to be one if it killed me.  I had a company picked out, I had investigated salary, interviewed six or seven months early, been practically promised the job, and I was getting ready.  I had lists of equipment saved at rei-oulet, I had spent time thinking and pondering about what made a good guide and how I could be her.  I was going to the gym to train the muscles in my diminuitive form to be able to manhandle 22-foot gear boats.  I was even dreaming of rafts flipping over and what I would do.  Over analyzing everything, I even got a perm because it would be a hairstyle that would work well wet and unwashed except by repeated encounters with riverwater and bug spray.

   

     About a month and a half before winter semester ended and my adventure began, I got a call from my "river boss."  No job.  Bookings were down; the number of guides he had were up; his need of a new guide was zero.  I was floored.  My dream, my goal, the hope that had kept me excited and motivated for seven months had just been snatched away with one phone call.  All that preparation, the lists, the training, the perm--all useless.  

   

    I got lucky, though.  And I spent the summer living in the woods anyway, but as an actress instead.  As I returned to school and turned twenty, I planned again.  The next summer I would be guiding.  I applied again.  Then I decided to go on a mission.  So I started preparing, and, since such decisions always get relfected in my hair, I cut off the perm.  I wouldn't want to try and get it repermed in some third world country, right?  I needed my natural straight hair back.  So I cut my hair.  Then I decided I wasn't going on a mission after all.  But I got lucky.  I spent the summer in Japan teaching English and having all sorts of adventures in city, forest, and ocean by foot, bus, sailboat, and ferry.  

   

   Time,  as the song goes, is marching on, and three years after I got my original perm, I got another.  This time it was because, as a teacher, I didn't want to spend extra time doing my hair.  And, as always, I'm daydreaming of what to do with my summer.  Ideally it should combine money and adventure, since I need both a change of pace and a new car.  I've looked at international plane tickets, railway passes around the US, road trips to Canada, and greyhound buses across the continent.  A teacher's summer is so short compared to a college student's.  I have no long four months.  I have only about two months and a week.  What should I do?

    

      Then, with a sudden whim, I looked up that rafting company.  Adventure: check.  Money: a lot more than I'd make by not working at all.  Time frame: doesn't start until the second week of June.  Liklihood of getting time off for the annual family reunion: decent.  My qualifications: Except for physical preparedness, good.  The boss's need for new guides: unlikely.  But then, why not apply?  I've done it twice before.  This dream feel became optional and fell asleep long ago, but maybe it's time to wake it up and give it a third chance to come true.  

    

Besides, I already have the perm.  

    

A Tribute to Ben

 

Once there was a young lady school marm who was feeling stressed.  She had woken up and remembered all of her responsibilities and how much she wanted to succeed in fulfilling all of them and how impossible it seemed.  She did the best she could before she had to leave for school, but she could not get the right video files for her good lesson idea.  She headed out to parking lot later than usual, worrying because it had snowed all night and she didn't know if her car would make it out of the parking lot.  Just the day before she had been stuck in her parking spot at school and had spend five minutes pushing futilely against her car before someone stopped to help her.  If her car was stuck now, this early in the morning, who would help her?  She was already running late, and the roads were probably terrible.  She had parked her car on the opposite side of her apartment complex the night before, looking for the spot she was least likely to get stuck.    

As she looked at the sea of snow around her car, her heart let out its last gasp of hope like a deflated whopee cushion.  She trudged through the eight inches of snow in her low dress shoes, feeling the snow and cold soak into her pant legs and into her shoes.  She turned the key and listened to her car, never a fan of cold, choke to life.  With a hurried sigh she grabbed the ice scraper and began to clear her windows, thankful that the snow was loose and not frozen into ice.  She worked hurriedly in the early morning lamplight.  It could have been ten at night or four in the morning.  The parking would have looked the same as it did then, cold, quiet, and empty of any shapes but the cars sleeping under their blankets of snow while more snow drifted through the dark sky and lamplight to tuck them in.  As the young teacher brushed the snow off of her windshield, she looked up and saw an extraordinary sight.  A young man was climbing silently over the wall of the aparment complex parking lot, like Augustine stealing peaches.  He dropped lightly and easily onto snow, as if he did this every morning.  She laughed happily and called a good morning.  He responded just as cheerfully, and while she finished clearing her car, the two chatted as if she was not in a hurry and he not just returning from a graveyard shift at a drug rehab center and if it was not at all weird for two strangers to talk like friends in a deserted parking lot full of lamplight and snow.  He stayed long enough to make sure she wasn't stuck, shook her hand, introduced himself as Ben, and said maybe he'd see her coming over the wall again some other early morning.

   

It's hard for meetings in the privacy of early morning surrounded by stillness and snow to not feel surreal.  He appeared literaly from nowhere and quickly relieved the worry on my mind that I could do the least about myself.  As I told him when he offered to stay out in the snow a few minutes longer after a long night to make sure I could make it to work, he was "an angel come over the wall."  

    

Thanks, Ben.

New Year's Resolution

      It's safe to say that I'm a very nostalgic person with a great memory, which means that I tend to spend a lot of time living in the past.  I don't really believe in forgetting experiences, whether they be wonderful or painful.  Forgetting a wonderful memory is a shame and discarding a painful one is a waste.  Memories echo like faint harmonics to the everyday events of my life.  I look out my classroom window at the snow falling outside in the parking lot, and I also see the debate round I was panicking in, only to look out the window to see snow secretly falling while we were stressing ourselves out about with a bunch of words.  I see snow falling as I quickly walk out of the opera talking and laughing.  I watch it piling up on birdfeeders at home on a rare snow day in April.  I stare out my bedroom window back at home late at night, just watching the flakes fall in the dimness.  The longer I watch the snow out my classroom window, the more snowfalls I see.  I love this way of living.  It gives life depth and color and makes me feel as if I am constantly connected to everyplace I've ever been and everyone I've met.  

   

      But this pattern of thought also means that I can spend too much time looking backward instead of forward.  We all have times in our lives that stand out like bright sunlit patches among the other memories.  There the colors are vivid and living, feelings run deeper, and it seems as if we are living more fully than at other times.  It's the natural course of things for these bits of stormy radiance to come and go, live in memory, fade into the background with the rest of the echoes, and then be outshone one day by a fresh experience.  Twice now, I have made myself unhappy because I stared so long at a shining memory that it because like a spot light, leaving me blind and throwing the present into comparative darkness.  As the light begins to fade, I mourn its passing and reproach the world for being so dark and dingy.  Once before, and now again, I am going to make a choice rare for me: close my eyes, turn away from frantically holding a fading past, and step into the rich and fertile darkness of the future.  

   

Emily Dickenson wrote:

   

My life closed twice before its close;
  It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
  A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
  As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
  And all we need of hell.

   

Parting with the parts of our lives when we were fully living can feel like accepting a form of living death, but accepting those deaths is the only way to continue to live.  Who knows what lights have shone out of the darkness ahead that I missed because I insisted on walking backwards, eyes fixed on a retreating light?  Our past, no matter how bright, will fade, and if we continue to measure what it means to be alive by a those spot-light past moments, we will do nothing but mourn a darkness that is only a trick of that same light and eventually fade with the memories we refuse to release.

      

And, finally, from Tennyson:

   

CVI. 
 
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, 
  The flying cloud, the frosty light: 
  The year is dying in the night; 
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 
 
Ring out the old, ring in the new, 
  Ring, happy bells, across the snow: 
  The year is going, let him go; 
Ring out the false, ring in the true. 
  
Ring out the grief that saps the mind, 
  For those that here we see no more; 
  Ring out the feud of rich and poor, 
Ring in redress to all mankind. 
  
Ring out a slowly dying cause, 
  And ancient forms of party strife; 
  Ring in the nobler modes of life, 
With sweeter manners, purer laws. 
  
Ring out the want, the care, the sin, 
  The faithless coldness of the times; 
  Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, 
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
  
Ring out false pride in place and blood, 
  The civic slander and the spite; 
  Ring in the love of truth and right, 
Ring in the common love of good. 
  
Ring out old shapes of foul disease; 
  Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; 
  Ring out the thousand wars of old, 
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
  
Ring in the valiant man and free, 
  The larger heart, the kindlier hand; 
  Ring out the darkness of the land, 
Ring in the Christ that is to be.