I'm teaching an actual literature class this semester, not just freshman comp. I had thought that maybe, just maybe this group of students would be mature enough to handle reading some short stories that do not come from Chicken Soup for the Soul and discussing them. Ha. I need to stop dreaming.

I've always wanted to teach "Brokeback Mountain," because it's a beautiful story, and I love Annie Proulx, but I was too timid to teach it to freshmen. I don't know why. I had to read the Marquis de Sade's Justine when I was a freshman, and nobody made a fuss. While crazy people are always trying to ban books, I don't remember anyone trying to protect college students from the evil literature in my day. But it seems like the times have changed.

Now that I'm teaching a sophmore class, though, I put "Brokeback Mountain" in my syllabus, figuring that the worst I'd have to endure would be a bunch of puns on the title. I started off this week with 45 students. So far 27 have dropped. Part of me is really sad. But mostly I say good riddance.

I am sofa king wee todd ed with money. I got a call today from Holly, who is catsitting while we're in SC. I thought I had been paying the utility bill every month. I really did. But I guess I goofed, or their website is screwed up, or something, because I now owe the city of Tallahassee $553, and Cookie is not going to be able to play Mario Kart until the power gets turned back on. Holly, being the excellent catsitter that she is, offered to try and take Cookie to her house so she doesn't die of heatstroke. I'm not sure what Cookie would object to more--the heat, or having to get in her carrier. Anyway, I feel very white trashy right now--the gubment done shut off my power! While looking over my bank statement, I also realized that I am still paying for cable in my old apartment, and I have been paying Hallmark $5 a month for the past two years, ever since I sent my grandmother a fancy ecard using a 60 day free trial of Smilebox. Well, my grandmother is a special lady who deserves a $120 card.

Why can I not function in the real world? I can recite Pushkin in Russian. I have a fairly good grasp of oil painting, intaglio printmaking, figure drawing. I used to take pipe organ lessons. I spent the last two days teaching myself Latin--I could now have a fairly decent conversation with the pope, as long as he stuck to the price of slaves and who killed Caesar. I'm working on a freaking PhD. So why is it that I cannot click on a link and pay my goddam power bill?

Chris and I hit the road last Friday to go to my cousin Tom's wedding. We stopped at a Cracker Barrel in Savannah for a late-night dinner. Chris asked for some jelly to go with his biscuits, to which the waitress replied, "We have strawberry, grape, or this crazy new orange stuff." So Chris said he'd take a chance on the crazy orange stuff. She came back and warned that it was "really sweet," adding, "It looks weird, but then all jelly looks weird. It's called ma...man...mar...Well, here it is." When she left, Chris showed me the label; it was marmalade. It's going to blow her mind one day when she discovers peanut butter.

The next day we stopped by my dad and stepmom's hotel room so they could finally meet Chris. Screamy was being unusually quiet. For her. Which is still really loud for a normal person. My dad has recently discovered Facebook and doesn't quite understand how it works. It took me a couple of days to realize that he'd been having a one-sided conversation with me on his own wall. I also noticed that he recently friended a guy I was in marching band with. It turns out that he had wanted to friend Chris, but he didn't know his last name, and I had set my privacy settings so that he couldn't see my complete profile. So my dad decided to look through my friends list and just add the first Chris he found.

We had numerous issues getting to the wedding on time and ended up missing the sermon, which was fine and dandy with me. The reception was dry and involved some exceptionally long and rambling toasts. I always forget to bring a wedding flask.

Sunday we went to Folly Beach. It was super fun, and now we have sunburns as souvenirs. Then Chris, Ansley and I went on a ghost tour that night, which is something I had always wanted to do in Charleston. It was a good one, too; we got to go into an old cemetery and everything. All in all it was a pretty fun trip, but I also hope my remaining single cousins can put off mating for at least another year.

I posted it under a fake name. Because I'm a coward.

Awkwardfamilyphotos.com


BTW, I also sent them this one, which they didn't use:


Check out the bayonets in the background.

...it's not okay.

I got my mom a ticket to come down and stay with me for a week, which
I'm happy about, although right now I'm looking around my apartment and
realizing just how much stuff I'm going to need to hide. It's pretty
pathetic to be thirty years old and still throwing my books about
evolution under the bed, but I really, really hate confrontation. And
so I'll be stashing all my DVD's that aren't Jane Austen movies or Gilmore Girls (the
older seasons, before Rory becomes a huge whore), almost all my CD's,
any books with "sex," "Satan," or "science" in the title, the tiny
Buddhas I compulsively buy just because they're so little and cute, and
signs stolen from various restaurants. There's probably more that I
haven't thought of yet.



I also need to think of some Mom-friendly activities. There's a flute
concert one night that she's going to be here. There's the paint-a-pot
place in the union. The Knott House museum looks blandly entertaining.
I'm not sure about the Florida History museum; they have that mastadon
skeleton that they claim is millions of years old, when we all know
that it could only be six thousand at the most. The Museum of Fine Arts
is way too edgy, what with their phallic vegetable paintings. Anyone
have other suggestions? Where would Queen Victoria go if she were in
Tallahassee? The IMAX, maybe?

My mom's side of the family constantly tries to make Christmas simpler and less stressful. For example, a few years ago, they decided that Christmas shopping is a pain. So now we just look around the house for crap we don't want, wrap it up, and put it in each other's stockings. I now own lots of kids' meal toys, some odd napkin rings, and several bottles of green tea extract.

This year, they decided to have a drop-in Christmas brunch instead of Christmas dinner. It ended up being me, my grandparents, my uncle, my great-aunt, Mom, my stepdad, my stepbrother, his wife, Laura and her mom, Chris and his parents, and four dogs. It was fun, but after a while I started feeling like I should break out the old social anxiety journal and start giving things ratings. My fear that my great aunt was going to force everybody to sing: 7. My fear that one of my relatives might ask me to read aloud from something I've written, which was cute when I was little, but now all my stories are about war criminals or sexual deviants or people who believe in evolution: 8. My fear that my stepdad was going to make racist comments about Obama: 8.5. I told my mom I was feeling overstimulated, so she poked me and said, "Boo!" She's a funny lady.

There was indeed enforced singing--which included singing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus. Chris's dad asked why we didn't do the "How old are you?" line, which I thought was a reasonable question. Before we could open our stockings, my stepdad said, "I have something to read to everybody," and he pulled out a couple of sheets of paper. My fear that my stepdad was about to read some psycho Jack-Chick-type article about abortion or Satanic Harry Potter books or the looming threat of radical Methodism infiltrating our society: 10. But it turned out to just be a passage from Oswald Chambers, which was merely long and boring.

So everything went pretty well. Next year, though, I think we should celebrate Krampusnacht instead.

Clearly it's because I never believed in Santa and therefore never believed in going to sleep on Christmas Eve.

Things I have baked tonight: one pear spice cake, three dozen ginger snaps, three dozen peanut butter cookies, two dozen fucked-up, melted peanut butter blossoms, forty-five mini-quiches. That's the upside of insomnia. I say 'insomnia,' but it's probably the eight cups of coffee I've had. I remember in undergrad how I used to drink coffee all night and then worry that I needed some kind of prescription medication to make me sleep. I never did make the connection. 

Anyway, happy holidays to everyone.

  

Had to throw in an MC5 reference, as I am currently in beautiful Detroit. I missed my connection, so I'm (hopefully) flying to Tampa tomorrow. Meanwhile I'm here at the Hampton Inn, grabbing all the free stuff in sight. Some lucky relative of mine will be getting a Christmas stocking full of mouthwash and shower caps. This is the second time I've ever been stranded somewhere because of a missed connection; the other time was also on a trip back from Maine. What do they do--let moose run their airports?

I had a dream the other night that I was back in social anxiety group therapy. I think all the screaming is getting to me. We were in a quaint New England Wal-Mart on Sunday, and I went off on my own to buy some last-minutes gifts. I figured I could follow Screamy's voice back to the group. But when I was looking for them, I realized that every single person in the store sounded exactly like her.

Will had a couple of theories about the screaming:
a) Yankees are too thrifty to hire town criers, so they all do it themselves.
b) They scream to keep warm.

I also suggested that a) Everything is so spread out here that they are used to yelling across fields to each other, or b) They scream to frighten away angry moose.

My dad just came in and said we're getting four to six inches of snow tomorrow. "I hope we can get you to the airport," he said. Wait a minute. "Hope"? Can't all Yankees drive in the snow? Don't they always brag about that?