Christmas Tree Love

No drawings this time, but at least I have pictures!

Behold, my beautiful Christmas tree! I fell in love with it on Christmas morning and took a gajillion pictures; these are the three which I liked best.

I've always rather identified with whales (they're so big! and I was a pretty big kid), while still being in awe of them. But I fell in love with the ship ornament first.

You can barely see either of them, in this photo.

I did think the pop of red was nice for this tree, and it was an added bonus that this particular ornament was, you know, a little more directly Christmas-y.

Hopefully you can see the whale a bit in this one, too.

I think I've loved this Christmas tree as much or more than any I've had in my life.

Drawing abilities, part II

This time it was a table of girls. I didn't draw a sports car; I didn't draw anything from a book, since I had sort of forgotten until after I walked into the lunch room that I had been threatening for a while, and that it was time to put my money where my mouth was. So I slipped into the kitchen, grabbed a blank piece of paper and a pencil, and then went and sat down with the girls.

I considered drawing one of the girls themselves, but since under even the best of circumstances, it can be difficult to get kids to hold still for you to draw them, I decided to draw one girl's lunch. I had hoped merely to be busy enough to pass unnoticed, but that wasn't what happened. They were completely fascinated. "Don't eat that!" one of them said to her friend. "She's drawing it!" I told her that she should eat it-- I was a little horrified at the thought that someone would get less lunch because of my presence-- and I just drew as fast as I could.

And at the end of lunch, I asked them to please remember to clean up after themselves. One girl tried to argue that it was so small, why did it matter if they left (for instance) just one plastic baggie behind. I raised my eyebrows and looked her in the eye and restated my point, and she quickly agreed.

NOBODY EVER TOLD ME THIS: hey, you are pretty good at drawing, and that means that some day you are going to work in a middle school and you will need kids to clean up after themselves at lunch, and this drawing ability is going to be your secret weapon for connecting with them, getting them to view you as an actual human being, and being willing to do the decent thing and clean up after themselves.

Life is so weird sometimes. (Yes, yes, I will try to get that lunch tray drawing posted soon...)

How my drawing abilities indirectly got me one of my favorite compliments ever

Hmm. This is the second brag post in a row-- but I did promise to tell you this story in the last post, so I'll do this one and then maybe next time I will talk about some of the things I've been messing up lately. (But no promises!)

Anyway. About halfway through the school year, I was having some difficulty getting the some of the seventh-graders I supervise at lunch to clean up after themselves. One day, I was feeling extra frustrated, and followed a couple of kids from the cafeteria to the library to see if they had been the ones to leave a particularly bad mess. They denied it, but said someone else had done it. I duly went and asked the someone else, but of course he denied as well. I went home pretty steamed about the whole thing, and decided that the best thing would be to sit with them at the table to make sure that I knew who was leaving what.

But as I thought about it that evening, I realized that my presence might not just be a little bit unwelcome; it might be very unwelcome, and I could get kids so upset about me being there that it would distract from my real purpose of figuring out who was causing the messes. I needed a strategy.

Luckily, I had been recently working on learning how to draw a Corvette. I had incorrectly assumed that I would be able to easily get the length of time it took me to draw it down to, oh, say, ten minutes so that I could teach it to my young library patrons during a special lunch hour when (with knowledge and consent from my lunch captain) I would not be in the lunch room but the library. All this was to no avail. My drawing time remains stubbornly at about the half hour mark, and the student (who really is good at drawing) who had volunteered to be my helper took even longer.

So, I had given up on the drawing project in terms of library programming, but as I was thinking about how to not make myself stinky, as it were, to a table full of boys, it occurred to me that if I were to draw a sports car, they might be interested enough not to mind me.

And that was exactly how it worked. The first day, they just watched. When a couple of them got up without taking their trays, I (without yelling, because they were right there) asked them to please come back for them, and they did so without complaint. The second day, I just reminded everyone as they stood up. The third day, they needed no reminder at all.

But this was the other interesting thing. One of the boys--I think on the first day-- said, "That isn't so hard. I can do that." And I genuinely thought that he might. Some kids spend HUGE amounts of time on drawing every day, and I thought if he was one of them, it might be cool for him to get to beat an adult at a skill both he and his peers valued.

The kid who had been helping me prepare for the drawing lesson that never happened remained silent. He knew from personal experience how hard it was to draw a good looking car.

And this is what happened: within about twenty seconds, it was very, very obvious that I had won. And normally I find impromptu contests annoying, especially when the contest is uneven-- yes, even when I'm the one who has the advantage, as in this case. But in this case, victory was SWEET, because every single one of those boys cleaned his tray up every day after that, and the boy who had challenged me happened to also be one who used to try to cut in line every day, and I would always have to harangue him to go back, and after that he just stopped, for most of the rest of the school year. And, basically, anything I asked him to do (which isn't much-- I'm really not that much of a dragon) he would just DO.

This is the thing. I know that I'm above-average at drawing, and yes, it's a real skill, and yes, it's great, but most of the time I feel like being good at drawing, in terms of my-life-usefulness, is a bit like having extra-handsome elbows: great as far as it goes, but not that useful. Except, this time it was! Like I said, SWEET!

And the epilogue happened a couple of weeks ago. My lunch captain, who is one of the school counselors and also one of my friends, came up to me and told me that our school custodian had told her that she thought our lunch team (meaning, the adults who supervise the seventh-graders during lunch) did a very good job. And my friend/captain said that she thought that was mostly me, and I think that this is at least a little bit true, and I was absolutely chuffed that my little old handsome-elbow-drwaing skills got me to the point of earning compliments from the custodial staff. I'll take it any day. :)

(N.B. I have grand planz to update this post soon with at least a picture of one of my drawings, but I don't have them with me at the moment, so I thank you in advance for your patience with me.)

Kept my goat

Image by Armin Kübelbeck; uploaded from Wikipedia

I have a kid-- like lots of my kids, actually-- who is somewhat of a tough customer. I had to write him up not too long ago for blatant disrespect. Earlier this year, I ended up sitting up at his lunch table a couple of days, in order to get the kids there to clean up after themselves (which is also a good story which I should tell soon...)

Anyway. The other day, he called me over and said, showing me his phone, "Look! It looks just like you!"

It was a picture of a purple, triangular-shaped cartoon character. Sort of blob-like. And for once in my life, I had the perfect response: "Oh my gosh! It DOES look like me! It looks exactly like me!!!"

The kid doubled over, cackling in laughter. I smiled, and then started walking again. When I told the story to a friend later that day, she pointed out that I had won my not letting him get my goat. The part I like is that I think we both won. :)

So I Quit Grad School to Focus on My Writing

Long-time readers of this blog will not be that surprised-- I believe that I've announced that I was "going to get serious about my writing" at least twice, here-- but the decision did surprise me, as well as a few people who had not known me as long.

And since the same questions seem to come up over and over again, I decided that I would just answer them here and then link to Facebook, and then hopefully everyone will have theirs answered. Or, mostly answered. I hope. Here goes!

Q: What are you working on?
A: Four main projects: a biography of my dad; a middle school cookbook; this blog; and a young adult fantasy. The fantasy is my main project. I spend as much time on the biography, but since I am sort of still in the collecting-data phase for that project, it is much less towards the finished end of the spectrum.

Q: Cool! Young Adult Fantasy-- like Harry Potter!! Doesn't that mean you'll be rich?
A: Not... really. I mean, sure, I have ideas about what I would do with buckets of cash, but the truth is that "wildly successful" for me would mean I could, first, move out from living with my mom, and second, buy my own house. And, once I have enough years in my job to be able to carry my fabulous health insurance with me, to quit my job. Maybe. I actually really enjoy my job; I just don't love that I get paid so little that I have to live with my mother.

The issue of how much/little I get paid (about a third of a teacher salary) is a whole can of worms, but suffice it to say that I think the school system would be better served if it paid all the adults it emplyed a living wage. I know they can't afford it. They can't afford what their budget even now. And yet, I believe that if the pay went up, the candidate pool would suddenly and mysteriously grow both larger and more qualified, and the work that got done would be of much higher quality, thus saving money in the long run. *sigh* /end rant.

Oh, right, you wanted to know about my future income. Huge quantities of money would bring their own headaches, which I am not really interested in. Moderate quantities of money (and research backs me up here) would, given my current income level, have a significant positive impact on my happiness. So, that's what I'm aiming for, and luckily that is also what is much more realistic to aim for. Publishing books-- really, making entertainment of any kind-- is a bit of a gamble, but part of the reason I am taking extra time now (see below) is because I am focused on that goal of producing steadily high-quality work. Only time will tell if this was a good strategy for me in the end.

Q: Cool! Young Adult Fantasy-- I LOVE young adult fantasy!!! Can I read your stuff?
A: Not quite yet. Sorry. I am a painfully slow writer, though I believe/hope (but really, I do believe) that this will change as I become a more experienced writer. If you would like to be a beta reader, whenever that may happen, you are welcome to email me at corneliaphilosophene at the email service provided by Google, and I will put your name and email on my list of beta raders. And I even JUST NOW started a Google doc for this very purpose.

Q: How long do you think it will be until you have something for beta readers?
A: My best guess is that it will be a bare minimum of one year, but possibly two or even three. But I'm hoping for one.

Q: But you'll start in on grad school again in the summer, or whenever you find one that's right-- won't you?
A: You know, the first couple of times I got this question, I said "yes," but since then I've realized that the answer is "no."

This is the thing. I've known for-- mmm-- at least fifteen years that I wanted to be a writer, and for the last ten that I also should be a writer. I had always thought that I would get a "real" job, then in my spare time, write, and then my career would take off. But that isn't how things have worked out.

I remember once being at a wedding luncheon at a table with a woman who had a great job as a voice actor. Someone else at the table was congratulating her. She said thank you, because it really was a dream job for her, but she also pointed out that it was the only job she could find. Even the local university's custodial crew had rejected her before she finally, in desperation, applied for a job which she was afraid was too cool for her.

I have tried a number of different things-- things which have worked for other people. For pity's sake, the program I just quit was a librarianship program, and other people shift from being librarians to being writers all the time. But the realization I finally came to is that just because other people could do it doesn't mean that I can do it.

Thus: my second job is just. writing. And I must say, while I had thought I was "getting serious" about my writing before, there are few things to light a fire under one's tail like the prospect of spending one's forties, after one's thirties, living with mama. I mean, I love her. But there comes a point.

New York Trip, Part III

And this is the last.

I remembered my resolution as I was walking from the Natural History Museum to the temple not to be embarrassed about taking pictures. (I tend to be embarrassed no matter whether I'm on my home turf or not, if I'm in public.) So the next three are just cool iron gratings in front of buildings in streets which are quite close to the Manhattan LDS temple.

First, a couple more creatures-that-are-not-gargoyles:

Then, a cool piece of ironwork just below a window-- quite frankly, it reminded me of some of the cool ironwork in front of rowhouses that I see in Baltimore when I go up there:
 

In the afternoon, after I had gotten back to the hotel and Mom had finished her meetings for the day, we decided together to go to St. Patrick's Cathedral. This was beautiful and well-worth the visit, and also the light was dim enough that I'm going to have to send you off to the wide, wide internet again to find someone else's gorgeous pictures of the inside (or even the outside-- sorry).

We walked past the famous Rockefeller Center on the way back, with its skating rink. And then... as we passed a building... I saw a sign which I could not help taking a picture of, despite the deplorable lighting conditions. I squealed when I said, "MOM! LOOK!"
 
And I was a happy chica.

After I got back home, I told friends that I had heard that New York is awesome because it's big, but I came to the opposite conclusion: it's big because it's awesome. I actually found it to be, in a way, rather cozy. This is no doubt related to the fact that I took zero motorized transportation in the time I was there, and my own two feet carried me to enough cool places to make me rawther happy for one trip. I am super excited to go again, whenever that is. :)

New York Trip: Part II

With gargoyles. Well, one gargoyle-like creature, if it had served a different architectural purpose. You'll see. :)

I wasn't there very long; I couldn't take very long off of work. So, I got there on a Wednesday afternoon, then walked with Mom down to the main branch of New York Public Library-- which I didn't get any good pictures of, but happily for YOU it's famous, so you can just look some up online. (The outside has marble lions; the inside looks a lot like the Library of Congress, having been built in approximately the same era.)

The next morning, I walked ALL over Central Park-- well, over half of it anyway. I walked from Times Square, where the hotel was, up through the south end of the park and then up to approximately the middle (North-South wise). I had wanted to go to the Metropolitan Museum of New York, but it turned out that it didn't open until ten, and since I wanted to make it to the temple by ten thirty or so for an eleven o'clock session, well, all I ended up seeing was the outside of the museum. *sigh*

But that was not the end of the world. As I walked across the narrow side of Central Park to see if I could catch any of the Natural History Museum (of Night at the Museum fame), I happened to come across Belvedere Castle. This structure was originally-- and, to quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up-- called a "folly," which is a structure built mostly to look good, without having any other real purpose. (This is where I got that info: https://www.centralpark.com/things-to-do/attractions/belvedere-castle/) Anyway, it's still serving the purpose of looking decorative, while also serving as a weather station, having a tourist shop inside, and being a nature observatory, from which you can actually check out stuff like binoculars. (This last part I didn't know until just now-- more to do for my planned return this summer!) But none of that was open yet as I hiked my way through.

I did, however, get a picture of this lovely metal creature over the door:

I just looked up the definition of a gargoyle. This one doesn't count, because it's not part of a gutter. But you can't tell me it isn't cool!

Next, I walked to the Natural History Museum-- which, you guessed it, was still closed when I got there, though it was opening as I arrived. I decided to step inside, which meant letting a guard give my purse a glance, which I certainly didn't have a problem with. The great hall did have a dinosaur-bone replica, but other than that was empty of objects. It did, however, have a lovely quotes from T. Roosevelt on the walls, one of which I liked so much that I took a picture:

The part I most like says: IT IS HARD TO FAIL BUT IT IS WORSE TO HAVE NEVER TRIED TO SUCCEED. It felt quite relevant to my life as I looked at it. It feels quite relevant to my life, even now.

New York Trip: Part I

Mom had to be in New York for work, which meant that her work paid for a hotel for her, which meant that I could stay for a night in New York for free! Except for the time off I took. But it was TOTALLY worth it, and it turns out I love New York, and I plan on going again.

Living there would be a different matter.

I took a cheapo bus up, and it was a gray, cloudy day-- which is a kind of day I love very much, so it was kind of perfect. I felt that the couple of shots I got of the Sesquehenna River as we passed over it were quite pretty:

And that's all I'll post for now. I will get to the other pictures of the LoC later, I suppose.

Floor at the Library of Congress

My oldest niece came out for a visit in October, and when I asked what she most wanted to see in the area, she said (after mentioning the temple) the Library of Congress.

Which I had seen before, but I had ABSOLUTELY NO objection to seeing again. So we went, and I took a lovely picture of the tile pattern on the floor:

We'll see if any of the others turned out well enough to post. My phone's camera isn't great, but it does have that one must-have feature: I almost always have it with me. :)

from ancient times: #metoo

I was looking at this poem I wrote a while back, and it seemed relevant to our current state of affairs. My deepest apologies, though, for all the poetry. I like writing it, but not as much reading it, and if that isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.

Sarah, to Pharoah

I used to pray

every day

(though I did not know it was a prayer)

that I would be beautiful.

Very beautiful.

I did not know

that beauty

sometimes

makes others wish they owned it

enough to suppose they did

O Pharoah

Did you really think

you had but to wish me

and I was yours?

That you had but to take me from my brother

--as you supposed

--and I would be yours?

(But of course you did.

Any man who would

declare himself a god

is delusional enough

to suppose anything.)

Becoming a Writer (getting to know myself)

There were a couple of summers, once I realized I wanted to be a professional writer, when I spent a significant chunk of time each day for a matter of weeks or months, working on writing projects. And, in this way, I got through a couple of drafts that didn't work, but became a bit discouraged that I didn't get any closer than I did to anything publishable. (But at least now I know that I CAN blitz my focus like that, which is indeed useful to know.)

The problem was, I became so discouraged that I stopped writing regularly, which was a problem. Finally towards the end of 2016 I decided to address it, so for 2017 my writing goal was to write for ten minutes a week-- and I made it! And I often wrote a lot more than ten minutes. It felt really good to be able to set an achievable goal and to feel the sense of accomplishment from meeting it over and over and over.

In December of 2017, a friend found out that I was trying to become a writer, and that I was writing for ten minutes a week, and she said what I had been thinking all along: that's not enough! You have to write more than that! Which wouldn't have been helpful in 2016, but in 2017 it hit me just right. Thus, a couple of weeks ago, I set a new, too-small-but-still-not-happening-regularly goal: I work for an hour a week on my writing.

Before I did that, though, I had to sit down and decide what I wanted to work on. In the past, remembering that in college I had done better during spring and summer terms (block classes) than fall or winter term (regular-length, and more of them) I had cut down the number of writing projects I was working on to one fiction and one nonfiction. And I don't regret this. I made real progress on both of these. But in late December (as in, last month), as I considered expanding my writing time, I realized that I really wanted to start something fresh, while not abandoning the old projects. And I remembered that there was that one term when I took 19 credit hours and got straight As-- so, sometimes it's a good idea for me to try a lot of things at once.

So here's the plan. I'm still working on my dad's biography; I have no idea what I'm doing, and therefore no idea when I will finish, but at the moment I'm still getting new information from interviewing him, his brothers, and his sisters-in-law, among others, so I figure I'll work on what to do with it once I have it all down. I'm also working on the fantasy novel I've been working on FOR.EV.ER. I've seriously wondered if I should abandon it, but again, even though I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing or when I will be able to finish, I'm still making progress at making it a better story, so I'm just plugging away (but not very fast).

I'm also blogging again (obvs.) and also starting a new non-fiction project, which I'm afraid to write about here because I've talked it up to so many people already, and I'm a little afraid that I won't get it done and that I will disappoint all the people. But the weird thing about it is, all that advice about "turn off your internal editor"? Yeah, it's actually relevant for this one. (I tried it for the fantasy novel last time I blitzed it and wrote 40,000 words of which I hated about 30,000 words, so it isn't always good advice.) In this case, my internal editor is saying kind of stupid things like, "you'll never finish," or "You're just blathering on and on; no one wants to hear what you have to say about this." THAT's the kind of internal voice you need to ignore.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't be deeply embarrassed if my first draft were to see the light of day. It's just that I know from experience that listening to stupid voices like that will lead to never getting said first draft finished, which is the absolute requirement for being able to get to the later, better drafts.

And here's the last thing. I'm a little extra-weirded-out by this, but it looks like having more projects to work on is motivating me work more on each one, which means that so far I'm not working an hour a week on writing; I'm working, like, four hours minimum. (It has helped that the weeks thus far have included vacation and/or snow days). Notwithstanding how very weird I find this, I'll TAKE it.

I'll let you know how it goes. :)

The parable of the book tape

So, there had not been a library media assistant for two years before I came into the job (the school board had decided that they weren't necessary, for budgetary reasons, but then later reversed their decision). And that means, among other things, that book repair had been done only on a very irregular basis for the last two years, and sometimes when it was done, it was done inexpertly.

Being addicted not just to books, but to learning, I of course had to do some internet research on book repairs.

Just for the record, my very favorite is called "tipping in a page," wherein you glue along the very edge of a page which has fallen out of a book, stick it back in (carefully!) and then, once this special glue has dried it's like the page never fell out. WOW.

Also just for the record, my least favorite repair at the moment is called hinge repair, wherein you smear glue on a thin little piece of wood, and then try to get the glue into the narrow space where the endpaper and the cover of a book are coming apart from each other. It's messy, it's hard to see what I'm doing, and I'm always afraid that I'm going to get glue where it should not be. But I am firm in my belief that I will cease to hate this repair once I have more practice and feel more confident because I am in fact more competent. And, I make myself do this repair anyway, because I know both from reading about it and now from experience, that it prevents much worse damage (like the book and the cover coming apart completely).

Anyway. Book tape. Besides the cloth book tape I have pictured below, you can get some really thick, super-strong tape called (amazingly enough) book tape, which is thick-ish plastic film with adhesive on one side. And you would think-- or someone would think, because someone actually did this-- that it would be a good idea to use this somewhat expensive, extra-thick tape to tape pages back in if you didn't feel like messing with the glue, because then the pages would stay in place extra-well. But you would be wrong. True, the tape doesn't come undone, but the pages are so much thinner than the tape itself that on at least one of these repairs, I can see that the pages are starting to have crease marks where the edge of the tape is, and will eventually rip off entirely.

So what do I use? I use packing tape-- which is like book tape, but much thinner, so at least I'm not damaging the pages by using something that's way too heavy for them. There exist better products for this job, I'm 100% sure, but this is the best I've got available at the moment. Book tape I use for covers, both hard and soft, which need reinforcement.

(I've pasted a picture below of some cloth book tape. Most tape is sticky on one side these days, but the tape in the picture below needs to have glue put on it before it can be used.)

This is single-stitched book tape, of which a roll was supposed to be ordered with our other book repair supplies, but somehow it didn't get ordered. Which made me sad, but it isn't like I don't have plenty of other things to repair. *sigh*

And why is this the parable of the book tape? Well, every time I pull out either the book tape or the packing tape, I inevitably think about Jesus, saying that you can't mend old clothes with new cloth, which is true, because the new cloth will be so much stronger than the old that it will rip the old cloth. It's like using book tape on a paper page. And he also said that you can't take old cloth and mend something new with it, and this is also true: the old cloth will just rip out, and there is no point in making a mend like that. So I always feel a bit surreal, sitting at the table where I do my repairs, thinking about what would it be like if Jesus had been speaking to a bunch of book conservationists: "Neither do ye take book tape and put it on pages..."