Ghosts/Haunted

So this is about ghosts, but not in the way it seems at first. 

It's not a "spooky season" pre-Halloween kind of ghost, or a horror story movie night kind of ghost. It's about being haunted in the way we all really eventually are, and these kinds of ghosts absolutely exist. If you've never seen one, just wait, because you probably will eventually. Unfortunately. You, too, will probably be haunted. 

My first ghost, I guess, was my father-in-law. He was so much more of a dad to me than the in-real-life biological guy, who honestly took off when I was four, but I have a feeling it was way sooner in reality.

From what my mom said, I was supposed to be the baby that brought them back together after my sister Peggy died as a toddler.... apparently kind of my dad's fault, or at least he blamed himself.... (he's a ghost too, but that comes later.) My father-in-law died coming up on 20ish years ago (give or take a year or two because I suck at math.) 

He was a very tall man, and funny, and stubborn, and a real pain in the butt sometimes. He had that Texas loping walk, lanky, cowboy poet thing happening. I used to tell him about this poem called "Reincarnation," by Wallace McCrae, because he reminded me of that lazy, funny, serious vibe, all the time.  (There's a long story about that, including a funny night with his cousin Will, and an old man fight [verbally, not physically, although I think that wasn't completely out of the cards]).  But yeah.... he was a guy that meant a lot to me, pain in the butt and all. 

I made this image illustration of the poem-- which is kinda fun, and it definitely took way longer than it should have 'cause I should be working on my course in Canvas, but nah. 

And after he died-- I would see him all. the. damn. time. Still do.  

He's a very tall man who looms over everyone else in the crowd, wearing a plaid shirt and a longer torso than most, with his belt around his hips, that belt doing the lord's work keeping up his pants because he didn't want it to go over his substantial belly..... Or an older man, greyish hair slicked back in the 1950s way that was pretty cool/hot back in the day, wearing wire frame glasses, squinting up at something he was trying to figure out. He was always at the cafeteria-style restaurant he used to like best of all (Luby's, for those who know.) Or off in the distance, there he would be, walking through Costco. It wasn't REALLY him, but it was him. I could almost smell his aftershave. And don't get me started about the giant Hershey bar he once ate in one sitting in the car driving home AFTER eating at Luby's.... Chocolate, and him just basking in the pleasure of having all of it to himself. 

But still. Haunted.

My next ghost was my mom. She is actually the "ghost" I saw today that inspired this blog musing. So there you have it... what is going through my mind when I'm walking around the library. (Among many other things. I'm a bit of an overthinker.)

When I lived with her as an older teen/young adult, sometimes we would fight, and I just couldn't wait to not live with her anymore, because she was an opinionated old lady with a loud ass voice and a smoker's rasp. She smoked two packs of More Reds a day, and God, I could never get that smoke out of my nonsmoker's clothes. I hated it. I sometimes hated her a little bit because of it. Being the only nonsmoker in a house full of heavy smokers is rough sometimes. 

She had been in the Navy in the late 1950s/early 1960s; her call sign was Rocky, (based on her last name, not the movie, which arrived way later) and she had a Drill Instructor's voice that would put the fear of God in you if you were acting up (and by the way, I now can do that in my old age... yes!!) She once took a sawed-off shotgun away from a guy in a bar (called the Purple Peacock and I think it was a Biker Bar she worked at?) in the early 80s when he was threatening to shoot up the place because his heart was way broken by a woman who was cheating on him, (not my mom, by the way; she was the bartender) and shamed him into sitting down and behaving himself..... and then was scared after the fact and had to sit down because what he heck did she just do? (And for the record-- I do things like that all the time, too... not thinking about the danger I'm in until after, but dang it, that dude should not have tried to steal from that Home Depot that one time! One of my coworkers used to joke that he was scared of me after that incident I could maybe tell you about but won't for now cause this one isn't really about me.....) 

And I'm going to interject here to anyone who stumbles on reading this to ASK your loved ones their stories, over and over again, because you never know when they won't be there later to tell them to you to clarify what the HELL she was doing in that biker bar, but also COOL you were a bartender in a biker bar? Tell me MORE. 

And we got along GREAT on the phone after my kids were born. I would call her, and tell her that I felt awful for dropping them off at a daycare-- I was the worst mom ever for trying to get them acclimated before I started work (and for the record, they did spew from both ends like three days into it, so it was kind of a terrible daycare) and she calmed me down off the ledge and I learned that it's a process of letting them have their own lives.... and every mom thinks that, and sometimes we're right, but sometimes we're just trying to do TOO DAMN MUCH. 

But boy, do I miss her. I miss her almost every time I get into a car alone for a longer drive, even this many years (like 15? Again, I'm not going to do the math) later. I want to call her, and talk over my day, and get advice, and hear her stories. 

And sometimes, I'll see a silver-haired older lady, especially like the housekeeping staff lady I saw today at work, stooped over a little, her eyebrow furrowed in concentration while she held one of those weird long duster gadgets, and thinking about how she was going to finish cleaning this one spot near the escalator, and suddenly, there is the ghost of my mom. I wanted to ask her (a little bit but I didn't) for a hug, beause there she was. My mom. But this Mexican American lady in San Antonio would have thought I was crazy.... 

But for a moment, she was Iva. Just for a moment. 

I was haunted. I am haunted. 

Ghosts. They're all over the place, and just kind of growing in number for me these days. I didn't really have ANY until my late 30s and now I am perpetually running into someone who reminds me of someone, who for a moment IS that someone, even people I've never really even met. (Long story there but it's a doozy). 

It makes it difficult, and I don't entirely know what to do with this information. 

I could tell you about the ghost of my sister Judy, and her daughter Sara, and life choices and people I've loved or never even had a chance to love, and some I've hated and lost and no one ever wrote a eulogy for that loss but it's still there.  And it's both the lighthearted Cowboy poem above and the deeply sad moments when even an entire four servings (who set that single pint as FOUR people should eat it? Or you should eat it over a period of four different times??? Sadists, that's who) pint of Ben & Jerry's doesn't really push deeply enough down.  

But sheesh. Reading over this, maybe I just need to go find myself that therapist I've been musing over for a while. Or some Ben & Jerry's. Two pints this time. For the ghosts. 

Finals Week! wOOOOOOOooooOOOooh

First day of finals week is in the bag. My students give oral presentations & turn in a letter of metacognition about their progress over the semester. 

Today was a small class, and they did mostly fine. Yes, some of them put it off until the last minute and it showed, but it was fine. 

But I forgot to bring food with me and had no lunch and came home and had a tasty small ish snack and my hubster is going to make a tasty dinner later. All good things. And the rest of this week I also have finals, with my busiest day being Wednesday, when I have two finals to give right in a row. That's gonna be a rough day; I love listening to finals, and my students are awesome, but six straight hours of listening to oral presentations about their paper topics is HARD, even when the presentations are good. 

SO what's the reason I'm posting? Procrastination, obviously. 

But also-- I have Things That Are Going On Backstage. Concerns and plots that we thought maybe were wrapped up but were actually maybe Chekov's storyline all along. And I dunno. I just wanted to mention it here, and say that sometimes, it's that duck that looks still and peaceful but is really padding under all that water. But I also feel a little like this lil' fella: 

So I'll stop for now and go grade some stuff. And remember to bring a lunch with me on the other days this week. And also remember this inspirational quote from Anne Lamott from Bird By Bird to remind myself that I can still take it one bird at a time. Even if that bird is a little kerfluffled. 

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said. "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

Sleep Can Be a Real Evasive Jerk Sometimes Ya Know?

When I was younger, I lived for a few years with my Grandmother. God, I loved that woman, even though she was difficult at times. But honestly, difficulty is the least of my worries far more often than not. These days I'm definitely team Let's Be Difficult As Often As Possible. I even named my Apple Watch after her because dammit if she doesn't still remind me to get up and go outside. 

(AND NO, GRAMMARLY, DO NOT RESTRUCTURE MY SENTENCES. I WANT IT TO BE THAT WAY. YOU CAN FIX SPELLING OR OBVIOUS SYNTAX ERRORS! NO STYLE CHANGES)!!!!

Okay. Sorry. Grammar argument with AI tone police.  Anyway. Back to my point. In the days she lived with us in Florida, back when my mom finally got her sh*t together enough to buy a house (and really, it wouldn't have happened without Grandma), my Grandma would get up Hella early. The kitchen was just off my bedroom, where I slept with the window open most of the time to the sound of the neighbor's backyard roosters clucking and screaming their "raise the sun" magic. 

Grandma would get up at 6 AM on a regular day and putter around in the kitchen. The cats would harass her, and she would call them "a bunch of beggars" and feed them affectionately anyway. 

And I would lie in bed, secure in the fact that she was there, and I'd need to get up and get ready for school (this is when I had finally figured out how to start college, thank you, Pell Grants). Only about a year before the hubster & I decided to go ahead and get hitched, & everything changed. 

That's a rambly way of saying now that I'm 55, sometimes mornings start ridiculously early because I start thinking of all the things I really need to do, and lying in bed with that process and sleep will not come back. Those frikkin' sheep evade me, and the hubster sleeping happily on his side of the bed just makes me want to poke him and say "you awake?" so he'll make me coffee. 

Submits as evidence: today, on a Sunday (which happens to be the hubster's birthday, so I need to figure out what we're doing for that), I am up dumb early. I woke up at like 5 something. I have papers to grade, and stuff to do, and I probably should exercise, and I am thinking of past things that I should do something about, but not 'til I have time to think, and yet, I am up at 5, thinking anyway, and yeah. "You Sheep Get Off My Lawn!" 

And it makes me wish I could call my Grandma, because you know she'd be up. 

Gamer Street Cred list

 Video games I've played more than just a little bit:

I took students to a special event on campus today and part of it was "mingle while eating" before the event started. Students were asking me what video games I had played in my life and honestly... I started thinking about it and it is a lot, but like... now I need a list. This probably won't be entirely chronological, but I might also hyperfixate and put it in some kind of order. We'll see. I may come back and update this as I play something, or remember something, too. But this is what I can think of right now. It's kind of a lot, and it doesn't count games that are ONLY phone games like those "make a pizza parlor" games.

So I got my first game system when I was about 13 years old in 1983, an Atari 2600. I had the basics: Pong, Space Invaders, Othello, Dig Dug, Pitfall, ET (not a great game.) Joust. Indiana Jones. I know I had others; I had like 50 cartridges at one time. The one I remember playing the most was Pitfall. There was a challenge where if you got a certain score, you could take a photo and send it to some address and get a special patch. I got that score, took the photo, but I never was able to talk my mom into taking me to the post office and getting me a stamp. Sad trombone noises. I played Mario, Donkey Kong. All the big 80s console games. All the "arcade games" too. I was BADASS at Street Fighter. Boys would stand near and watch this young looking skinny ass redheaded girl, mouths wide open, while I beat wave after wave. 

It was some time from the later 80s until I played many games again. My sister & I played the HECK out of the game Willow on my nephew's Nintendo in the early 90s. I also obsessively played a game that was Baby versions of Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck and stuff. I think there are a couple of other odd little games in that time frame too. 

Then I got married, went to college, moved around a bit. I did play a couple of games though. 

• Myst. (Stupid, pointless but intriguing still). 
• DOOM. 
• I totally beat it, and am still traumatized by the giant Hell Spider. It always made me vaguely carsick feeling too. 
• There was this odd game on the basic Windows PC that was a puzzle game, that you were supposed to save a code so you could restart levels. No one but me ever got on my computer, and I was HELLAfar on that game and my nephew restarted it. Silent Internal Screaming.  
• Some kind of Xanth related game-- there was a "the door is ajar" trick that I immediately got because I read all of those books in the 80s. I might look it up later. 
• Oregon Trail. Obviously. 
• Wolfenstein. But not much of it. I didn't like it.
  
• Space Quest 6-- a hilarious game I would totally love to play again. 
  

Then there was the game called "Grad School." Lol. There still are a couple of video games in there though.  

• This history based game where you kind of time traveled, and there was a thing where you solved some sort of Ghengis Khan puzzle. I actually still dream about this game. 
• The Sims. 
• I made Sims out of all my friends and once had a friend who was a baby of other friends get taken away from them cause I didn't know you could move the baby bed. Oopsie. I wrote a conference paper about this. Heh. 
• A Bladerunner game. 
• I'll look up the name and update it, but I also ended up being a replicant because of questionable game choices. Heh.
• American McGee's Alice
  
• History Time Travel game: 
• Some kind of game where one thing you did was inhale a fish scale thingy to breathe underwater. I don't really know what this was called. It might have been the same game as the Ghengis Khan one?
  
• A Wheel of Time game that didn't run correctly on my computer. 
• The Longest Journey
  

Then I had TWINS and finished an actual PHD. So there is a bit of a gaming break.

• SO MUCH FARMVILLE. Lol. Don't judge me. It was a weird time on the internet. 
• Life is Strange (I actually have played all of them, but the first one is hereish.
  
• Devil May Cry (one of the sequels.... I don't actually remember which one. It was fun but I never finished it). 
• The Puss in Boots game. 
• A lot of Just Dance
• A LOT of Skylanders with my kids. 
• (You can see that this is the "teaching my kids to be gamers" phase, right? 
• The Last of Us
• Bioshock
• Plants Vs. Zombies
• Plague Inc
  
• The Stanley Parable
  
• That game with the blobby oil thingy.... I don't remember what it's called. Phone games count, right

THEN I got this teaching job and we moved back to Texas and I was pretty much working ALL THE TIME and I didn't play video games when I was teaching. 

• I did play Skyrim a lot one summer. Turns out I am the Dragonborn. Heee.
  
• and Rock Band. 
• Zelda Breath of the Wild.  I didn't finish it though. I think I got about 3/4 done?
• Overwatch. I never played much of it though. I like being the pink haired Russian chick. TANK life! But I don't really like playing in teams.  
• The Outer Worlds (really enjoyed this!! I'd like more like it). 
• Night of the Rabbit
• More Longest Journey Games. All of them. 
  

Until COVID lockdown. Then we were all BORED and there were Switches. 

• Animal Crossing!! Thank goddess for it!
• Stardew Valley
• More Skyrim. 
• Went back and replayed Last of Us and Last of Us 2.
• Frostpunk. I got pretty far in this but then it just got depressing and I felt cold all the time.  
• There was this other apocalypse game where you built up a city and I kind of liked it but it was a little glitchy and then it got sort of too depressing when animals and stuff started attacking. It just got too grindy. 
• Terraria.
• Portal
  
• No Man's Sky
• Max Payne
  
• Fallout-- the one with Boston in it. I don't remember which one that is.  
• Subnautica
• Little Big Planet
  
• All of the Uncharted games. I started with the one that was sort of a spinoff, with the chick, though, and it was the best one.  
• This creepy game on Playstation where you're a pixelated serial killer and the goal is killing people at a party. I honestly kind of hate it but it's fascinating too. 
• Detroit Become Human (really great game, BTW)
• Assassin's Creed Valhalla (LOVED this. Except for the fishing.)
• Assassin's Creed Odyssey
• Murdered, Soul Suspect
  
• Firewatch
• What Remains of Edith Finch
• Stray (I didn't finish it; got stuck in one spot and rage quit)
• Horizon Forbidden Dawn &  Horizon Forbidden West 
• Control
• All the Just Dance games. 
  
• Potioncraft Alchemist Simulator
  
• Elder Scrolls Online LOT of time on this game. Sigh. I hear the platform has mostly died. Sad trombone again.  

VR Games

• Beat Saber 
• Supernatural
• Work Simulator
  
• This Space Pirate Game
• Maestro (like it, but they need more songs)
• Some other dance game
• Tennisy game. Bleh
• I don't really like many of the VR games yet

I have to not really play games during the school year because I get too hyperfixated and forget to actually do my job. And also, it hurts my carpal tunnel. Cause-- see long list of video games above. LOL. 

Poetry & stuff

When I teach literature, it usually makes me need to write my own. I'm not even trying to claim that I can write even close to any of the poets or writers that I teach. Literally never. 

But still, it makes me feel like putting metaphors & similes & allusions down in my own little obsession filled ways. 

I'm supposed to be exercising, and grading student work, but I was logging into Microsoft Cloud and found a poem I had started I don't even know how long ago and was like OOOOO this is good and then I finished it and added more stuff allusion wise to it and I submitted it for potential publication somewhere. Which is both exciting and nausea causing and I'll totally forget all about it and maybe something will come from it eventually. We'll see. We'll see. Wish me luck. It's about a Greek figure that I've always been fascinated by and my kid is lucky she wasn't named after. (I mean. I did name her after a Greek goddess. Just not this Greek figure.) 

So now I'm gonna go exercise in a virtual reality landscape and grade some poetry mini zines (some of which are TOTALLY AWESOME btw). And then the week ahead includes MUCH SHAKESPEARE SO WOW SUCH JULIETROMEOMURDERMETAPHORTROPES. Many Baz Luhrmans. 

And yet, I'm also constantly on edge and terrified of my government. So there's that, too. Dear rest of the world: some of us didn't choose this, and we're just as outraged and ashamed and enraged. And a little afraid to say it out loud but it's not like they wouldn't have me with a big old "on that list anyway" so there's that. Anywaysssss.... Y'all know Gil Scott Heron said the reason the Revolution Would Not Be Televised was cause it had to come inside your own head, it was a "click moment" when you understand that the fight isn't about what's on TV? But yeah. These days, I think they'd probably try really hard to not put it on TV.

About a Dad

My dad left us when I was four. I had two big sisters, both who were in their "teenaged rebellion" phase, and I was just a teeny baby. FOUR. My mom, who was studying to be an RN, and working in a temporary nursing job that required her to be a student to keep, had to quit both school and the nurse job. She got a job as a bartender-- a job that would be one of the things she did for many years after that. 

Incidentally, (I'm not sure I'm using that word right here. Maybe it's monumentally). He left us for my mom's best friend. Who had kids of her own, who he ended up raising. Which meant that, in the long ago days of the early 1970s, he didn't pay any child support. My mom was on her own supporting three daughters, who were all still schoolkids. This was, to put it mildly, hard to impossible. 

I have a vivid memory of a summer day I came back from my next-door bestie neighbor's house (my sisters were out doing teenagers-with-boyfriends-to-visit-and-pot-to-smoke things.) My mom was in the recliner chair that she always sat in, and she had thrown something (I think it was a coffee cup? But it had probably been full of alcohol) through the glass front door (not a screen door if it had glass. What do you call those?) The front porch was covered in shards of shattered broken glass, and my mother was sitting in the chair, her face dark and unreachable. I think I said something like "Mommy?" and she said, in a voice filled with dark places you don't want to go, "Go Away." 

I can't even imagine doing this. How and where was she that she told her four-year-old child to go away at night while she sat in a fugue state (I think. Something like that) in the living room? The four year old having to fend for themself, with no adults to help. Sheesh. I'm still kind of scared for little me. I send back into the time travel mind that it's okay. Kim. You'll get out of the dark, and you'll not let other people be in the dark in the future. In spite of the pain you feel. 

I myself have been in some dark places but if I had a child in the darkness, I think that would have pulled me out of the dark to help them. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. Save your pain and your spiraling for another time. 

I was hungry. I was scared. It wasn't cold, but it was dark. Here, there be dragons.  

I hid on the front porch under a porch chair for hours. My oldest sister eventually came home, found me there, coaxed me out, and we went inside. I'm assuming things were cleaned up, my mother eventually came out of whatever depressed state she was in and things were hunky dory, right? 

This memory has haunted me for so long. I've written about it before; I've tried to write it into a fictionalized auto memoir. Back when she was still alive I thought I couldn't do it because it would hurt her, in spite of Anne Lamott's advice 

I've been mad at my dad, mad at my mom, mad at the world, before. We lived SUCH a hard life because my dad chose to follow his urges and leave us and then not take care of us. But he had done that before and abandoned his first family, some half-brothers I've never met and would kind of like to meet now that we're all old and can realize that it's not about them, but it could be about us. I imagine their mom did not have nice things to say about us, though. 

In between that day and today there were bouts of homelessness. Hunger. Some petty theft on the part of that one sister's boyfriend of the most amazing BBQ I've ever had and still long for. And there were mistakes of my own before being the mom to my smarter than I deserve eldest girlchild. She tells me that my mom was doing the best she could with some really bad situations and yeah. She's right. And she's awfully forgiving of that, in many ways. She has a distance and a kindness that I don't really have, even today, even now after it's been more than thirty years since I lived that life. That "I don't actually know where my next meal is coming from and I have to rely on strangers for help" place. 

I think my mom told me to go away that night because worse things were possible in her mind at that moment. She couldn't be a mom because she was a hurt animal. I wish she were still here today to talk to about that because I don't think we ever sat around as adults and discussed who she was then. 

But hey, this post started about my dad, and I have to circle back (Chekov's Dad, if you will). He was a complete deadbeat. MANY many many of the struggles of my childhood, and shit, even today (because I have awful teeth from not seeing a dentist for the first 22 years of my life and it STILL affects me at 55) are because he couldn't be assed to send us 100 bucks a month for food. 

I had a little bit of an epiphany this morning. I reached out to him when I got married and asked him to give me away. He did, and was really happy about it, and drove down to Florida to be there.  He brought the woman he left my mom for, actually, because even though they weren't still romantically together, they were weird roommates. My mother in law even asked me who that woman was and when I told her, said something along the lines of "your mother is a lot more forgiving than I would have been." And yeah. I think she was. To a point. 

My dad-- he failed. On so many levels. And one of them was having a sort of hands off approach to us. He seemed to only relate to us when we reached out to him. To respond when WE initiated it. But shit, ya'll. We were children. HIS children. And he had a responsibility to take care of us, in one way or another, a responsibility that he just bailed on. My sister never forgave him for that and when he died, I think it hit her way harder than it hit me because of that lack of forgiveness. She was a lot like him, in a lot of ways. 

The day he died, the day I heard about it, I was in a sort of brutal twist of fate, teaching the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas to my intro to lit class in Louisiana. 

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I had to read that out loud because it was in the days before we had computers in the classroom. That, my friends, was HARD. Still is. It's a poem I do not teach anymore. 

*************************************************

Exercise in Virtual Environments

That title sounds serious and academic and I don't think this post is going to actually go there but let's see. Maybe it'll earn a colon: and a subtitle.  Hee hee. 

Because it's winter break still for a few days, I've been spending a lot of time 

1. going to doctor's appointments 

2. exercising by playing virtual reality games on my headset. This includes Beat Saber and Supernatural (which is unrelated to the TV show, and I'm not sure entirely why they picked that name because it's always confusing to people.)  This time around it also included a game called Maestro, which is pretty fun-- you are directing a symphonic orchestra to mostly classical music-- but that one is a lot lower key as far as the cardio goes. 

I've been doing virtual/at home workouts now since about 2021, when I started dancing to Just Dance. I kind of love almost everything about it because it's really convenient (I don't have to drive to a gym-- I just go upstairs to my game room and put on a headset). I think I need to add some kind of weight-training component to it, but that's a different post for a different day. 

This duality of time spent over my break is important because I'm trying, really hard, to get fit. I'm not really trying to get skinny, (although who is gonna lie that in the modern era, skinny equates in most people's head to fit and chonky cannot ever be fit, in spite of all kinds of lies and statistics about BMI and cardio and other things like middle-aged women and menopause and all that jazz). I would not HATE being skinny and fit. I'd really just like to LOOK to people like I work out as much as I do. 

Cause seriously. During the school year, most days, I get up at 5:30 AM so I can get a 30-minute cardio session before I go to work. That's pretty darn dedicated, and it's actually quite an intense workout if done correctly. To give a little data, my Apple Watch right now says my workout today burned 756 calories, and I've gotten in about 8,300 steps so far today (and yes, I know that the 10,000 steps guidance was created by a pedometer company to drive sales, but it's not the worst benchmark I've ever seen for fitness).   And before the day is over, I'll probably manage to get in about those 10,000 steps. 

And my heart rate ranged from 94 to 161 BPM. Which for a chonky middle-aged woman is right in the zone I want. It's going a little bit anaerobic there at the top, but that wasn't for very long, and it's perfect for interval training. 

So, where am I going with all of this? In 2021, when I first started this virtual fitness quest, I lost about 30 pounds. It was mostly pandemic gained weight from stress, chili cheese fries, and a lot of really good ice cream, so it came off pretty fast once I really started exercising. But then it STOPPED. Like seriously, nothing I did, from dropping the calorie count down really low (my husband, for example, lost 50 pounds on the same diet as mine and at first on that diet he wasn't even working out, like for the first 20 pounds or so it was just the food difference). I tried keto. I tried intermittent fasting. I got vitamin shots from a "diet doctor," and I went to TWO different nutritionists. They took my metabolic rate, gave me a plan that you could have gotten out of Women's Day Weekly (the January edition-- in other words, not all that different from something you could have gotten for 2.50 in the checkout counter). 

And no matter what I did for like two years I did not lose ANYTHING. And then, last year, it slowly started to creep back on. The weight. I was still working out, still have a great VO2 measurement on my Apple Watch and still can mostly run up stairs. But the weight started coming back, as it does. 

And I've been so frikkin' frustrated. I can say all I want that I'm just exercising for the fitness, and that's not untrue. But honestly, I want to LOOK fit, and I don't want doctors to write that really rude word on my chart that rhymes with shmobese. I don't want them to be surprised when they run my heart rate and it's good. Because they think I'm lying about how much I exercise. 

Anyway. The final tie in here is that I went to a new family practice doctor and instantly liked her. And she listens, and she did blood work, and she gave me a medication because I've been, for several years, slightly on the edge of having serious insulin resistance. Which means, as she said, that I've been "fighting with my genetics." THANK YOU. That's what I've been saying!!! I don't know why I haven't been given this medication before. 

I've taken it now for three days and even if it doesn't do anything metabolically (which I have to say I actually think it already is. There's a certain "tautness" to my skin when I've exercised productively, and I've been missing it for a long time.) 

But even if it doesn't actually mean much for the chemical balance in my body, my mental feelings at working out have radically changed the last three times. I feel GOOD about it. It's not a sludge slog that I don't think is going to work anyway. I've got so much energy and I feel like I could keep going, even though I'm tired and sweaty and need to take a long bubble bath. 

If that doesn't help in some way (placebo effect is fine with me if it placebos something) then I'll eat my hat. (I don't own very many hats, either, so it'll be a fuzzy winter one.) 

I want to say that I don't care about the weight loss but I'm gonna be totally honest that I do care. At least a little bit. I'm hopeful that I can just get to a place where I look like someone who plays volleyball or something. Who can pull a plow while holding several babies. Who can make a lot of pancakes and feed a whole army without getting too tired. Who knows the difference between dark clouds that are going nowhere and the ones that are gonna lead to the scent of petrichor soon cause there's a rain coming, and we need to get the laundry in. (I dunno. Farm girl stuff.) 

And if this medication works, and it's an old one, not a newfangled expensive thing that every Hollywood someone has been doing, then I'm going to have some strong words for the doctors that wouldn't listen to me in the last few years when I asked if there was something we could try. 

And I'm still gonna keep beat sabering those little triangles away, and whacking those balloons with baseball style bats. Cause fitness is fun, and I suddenly have a tiny little spark of hope. 

Time Travel in the Age of AI

This post is about time travel, DNA, and ghosts, and AI. Very sci-fi of me. Sort of. 

I got a text from a family member yesterday that required me to think back 30+ years to a time when I was very young, and very foolish at times, and thought I would be young forever (apparently) and thought I was way too smart for bad things to happen to me. HA! 

I had to think back to remember a couple of things (and by the way, I got a little bit of that wrong, in a "meet your own grandpa" kind of way that I'll have to try to remedy) and it made me realize JEZUS MARY AND CHEERUST it's been more than 30 years. I know this. I know this for sure; my hubster and I have been married significantly longer now than we were single without each other. And that's frikkin' weird. But in this particular moment & this series of text messages with said Fam I traveled to an ancient date. 

The early 1990s. THE 1990, in fact. This is where the DNA comes in. (See-- I'm getting that title into the text. This is what we writing teachers call a transition, and clever use of a hook.) Said fam was reacting to a DNA test his fam had gotten. And someone who we will call Cousin A was reached out to by Second Cousin B. So there's some family adoption and unknown relative distance (there's the time travel again) that's involved in this query. 

And again, I had to think back in time to a time when I was so young I had literally no wrinkles. No grey hair. I was actually skinny. Like annoyingly skinny, and said things like "I just have a fast metabolism" to people. NO. I JUST NEVER ATE FOOD thank you very much. And had a very active job and was seriously being neglected and needed to eat two sandwiches (thank you very much I did eat those sandwiches and hence am now a chonky middle aged who will slap skinny me for that "fast metabolism" curse.) Thinking back in time, I.E., time travel, is hard. There's a lot of water under that bridge and it makes the memories murky. 

This sentence, now, is where we work the ghosts into the story. I first realized that the idea of ghosts is often something we are just haunted by. A person, yes. A beloved pet was where I figured this one out-- Tituba, my black cat, my first kitty baby, would appear behind me sometimes after she was gone. I had to get more black cats to save and pamper to make up for losing her. She haunted me in the very best way. And then, after my father-in-law died, I would see men far in the distance wearing a shirt that he would have worn or standing with the slight stoop he had (as a very tall man, this was something of a defense mechanism, I think.) Or smelling whatever 1900s man cologne it was that he used to wear. A ghost. A person (or cat) that I missed in my life and wished I could really see again. THey also haunt you when you're sleeping, visiting in dreams, or those thoughts you have while you're trying to sleep, things you could have done differently, better, worse. Ghosts visit me a lot at about 3 AM, which is also (coincidentally?) when I have the most frequent sleep apnea drops in Oxygen. Those ghosts like to poke you awake, maybe? 

So. Back to the time travel and the DNA: this lost Cousin B. They might be someone who opens up a pathway that had previously closed, and that's a little scary butterflies in the stomach fear of "what if" but also kind of exciting in a way that I can't even relate but also a ghost of some previous timeline that I can see just out of the corner of my eye, if I look very carefully. I might update this with less obscure references in sometime future, time travelers from that future, let's see. 

And this is where the AI comes back into the conversation, and what we English teachers like to call the "reverse hook" where we go back to the beginning again and end up this clever post. I honestly don't know exactly where to fit the AI into this story.... but at least my narrative here is unlike anything that Ye Olde CHATEGPT is going to spit out. I think. (Look. I'm working on one cup of coffee here and also my left hand carpal tunnel is flaring AGAIN and I guess I'm gonna have to get that surgery after all. Dammit.) 

Dear future and past versions and alternate timeline versions of me: it's gonna be okay. Or it was okay. Or it wasn't okay for a bit but then we got over it. Love ya. Mean it. ~~ me. 

On the negative nagging voices

I've been a teacher for a really long time. And I know that sometimes, student people will lash out when they're mad about something, and usually, it's the people who are failing your class who are mad at you because you did something that they think made them fail and that they are the ones who didn't put in the effort and they will find whatever thing they think can hurt you to say because they are mostly mad at themselves. And they can almost always, always find that one thing, that thing you yourself know isn't how you are your best. They almost always latch onto the things you're not perfect at, knowing yourself, and the thing you even TOLD them you suck at, and they say, "YOU SUCK BECAUSE OF THIS," and then the rest of that day, the only thing your brain can think of is that one negative, mosquito buzzing in the room voice. 

I am aware of all of these things and yet, I still look. 

Why do we do this? Why does our very "evolved" human brain (for some of us, cause, some of us don't ever hear those voices because they always think they're great... apparently) just latch on to that one mosquito in the room buzzing around saying the mean things? 

I knew better than to look, and I did it anyway: Bluebeard's Bride. Now, my brain is full of one noisy mosquito. 

Yes. You win, person who just wanted to be mean. Now, next time, maybe do better on your work so you don't have to do that to someone who tried their freakin' best and is actually a human being.

Dear future students, future review people, future nice folks in the world: if you like something a teacher has done, go to the places and make the nice comments. They sometimes drown out the mean ones, and usually, the only people who do make comments are the mad ones. 

Comic for reference.  

Advice

I think about the power of laughter sometimes.
The joy that flows through the grief, the bubbling
forbidden hysteria of the laugh at the wrong moment. 

Once, when I was very young, in a symphonic band concert,
a friend and I caught that laughter, deep in our chests, swelling,
in danger of overflowing, rolling out over the clarinet rows, contagious.

We dared not look at each other, knowing that would be our end, the trigger
for no way back from all of that abundance of joy. Giggles stifled, choking, actually
painful. Her shoulders next to mine shook with the suppression, and I felt tears prickling.

The conductor, his thick mustache bristling, his eyes serious and focused, looked towards us,
there on the back row, the last row, the third chairs, the deep bass line of the clarinets,
and we knew we had to pull the pain into ourselves, keep that joy within, clutch it. 

Deep breaths now, focus on the music, think of things other than whatever was
tickling our minds to the abundance of deep taboo within, that sense of the
things you aren't allowed to feel. This was serious business, this music. I

think of how we stared, tearing up, deep to stop our joy. Remember
the sense of refusal to be broken, of never letting that joy go, of 
holding it within until it hurts, sharing the unshared moments. 

And I remember:

they don't like it when we laugh at them. 

So keep doing it. Don't let them win. 

Let the laughter roll out of you, until,

weak and spent, you have to sit down. 

Regroup. Gather within yourself

all of that old, held in taboo. All

of those emotions you weren't 

supposed to feel. And share

them until they know we know. 

Let it out. Let the years of

joy roll out of you until

your hope, your love,

your beauty —  is a weapon —  point it. 

At their weaknesses. 

KAW 2024

Art licensed through Adobe Stock & edited by me....

Losing a friend, ADHD and Grief

I think something we don't talk about, almost ever, is the life fact of losing a friend. Not to a dramatic event, necessarily, but sometimes even the slow loss of fading connections. In my life, I've lost a LOT of friends when I was young because we moved so often. I've lost a few to distance, and a few to dramatic events that had an impact both in the short and long term, as well. 

Sometimes when I get those security question that ask you things like "the street your first home was on" or "your first grade teacher's name" or especially "your childhood best friend" I think-- who knows those things? I know people do, but it's definitely not me. I moved regularly as a child, sometimes with some notice, often without any notice at all. My family's single mother, excessive poverty lifestyle was anything but stable in those ways. I always have to choose one or two of the "security questions" that have to do with things that are less about your early childhood..... It makes me a little sad to realize how many of those usually ten questions I can't even come close to answering. (Also this is part of a discussion I think I'll eventually write about CPTSD, as well, but not today). 

But back to the point-- losing a long term friendship. Sometimes it CAN be a dramatic thing-- a big fight, especially. In our culture, we talk about losing love a lot. You turn on Netflix alone and there are going to be entire categories of movies and TV shows that deal with this. (And this doesn't count the ones based on death, which isn't at all what I'm talking about). So culturally, I don't think we practice the thought of what happens when a friendship ends.  And part of you tells yourself that you're making too much of it. That you shouldn't be this upset. That you're over-reacting. But then part of you KNOWS you're over reacting and can't help it and knows that the over reaction might even make what you dread worse. 

It's hard. It's as brutal as the love relationships. Sometimes I think it's even more brutal because a part of you, at least at some level, expects those love relationships, romance, to not last forever. (And I don't mean marriage-- because that's a different topic entirely). 

So the point is-- being ghosted by someone who you care about, who you think of as a friend, and who you try to reach out to and connect with to let them know -- "hey, this feels really bad; what's going on?" is really, really rough. 

Image from article at this link.

I have a kind of emotional issue with my ADHD called RSD: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria that makes this kind of thing even worse. Because look, I ALWAYS worry if you don't text me back right away. I can handle it if it's a few hours. But if you leave me on read for weeks at a time, and there's no real reason I can trace it to, I'm definitely certain you hate me and never want to talk to me again, and if I tentatively say "hi" trying to rekindle that chatting and you don't reply, or you reply that you're busy and will get back to me but then NEVER DO, be pretty sure that I am devastated and spending hours thinking about it in a way that would seem stupid to most people. There's a reason why ADHD is an actual disability. It makes life a lot harder in everything, but people will say "don't let it bother you so much; it's not as big of a deal as you think" but hey, look. I want you to know that it IS actually as big of a deal to some people as we think it is. Your neurodivergent friends are definitely upset. And we can't just stop being that way any more than a blind person can just think about it harder and see things better. 

A neurotypical response to something might say "ah well; I'll deal with that when I need to; they're busy; whatever" but trust me, even if it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to you, and even if maybe you think you not talking to them when they've reached out to you is just YOU being busy and not having time to respond-- a certain percentage of us are mourning, deeply, the loss of a friend we trusted. And we don't do trust deep friendships easily, by the way.  

So if you manage to work your way into a trust circle of a person who is very introverted and also has a neurodivergent mind-- please don't ghost them. And know that the amount of times they've reached out to you to try to connect and find out what's up are actually HUGE steps, and even a short "hi, I'll get back to you soon; I'm busy" would go a million miles to let us know it's not the worst case scenario we already have built up. 

Summer Thinking: Meet Your ADHD

I tend to neglect my writing in the summer, which is absurd, because during the school year, I always feel pressured and/or conflicted in my own personal writing. I am helping students write, usually, and the critiques of other writing tend to mean that it's hard to find space for me. And in the summer, I don't teach-- so I don't have those other critiques. So summer should be ultra writing productive. Right? Haha lolz. 

This summer, I am in the first summer where I have been full diagnosed with ADHD and have medication that helps me really, truly, productively FOCUS. It's amazing and infuriating at the same time. Amazing because I can accomplish so very much. Infuriating because I'm almost 55 years old and I've had this disability my entire life and was never diagnosed with it. All those years I struggled to focus on writing my dissertation, on finishing grad school before I had my kids, on my career productivity, on grading and creating things for teaching without doing it all in a rush at the last possible minute. I honestly always just thought I was inherently lazy and the way I am is just the way everyone else is but they just aren't lazy. 

This kind of thinking is incredibly common, turns out. It also turns out that thanks to us GenX moms getting help for our teens and going "hey, I do that too? Maybe I could use some help?" a LOT of moms (and probably dads too) are learning at midlife that they have this issue. That they've been walking in knee deep water their whole life, and that now, with a little help, they can actually walk ON DRY LAND LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. 

Menopause has been my trigger, I think. I think mostly I was able through most of my life to "mask" and be mostly on target. But the hormones and a fuzzy brain from that just made some things SO HARD that I finally admitted that perhaps I could take a look at talking to a psychiatrist, and he was pretty flabbergasted by how intense my issue was and how much I'd accomplished anyway and how much help I deserved to get. 

SO what does that all mean for me as a writer? This summer for me has been incredibly productive, just not for writing. I have done a LOT of spring cleaning (okay, summer cleaning) in my home. I've gotten a bunch of piles of stuff tossed away, cleared out, donated, organized. I "Marie Kondo'd" my house, like yes, yes, yes I did. I do still have ONE area that might not happen because right now my thoughts are turning away from the urgency of "sparking joy" with home decor. But it's still possible I'll get inspired and get the little closet under the stairs done. That might wait 'til Winter Break, though. 

Anyway. I kind of came here thinking I'd write something creative and it took me like 20 minutes to re-secure my account because it had somehow gotten rerouted to some other domain (which like-- how does that even happen? Hackers? And if so, to where? Cause it just seemed glitched, not rerouted and hacked). And then I lost steam and decided to just journal about this huge life issue. 

And now I'm probably done for the day on writing. The rest of summer is already filling up with a bunch of "human maintenance" appointments for me, my kids, and a family member I'm helping out so..... this might be all we get for Summer 24. And you know what? I feel fine with that. 

Trying to Keep Up With Spring

This is less of a creative post but it's kind of me thinking about what it takes to be creative so I'll put it here in the blog no one reads anymore. 

This time of the semester (close to finals) is always kind of tricky, especially in the Spring. I generally try to avoid teaching summer classes, mostly because our contract is for just those Fall to Spring 9 months and summer is "extra." I don't need the extra to live to support my life so if I can let other teachers who DO need the income have that time, then I will. And I'm also kind of happy to have the summer to regroup, to make my inner introvert happy and bored. Happy and bored makes me a much better, less burnt-out teacher again in the Fall. 

But Spring-- Spring we are all a bit tired. Students aren't "NEW" to this anymore, and they maybe aren't quite as rosy and enthusiastic about things like "learning to write a research paper with MLA sources!!" Now with parenthetical citations!! (To be fair, it's been parenthetical citations for a pretty long time, so it's not really a new thing, but I was going for a vibe there.) 

Not an eclipse. Kinda the night sky; Stars and Moon.  By LoFfofora Licensed via Adobe Stock. Please do not reproduce unless you pay them too. 

And so a week or so ago (it was longer than that really but who is counting) we did Total Eclipse of the Sun activities. Except in Texas, the clouds mostly came out to play and ruin our glimpse of the small dragon who occasionally comes out to take small bites out of our star. It did get a little chilly, the sun went dark for about 30 seconds, the birds caught zoomies and students, who had clustered around the quad and gotten snacks and eclipse glasses, milled about, not sure exactly what to do and a lot disappointed. 

My smallest offspring and I stood on a walkway up a bit higher and watched. A couple of the dual credit high schoolers were also up there and we all peered at the sky to see clouds part, which they did a teeeeeensy bit. Then the eclipse was officially over and we went back to our day. Pretty underwhelming for us, honestly. 

I did really like what my college's student life offices tried to do. They had music blasting, including "Total Eclipse of the Heart" (which we also looked at in my classes.) "New Moon on Monday." Other moon related songs. And when the sun briefly went dark, the campus lights came on and students dutifully "oooooh'd." 

Moving on into this coming week, we are moving into Research Projects. It could go well; it could be difficult. One never really knows. I will get some essays that make me smile and I will grade them and we will do Presentations and then a few weeks from now I will dress up in the cap n gown and traipse in to the cap n gown music and sit there smiling and clapping for the students who have passed their first two years of college and are moving up to the next couple. Some of them will have written Research Projects for me in the past. The dressing up in cap n gown and cheering for students in a milestone is still one of my Favorite Things™.

And so, it is Spring. We might want to fall backwards into piles of cherry blossoms (sort of a reference to this long loved sad poem) and melt into the landscape of our own sorrows. But this is Texas, and we don't have cherry blossoms. So I guess we're just gonna melt into the oncoming heat (coming soon to a small campus near you) and be glad it's not quite summer YET. 

April is National Poetry Month.

We read poems today.
Short ones. In my literature &
composition class. Students, stuck inside on a spring Tuesday,
a day a little mud-luscious, 
listened to Langston Hughes, ee cummings,
Dorothy Parker. Margaret Atwood. Marge Piercy. 

Well. At least some of them listened. Some of the we
focused instead on their phones. Look,
I'm not of the age of the "shakes fist at sky/ this blasted generation" type.
I'm good with the social media. And the dank memes & the culture wars.
But really. These are some good poems. Razzle AND dazzle. 

We
are supposed to be studying tone. As in "don't use that tone with me"
teens.

And also speaker. And voice. We
definitely read some Gwendolyn Brooks. And I told them how, when I
first learned that poem, in high school, I had never heard a real poet read a real poem. 

Not really. How would you even do that in 1987?

Can you imagine? 

And the revelation when I finally did hear Brooks emphasize that 

WE
at the end of every line. Jesus. What a voice. Singing sin and gin.

But, even then
I did get to hear music.
MTV, radio.
Oh I loved me a good pop song. Lived for it, really.
Cassette tapes carefully curated,
pause pressed to stop the DJ from talking over the song. (Why did they
do that? Anyway?) We
would scramble, and the DJ would talk anyway. 

I remember calling in, once, to dedicate "Keep on Loving You" by REO Speedwagon
to a boy with curly dirty-blonde hair. "To Scott from Kim." The thrill
when I heard the DJ read it out in a long list of

to xxxx

from xxxx's

(I don't even know
if he heard it.) I also did (not)
          keep on loving him. We
          were doomed from the start,
          I guess. 

So anyway. Back (as it always goes) to the students. 

The room is always a bit dim because the
PowerPoint you need to keep
(this generationanygenerationme) engaged
doesn't really show up in full light
using the ancient projector. Dim.  
And they're probably a little sleepy. 
And April is still (as far as I can tell)
the cruelest month. 

And they smiled when appropriate and eddieandbill and bettyandisbel 
are still always as charming as they've always been (which
if you ask Dorothy Parker was never). They
seemed sad at Piercy's Barbie Doll. 

And I ran out of lines of poetry to share. And I let them go early. 
How's that for a tone? 

KAW 4/2/24

I'm LITERALLY on the moon.

That title is not poor literary device use. We tried in January of 2024 but the second time in February was the charm and it worked!! My two creative anthologies I curated and my own short stories in other anthologies finally landed on the moon!!  

I honestly don't know which thing I'm more proud of-- the short story about space dragons, the shapeshifter story, or the two anthologies I curated to publish dozens of intersectional feminist writers, along with a dear friend. And I was also published in an anthology with a really weird and wonderful story about an undead cyborg girl... inspired by a James Tiptree story called "The Girl Who Was Plugged in." Regardless-- they are all on the moon in an incredible digital archive. SQUEAL!

Here is news about the project!