Pencil Shavings

Friday, January 29, 2010

An apple in the hand

It's Friday. I just got done with the last class of my day. I'm happy and I'm tired and I'm frazzled and I'm spent. The long days in school are wearing me down. It's awful. I feel like I don't have time to think.

Yet, I'm happy. Last night I thought that happiness felt like holding an apple in the hand. It seems a somewhat oddball thing to say now, yet last night, it felt true. The feeling of the apple in the hand encapsulates my happiness.

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Sunday, January 24, 2010

When Joshua left

When Joshua left, I wept. I went for a long run, paused on top of a flyover overlooking a busy expressway, and cried for a while.

I knew that his leaving meant that one possibility for my future would be forever closed: the socially-accepted, God-blessed option. He was someone really special to me — I had loved and admired him in way that I knew would never be repeated again with another boy and I was disappointed that I couldn't make both of us happy.
I met up with him this weekend. He looks the same. At some fundamental level, I still love him to bits. I hear from Ming that he bought a ring this trip to propose to his gf, and my heart twinges slightly with envy, but it is quickly taken over with gratitude and peace because he is finally happy. And I am happy too, because I finally have the guts to accept who and what I am.
So I must love from a quiet distance. Maybe in two or three years' time when there's a baby in tow and I have finally met his gf/ wife, I can be his sister again. Or maybe not. But it doesn't matter.
To love is a gift.

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Sex, flirting and teaching

I just watched "The History Boys". Remarkably, it was inspiring and shockingly erotic at the same time. Do the two go together? Is teaching the pushing of new boundaries, just as making out the exploring of territory? It was flirting by metaphors and the stunning use of language, poetry and dialogue played havoc on the mind, even as the action on the screen was decidedly NC(16).

I want to be like both Hector and Irwin. I want to recite poetry; I want to make them think. Yet I have Irwin's timidity and Hector's unfocused—that's a compound noun, like uncoffined, unkissed, unrejoicing, unconfessed, unembraced—wanderings. I want to know, beyond the learning objectives and the grammatical objects, exactly what I want to teach.

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Friday, January 01, 2010

1126.

The power to make decisions is not as important as the power to influence. Why do people get so heady over the first?

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