born into this mess
damn this metabolism. crazy cook genes. rrr.
I ate banana bread all day yesterday. this is a significant step for me, since, if you know me at all, I loathe bananas. HATE them with a burning and fiery passion. still, in the past few years, I've tried my best to eat anything. frog legs, goat barbeque, elk, duck, sweetbreads... seems like I can choke down some banana bread to be polite.
bof. c'est pas mal.
'd prefer some fried chicken, grits, and cornbread with bacon gravy, though.
must. stop. thinking. about. food.
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woo!
Dear New Teacher Candidate:
Thank you for interviewing with Memphis City Schools! We believe that you possess the skills necessary to be the difference for our students. As a result of your interview, we are pleased to inform you that you are now a member of our new teacher pool for the 2005-2006 school year.
As part of our New Teacher Pool, we will actively consider you as a candidate for existing and potential vacancies for school year 2005-06. Membership in the pool does not guarantee you a position, but it does mean that we will invite you to school job fairs, attempt to schedule specific school interviews for you and make your information available to principals who recommend candidates for hire to the Human Resources Department (HRD).
When vacancies become available, school interviews for New Teacher Pool candidates are set-up in a number of ways including:
* Interview referrals made by the Human Resources Department
* Large-scale teacher job fairs and interview days
* Targeted subject-specific mini-job fairs and interview days
* Direct interview scheduling done by principals using New Teacher Pool candidate information
There are a number of factors that affect the availability of vacancy information such as the timing of teacher retirements, previously unannounced resignations, and certification issues. Because the Human Resources Department cannot completely control when this information is available, the arrangement of school site interviews can take time. We will be in ongoing communication with New Teacher Pool candidates to provide you with status updates and other pertinent information throughout the summer. Please be patient with the process as we work to find the best possible school site for you.
We prioritize candidates for interviews based on how close they are to Tennessee state certification. While candidates in critical needs areas will be considered using alternative certification guidelines, candidates in moderate and low need areas will likely not. Please consult the next section of this mailing for certification and critical needs subject information.
We look forward to working with you through the remainder of the recruitment season.
Office of Recruitment
Memphis City Schools
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draw the blinds hoping it'll pass
a kid I went to school with, like all my classes, killed himself last week.
shit. shit. shit.
there was a point back there when I thought about it, I thought about it long and fucking hard, lying on the floor in my kitchen with the wolves closing in, sharp black shadows hovering just out of sight. I thought about it but didn't have the energy to do it. couldn't handle the thought of leaving a mess for someone else to clean up.
I don't know. there was a night a few days after I left the hospital when I was pacing around my apartment fighting with the idea of eating every pill I had. I'd just been to the new p-doc and she'd given me boxes and boxes of samples and I'd spent hours popping them out of their plastic blister into an egg carton. they were so pretty, pink white and round or red and oblong and I could actually feel them in my mouth and I was calling every one I knew and when they'd answer I couldn't get the words to come out of my mouth, please come get me, I think I might do it, I'm scared. none of the knives in my apartment were sharp enough and I had tried them all and was almost to the point of breaking the razor blade out of a pencil sharpener.
I don't know, I was standing by the door howling, literally howling, insane and out of my mind and my cat asked to be picked up and I sat there and held him until it passed enough for me to put some music on, a fucking iTunes mix called 'music to keep breathing tonight,' a bunch of Godspeed and Low and Dirty Three, then Kiss the Bottle over and over while I lay in the tub with the shower running over me staring at the ceiling.
long night. so many long nights to get to here where they're secret treasure maps instead of ravening wolves. I wouldn't have made it if it weren't for Tiffany.
shit. he's dead and all that religious fervor he developed after they kicked him out of high school couldn't keep his wolves from pulling him under.
I'm so glad I got better. goddamn, hungover and sad as I am it feels fucking amazing to be breathing.
how were we born into this fucking mess. such a mess.
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this is quite possibly the best book I've ever read.
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I blame this job
since I totalled my car a few months ago, I've been biking to work. most of the time this just involves a short ride of 5 blocks total. every other Friday morning, however, I haul my vacuum, mop, and Bag O Biodegradeable Cleaning Products in my paperboy baskets about 4 miles away over to the U of M area. not so bad, except when I forget the key and no-one's home and I have to haul ass back to Midtown to fetch it and end up wasting 45 minutes of lunch break.
rrr.
every Friday afternoon I clean the yoga studio. this is quite enjoyable as I am all alone for a few hours and can do a few rounds of Sun Salutations or other weirdly named poses when I'm through on the newly cleaned floor.
I also utilise my time alone in the the building to sing my heart out to whatever I have playing on my iPod at the moment. this isn't necessarily something I do only when I'm alone in the house I'm cleaning. I'm known to serenade the family dog and/or baby, as well.
this is all well and good, but it was just a wee bit embarassing when Sarla, the owner of Midtown Yoga, walked in and caught me doing an interpretive dance to Modest Mouse...
Party at the Stanfills' tonight. see you there.
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soul food
the only thing I really miss about having a car is being able to drive half way across the city to eat. there's plenty of restaurants in Midtown, but one can only eat so much Vietnamese, Thai, and bar food. especially since Pho Pasteur, with their mind-blowing duck leg soup, hasn't been open the past 4 times I've been by.
all a girl really wants is some good fried chicken. ok, fine, I'm obsessed. I have a problem.
If you drive me to Miss Ellen's, I'll be your best friend. totes BFFL for realz!
I need a nap, since I've obviously lost all touch with reality. that or the crazy smelling floor wax I just used made me high.
bluh.
new best place to meet cute boys: karaoke.
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up past my bedtime...
thursday: 6 am
friday: 1 am
saturday: 7 am
sunday: 1130 pm
monday: 8 am
tuesday: 6 am
after years of crippling social anxiety, I've started going out way too much. not way too much as in ingesting huge amounts of illegal substances, but way too much as in my circadian rhythms are starting to resemble squarepusher beats. I don't think I've ever had this much fun before. and best of all, I don't have to drive. ever. woo hoo for that.
I've developed a serious jones for early morning fried chicken. every time I end up at the Two-Way at 530 in the morning, the rancid grease smell makes me crave something edible. I keep trying to talk Pony into taking me to schnuck's so I can make everyone friend chicken at 6 am, but so far, no luck.
last night I walked into beer bust just in time to see about 18 kids up on stage hollering along to "knockin on heaven's door" with a live band doing back up. that's right, live rock&roll karaoke AND $5 all you can drink till the keg runs out PBR.
Memphis used to suck. or maybe I did. who knows. all's I know now is that this is the best summer ever and it's not even technically summer yet. is it? wait, does summer start in June or July?
snap. I need some more sleep.
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but it's not yugoslavia
I've spent the past few weeks madly in love with
CocoRosie. these two sisters with these high, scratchy voices that sound like ancient jazz 78s sing about butterscotch, st nicholas, and falling in love. I've been getting a huge kick out of trying to identify the weird samples that serve as a sort of ambient percussion. so far: water slurping down a drain OR rain in a gutter, traffic noises, dishes rattling, a typewriter carriage return, a see & say. I'm pretty sure that none of these are right.
then every now and then their voices tangle and soar up octaves into the top of my brain when I'm riding under the train bridge and I almost fall off my bike with the ice crystal piercingness of it all.
lovely.
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there's something so strange about sleeping until 530.
must. start. going. home. sooner.
yeah, right.
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spoilers
The new Star Wars kicked me right in the chest. I think I cried for the last hour and a half of it.
In a sense, it's a brutal and fucked up love story.
I don't ever want to love like that, never ever again.
it's hot.
goat tastes good.
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it's very, very hot out here. holy shit, i just saw an extendable bus. you know, "MATA" means "KILL" in spanish. it's gotta be crazy as hell to move here from like, Mexico, and see directives urging you to kill all over the public transportation.
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finished my book
I don't know how to tell you about the person I've become. My bed is a few inches higher than the windowsill and I sit and look down into the yard, at the sloping amber glow of the hour before sunset. if I narrow my eyes and look inside, there's this feeling of indescribable fullness that threatens to leak out. I feel like the boy in the Hemingway story, the one who thought he was going to die because he had a fever, and because he'd been away at school and was used to degrees centigrade and not fahrenheit, once he found out he was going to get better and he "cried very easily at little things that were of no importance."
the closest words I have for it are to say that it all goes 'all the way through.' when I was in high school and I was on so much Lithium I could feel the electrical wires like veins in the walls, I used to brand myself on my arms because I couldn't feel anything. or I felt something, but it was this tiny faint thing inside me like the pale sharp core of a carrot and I had no way of bringing it out to the surface to make me feel real.
I feel real, now, and it's such a strange feeling, not to feel like I'm a tiny little homunculous at the controls of a giant me-shaped robot.
excuse me. I've just finished my book and I need to go watch the sun set.
He was reaching into the familiar place inside him, but what he found there didn't feel like a sorrow anymore. He wondered if it had really been a sorrow to begin with. From Jonathan Franzen's Strong Motion
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awesome
I get home at the end of the day from work and my feet have little clean stripes on them when I take off my sandals. I've got this sticky feeling and thousands of new freckles.
today I used no fossil fuels.
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listening to Pearl Jam's "state of love and trust"
the street we lived on was wide and sloped down to a steep shoulder into the people across the street's yard. it had a decent amount of traffic in the evening and I used to sit on the curb at the end of my driveway and watch the cars go by.
towards the end of the summer my parents had pretty much given up on me and things had calmed down. i'd just started ninth grade and things had finally started to feel like they were going to be alright.
i'd sit out there on the curb and smoke cigarettes and listen to the air moving in the pines on the other side of the road. I had this feeling that everything was happening just over the horizon. sometimes at the park I'd run into other kids I knew, boys with their hair long over their eyebrows, baggy shorts, lo-top allstars, and their skateboards. we'd go sit on this bare-skinned log by the edge of the river and watch the sun go down, trading stories about geting wasted with the older kids or about how much our parents sucked. some nights i'd go home and wait for my folks to go to sleep and go out my window to go back to the park. the clearing where the log sat had a tiny beach, about 10 feet across, and i'd stand up to my knees in the warm silty water and look at the moon on the water, the current tugging gently at my feet. i wondered what would happen if i swam downstream until i couldn't anymore. where i'd end up. if they'd find me tangled up under some dock near savannah. if crawfish would creep up next to my waterfilled ears and sing me silky copper lullabies. if things would be easier if i disappeared. if i could walk up to the highway and stick my thumb out and turn into someone else.
i was so young. growing up hurt, this persistant ache in my rib cage, this burning in my shoulders. i'd wake up nights unable to breathe, stifling in my room. i'd lie on my back and try to imagine looking down on myself in my bed, in my bedroom on the west side of one house in a row of identical houses in a subdivision of identical houses surrounded by the raw red clay of newly cleared land. i tried to imagine all the other kids i knew, lying awake, wishing we were somewhere else. in my irritable dreams we walked in the moonlit streets in droves, looking for something we couldn't ever find. following something we'd never seen.
when they sent me off my parents threw away everything i owned. diaries, tapes, books, clothes. i had my head broken into, its contents scrubbed hard and shoved back in more or less the same places, but that year has been reduced to a handful of images and an eighth grade yearbook, signed when i was in the hospital. it's painful to look through it and wonder who i would have been if i'd been able to stay there. my thoughts sort of squirm away from me when i try to force them in that direction, as if they weren't my own.
that year doesnt seem real at all. it's more like a series of stories someone else told me that i've heard so many times i can picture them happening in my head.
sometimes it's hard to believe i was ever that thin faced little kid with a copy of catcher in the rye stuffed in my coat pocket, knee deep in the water, frozen in place, terrified by the wave curling up over me, holding my breath against its weight.
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Poem for Monday, May 16, 2005
Nocturne
by Mark Yakich
If time is the sky,
Then moments are understandable
Autumns, the leaves split
Seconds, and sorrow is
Undressing the neighbor boy
In a single breath.
If such gusty emotion is
The landscape, words make
Only the mountains, and the valleys
Are just gorgeous inversions.
And if the head sounds
Like that, each drop of rain
An amorous dialogue,
Then leave tonight,
Between the wave and the lantern,
Every particle
Rowing.
The poet can be found at www.markyakich.com
Burke's Book Store
1719 Poplar Avenue
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com
Winner of Best of Memphis in Memphis Flyer
for 7 Straight Years
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jonathan franzen is a genius
"this and all the other motions he repeated every night were like a sorrow."
I wish I could write about raccoons and make it hurt. jesus, man, to be able to write like that.
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heartattack & vine
I will spend the entire day in the semi-shade behind my house, reading and listening to tom waits.
on fair days the wind carries the wireless signal from the house I live behind into my apartment.
don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just god when he's drunk...
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is this enough
a stack of books and somewhere comfortable to read them. a short bike ride home from a going away party.
a small white cat curled up sleeping on a white down comforter. a yard with two border collies bouncing tirelessly after sticks. coffee after work and a plateful of cookies.
iron and wine, the glass, cory branan, richard hawley, otis redding, and tom waits.
maple syrup, bacon, and fried eggs. earl grey with half and half.
no fireflies yet. it's been cold for may.
had we but world enough and time...
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we should shine a light on
my tenncare got canceled so no more free meds. bleh. i'm slowly weaning myself off them, trying to get down to just one. it's ironic that i have traded the crippling anxiety for a goddamn eating disorder. i'm hungry all the time. not just hungry, but like craving food all the time, like having the munchies but worse. i eat until i feel sick and still feel hungry. sucks.
am hoping p-doc can give me buspirone.
good god, it's hot. i feel sticky all the time. it's kind of nice to be biking in this weather, not having to deal with being stuck in a car waiting for the air to work, going through 30 bucks of gas every few days. i gave in and watched some tv today in an act of hungover desperation, and 90% of the commercials are for cars. there's this ridiculous contrast between the new huge rugged gas sucking trucks aimed at the rednecks who run our country and then the super gas efficient hybrids and saturns aimed at the rest of us.
i'm trying to like joanna newsome, but her voice is so damn weird.
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Poem for Monday, May 9, 2005
from "To the Soul"
by W. S. Merwin
Is anyone there
if so
are you real
either way are you
one or several
if the latter
are you all at once
or do you
take turns not answering
Burke's Book Store
1719 Poplar Avenue
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com
Winner of Best of Memphis in Memphis Flyer
for 7 Straight Years
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listening to Iron and Wine
last night, riding down McLean, I smelled honeysuckle for the first time this year.
there's this very specific nostalgia I get every year that has to do with the way sprinklers smell on the cement, the sound of bicycle tires on asphalt just after midnight, the tightness in my chest I get just before I walk into a brightly lit place filled with people I don't know very well.
a year ago I was spending about 65 hours a week in a 20x100 foot room frenziedly
mettrant en place, swearing to myself and staring out the window at Monroe, wishing I was over at Squidge's drinking wine and watching cable. wondering just how worth it it really was. pretty salads and seven squeeze bottles.
two years ago I was riding my bike down Central, up Cooper and over to Felix every night, drinking beer and eating tofu and rice messes on the porch with Sarah and watching Josh and Suzy sing strange howling songs with banjo. it never seemed to matter if it was hot or if it was late; we were young and we were living forever. the smell of old cast iron heating on a stove will always make my stomach clench up.
we go through the nights blindly aiming ourselves at the morning but in the end we won't remember enough of it, the days run away like a sack of marbles dropped on a hill, they scatter in every direction and we run after them, they spin out of our reach and where we once held hundreds we hold but a handful or maybe just one, its color hidden inside its scratched up glass.
There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days
Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
And she's chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls its children from the piles of fallen leaves
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seisdemayo
I can't believe how much I love my bike.
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