"The future is always beginning now" --Mark Strand

What did you want to be when you were little? How has that changed?
Oh, so embarrassing. Not a teacher, or a princess, or a mommy. I wanted to be a geologist. I think my fourth grade teacher told me that if I liked to be outside and play in the dirt, then geology was the way to go. Plus, I would make thousands of dollars.
I had a fine, fine rock collection, and loved to point out want different rocks contained. I thought I was just so smart. When my family would visit Litchfield Beach, there was a shop called Earthly Treasures (it's still there, I have to visit now for nostalgia sake) and I would stock up on (what I thought were) cool things like geodes, amethyst chunks, and fool's gold. My brothers were mortified with me, and called it The Rock Shop. They couldn't understand why I wanted to pay money for things I could dig up out of the ground.
This all means I have these strange stones packed away and kept on my bookcases--between Walden and Elizabeth Bishop poems are strange pieces of quartz and shale. Because what I really wanted to be was--
well, who really knows? I want to write somehow, but any sort of art does not come with health benefits, and one of the bitterest parts of growing up is learning the necessity of health insurance. A sad sad thing indeed.
As I got older, I realized that God gave me gifts and desires like colored thread, weaving in and out in all sorts of new patterns. I have a love for teenagers and for writing. I have a love for literature and God. I have a love for helping people and listening. These are all wound together, knotted into new pictures, new jobs, new calling. I am learning to enjoy the mystery.
As I named the alabaster, micha, and quartz in a piece of granite gravel, maybe the threads were already aligning. In a way, maybe all along I wanted to grow up to be a teacher.

"A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms." --Edgar Allan Poe.
Review your week.
So we finish a full week in the life of a singular writer. Mr. Edgar Allan Poe finally disturbed my eighth hour class so much that Melissa said, "does anyone else feel Satan in the room?" Isn't that what he, tortured soul that he was, wanted us to feel? Scary, but really simply sad. A life spent searching for identity and acceptance, only to die alone in a drunken fit. Why is it that the darkest stories are what we weave into legends?
What a good, varied week it has been. Our field trip on Tuesday was joyous: the park sparkled in the autumnal sun, all of my students were gleeful to be out of school--there was an air of rebellion about it all. Like I was skipping school with 68 others. How bizarre and collage-like the play was! Of course, my students only wanted to know who the cute, male teacher was sitting behind me, "Miss Brown, do you want me to ask if he's single?" Will it ever end? I need to buy a huge, fake engagement ring to squelch all the matchmaking.
So today is a "teacher workday," and haven't you always wanted to know what these days were for? Not that I spent too much time in high school on those much-needed days off thinking, "hmm...wonder what my Algebra teacher is doing at school without me?" But, I did wonder...was it for meetings, dart-throwing, gradebook cooking, three-legged races?
Here's what I am doing: (when I am not typing away on this ever-so-popular blog o'mine) I finally, after a full nine weeks of teaching, have time to unpack my office. The Coldplay poster is now on the wall, the boxes of books now rest on shelves, and files are...filed. I wish there was some sort of secret teacher meeting, a three-legged race at least (I'm the master of that!)--but, sadly, it's just a catch-up, catch-all day. Much needed, and painfully boring.
I'm going to procrastinate lesson plans and go eavesdrop on the Sherlock Holmes rehearsal. Happy weekend, all!

"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it." --Edgar Allan Poe
Do you think you are confident? Why or why not?
I think I question and second guess everything. I think I am very good at acting confident, but inside I am a mess of worry "do they like me? do they understand me? is there something on my face?"
Perhaps everyone is that way, but I feel like I'm the only one. Isn't that strange how we all question ourselves, though? I think that is my greatest spiritual struggle--because really, worry is just another type of control.
So, that's all to say I think I'm confident in some ways, and have a long way to go in others. Day to day life is that, isn't it? That growing and changing kaleidoscope of time.

"Nature gives to every time and season, some beauties of its own." --Charles Dickens

Describe what it felt like outside this morning.
It felt...alive, fresh, and new. It felt like finally fall--no, more Autumn than Fall. It brought the promise of leaves changing, shorter days, and change. It felt to me like college, like London in the evenings, like wide-eyed wonder.
There was a difference this morning. Things seemed possible more than ever.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
--Robert Frost

Write about something that you thought was one thing...but was really another.
I hate pickles. In a get-this-off-my-plate-I-can't-even-touch-it sort of way.
Around Christmastime when I was five years old, my brother Brandon said, "Beth! Close your eyes and open your mouth...I have a piece of chocolate for you!"
(note: my childhood nickname--and to be honest, a nickname my brothers still love to use--was "Sugarbear" because of my unending sweet tooth)
So, being gullible and a sugar freak, I did what I was told.
And he gave me a pickle slice from the refrigerator.
Now, that may not sound that bad, but when you are expecting a nice melty, Christmasy piece of chocolate and get a briney, crunchy pickle...
Well, then, you'd hate pickles too.

PSAT today
I'm sitting in my classroom watching students (some mine, some I have yet to meet) take the PSAT. Strange to think--I never thought I'd be giving the PSAT. The transformation in the room is unusual. From jovial, wide-awake teenagers to test-taking, number 2 pencil bubbling hunchbacks in a matter of "you may begin."
I took the PSAT on two Saturdays in two different cafeterias with hundreds of people. The institutional smell of cafeteria food mixed with generic Pine Sol really added to the academically-stimulating atmosphere. At least here, these students are among the familiar, and among friends.
I will miss teaching class today. There's such a privilege to seeing the same faces each day at the same hour. Even if (I am or) they are in horrible moods, I enjoy the whole scope of our relationship. So it surprised me the other day when many students in my eighth hour said they would be scared if I called their house! I hope they don't mean that they are afraid of me, but I wonder. There is a weird disconnect between a teacher and a student that was not an issue when I was a youth minister. We'll see. It's only October, I may make a new habit of calling students in the evening. Hmmm...I think its more of a parental issue, "Honey, why did your English teacher call tonight?"
So no journal topics today, no quotations to copy down. Only thousands of ovals to fill in and a calculator for conversation.

"Live in the sunshine" --Ralph Waldo Emerson
What do you like most about where you live now?
Greenville has grown on me, that is for certain. When I was in high school, my friend Baker and I swore we would never move back here after college, we called it "Small Town Disease," and we were not going to catch it. I think what we meant by that is we wanted to be somebodies, to do many somethings with our lives.
So he's in Baltimore, and I have Small Town Disease. I am fine with that. Like I said, there is much about this place that I have grown to love. Downtown is a favorite spot--I love how Reedy River hems in the bottom of Main Street, how on the weekends and sunny afternoons the park is confettied with people. I feel proud to bring out-of-town friends downtown just to walk across Liberty Bridge (a friend and I once ate Krispy Kremes in the middle of that bridge in the middle of the night in pajamas--I still smile when I walk past in broad daylight).
I love the feeling of the familiar, and the sense of change and growth here. All at once, this place is and is not the same small town where I spent my high school years.

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin alone than on a velvet cushion and be crowded." --Henry David Thoreau
This is one of my favorite quotes, and people often ask me what it means.
To me, it means that I would rather sit outside and enjoy something different, than something fine and fashionable--something that everyone thinks they want.
A crowded cushion, a trend.
I value authenticity, and strive to live differently in this world. A velvet cushion makes a sensible seat, does a pumpkin? I'm resigned to the fact that I may often seem out-of-place. I do not wish for the popular things of this world.
Okay, okay, but I fall into the swirl of "I want I want I want" all of the time. We are infected with images that drag us from the holy, that cover our true desires with desperate wantings.

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heal that has crushed it."
--Mark Twain

List the top ten things you do to procrastinate.
1. stare into space
2. clean
3. read
4. walk around aimlessly
5. call everyone in my cell phone memory
6. change my cell phone's ringtone
7. doodle
8. watch TV (like old re-runs of "Felicity")
9. listen to music
10. repeat in no particular order

"Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough" --Garrison Keillor

Describe one of your favorite (or least favorite) places.

I am thinking of London.
There is one place, Kynance Mew, on the way to Hyde Park from 12 Ashburn Gardens, where I lived and studied. A mew is a large alleyway where stables were built in the horse and buggy days of the city. Now they are quirky, cobblestoned streets with crooked houses and glowing streetlights criscrossing posh city streets.
On my walks to Hyde Park, I'd look to my left, and there bowing under a low archway was my favorite mew. Lush windowboxes tucked neatly under shuttered windows, cobbles in patterns bumpy underfoot--it was like some otherworldly doorway.
I'd look to it like a talisman, something to bring me luck, to nudge me closer to the miracles in our every day worlds.

"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend." --William Blake

Write about a time when you felt left out.

Well, well...this is a too-easy subject for me. As the youngest of three (with two big brothers), and the perpetual new kid (I've moved about nine times), I know what it means to be on the outside-looking-in. What might be difficult is just writing about one time.
When I was ten, my family and I lived in Clermont-Ferrand, France. My brother Brandon and I went to a private Catholic school, St. Alyre, in the downtown area, where Michelin housed a small English-speaking school for kids like me.
The building was terrifying: made of black, porous volcanic rock, it was older than America by hundreds of years. There were hidden catacombs twining underground that were used during the French Revolution, and nuns (I had never seen a nun up-close before ) taught the classes. To me, the classes seemed like Little House on the Prairie: there were big wooden desks with benches attatched which two students shared, and a big platform in front of the chalkboard where the teacher stood.
So you're thinking I felt left out because I couldn't speak French and I was afraid of the nuns.
Not true. In my small English-speaking class (first through fifth grade in one room), I felt the most left out. There was one other girl my age named Karen. She had two older siblings just like me, and I was so happy to have a friend. Envisioning sleep-overs and playing outside, I instead found that I was "immature" because I still liked playing outside and playing Pretend.
So I was left out. I made friends with a little girl named Amelie, and through sign language and simple simple French, Pretended to be shopkeepers, making things out of leaves to sell. I realize now this does seem immature, and I also know now that we all mature at different rates. But I do appreciate that children stay children longer in France, and I am very thankful for my stolen years of childhood.
The feeling of "left out" was a small price to pay for those precious times.