sea salt

"A nuclear bomb just went off in your body. Your life has completely changed. It's ok to feel crummy." I curled up on the couch next to my mom, silent tears streaming down my face, my knees tucked up close to my body. I didn't know why I was crying. I couldn't articulate what I was feeling. All I knew was that I needed to feel close to my mom, hear her voice, simply be  right next to her until the storm passed. She knew why I was crying. I'd just had a baby, and in one week my world had been turned upside down. My husband and I were trying to figure out how to take care of our new daughter, I was still recovering from my delivery, and everyone kept talking about what amazing parents we already were and how wonderful our little girl was. Somehow all the glowing compliments made it even harder to get through the moments when I had no idea how to comfort my baby, no idea what she needed. "She's so completely needy right now. It will get bette...

Our first skydive together, 2008 "You've been skydiving?! Twice?!" This is usually the reaction I get. I went skydiving for the first time in college, and then again when Kevin and I had been dating for about 5 months. Both times were fabulous - and both times I tried to convince people that it's not scary, and that they should definitely do it. At least once. But most people don't believe me. In their minds, skydiving means a terrifying leap, a dizzying frenzy of clouds and screaming, and a potentially body-crushing landing. They couldn't be more wrong. Skydiving has 3 phases: free fall, glide, landing. The free fall is the frenzy - screaming, waving at the camera, whizzing through clouds at a high speed - but it's over in 60 seconds. It's crazy, but it's literally one minute long. The landing, if you lift up your legs, is like going over a speed bump too fast in a car - a little surprising, but over in a flash. The best part of skyd...

I never identified with kids who watched TV after school, or went to friends' houses during the week, or slept in until 11am on the weekends. The idea that kids my age had so much free time was mysterious and wonderful. What did it feel like to have all that free time? While I chose all of my school activities and am ever grateful for the experiences I was able to have as a kid and a teenager, there were times I wanted to know what it felt like to not have sports practice after school every day, often followed by another practice for another team. There were times I didn't want to wake up at 6am on a Saturday to play a weekend volleyball tournament. There were summers I wanted to sit around all day, instead of going to my job at a day camp and eventually two-a-day practices. In addition to sports, and homework, and AP classes, there was church, family, sisters' soccer games, college applications, and mandatory house cleaning. I had a very happy childhood - and a very bu...

 (published in word~river literary review) "What I love about our students is that there is so much to mine out of them.  They're not used to valuing education, or thinking that they have intelligent things to say, but it's in there..." This is my answer to the question I hear a lot these days: "What do you like about teaching?" It's true.  Our students are at a wonderful crossroads in their education, where they can decide to complete an associate's degree and begin careers, or they can transfer to a 4-year college and earn a bachelor's degree.  No matter what they choose, they are very often accomplishing more than they, their parents, and many of their teachers thought possible.  I'm not sure when I first compared teaching to mining, but I can't think of a more apt way to describe it.  What makes mining unique is that it's not a guaranteed success - you can fail.  This doesn't mean the precious metals or diamonds ...

Winthrop is not known as a surfing community.  We have the ocean, beautiful and active, but it is cold, and the waves are not remarkably big, except during storms.  We're no California. This morning I went for a chilly run along the beach.  It was a gray morning, and the low cloud cover swallowed up the tiny orange flash of sun at the edge of the horizon.  A thin stripe of pink stretched between the clouds and the ocean, and the water was calm.  Seagulls whined as they trolled the beach for food, and a black Labrador ran in and out of the surf.  I haven't seen my iPod since the first week after my move to the new apartment, so I've been running to the tune of the sea, the wind, the gulls, the "good morning"s of other runners, the cars, the stomp of my feet as they hit the sidewalk.  Strangely, opening my ears has allowed me to see better, my vision constantly directed to the subtle noises of life around me. As I jogged south towards Po...

I'm a seedling in the dirt.  I'm ready to root, and I want to grow - want more than anything to blossom, yawning my petals away from the bud to finally show the world what I am.  But until then, I'm in the dirt. I recently submitted a profile to mediabistro.com, an online networking site for freelance work.  After completing my profile and listing my experience with freelance writing/editing/media, I nestled into a small, dark cave of soil, hoping to enrich myself with the contributions of other, more experienced matter.  That's a nice enough idea, as I appreciate the way flowers and plants blossom, and I'm constantly aware of the deeper significance of this process in daily life.  Growth is good.  But before you grow, you dive into the cold dirt and sit there with other people's roots, bulbs, decaying leaves, and earthworms.  The beauty of this growth underworld is that the truly great growers - the redwoods, the dahlias, the orchid...

I wrote a book.  A personal, complicated book.  A memoir.  I began it in college, under the guise of fiction (I figured since I changed the names of my family members, they were fictional characters).  Then I went to graduate school and wrote enough for a creative thesis (for an MFA, this is a book-length work in your chosen genre).  And two years after graduating, I finished it.* If you are not a writer, this is probably impressive.  If you are a writer, you know that this is much like a runner finally tying his sneakers.  It's the beginning - now you must run somewhere. The process of publishing a book, unless you choose to self-publish, is like dating, applying to a job, trying to make a new friend, or, really, anything that requires connection with another human.  This makes it exciting, exhausting, and often defeating.  You put yourself out there.  You wait.  Sometimes you receive a return call ...

"There is no character flaw in ignorance. The character flaw is the willingness to remain ignorant." My mother and I had a conversation today about our students.  She teaches high school, I teach college, and we both at times feel we are losing the battle against apathy, laziness, and a lack of intellectual curiosity.  I knew I would face this when I signed my first teaching contract in September, but in my mind it was simply ignorance, a tragic character flaw.  What my mother revealed to me in one simple statement is that ignorance isn't what makes a student - or anyone - tragically flawed.  The tragic flaw is the willingness to remain ignorant, the refusal to change. My concept of ignorance has always been directly associated with people who are racist, uneducated, irrational, intolerant, extremist in any way (leftist, rightist, elitist, supremacist...).  I don't think my associations are unique: hyper-educated New Englanders pick on the "ignor...

I have a Plato quotation in my email signature: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." It's true, you know.  Everyone is at war of some kind, fighting battles on all fronts: battles against themselves and their own insecurities; battles against family members and ever-present memories of abuse or abandonment; battles against people they love and feelings of rejection, desire, and inadequacy.  Then of course there are the battles against bosses and coworkers, against the liberal or conservative media agenda, against the president, against the former president, against racism, socialism, indifference, health care, aging, censorship... I bring this up because a woman yelled at me on the phone on Tuesday.  She is frustrated that her custom textbook is taking so long to create (it is ~1500 pages of text for which we have no existing files, so every word must be retyped).  Her book is a collection of readings about public policy in higher educ...